I have been deliberating on this for a very long time and i am actually working on an article concerning this as well.as we all know machinations,meetings and political horse tradings has already started surreptitiously of course amongst nigerian politicians concerning the 2015 elections.While the new wave of online new media revolution amongst nigerian youths have been very commendable,i strongly believe and am that sure in my convictions that we can take it a notch higher by approaching campaigns and elections in a totally different way.
The good news for us is that it has been tried and tested in a modern democracy and has not been found wanting..Its called community organising which is credited with winning obama 2 terms in office against the odds..
I know this is just a wikipedia source, please bear with me as this is just for a basic understanding of how it works and what it entails. i really hope this inspires at least one nigerian youth.
Community
organizing
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Community
organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to
each other come together into an organization that acts in their
shared self-interest. Unlike those who promote more-consensual ,
community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily
involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective
power for the powerless. A core goal of community organizing is to
generate 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.
Characteristics
Organized
community groups attempt to influence government, corporations and
institutions, seek to increase direct representation within
decision-making bodies, and foster social
reform more
generally. Where negotiations fail, these organizations seek to
inform others outside of the organization of the issues being
addressed and expose or pressure the decision-makers through a
variety of means, including picketing,Boycotting, Sit-ins,
petitioning, and electoral politics. Organizing groups
often seek out issues they know will generate controversy and
conflict. This allows them to draw in and educate participants, build
commitment, and establish a reputation for winning.Thus, community
organizing is usually focused on more than just resolving specific
issues. In fact, specific issues are often vehicles for other
organizational goals as much as they are ends in themselves.
Community
organizers generally seek to build groups that are democratic in
governance, open and accessible to community members, and concerned
with the general health of the community rather than a specific
interest group. Organizing seeks to broadly
Empower community members, with the end goal of
distributing power more equally throughout the community.
The
three basic types of community organizing are grassroots or
"door-knocking" organizing, faith-based community
organizing (FBCO), and coalition building. Political
Campaigns often claim that their door-to-door operations are in fact
an effort to organize the community, though often these operations
are focused exclusively on voter identification and turnout.
FBCOs
and many grassroots organizing models are built on the work of Saul
Alinsky, discussed below, from the 1930s into the 1970s.
Grassroots
action
Grassroots
organizing builds community groups from scratch, developing new
leadership where none existed and organizing the unorganized. It is a
values based process where people are brought together to act in the
interest of their communities and the common good. Networks of
community organizations that employ this method and support local
organizing groups include National People's Action and Acorn.
"Door
knocking" grassroots organizations like ACORN organize poor and
working-class members recruiting members one by one in the community.
Because they go door-to-door, they are able to reach beyond
established organizations and the "churched" to bring
together a wide range of less privileged people. ACORN tended to
stress the importance of constant action in order to maintain the
commitment of a less rooted group of participants.
ACORN
had a reputation of being more forceful than faith-based (FBCO)
groups, and there are indications that their local groups were more
staff (organizer) directed than leader (local volunteer) directed.
(However, the same can be said for many forms of organizing,
including FBCOs.) The "door-knocking" approach is more
time-intensive than the "organization of organizations"
approach of FBCOs and requires more organizers who, partly as a
result, can be lower paid with more turnover.
Unlike
existing FBCO national "umbrella" and other grassroots
organizations, ACORN maintained a centralized national agenda, and
exerted some centralized control over local organizations. Because
ACORN was a 501(c)4 organization under the tax code, it was able to
participate directly in election activities, but contributions to it
were not tax exempt.
Faith-based
Faith-based
community organizing (FBCO), also known as Congregation-based
Community Organizing, is a methodology for developing power and
relationships throughout a community of institutions: today mostly
congregations, but these can also include unions, neighborhood
associations, and other groups.Progressive and centrist FBCO
organizations join together around basic values derived from common
aspects of their faith instead of around strict dogmas. There are now
at least 180 FBCOs in the US as well as in South Africa, England,
Germany, and other nations.Local FBCO organizations are often linked
through organizing networks such as the Industrial
Areas Foundation, Gamaliel
Foundation, PICO
National Network, and Direct
Action and Research Training Center (DART). In the United
States starting in 2001, the Bush Administration launched
a department to promote community organizing that included
faith-based organizing as well other community groups.
FBCOs
tend to have mostly middle-class participants because the
congregations involved are generally mainline Protestant and Catholic
(although "middle-class" can mean different things in white
communities and communities of color, which can lead to class
tensions within these organizations).Holiness, Pentecostal, and other
related denominations (often "storefront") churches with
mostly poor and working-class members tend not to join FBCOs because
of their focus on "faith" over "works," among
other issues. FBCOs have increasingly expanded outside impoverished
areas into churches where middle-class professionals predominate in
an effort to expand their power to contest inequality.
