Challenging Community Organizing: Facing the 21st century

This paper is a critical, reflective essay on the state of community organizing. Because we believe that organizing is shaped by a complex interaction between human agency and the wider social, political, and economic context, this paper explores the changing context and the shifts in practice that have accompanied it. In a nutshell, we see these shifts as ones that have dulled the political edge of organizing and removed its passion for social change. To develop this argument, we contrast two approaches to community organizing.