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Community Organizing
During the Great Depression, methods of social work community organizing that had been useful at the turn of the 20th century had much less salience. As capitalism collapsed, one reform solution after another failed to halt the depression. On July 14, 1939, however, community leaders of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, led by Saul Alinsky, held their first constitutional convention, attended by 350 delegates representing 109 local organizations. This effort launched Alinsky on a long career of organizing people in low-income urban communities around the United States (Stoecker, 2001). This type of political activist neighborhood work represented a new approach to grassroots organizing efforts (Fisher, 1996). Alinsky's model applied methods, strategies, and techniques developed by labor organizers to organize community members seeking justice. Both labor organizing and Alinsky-style organizing "used controlled conflict as their chief organizational tool" (Betten & Austin, 1990, p. 152).
Although Alinsky was not the first to combine political activism with an emphasis on rebuilding a specific community, he has been considered the first to do it by bringing together groups of low-income people from several neighborhoods into a coalition, often challenging large corporations to obtain better wages and working conditions (Reitz. & Reitzes, 1987). Alinsky wanted neighbors to understand that the real objective of community organizing was to build collective power so residents could run their own neighborhood and create the kind of community they wanted (Alinsky, 1974; Fink, 1984).
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