By: Diane Cornman-Levy, Executive Director of the Greater Philadelphia Federation of Settlements
Monday, January 19, 2009 Page A15 


Diane Cornman-Levy is executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Federation of Settlements ...

Maybe it is fitting, or divine providence, that America's next president hails from the city that could be considered the home of community organizing, having produced one of the greatest thinkers in the field of social activism. 

In the 1930s, community organizer and writer Saul Alinsky mobilized the Back of the Yards neighborhood of Chicago to protest deplorable working conditions in the meat-packing industry. He is credited with coining the term community organizer in the 1940s, defining his philosophy of social change as bringing together people living close to each other to act in their common self-interest.

What might this founder of modern American community organizing say on the eve of the inauguration of a kindred spirit, Barack Obama, as the 44th president of the United States? I think he would urge the new commander-in-chief to be true to his heritage and carry on with the principles that historically have defined community organizing in America: empowering individuals, fostering a sense of ownership, building broad coalitions, developing new leadership, and, in all endeavors, working for the common good.

I think he would tell community organizers to take heart that one of their own has an opportunity to make a distinctive mark on the American landscape, and to rededicate themselves to the critical work they do.

Throughout contemporary American life, community organizing has brought historic change - starting with organizations such as mine, a collection of neighborhood settlement houses established to help immigrants adjust to urban life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Today, the settlement-house heritage lives on through institutions more popularly known as community or neighborhood centers.

In the Depression era, community organizing was probably best embodied by journalist-turned-social activist Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which resulted in the founding of farm communities for the poor. Since the late 1950s, the civil-rights, antiwar, farm workers, feminist, and gay-rights movements have flourished through community organizing.

Many smaller but important gains have been made through faith-based ministries, civic associations, grass-roots organizations, and settlement houses, helping thousands of families find homes, learn English, gain employment, improve their children's education, and create safe, healthy and nurturing neighborhoods. That is the unsung work that community organizers tirelessly pursue every day.

Now that we will have a community organizer in the White House, maybe we will experience on a grand scale what people such as Saul Alinsky foresaw decades ago, when he went into the slums of Chicago to empower their residents to demand change.