You are probably right though that encouraged people to target government to help.

You are also right that it’s not such a hot credential. But once you’ve pondered what “systems analysts” and “project managers” might have been up to, the vagueness of “community” and the pretension of “organizer” don’t seem all that much worse.

I grew up in a small Upstate NY city so my work was alien to family and friends. Crack cocaine was sold openly on street corners and on blocks. Residents went months without heat and hot water after landlords lost their title to their properties for non-payment of taxes. And Freddie Mac, can you imagine, was overfinancing properties with unaffordable debt that enriched brokers and landlords.

My job was to knock on doors and find people willing to join together to tackle these problems. That meant pressuring police to enforce the law. It meant organizing tenant groups to press owners to meet their responsibilities whether those owners were public or private entities. Connecting West Indian Anglicans with African-American Baptists and Hispanic Romanian Catholic is a job — there weren’t well-established lines of communication among them. Just as Senate Foreign Relations Committee or the GE’s Office of the CEO needs someone to arrange for meetings, do research, and help plan strategy, so too do people coping with challenges overwhelming their communities — communities that held their churches, families, friends, and connections to employment.

Community organizing’s focus on grassroots issues was in some sense a reaction against the ideological excesses of the Sixties even while it generally shared with the Zeitgeist attributed to the decade a spirit of Anti-Authoritarianism and a striving for social justice on behalf of those society had denied it. My kind of organizing focused on finding local leaders, people respected and compelling, and doing the leg work to help them effectively address the issues degrading their communities. It started with the directly immediate issues people confronted.

Ironically, given his speech, my organization met with Rudy Giuliani when he was US Attorney. He was engaged, solicitous, and exceptional in his staff’s follow-up. I’ve always thought that his encounters with our organization, The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, underwrote his confidence that a public safety focus would resonate positively in low-income, traditionally Democratic neighborhoods politically.

But it is difficult to make an untrue statement about the variety of people who have called themselves community organizers. Some are self-style advocates who gladly fill a well-understood role in media’s storylines. Others are disaffected with society and believe that changing society in broad terms entails working directly with those perceived to be its victims. Still others are like me: convinced that tremendous capacities lie in communities even when they are apparently bereft of them.

This particularity which makes the traducing of community organizing hard to answer also makes me, at any rate, sanguine. The grace of organizing for me was coming to know the many extraordinary people living
Anyway there have been many varieties of community organizing since its patron saint, Saul Alinsky, founded it as a cognate discipline to labor organizing in Chicago’s working class neighborhoods in the 30′s. Some could with justice be called “heirs of the mau-mauers.” Many, even when they occasionally entailed being rude to decision-makers, were opposite in the sense that they were devoted to day-to-day rather than ideological issues. Targets of pressure included Democratic politicians, offcials, etc., and business people.

Community organizing, as a field, will never be ready for prime-time. Many Americans, though perhaps fewer over time, live in communities that don’t need “organizing.” They’re smaller, elected officials are actually reasonably accountable to their electorates, the threads of connection and habit, effectively bind people. Many of the people the media latches on to are “advocates,” not organizers, and are required by media to fill a role from central casting. All good community organizing starts out as very local and acquires a national dimension only when problems are shared across regions and states.

I disagree, wheelhouse; I think that it’s not programmatic but tribal.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/09/what-is-community-organizer.html