Alexandra Pineros-Shields

This essay introduces the inaugural issue of Community Organizing Journal, "Reimagining the Scholarship and Practice of Community Organizing." Written by two scholar-organizers, the introduction summarizes key themes from Issue 1 papers, including 1)defining community organizing; 2) problematizing Alinsky-style organizing; 3) diversifying organizing strategies; and 4) exploring power dynamics. 

In the tradition of community organizing, ECCO leaders asked the pivotal question, “how do we build power for this campaign?” Part of the answer to that question was identifying new stakeholders who would increase ECCO’s power base and exploring how that cohort of stakeholders might be organized and mobilized to advance the campaign. ECCO immigrant leaders identified “small immigrant landlords” as a potential group of stakeholders who might share common interests with the goals of ECCO’s housing rights campaign and potentially be open to joining ECCO’s work. This was a novel idea because ECCO’s housing rights campaign in Lynn is composed almost exclusively, of tenants. To explore this question, ECCO decided to conduct a Participatory Action Research project (PAR) and assembled a team of immigrant women of color leaders between December 2022 - January 2023. The research began in February 2023. This research was funded through a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation administered through the Urban Institute.

Every election year, think pieces and articles are written about the political alignments of Latinos and of Latino evangelicals in particular; however, the sparse information presented tends to be about Latino evangelicals, not by them. This summer, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition (NaLEC), UNDIVIDED, and the Heller School at Brandeis University, embarked on a pilot project to address this gap. Five bilingual Latino community co-researchers were trained to collaborate to develop questions, conduct interviews, and analyze data. The co-researchers contributed over 60 collective hours to the project. Eleven pastors participated in a focus group, and 27 congregants from Latino evangelical churches in Central Florida were interviewed. The methodology and findings provide a firm foundation to be built upon in new locations and cultural contexts so that organizers, advocates, and elected officials can begin speaking with Latino evangelicals instead of at them.

This chapter describes leadership-development strategies to promote autonomy and power among marginalized women. Grounded in a case study of a community-organizing group, this chapter outlines concrete frameworks and techniques that practitioners can use to encourage individuals to “step into their own power” and become agents of change in their own lives. The chapter presents both theoretical frameworks as well as hands-on techniques that practitioners can apply in many different settings. The frameworks and strategies presented include Participatory Action Research and the Question Formulation Technique. The case study used to present the various approaches focuses on a community-organizing nonprofit that works with undocumented Latina immigrants. It provides an overview of the challenges faced by this population, as well as best practices to address those challenges.

Involving people with lived experience in all stages of an evaluation can strengthen the credibility of the findings. This paper provides an example of this involvement. It focuses on a program designed to support kinship caregivers—those who step in to take care of a child when the parents are unable to do so. To the best of our knowledge, our team conducted one of the only participatory evaluations in which kinship caregivers were involved in all stages of evaluating a kinship navigator program in the U.S.—from designing the questions, to collecting and analyzing the data, to reporting the results. Through this process, we learned that participatory evaluation is a feasible and useful approach both to understanding the experiences of kinship families and to improving the supports in their lives. In this paper we share our collaborative journey through each stage of the evaluation, offering lessons learned about the process that may apply to the field of kinship care as well as to other areas of social service delivery.

Listening campaigns are traditionally part of organizing cycles. It is through listening that grassroots social justice organizations create power by centering the knowledge of their community as their primary source of expertise, thus incentivizing local ownership of organizing campaigns, and ensuring that organizing and political goals are grounded in the wisdom and desires of local communities. PAR was chosen as the framework to carry out the listening campaign because it is an antiracist research paradigm that shifts power to communities, establishes rigorous systems for listening and analyzing data, and requires that knowledge gained be used for action toward justice. From May through October 2021, FIA provided participating Federations with ongoing training and technical assistance to carry out local listening campaigns using PAR. Local Federations analyzed their people’s knowledge that emerged from listening sessions held from August to December 2021. After completing their Seasons of Listening, many Federations conducted public accountability events to proclaim the wisdom that emerged from their community’s knowledge and demand public accountability for addressing injustices. These public events took many forms including but not limited to press conferences, candidate forums, and community assemblies.

In recent years, communities have responded to police violence in U.S. cities through confrontational models of community organising that evolved from patriarchal and male approaches. Very often, these approaches have not produced the hoped-for outcomes. In this article, I argue that a women-led community organising model, grounded in feminine relational power-with epistemologies, can lead to innovative policy changes, including in contexts of intractable problems, such as police misconduct. This article presents the Midwife for Power community organising model, which creates space for women organisers to nurture solidarity and creativity across all lines of difference, centres personal testimony and uses collective inquiry to create relational power to address injustice. Theoretically, this model draws on the rich insights of Black and Latina organisers and scholars, as well as traditions of intersectional solidarity. In order to illustrate the model, this article presents an empirical case study of a successful police accountability campaign.

Across the United States, more than 2.5 million children are being raised in the homes of grandparents or other relatives. This is called “kinship care”—loved ones caring for a child when the parents are unable to do so. Research shows that children fare better when placed with family rather than in foster care. Yet, when families take on this caregiving role, they often do so without additional financial help or advice in navigating the systems of support available to them. This is the unique role of Kinship Navigator programs—to provide caregivers a single point of entry for connecting to financial, health, housing, and legal assistance. HALOS offers the sole Kinship Navigator program in South Carolina. Over the past year, from the time the pandemic began in March, 2020 through February, 2021, the program has reached 146 kin families and 479 kin children. As a first evaluation effort of the program, our goal is to gather an in-depth understanding of the experience of caregivers and explore preliminary evidence of the program’s impact. Our approach is a participatory evaluation, with kinship caregivers engaged in all stages of the evaluation process.

In June 2020, LA RED, Faith in Action launched a listening campaign to hear about immigrant leaders’ experiences over the last four years, to share hopes and dreams for the future, and to create a collective vision and priorities for LA RED within a shifting political landscape. The campaign trained 60 immigrant organizers and grassroots members to facilitate sessions in their communities, conducted 100 sessions in 13 states and the District of Columbia, and heard from 715 immigrant leaders with non-permanent immigration status, either undocumented, from mixed-status families, people with precarious status such as DACA, TPS, or Visas. LA RED used an anti-racist Latin American research paradigm method called Participatory Action Research to determine the key themes and findings and compiled what we learned from the listening campaign into a report titled, Our Stories, Our Futures: The Voices of Immigrant Communities.