posted on: Wednesday, October 21, 2009

By Ben MacConnell

Seize the day! That seems to have been the rally cry in community organizing circles ever since the former Chicago organizer – now president and Nobel laureate – Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries in the summer of 2008.

Having a former organizer in the White House does seem to have presented a unique opportunity for the field of community organizing. In April, the New York Times printed an article (in their fashion section no less) suggesting that President Obama has made community organizing “cool again.” College professors have reported that previously obscure classes on community organizing are now seeing record enrollments. Last year, during the Direct Action and Research Training Center's (DART) annual recruitment drive for the DART Organizers Institute, recruiters collected over 2,000 resumes and 900 applicants for only 17 available positions. So something seems to be happening.

But seizing the day can take many forms. When Sarah Palin mocked President Obama’s organizing experience at the Republican national convention, community organizers across the country launched websites, wrote blogs and printed bumper stickers to defend the profession. After the inauguration, several foundations pieced together money – even with the market crash – to encourage activities that would capitalize on this moment in history. When President Obama announced his plans to reform healthcare, some community organizations that have historically focused their efforts locally, began sending staff to the beltway to work at the national level.

Business writer, Jim Collins, is an unusual author to cite for an article about community organizing. But then again, Collins has researched how to build great companies that last, and any recipe for enduring greatness ought to be understood by disciplined organizers. Collins talks a great deal about companies that spend too much energy telling the time of the day and not enough energy building clocks. Martin Luther King, Jr. made a similar observation when describing churches during the civil rights movement. He said churches had acted more like thermometers recording the temperature of the day, rather than thermostats that set the level of heat.

These lessons seem relevant to this “seize the moment” phenomenon that’s currently all the rage. It suggests that instead of focusing on telling the time with the hottest issue campaigns, organizing technology or slogans, the field of community organizing needs to take this opportunity to build good clocks. To do this, community organizing needs to do what any industry does with a long-term interest on impacting the world – it draws in, uses and retains great talent. Notably, most applicants to the DART Organizers Institute said that their interest in organizing didn’t stem from President Obama’s past life as an organizer, but from someone they know and respect telling them about this line of work. So while President Obama’s past has raised awareness, the onus is still on organizers and their allies to do the outreach and cultivation necessary to bring talented people into this line of work.

Every year or two a survey or report is issued that highlights the severe need for more professional organizers to sustain a movement. In 1998, the Peace Development Fund reported that community organizations faced, “survival issues hampering efficiency and effectiveness, including personnel issues such as high turnover, the scarcity of trained organizers, and burnout. …” After surveying 100 local faith-based community organizers, Interfaith Funders discovered in 2001that, “The factor most consistently cited by respondents as limiting the growth of their work is the recruitment of talented organizers.” Andrew Mott, the former Director of the Center for Community Change, wrote in his 2006 report compiled for Community Catalyst, “We have invested too little in developing sufficient numbers of people with the vision, breadth of knowledge, commitment and skills needed to tackle the issues, which low-income communities and people of color face in America today.” All of these reports and others like them have drawn the same conclusion – the ability to build strong organizations committed to a shift in power and reversing injustice rests on the capacity to develop great community organizers.

For all of these reasons, we – organizers and funders alike - ought not ask how to seize the day; we ought to ask how to seize a generation.

Ben MacConnell is Director of the DART Organizers Institute, a field school for new professional community organizers that will be celebrating its tenth year in 2010. For more details, check out their latest video.

Editor’s note: In a couple of months, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy will be marking the first anniversary of Strengthening Democracy, Increasing Opportunities: Impact of Advocacy, Organizing and Civic Engagement, a series of reports that highlights the positive impact that communities have seen through funder-supported nonprofit policy engagement. This posting by guest contributor Ben MacConnell brings home a basic resource requirement for nonprofit advocacy groups – or any organization - to have a chance at success.