SUMMARY of TD1: Saul Alinsky's Grassroots Community Organizing Model is perhaps the earliest form of democratic consulting to multi-organizational systems. Saul's successor - Ernesto Cortez has a more bureaucratic model. A competing grassroots community development model is ACORN.

Similarities to other TD methods: l#2 - Most Similar to Emery Model of Participative Democracy. C#4 - Some similarities to Participative Action Research Dissimilar to other TD Methods: ? Reengineering

NAVIGATION ON THIS PAGE Part I: Saul Alinsky's work in Community Organizing Part II: Ernesto Cortez's work Part II: Reinventing Government            Going Beyond 2 Party System - the GREENS            Reinventing Government - America Speaks?                Claims and Counter Claims            Links Part III: Direct Participative Democracy & Distributive Work            Direct Democracy movement            Distributed Work movement

 

There are natural community organizers. I studied Ted Watkins work in the early 1980s, but my real mentors were Ms. Nora King, of Nickerson Gardens and former Vice Chancellor of UCLA, C. Z. Wilson. 

• Ted Watkins' Watts Labor Community Action Committee (WLCAC)
• An alternative to Alinsky/Watkins/Cortez Models - In Nickerson Gardens (Click here - for Oral History Project) is a place where women make up the majority of grassroots organizers. (Click Here) for COMMUNITY ORGANIZING OR ORGANIZING COMMUNITY? GENDER AND THE CRAFTS OF EMPOWERMENT, a paper by Susan Stall and Randy Stoecker (1996).

Part I Saul Alinsky

• Saul Alinsky's Grassroots Community Organizing Model
• Alinsky: More Important Now Than Ever By Sanford D. Horwitt. [Reprinted from the July 20th 1997 L.A. Times (press here). Same article different source (press here). History by Plotkin (press here).

• Excerpts from Book Rules for Radicals (press here).
• A critique of Alinsky-style organizing in contemporary life - Paper - The Square Pegs Find Their Groove: Reshaping the Organizing Circle by Francis Calpotura and Kim Fellner (press here).
• Robert Slayton, Review of S. Horwitt LET THEM CALL ME REBEL: THE LIFE AND LEGACY OF SAUL ALINSKY (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987) (press here).

• Sol's successor - a more bureaucratic model (Press here) for brief overview -Power to the People: Twenty Years of Community Organizing Adapted from The Workbook, Summer 1994. Copyright 1994, 1996, by David Walls.
• Ernesto Cortez Jr. (press here). Industrial Areas Foundation site (click here).
• Paper (Click here) Campaign for Human Development Part II: The Chicago Story By Scott Weinberg October, 1995
• Cortez Jr. on Reweaving the Social Fabric (press here).
• Paper (click here) Reconnecting Power and Vision by Harry Boyte
• Paper (click here) "YOU WILL REBUILD YOUR ANCIENT RUINS": RELIGION, THE IAF, AND COMMUNITY-BASED ORGANIZING IN METROPOLITAN NASHVILLE by Michael Byrd
• Dissertation (press here). CREATING A MULTI-RACIAL DEMOCRATIC COMMUNITY: A CASE STUDY OF THE TEXAS INDUSTRIAL AREAS FOUNDATION by Mark R. Warren Center for International Affairs Harvard University (press here).
• Actions (press here) INTER-FAITH ORGANIZING ACTIVITIES IN CALIFORNIA, MARYLAND AND NEW YORK. In NY (press here). In Los Angeles (press here). For Texas (press here).

Related Models

• So, You Want to Be a Community Organizer... Tracie McMillan, City Limits August 20, 2001
• Carlos Provencio -RUNNING DEER  Carlos was part of Industrial Areas Foundation - Does Community Organizing here in New Mexico.  
• ACORN's 25 year history (press here). ACORN Workbooks (press here).
• Similar Case studies of community organizing.
• Check ACORN, DART, Gamaliel, the Industrial Areas Foundation, PICO, NTIC, OLTC, Midwest Academy approaches. (Click here) for strengths and weaknesses of project and power-based community large-scale change models.
• Linking Activism and Academics COMM-ORG, which has over 650 members representing over a dozen nations. For great list of Working Papers (press here).

The Reinventing Government Network (RGN) is a transorganizational association of various individuals and organizations from around the world, seeking innovative  public-sector reform. RGN currently has associates in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

America Speaks is an effort to bring more local and informed dialogue to democracy.  It is a move away from representative democracy as it is currently practiced, but is not direct democracy (as for example in Emery's Participative Design for Participative Democracy).

