The global spread of community organizing: how ‘Alinsky-style’ community organizing travelled to Australia and what we learnt?

Summary:

This is an academic peer-reviewed article about the spread of community organising to Australia. It documents conceptually, and through stories of the Sydney Alliance, the practice of community organising, and lessons learnt from its transmission to a new place.

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Abstract

Community organizing refers to a particular way of working in public life that aims to enhance the capacity of community leaders to act for the common good in collaboration across civil society. In the last two decades, this practice, founded in the United States, has spread to Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. This article develops a definition of community organizing, then explores the history of the practice. The article focuses on the translation of community organizing to Australia and the development of the Sydney Alliance. The article identifies a series of ‘key factors’ that helped create a successful adaptation of community organizing ‘universals’ to another country. In doing so the article applies several frameworks developed in Power in Coalition to help understand the successes and challenges that the Sydney Alliance has endured (Tattersall (2010) Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY). The author has a distinctive perspective, as she was the founder of the Sydney Alliance as well as the author of Power in Coalition. The article does not pretend to provide ‘objective’, disinterested observation, but is presented from the vantage point of active participant observation.

Citation:

Amanda Tattersall, The global spread of community organizing: how ‘Alinsky-style’ community organizing travelled to Australia and what we learnt?, Community Development Journal, Volume 50, Issue 3, July 2015, Pages 380–396, https://doi.org/10.1093/cdj/bsv018