Community Organization: Concepts and Planning

• Understanding Community Organization

Key Learning Outcomes

• Describe community, its categories, and types.
• Discuss community organizing's concepts, importance, goals, steps, and models, including wheel participation and community development.
• Conduct community needs assessment, detailing its outcomes and steps.
• Identify key improvement areas within a community.
• Design a social and resource mobilization plan, with tips, key elements, and resource types.
• Engage stakeholders for networking and creating linkages.
• Explain the elements and critical aspects of community service.
• Establish methods for mobilizing students for community action, service engagement, types of community service, and service learning.
• Realize the value of volunteerism.

Introduction to Community Organization

• Community development involves understanding the current state and future aspirations of its people.
• Achieving a better future requires collective planning, implementation, and assessment to measure progress in system design, policies, and aligned practices.
• Effective use of financial, human, physical, natural, and intangible resources is crucial for positive contributions.
• Evaluation of capacity, skills, and plan execution is important to ensure service satisfaction and exceed expectations.
• Community organization is a strategy for community immersion.
• Before project commencement, project management teams should know the community structure in order to succeed in their programs, activities, and projects.

Meaning of Community

• Community is a group that follows a social structure within a society and organizes social life in a specific place.
• Members are bound by belonging, sustained across time and space, and are recipients & beneficiaries of development projects.
• The word "community" comes from Latin communitas, meaning "common, public shared by all or many".
• A community is a group of people living in the same place or sharing characteristics like norms, religion, values, or identity.
• Shared aspects include living, working, playing, problem-solving, and issue resolution.

Types of Communities

• Communities can be characterized by many factors including age, ethnicity, religion, location, and profession.
• Ferdinand Toennies used the concept of Gemeinschaft to describe societies with strong social ties where everyone knows each other.
• Gesellschaft is the opposite of Gemeinschaft.
• In the digital age, people increasingly form identities and support networks online based upon common interests rather than through nationalistic and regional identity features.
• Ethnic group: People with a shared ethnicity have common history, practices, cultures, and beliefs.
• Disabled people come together to share their common experiences, advocate for their shared needs, and support one another
• The deaf community is a well-known community who come together out of shared need and interest.
• Elderly community: Share experience of aging. Can lead to medical resources and active community-building
• Migrants often come together in new countries and support one another through shared language and culture.
• Professional communities: Share a profession or expertise. Advocate for their profession + professional development
• Guilds and associations: Similar to professional communities
• Business Communities: Advocate for people in the business and share running business.
• Economic communities are larger-scale than business communities and linked to nation-state economies

Categories of Community

• Communities of place.
• Communities of interest.
• Identity-based communities.
• Communities of need.
• Communities of practice.

Communities of Place

• Urban: heavily populated with a unique structure and a reliance on peripheral communities for resources.
• Suburban: less dense than urban areas and have a concentration of families, with interests focused on family planning and education.
• Rural: agrarian-focused with concerns about healthcare access, and conservative political leanings.
• Neighborhood: a small subset that entails the close proximity of residents and shared local amenities.
• Suburb: bigger than neighborhoods but smaller than cities a local government.
• National: an "imagined community" with shared and promoted identity purpose built up by media institutions.
• Global: encompassing everyone in the world.

Communities of Interest

• Subcultures: cohere around distinct beliefs from the dominant culture.
• Countercultures: oppositional to the dominant culture.
• Sporting: revolve around a specific sport with shared practices.

Identity-Based Communities

• Religious: cohere around shared spiritual practices for example to worship.
• Virtual: Formed online

Community Organization

• It is a method that addresses public problems and enhances people's ability to collaborate and wield power.
• Eduard C. Lindeman, emphasizes a consciousness on the part of a community to control its affairs.
• Walter W. Pettit states that it is assisting a group to understand and resolve their needs.
• Sanderson and Polson describe it as a technique for obtaining consensus concerning the direction and implementation of improvements

Models of Community Organization

• Locality Development: the key is the belief that communities have some common needs and interests and takes from improved quality of life.
• Social Planning: the key is a worker evaluates areas to suggest how to improve efficiency.
• Social Action: the key is to confront power structures to solve inequalities and deprivation.

Steps in Community Organizing

• Community Assessment: Understand the community. This includes gathering demographics, geographic boundaries, and history.
• Community Outreach: Conduct own survey and listening to the community to understand their concerns. The survey includes meetings, door-knocking, telephone surveys, and social media ads.
• Clarify Your Goals: Align mission and goals by listing what the project will achieve. Divide goals into internal objectives (organization-focused) and external objectives (community-focused)
• Frame Strategies for Action: Create plans for action with a strategy that is manageable. Some of the tactics include organization forums, e-mailing, and meetings with local government leaders.
• Build Local Leadership: Build a leadership so people can lead the community initiatives.
• Mobilize People: The people who are impacted must be involved in mobilization and the checklist of steps needed.

Aspects of Consultation

• Set benchmarks for people to achieve specific goals.
• Set timelines for people to achieve objectives.

Importance of Community Organizing

• Identifies issues by listening to people of the community about their concerns.
• Supports inclusivity by distributing community power more equally among the people by electing the leaders.
• Influences policy changes by assisting people plan and direct action towards policy changes.
• Amplifies voices by bringing together individuals who might not normally have a platform to make voices heard.
• By working together, communities can build real power and influence.

Community Development

• An organized effort to assist people to acquire the attitudes, skills, knowledge, and capabilities required for democratic participation.
• Community development is best undertaken if the approach is collaborative, consultative, and participative.
• Community: Often a geographical area
• Consultation: Survey's performed on a community to understand their opinions to an issue
• Participation: Community members who work on the development, delivery of initiatives.