Because
of their "organization of organizations" approach, FBCOs
can organize large numbers of members with a relatively small number
of organizers that generally are better paid and more
professionalized than those in "door-knocking" groups like
ACORN.
FBCOs
focus on the long-term development of a culture and common language
of organizing and on the development of relational ties between
members. They are more stable during fallow periods than grassroots
groups because of the continuing existence of member churches.
FBCOs
are 501(c)3 organizations. Contributions to them are tax exempt. As a
result, while they can conduct campaigns over "issues" they
cannot promote the election of specific individuals.
Power
versus protest
While
community organizing groups often engage in protest actions designed
to force powerful groups to respond to their demands, protest is only
one aspect of the activity of organizing groups. To the extent that
groups' actions generate a sense in the larger community that they
have "power," they are often able to engage with and
influence powerful groups through dialogue, backed up by a history of
successful protest-based campaigns. Similar to the way unions gain
recognition as the representatives of workers for a particular
business, community organizing groups can gain recognition as key
representatives of particular communities. In this way,
representatives of community organizing groups are often able to
bring key government officials or corporate leaders to the table
without engaging in "actions" because of their reputation.
As Alinsky said, "the first rule of power tactics" is that
"power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you
have."[11] The
development of durable "power" and influence is a key aim
of community organizing.
“Rights-based”
community organizing, in which municipal governments are used to
exercise community power, was first experimented with by the
Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF.org) in
Pennsylvania, beginning in 2002. Community groups are organized to
influence municipal governments to enact local ordinances. These
ordinances challenge preemptive state and federal laws that forbid
local governments from prohibiting corporate activities deemed
harmful by community residents. The ordinances are drafted
specifically to assert the rights of “human and natural
communities,” and include provisions that deny the legal concepts
of “corporate personhood,” and “corporate rights.” Since 2006
they have been drafted to include the recognition of legally
enforceable rights for “natural communities and ecosystems.”
Although
this type of community organizing focuses on the adoption of local
laws, the intent is to demonstrate the use of governing authority to
protect community rights and expose the misuse of governing authority
to benefit corporations. As such, the adoption of rights-based
municipal ordinances is not a legal strategy, but an organizing
strategy. Courts predictably deny the legal authority of
municipalities to legislate in defiance of state and federal law.
Corporations and government agencies that initiate legal actions to
overturn these ordinances have been forced to argue in opposition to
the community’s right to make governing decisions on issues with
harmful and direct local impact.
The
first rights-based municipal laws prohibited corporations from
monopolizing agriculture (factory farming), and banned corporate
waste dumping within municipal jurisdictions. More recent
rights-based organizing, in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine,
Virginia and California has prohibited corporate mining, large-scale
water withdrawals and chemical trespass.
Political
orientations
Community
organizing is not solely the domain of progressive politics, as
dozens of fundamentalist organizations
are in operation, such as the Christian
Coalition. However, the term "community organizing"
generally refers to more progressive organizations, as evidenced, for
example, by the reaction against community organizing in the 2008 US
presidential election by Republicans and conservatives on the web and
elsewhere.
Fundraising
Organizing
groups often struggle to find resources. They rarely receive funding
from government since their activities often seek to contest
government policies. Foundations and others who usually fund service
activities generally don't understand what organizing groups do or
how they do it, or shy away from their contentious approaches. The
constituency of progressive and centrist organizing groups is largely
low- or middle- income, so they are generally unable to support
themselves through dues. In search of resources, some organizing
groups have accepted funding for direct service activities in the
past. As noted below, this has frequently led these groups to drop
their conflictual organizing activities, in part because these
threatened funding for their "service" arms.
Recent
studies have shown, however, that funding for community organizing
can produce large returns on investment ($512 in community benefits
to $1 of Needmor funding, according to the Needmor Fund Study, $157
to 1 in New Mexico and $89 to 1 in North Carolina according to
National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy studies) through
legislation and agreements with corporations, among other sources,
not including non-fiscal accomplishments.
History
in the United States
Robert
Fisher and Peter Romanofsky have grouped the history of "community
organizing" (also known as "social agitation") in the
United States into four rough periods:
1880
to 1900
People
sought to meet the pressures of rapid immigration and
industrialization by organizing immigrant neighborhoods in urban
centers. Since the emphasis of the reformers was mostly on building
community through settlement
houses and other service mechanisms, the dominant approach
was what Fisher calls social
work. During this period the Newsboys
Strike of 1899 provided an early model of youth-led
organizing.
