Community organization
This often includes inclusive networking, interpersonal organizing, listening, reflexivity, non-violent communication, cooperation, mutual aid and social care, prefiguration, popular education, and direct democracy.
Under globalization, the ubiquity of ICTs, neoliberalism, and austerity, has caused many organizations to face complex challenges such as mission drift and coercion by state and private funders.
"[5] In 1925, Walter W. Pettit stated that "Community organization is perhaps best defined as assisting a group of people to recognize their common needs and helping them to meet these needs.
Community organization may be thought of as the process by which these relationships are initiated, altered or terminated to meet changing conditions, and it is thus basic to all social work..." In 1947, Wayne McMillen defined community organization as "in its generic sense in deliberately directed effort to assist groups in attaining unity of purpose and action.
In 1975, Kramer and Specht stated "Community organization refers to various methods of intervention whereby a professional change agent helps a community action system composed of individuals, groups, or organizations to engage in planned collective action in order to deal with special problems within the democratic system of values."
The first formal precursor to the Community Benefit Organization was recorded in Elizabethan England to overcome the acute problem of poverty, which led to beggary.
The London Society of Organizing Charitable Relief and Repressing Mendicancy and the settlement house movement followed in England during the late 1800s.
[11] History shows that innovative methods of community organizing have risen in response to vast social problems.
[13] Community-based organizations (CBOs) which operates within the given locality insures the community with sustainable provision of community-service and actions in health, educational, personal growth and improvement, social welfare and self-help for the disadvantaged its sustainability becomes healthier and possible because the community is directly involved in the action or operation wherever and whenever monetary and non-monetary support or contribution is generated.
[14] In developing countries (like those in Sub-Saharan Africa) community organizations often focus on community strengthening, including HIV/AIDS awareness, human rights (like the Karen Human Rights Group), health clinics, orphan children support, water and sanitation provision, and economic issues.
According to Rothman, the reframing of the typologies as overlapping and integrated ensured that "practitioners of any stripe [have] a greater range in selecting, then mixing and phasing, components of intervention.
Feminist community organization scholar, Cheryl Hyde, criticized Rothman's "mixing and phasing" as unable to transcend rigid categorical organizing typologies, as they lacked "dimensions of ideology, longitudinal development ... commitment within community intervention and incorporati[on] [of] social movement literature.
Many of the challenges created by globalization involve divestment from local communities and neighborhoods, and a changing landscape of work.
Scholars such as Grace Lee Boggs and Gar Alperovitz are noted for their visionary understandings of community organization in this changing context.
These and other scholars emphasize the need to create new social, economic, and political systems through community organization, as a way to rebuild local wealth in this changing landscape.
Related concepts include visionary organizing, community wealth projects, employee-owned firms, anchor institutions, and place-based education.
Across all sizes, Canadian community organizations rely on government funding (49%), earned income (35%), and others through gifts and donations (13%).
