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David Moberg 19 Back to Its Roots: The Industrial Areas Foundation and United Power for Action and Justice MODERN AMERICAN community organizing tracesitsrootsbacktotheworkduringthe1930s of Saul Alinsky, a tough-guy intellectual with an independent leftist outlook, who organized an impoverished eastern European neighborhood near Chicago’s famed stockyards. Alinsky saw his Back of the Yards Organization, as well as later groups, such as The Woodlawn Organization (TWO, in an African American, South Side Chicago neighborhood), as the community counterparts of the industrial unions that were organizing at the time (Horwitt 1989). These “peoples’ organizations” were intended to mobilize communities to fight for their self-interest outside the normal boundaries of politics and to challenge established political and business powers. Alinsky’s organizing work—but most of all his writing and brilliant knack for public political theater—spawned a wide variety of organizingeffortsacrossthecountry ,butnowheremore so than in Chicago. Although Alinsky’s own Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) continued to organize throughout the country, many other related styles of organizing splintered off and evolved independently, often with different networks of organizers and organizations in competition with each other despite their common goals.Indeed,eventheIAFchangedsignificantly after Alinsky’s death in 1972, mainly under the influence of its long-time director and Alinsky protégé, Ed Chambers. Whatever their evolution, most community organizing strategists remain convinced that a need exists to organize citizens based on geographical community as much as on specific policy or ideological interests (as is the base for the Sierra Club) or on electoral action. While some community groups are conservative (and indeed Alinsky’s Back of the Yards Organization for many years mainly fought to keep blacks out oftheneighborhood),mostorganizersarepolitically progressive: They implicitly assume that if low- to moderate-income communities become engaged in civic life and begin to act on behalf of the self-interest of their neighborhoods, the results will be progress towards social and economic justice. Although rarely stated, an assumption also exists that community groups— especiallyiftheyworkwithsimilargroupsacross ethnic or racial divides—will forge a common class interest in, for example, safe neighborhoods , affordable housing, better schools, more public and private investment in neighborhood economies, or better access to health care. But most community organizers also advocate participatory democracy, that is, civic life in which average citizens become powerful and in charge of their own lives, not just clients of the more powerful, even if beneficent. It is a sentiment captured in the “iron rule” of the IAF: Never do for others what they can do for themselves. Each historical stream or contemporary network of community organizing has changed in response, first, to its own internal dynamics and history, and second, in response to changes in political climate, the structure of the economy, and the characteristics of particular urban areas . But there is widespread recognition that the classic Alinskyite model is no longer adequate: Isolated community groups that are not part of a larger-scale organizing effort cannot provide 240 David Moberg the power that powerless communities need. As John McKnight and John Kretzmann have argued , many urban neighborhoods are increasingly fragmented and deprived of traditional socialresources .Thisispartlyaresultofthedecline of political parties, unions, and, in some cases, organizations of ethnic solidarity, as well as the growth of suburbanization, physical separation of work and home, and economic insecurity. Also, fewer local power centers are useful targets for community organizing (for example, today’s neighborhood branch bank, currency exchange, or payday loan office does not wield the power or make the decisions that a local bank once did) (McKnight1995).Eventhoughmanyorganizers agree on the need for a different scale of operation , community organizations differ widely on the basics of how and whom to organize, how to work with potential allies, and how to engage with electoral politics. The Industrial Areas Foundation had already begun its transition from the classic local neighborhood model when it established a training school for organizers in Chicago in 1969. Soon afterwards,IAFlaunchedacitywidegroupcalled Campaign Against Pollution (later Citizens Action Program, when it expanded to fight a proposed expressway through working-class neighborhoods ). But, by 1976, the organization had collapsed, and the IAF training institute moved to New York. The IAF has subsequently greatly expanded, forming more than 45 organizations in 17 states, including the politically powerful Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS) in San Antonio and the ambitious East Brooklyn Congregations, which helped bring about the construction of roughly 4,000 new single-family homes in a deeply troubled neighborhood (Freedman 1994). Increasingly, IAF groups...

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