1900
to 1940
Community
organizing was established distinct from social work[citation
needed],
with much energy coming from those critical
of capitalist doctrines. Studs
Terkel documented community organizing in the depression
era, perhaps most notably that of Dorothy
Day. Most organizations had a national orientation because the
economic problems the nation faced did not seem possible to change at
the neighborhood levels.
1940
to 1960
Saul
Alinsky, based in Chicago,
is credited with originating the term community
organizer during
this time period. Alinsky wrote Reveille
for Radicals,
published in 1946, and Rules
for Radicals,
published in 1971. With these books, Alinsky was the first person in
America to codify key strategies and aims of community organizing. He
also founded the first national community organizing training
network, the Industrial Areas Foundation, subsequently led by one of
his former lieutenants, Edward Chambers.[14]
The
following quotations from Reveille
for Radicals[15] give
a good sense of Alinsky's perspective on organizing and of his public
style of engagement:
A
People's Organization is a conflict group, [and] this must be openly
and fully recognized. Its sole reason in coming into being is to wage
war against all evils which cause suffering and unhappiness. A
People's Organization is the banding together of large numbers of men
and women to fight for those rights which insure a decent way of
life....
A
People's Organization is dedicated to an eternal war. It is a war
against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice,
hopelessness, despair, and unhappiness. They are basically the same
issues for which nations have gone to war in almost every
generation.... War is not an intellectual debate, and in the war
against social evils there are no rules of fair play....
A
People's Organization lives in a world of hard reality. It lives in
the midst of smashing forces, dashing struggles, sweeping
cross-currents, ripping passions, conflict, confusion, seeming chaos,
the hot and the cold, the squalor and the drama, which people
prosaically refer to as life and students describe as "society."
1960
to present
The civil
rights movement, anti-war movements,
Chicano movement, feminist
movement, and gay
rights movement all influenced and were influenced by ideas
of neighborhood organizing. Experience with federal anti-poverty
programs and the upheavals in the cities produced a thoughtful
response among activists and theorists in the early 1970s that has
informed activities, organizations, strategies and movements through
the end of the century. Less dramatically, civic
associations and neighborhood block clubs were formed all
across the country to foster community spirit and civic duty, as well
as provide a social outlet.
Loss
of urban communities
During
these decades, the emergence of an ongoing process of white
flight, the ability of middle-class African Americans to move out
of majority Black areas, and the professionalization of community
organizations into 501(c)3 nonprofits, among other issues,
increasingly dissolved the tight ethnic and racial communities that
had been so prevalent in urban areas during the first part of the
century. As a result, community organizers began to move away from
efforts to mobilize existing communities and towards efforts
to create community,
fostering relationships between community members. While community
organizers like Alinsky had long worked with churches, these trends
led to an increasing focus on congregational organizing during the
1980s, as organizing groups rooted themselves in one of the few
remaining broad-based community institutions. This shift also led to
an increased focus on relationships among religion, faith, and social
struggle.
Emergence
of national organizing support organizations
A
collection of training and support organizations for national
coalitions of mostly locally governed and mostly FBCO community
organizing groups were founded in the Alinsky tradition.
The Industrial
Areas Foundation was the first, created by Alinsky himself
in 1940. The other key organizations include ACORN, PICO
National Network, Direct
Action and Research Training Center, and the Gamaliel
Foundation. The role of the organizer in these organizations was
"professionalized" to some extent and resources were sought
so that being an organizer could be more of a long term career than a
relatively brief, mostly unfunded interlude. The training provided by
these national "umbrella" organizations helps local
volunteer leaders learn a common "language" about
organizing while seeking to expand the skills of
organizers.The Midwest
Academy, based in Chicago, provides week-long training in
organizing nationally to organizers and leaders who are not part of
these established national organizations.The Center for Third World
Organizing provides training focused on "change efforts in
communities of color.
The
distinction between an "organizer" who staffs a community
organization and "leaders" who make decisions and provide
the public face of their groups was increasingly standardized over
these years, even in many organizations not linked to "umbrella"
training groups as the Alinsky tradition became increasingly
influential.
Examples
of community organizers
Many
of the most notable leaders in community organizing today emerged
from the National
Welfare Rights Organization.John Calkins of DART, Ernesto
Cortes of the Industrial
Areas Foundation,Wade
Rathke of ACORN,
John Dodds of Philadelphia Unemployment Project and Mark Splain of
the AFL-CIO,
among others.
There
are many other notable community organizers: Mark
Andersen, Heather Booth, César
Chávez, Lois
Gibbs, Ella
Baker, Huey
P. Newton, Mary
Harris "Mother" Jones, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Ralph
Nader,Barack
Obama, and Paul
Wellstone.
Youth
organizing
More
recently has come the emergence of youth organizing groups around the
country. These groups use neo-Alinsky strategies while also usually
providing social and sometimes material support to less-privileged
youth. Most of these groups are created by and directed by youth or
former youth organizers.
