Community organizing

Organizing or Organizing Community refers to a package of measures for recruiting new members - mostly of unions, but also churches - and for the strengthening of their own assertiveness, which was first used in this form in the slums of Chicago in the 1920s. Under the guidance of community organizers, the residents are empowered and encouraged to actively engage in their own interests and often act against the interests of large companies, individual entrepreneurs or powerful state institutions. As the founder of community organizing applies Saul Alinsky.

Barack Obama worked as a community organizer, Hillary Clinton wrote her undergraduate thesis on this topic and had interviewed and Saul Alinsky. Both Obama and Clinton have Alinsky methods used for election mobilization.

The major unions in the Anglo-American world entertain for this purpose its own Organizing Institute, where professional activists ( " Organizer" ) are formed, whose full-time job is to go to farms with low wages, poor working conditions and generally low levels of organization and the employees for a membership in the union to win. In the second step, a labor dispute for pre- defined concrete goals will then organizes together with the employees, the employees are usually also heavily involved. U.S. unions were able to win millions of new members in the last few decades.

In Germany start the big unions to use organizing as a strategy in individual pilot projects.

The film Bread and Roses by Ken Loach shows the work of an organizer on the example of the campaign " Justice for Janitors " of the U.S. services trade union SEIU.

Organizing outside the trade union movement

The concept of organizing has been successfully applied in the campaign of the winner Barack Obama during his campaign for the presidency in the United States, 2008.