The transformation of community development in the United States

Community development in the United States, in contrast to most of the world, has been a more specialised and narrowly defined practice – so much so that we have a separate term, community organising, to describe the more political and power-based form of practice included in most other definitions of community development. Using that separation, the post-World War II history of community development in the United States can be defined by a transition from a power-based model emphasising participatory and redistributive community power building, to a neoliberal model emphasising physical rehabilitation and business development.

Community organising as a power-based model of community development in the US arguably can be traced back to European colonisation of the North American continent and its developing culture of voluntary associations (de Tocqueville, 2000) and then the early 20th century settlement house movement (Berry, 1986). Saul Alinsky (1969, 1971) was credited with naming the practice, and his work in Chicago's 1930s ‘Back of the Yards’ neighbourhood created a recognisable model (Finks, 1984). The Civil Rights Movement is the other crucial source of community organising (Morris, 1984; Evans and Boyte, 1986). Its influence on community organising practice has been as profound as Alinsky’s, but it has been analysed more as a national social movement than as local community organising processes with national impact. The accepted founding of the movement, the ‘Montgomery Bus Boycott’, was built through local African American organisations and networks and created a model used in locality-based actions throughout the south and beyond (Morris, 1984; Evans and Boyte, 1986). From these origins came offshoots that melded Civil Rights organising with Alinsky-style organising such as the Welfare Rights Movement (Piven and Cloward, 1979) and eventually the famous Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) (Delgado, 1986; Fisher, 2009).

Defined through these examples, community organising is the process of a group of people with a common experience of oppression, exploitation or exclusion – a ‘constituency’ – coming together to identify their common problems and create organisations to attack the causes of those problems.