Mamas, Don’t Let Your Organizers Grow Up to be Developers

Community Organizing

Waveland    The activist and academically oriented quarterly journal, Social Policy, trades out subscriptions with a publication called Shelterforce, which, as the name indicates, specializes in housing related issues. A random email called “rooflines” that I get from time to time featured their best articles of the year.   Scrolling through, one piece caught my eye because …

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The Tough Process of Organizational Change

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Grenoble     Over the last week from Birmingham to Edinburgh to London and now in Grenoble,  it’s amazing how often conversations and questions focus as much on organizational change as organizing programs and prospects. Talking to Martin Smith, the organizing director for the GMB in London, he made the point as clearly as anyone saying that …

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The Search for Community and the Hope for Organization in Southern Italy

ACORN International Citizen Wealth Community Organizing Financial Justice Organizing

Taranto       My second day as a “professor” at La Scuola di Bollenti Spirit, the School of Hot Spirits, we were set to dive into how to look at campaigns.  Roberto Covolo, the school’s director started with an exposition of some of the differences in the Italian understanding of “state” responsibility and reflections that he and …

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