Community Organizing
Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other or share some common problem come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. Unlike those who promote more-consensual community building, community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless. Community organizing has as a core goal the generation of ''durable'' power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence key decision-makers on a range of issues over time. In the ideal, for example, this can get community-organizing groups a place at the table ''before'' important decisions are made. Community organizers work with and develop new local leaders, facilitating coalitions and assisting in the development of campaigns. A central goal of organizing is the development of a robust, organized, local democracy bringing community me ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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ACORN Protest
The acorn, or oaknut, is the nut of the oaks and their close relatives (genera ''Quercus'' and ''Lithocarpus'', in the family Fagaceae). It usually contains one seed (occasionally two seeds), enclosed in a tough, leathery shell, and borne in a cup-shaped cupule. Acorns are long and on the fat side. Acorns take between 5 and 24 months (depending on the species) to mature; see the list of ''Quercus'' species for details of oak classification, in which acorn morphology and phenology are important factors. Etymology The word ''acorn'' (earlier ''akerne'', and ''acharn'') is related to the Gothic name ''akran'', which had the sense of "fruit of the unenclosed land". The word was applied to the most important forest produce, that of the oak. Chaucer spoke of "achornes of okes" in the 14th century. By degrees, popular etymology connected the word both with "corn" and "oak-horn", and the spelling changed accordingly. The current spelling (emerged 15c.-16c.), derives from associat ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Tom Gaudette
Thomas A. Gaudette (1923–1998) was a community organizer who worked in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago. Originally a businessman, Gaudette became interested in neighborhood organizing through his Catholic Church activism. Gaudette helped form a neighborhood group, along the lines of those organized by Saul Alinsky, on the far West Side of Chicago called Organization for a Better Austin. OBA was concerned with poor schools and neighborhood decline. He also founded the Mid-America Institute for Community Organizations, and trained notable organizers like Shel Trapp and Gale Cincotta. Biography Thomas A. Gaudette was born in 1923, in Medford, Massachusetts. His parents were Roman Catholic and his father a member of a railroad union, two critical influences on Tom Gaudette's later development as a community organizer. Gaudette served with distinction in the United States Army Air Corps in World War II, surviving the famous raid on Ploesti, Romania, and by war's end earning th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Canvassing
Canvassing is the systematic initiation of direct contact with individuals, commonly used during political campaigns. Canvassing can be done for many reasons: political campaigning, grassroots fundraising, community awareness, membership drives, and more. Campaigners knock on doors to contact people personally. Canvassing is used by political parties and issue groups to identify supporters, persuade the undecided, and add voters to the voters list through voter registration, and it is central to get out the vote operations. It is the core element of what political campaigns call the ''ground game'' or ''field''. Organized political canvassing became a central tool of contested election campaigns in Britain, and has remained a core practice performed by thousands of volunteers at each election there, and in many countries with similar political systems. Canvassing can also refer to a neighborhood canvass performed by law enforcement in the course of an investigation. This ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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National People's Action
People's Action is a national progressive advocacy and political organization in the United States made up of 40 organizations in 30 states. The group's stated goal is to "build the power of poor and working people, in rural, suburban, and urban areas to win change through issue campaigns and elections." People's Action and the associated tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, People's Action Institute, were established in 2016 through a merger of three national networks of community organizing groups, National People's Action, the Alliance for a Just Society and USAction, as well as of organizations like the Campaign for America's Future and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. National People's Action National People's Action was a federation of 29 grassroots organizations in 18 states working together for racial and economic justice. Headquartered in Chicago, the organization was founded in 1972 by Austin neighborhood activist Gale Cincotta and professional organizer ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Community Organization
Community organization or Community Based Organization refers to organization aimed at making desired improvements to a community's social health, well-being, and overall functioning. Community organization occurs in geographically, psychosocially, culturally, spiritually, and digitally bounded communities. Community organization includes community work, community projects, community development, community empowerment, community building, and community mobilization. It is a commonly used model for organizing community within community projects, neighborhoods, organizations, voluntary associations, localities, and social networks, which may operate as ways to mobilize around geography, shared space, shared experience, interest, need, and/or concern. Introduction Community organization is differentiated from conflict-oriented community organizing, which focuses on short-term change through appeals to authority (i.e., pressuring established power structures for desired change), by fo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Grassroots
A grassroots movement is one that uses the people in a given district, region or community as the basis for a political or economic movement. Grassroots movements and organizations use collective action from the local level to effect change at the local, regional, national or international level. Grassroots movements are associated with bottom-up, rather than top-down decision making, and are sometimes considered more natural or spontaneous than more traditional power structures. Grassroots movements, using self-organization, encourage community members to contribute by taking responsibility and action for their community. Grassroots movements utilize a variety of strategies from fundraising and registering voters, to simply encouraging political conversation. Goals of specific movements vary and change, but the movements are consistent in their focus on increasing mass participation in politics. These political movements may begin as small and at the local level, but grassroots ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Balcombe Anti Frack Protest