There are many claims and counter-claims:

• GOING BEYOND 2-PARTY DEMOCRACY - The Greens
• What  is  Inclusive  Democracy? (press here).
• Inclusive democracy is a new conception of democracy, which, using as a starting point the classical definition of it, expresses democracy in terms of direct political democracy, economic democracy (beyond the confines of the market economy and state planning), as well as democracy in the social realm and ecological democracy. In short, inclusive democracy is a form of social organisation which re-integrates society with economy, polity and nature.
• TWO PARTY SOLUTIONS -  Reinventing Government
• Really Reinventing Government Both parties promise to reinvent government. We asked the father of corporate restructuring to show them how by Peter F. Drucker (press here). Feb, 1995. Atlantic Monthly. "Vice President Al Gore's promise to "reinvent government," proclaimed with great fanfare in the first year of the Clinton Administration, produced only a nationwide yawn."
• Remarks at the Reinventing Government Conference by James D. Wolfensohn President The World Bank Group  Washington D.C., January 15, 1999 (press here).
• REINVENTING GOVERNMENT OR REINVENTING OURSELVES The Role of Citizen Owners in Making a Better Government Hindy Lauer Schachter (press here).
• Vice President Gore's "reinventing government" initiative (press here) has made a significant contribution toward achieving President Clinton's New Democrat campaign promise to provide a "government that works better and costs less."
• Auditing and Reinventing Government CITY OF SEATTLE Report #1  December 1, 1993 (press here).
• ’Reinventing government’ applies to researchers, too By Beth Azar American Psyschological Association Monitor (press here) A new law calls on scientists to submit goals that show their work aligns with government's public-policy aims.
• America Speaks - (press here for home page) -Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer - Chairperson- What structures and processes of governance can we fashion so that citizens can once again participate authentically in the policy decisions which are made in their names to solve their problems?
• BUILDING A FRAMEWORK FOR  DEMOCRATIC RENEWAL  A Working Paper on Governance by AmericaSpeaks Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer, et. al. 1997 (press here).
• Democracy occurs in communities. While the citizen is the fundamental unit of a democracy and the family is the core of our society, democracy exists and thrives  only within the interactions among citizens. While individual expression is essential, democracy is not  really about solitary processes such as voting -- whether via the internet or within a curtained voting booth. Citizens in dialogue, articulating the values they share and understanding their differences, reaching conclusions which art acted upon -- that is the core democratic image we must nurture.
• Shared responsibilities. Each community member must recognize the part he or she plays in the health of the community's democratic condition. Rather than becoming involved to fight a "not in my backyard" issue, participation can be motivated by an  understanding that we sink or swim together. This awareness that our society is the sum of each of our actions moves the community beyond fractionary  interest politics.
• Public trust. The only way a healthy democracy can be sustained is through public trust. Trust depends upon inclusive processes overseen by leaders acting as stewards, who articulate and deliberate citizen  concerns and bring all views to the table. It is such processes -- managed by leaders serving as stewards, not as career politicians -- which evoke the public's  trust and are the foundation of the true authority of leaders in a democratic polity.
• Healthy struggle. We believe that creative tensions are imbedded in society's most contentious issues. These tensions are the heart of democratic struggle and are the wellspring of a vibrant, vigorous society; they must be worked out in public, in direct processes that engage citizens and leaders in open dialogue.
• "Both-and" relationships. The capacity to find common ground amongst, and incorporation of, diverse solutions must be restored, sanctioned, and preserved. The processes that yield to accommodation and integration must be strengthened and pushed to meet the healthy challenges of diversity in America.
• Thoughtful deliberation. Supporting the five foregoing principles is the capacity for thoughtful   deliberation. The necessary skills include listening,  inclusion, mediation, dialogue, reflection, and closure, each of which is recognized as a fundamental tool for strong and effective governance.
• America Speaks Bibliography (press here).

• LINKS
• PUBLIC STRATEGIES GROUP (press here).
• Policy.com (press here)

• DIRECT DEMOCRACY Movement
• Participative Economics (press here) to find the following and other items:
• Participatory Economics  Michael Albert (press here) "According to most economists, the activities of separate groups of producers and consumers can be coordinated by markets or  by authoritarian planning—but there is no "third way." ... We disagree. The truth is that socialism as originally conceived has never been tried, but not because it is impossible. Council communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and guild socialists fell short of spelling out a coherent, theoretical model explaining how such a system could work."
• ParEcon, Anarchy and Politics by Brian Dominick "One of the most common questions posed by anarchists looking at the parecon model concerns the existence, or nonexistence, of a state in a society with a functioning participatory economy."
• Direct Democracy ...the only just form of government...(press here). "In a direct democracy there are no represenatives. All decisions are made at the level of the people. When a budget or law needs to be passed, then the idea goes to the people. This obviously could get very complicated but if broken down into state levels of the same system it could be sorted out. There would be no political action groups because they would have to "pay off" the entire population of  the country. Corruption and "pork" would be eliminated. Taxes could not be raised without the permission of the people. The few would no longer rule the many and  the government would not cost billions of dollars just to operate.
• DEMOCRACY  &  NATURE -THE  INTERNATIONAL  JOURNAL  OF  INCLUSIVE  DEMOCRACY (press here).
• The First International Congress on Direct Democracy was convened in Pribram (a suburb of Prague), in the Czech Republic, on August 25-27, 1998 (press here).
• The Debating room - Direct Democracy - What's if for? (press here).

• DISTRIBUTED WORK
• ISDW - Institute for the Study of Distributed Work (press here) Charles E. Grantham - Telecommunities electronically integrate work, education, and civic action.  Summary: Increasingly, a worker is no longer required to transport himself to work; the work can be moved to him. As corporations expand their market and human resource base, the trend to distribute work will become a significant factor in the recruitment, training, and retention of qualified employees. In urban areas, this takes the form of collaborative relationships with community development leaders and other businesses committed to the urban infrastructure.
• Democracy: Can the development of telecommunities foster a greater rate of citizen participation in the political process? Can this process create an opportunity for movement toward a more direct participatory form of democracy than we currently have?

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