2008
presidential election
Prior
to his entry into politics, President Barack Obama worked
as an organizer for a Gamaliel Foundation FBCO organization in
Chicago. Marshall Ganz, former lieutenant of Cesar Chavez,
adapted techniques from community organizing for Obama's 2008
presidential election.At the 2008 Republican National
Convention, former New York City mayor Rudolph
Giuliani questioned Obama's role as a community organizer, asking the
crowd "What does a community organizer actually do?", and
was answered with resounding applause. This was seconded by the Vice
Presidential nominee, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who
stated that her experience as the mayor of Wasilla,Alaska was
"sort of like being a community organizer, except that you have
actual responsibilities." In response, some progressives, such
as Congressman Steve Cohen(D-Tn) and liberal pundit Donna
Brazille, started saying that Jesus was a community
organizer,Pontius Pilate was a governor", a phrase produced on
bumper stickers and elsewhere. Pontious Pilate was
the Roman Prefet who ordered the execution of Jesus.
Since
Obama's election, the campaign website, formerly part of "Obama
for America," has been renamed "Organising for America"
and has been placed under the auspices of the Democratic
National
Committee(DNC). This rebranded organization promotes the
president's legislative agenda items, such as health care reform,
which was a key focus of the new "OFA" during 2009.
History
of community organizing in the United Kingdom
Citizens
Uk has been promoting community organising in the UK since 1989
and has established the profession of Community Organiser through the
Guild of Community Organisers teaching the disciplines of strategy
and politics. Neil Jameson, the Executive Director of Citizens UK,
founded the organisation after training with the Industrial Areas
Foundation in the USA. Citizens UK (formerly the Citizens Organising
Foundation) established citizens groups in Liverpool, North
Wales, the Black Country, Sheffield, Bristol, Milton
Keynes and London.TCC (Together Creating Communities) in
North Wales is longest established beginning in 1995. It has been
independent of COF since 2001. London Citizens forerunner TELCO was
formed in 1996. Milton Keynes Citizens began in 2010. The others had
a brief and glorious start lasting roughly 3 years when COF was
unable to finance them any longer.
Together
Creating Communities in North East Wales is remarkable in community
organising in that its area of operation includes substantial rural
areas. Its current membership of 40 groups includes churches, schools
and the Wrexham Muslim Association as well as community groups.
Amongst its actions,it has successfully prevented a waste incinerator
being built in Wrexham, and in 2010 secured the appointment of a
specialist nurse for Parkinson's Disease sufferers. It has held
accountability meetings for Westminster and Welsh Assembly Elections
in 2001, 2005, 2007, 2010 and 2011.
Manchester
Changemakers was formed in 2007 and is independent of Citizens UK.
London
Citizens
London
Citizens began life in East London in 1996 as TELCO (the East London
Communities Organisation) subsequently expanding to South London,
West London and by 2011 into North London. London Citizens has a dues
paying institutional membership of over 160 schools, churches,
mosques, trade unions, synagogues and voluntary organisations. In the
beginning small actions were undertaken to prevent a factory from
contaminating the area with noxious smells and prevent drug dealing
in school neighbourhoods. Over time larger campaigns were undertaken.
Before Mayoral elections.for the Greater London Authority
in 2000, 2004 and 2008 major Accountability Assemblies were held with
the main mayoral candidates. They were asked to support London
Citizens and work with them on issues such as London Living wage; an
amnesty for undocumented migrants; safer cities initiatives and
development of community land trust housing. South London
Citizens held a citizens enquiry into the working of the Home Office
department at Lunar House and
its impact on the lives of refugees and migrants. This resulted in
the building of a visitor centre.
Political
analysis
Community
organising in the UK is distinctive because it deliberately sets out
to build permanent alliances of citizens to exercise power in
society. The UK analysis is that to understand Society it is
necessary to distinguish Civil
Society.from the State and the Market. In a totalitarian Society all
three may virtually coincide. In a fully democratic society the three
will be distinct. Where the state and the market become predominant,
even in a democracy, civil society is reduced on the one hand to
voting and volunteering and on the other to consuming. This is very
dangerous for democracy because the sense of citizenship and agency
becomes feeble and ineffective. In other words Civil Society becomes
powerless. Community organising and the role of the professional
Community Organiser is working out how to take back power from the
State and the Market by holding them accountable. The state and the
market cannot operate without moral values and direction. It is not
the role of the state or the market to determine those values. In a
democratic society there has to be a genuine public discourse
concerning justice and the common good. Problems with the global
banking system in 2008 in large part arose because “light touch
regulation” meant that there was no underlying moral system. The
market was left to its own devices with disastrous consequences for
the global economy.
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