Balcombe is a village and civil parish in the Mid Sussex District of West Sussex, England. It lies south of London, north of Brighton, and east north east of the county town of Chichester. Nearby towns include Crawley to the north west and Haywards Heath to the south south east. History The name Balcombe may mean "Mining Place Camp". ''Bal'' is a Cornish word meaning a mining place as in Bal Maidens, and the same word may have existed in Ancient British Celtic. Although Coombe or Combe can mean a valley, it can also come from the Roman "camp". So possibly from its name Balcombe could have once been a Romano-British mining settlement. South of Balcombe on the London to Brighton railway line is the Ouse Valley Viaduct. Designed and engineered by John Urpeth Rastrick (1780–1856) in consultation with the talented architect David Mocatta, it was completed in 1842. It is high and 500 yards long. It has 37 arches and was built with 11 million imported Dutch bricks. The v ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Saul Alinsky
Saul David Alinsky (January 30, 1909 – June 12, 1972) was an American community activist and political theorist. His work through the Chicago-based Industrial Areas Foundation helping poor communities organize to press demands upon landlords, politicians, bankers and business leaders won him national recognition and notoriety. Responding to the impatience of a New Left generation of activists in the 1960s, in his widely cited ''Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer'' (1971) Alinsky defended the arts both of confrontation and of compromise involved in community organizing as keys to the struggle for social justice. Beginning in the 1990s, Alinsky's reputation was revived by commentators on the political Right as a source of tactical inspiration for the Republican Tea Party Movement and, subsequently, by virtue of indirect associations with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, as the alleged source of a radical Democratic political agenda. While criticised on the poli ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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People's Action
People's Action is a national progressive advocacy and political organization in the United States made up of 40 organizations in 30 states. The group's stated goal is to "build the power of poor and working people, in rural, suburban, and urban areas to win change through issue campaigns and elections." People's Action and the associated tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization, People's Action Institute, were established in 2016 through a merger of three national networks of community organizing groups, National People's Action, the Alliance for a Just Society and USAction, as well as of organizations like the Campaign for America's Future and the Center for Health, Environment and Justice. National People's Action National People's Action was a federation of 29 grassroots organizations in 18 states working together for racial and economic justice. Headquartered in Chicago, the organization was founded in 1972 by Austin neighborhood activist Gale Cincotta and professional organizer S ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Coalition
A coalition is a group formed when two or more people or groups temporarily work together to achieve a common goal. The term is most frequently used to denote a formation of power in political or economical spaces. Formation According to ''A Guide for Political Parties'' published by National Democratic Institute and The Oslo Center for Peace and Human Rights, there are five steps of coalition-building: # Developing a party strategy: The first step in coalition-building involves developing a party strategy that will prepare for successful negotiation. The more effort parties place on this step, the more likely they are to identify strategic partners, negotiate a good deal and avoid some of the common mistakes associated with coalition-building. # Negotiating a coalition: Based on the strategy that each party has prepared, in step 2 the parties come together to negotiate and hopefully reach agreement on the terms for the coalition. Depending on the context and objectives of the co ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Iowa Citizens For Community Improvement
Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI, Iowa CCI, occasionally ICCI) is a membership-based grassroots organization dedicated to community organizing in the state of Iowa. CCI is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, affiliated with sister 501(c)(4) organization Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Action Fund. History CCI was formed in 1975 by a group of ministers in Waterloo, Iowa who felt Iowa needed an organization to fight for social justice issues. CCI began by focusing mainly on neighborhood-level organizing, but soon grew into a statewide organization. Early issues addressed by CCI members included misuse of public funds, slum landlords, and the practice of redlining. Notable victories from the 1970s included the establishment of the Peoples Community Health Clinic in Waterloo, passage of the statewide Iowa Uniform Residential Landlord and Tenant Act, and the state Neighborhood Revitalization Law. As Iowans faced the Midwest farm crisis of the 1980s, CCI members added rura ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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United Farm Workers
The United Farm Workers of America, or more commonly just United Farm Workers (UFW), is a labor union for farmworkers in the United States. It originated from the merger of two workers' rights organizations, the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) led by organizer Larry Itliong, and the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta. They became allied and transformed from workers' rights organizations into a union as a result of a series of strikes in 1965, when the mostly Filipino American, Filipino farmworkers of the AWOC in Delano, California, Delano, California, Delano grape strike, initiated a grape strike, and the NFWA went on strike in support. As a result of the commonality in goals and methods, the NFWA and the AWOC formed the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee on August 22, 1966. This organization was accepted into the AFL–CIO in 1972 and changed its name to the United Farm Workers Union. History Founding of th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |