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Category C: Empowering

These disciplines are concerned with a community’s capacity to act on its own behalf and to improve local conditions. Some of this work is about building the conditions for collective power – relationships, leadership, and a shared sense that acting together is possible. Other aspects of the work are about exercising that power; turning relationships and shared experience into action and change.

06 Community organisers · 07 Community power-builders and collective advocates

  3. Category C, Empowering
Empowering

Discipline 6. Community organisers

A young woman in a hijab on a doorstep about to knock, a clipboard under one arm and a rolled banner on her shoulder.

Maturity of support

  • 4Codification
  • 4Institutions
  • 4Training
  • 4Communities
  • 4Academia
  • 4.0Overall, mean of the five

The discipline of community organising has a long history and is supported by prominent organisations, such as Citizens UK and Community Organisers Ltd. This work centres the empowerment of citizens to take control over the conditions of their lives, including by challenging established institutions and power dynamics. Characteristic practices include relational meetings, one-to-ones, listening campaigns, and public actions. The goal is to build the capacity for collective action, as opposed to helping people to access services or simply make connections.

Examples

Assessing the supporting architecture

This is the best-supported discipline in the report, and the only one to score four across all five dimensions we assessed. There are two main UK traditions with somewhat different codifications and lineages. One runs back through the American Industrial Areas Foundation, founded by Saul Alinsky in 1940, to the founding of Citizens UK in 1989, and provides a competency framework, role profiles, continuing development expectations and a well-known articulation of method in its Five Steps to Social Change. The other developed through the Cabinet Office’s Community Organisers Programme (2011-15), run by Locality with RE:generate and has national qualifications with an Ofqual-regulated awarding body, Skills and Education Group Awards, up to Level 3 Certificate in Community Organising, alongside its own published Community Organising Framework. A third cluster has emerged more recently around tenants’ union organising, where ACORN runs in-house training in the ACORN model, albeit without external accreditation.

The training environment is mature by the standards of this report, though not by the standards of a mainstream profession. Several thousand people have been trained in community organising through each of the two main routes, and there are some examples of university accreditation: Citizens UK’s leadership courses are accredited by Birmingham Newman University as a Professional Graduate Certificate in Community Leadership, and King’s College London runs credit-bearing modules with them. The intellectual tradition is also rich, particularly in the United States, running through writers like Saul Alinsky, Marshall Ganz and Freire, and there is a long-standing academic journal that publishes relevant work, the Community Development Journal, published since 1966.

Some interviewees we spoke to felt that the maturity of the field may have brought downsides, making the work somewhat less adaptable, with strongly held views about how organising should be done. This is a useful insight into the trade-offs that play out when a civic discipline matures and develops institutions, formal methods, qualifications and a recognised canon. The newer centres of energy around tenants’ organising may be a corrective to this, and it is notable that they have grown outside the more historic and accredited routes rather than through them.