15 Community Organizing, Partnerships, and Coalitions (13/8) -- Introduction to Community Psychology

15 Community Organizing, Partnerships, and Coalitions Amie R. McKibban and Crystal N. Steltenpohl Chapter Fifteen Objectives By the end of this chapter, you will be able to: - Understand why and how communities organize - Explain bottom-up and top-down approaches to community organizing - Understand the cycle of organizing “The basic requirement for the understanding of the politics of change is to recognize the world as it is. We must work with it on its terms if we are to change it to the kind of world we would like it to be. We must first see the world as it is and not as we would like it to be.” — Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals At some point, everyone wants something about their community—or how their community is treated—to change. Maybe they feel a law is unfair, or wish their group had more resources. One way to accomplish community goals is to engage in community organizing, or the act of engaging in cooperative efforts to promote a community’s interests. Just as there are many things people may wish to change, community organizing comes in many shapes and forms and can be used to initiate small changes within a community or larger changes throughout society. Engaging in community organizing involves actively cultivating relationships with a number of people, some of whom may have different ideas about solutions. If it sounds complicated, that’s because it is! Thankfully, we have many examples of successful community organizing, some of which come from collaborative partnerships. COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIPS To understand collaborative partnerships, let’s first break down these two terms into their simplest form. A partnership is a mutual relationship between two or more people. This relationship can be hierarchical, as is the case between you and your boss, or equal, like the relationship between you and your co-workers. Collaboration, on the other hand, is an action. Specifically, collaboration is the action of working with one or more people to produce or create something. Taken together, a collaborative partnership is a reciprocal relationship between two or more people with a shared goal in mind. Collaborative partnerships are often dynamic, characterized by constant change, activity, or progress. Thinking about what you have read so far, what are some examples of collaborative partnerships you have encountered in the case study boxes throughout this book? Before reading further, take a moment to list them. Now that you have revisited the case studies and have a list of collaborative partnerships, are there commonalities between them? Do they differ from what you think of as community organizing? Often in Community Psychology, collaborative partnerships have common themes with and key differences from other forms of community organizing. Let’s take a look at some of these commonalities and differences. Organization of Collaborative Partnerships As you may recall from the introductory chapter (Jason et al., 2019), a major focus of Com