Community Organizing

The CLDR Community Organizing course helped me to learn the core skills that are required when community organizing. Some important practical skills centered around facilitating story circles, understanding the forms of community organizing, and the importance of building social capital. Whether organizing around an issue or doing culture organizing, it is important for the organizer to engage people around values despite their differences. We grow from hearing different perspectives around culture and issues.

Community Organizing Plan

I am very interested in organizing a movement around getting doula services covered by Medicaid. A doula is a professional labor assistant who provides physical and emotional support during pregnancy, labor and postpartum to a pregnant person and their partner. Doulas meet with families during pregnancy to discuss birth choices and labor coping strategies. During labor and delivery, doulas provide comfort measures, such as touch, massage, and movement and breathing techniques. Doulas support and advocate for laboring parents in medical facilities. After childbirth, doulas support parents in breastfeeding and infant care. The maternal and infant mortality rates of the United States are significantly higher than comparable wealthy countries across the world. Furthermore, pregnancy-related deaths and infant mortality disproportionately affect communities of color in the U.S. The U.S. has to face this disheartening fact head on. Doula services could be part of the solution. But hiring a doula is expensive, usually costing between $600 and $2000. For the families who need it most, poor marginalized communities, this is cost prohibitive. However, if Medicaid covered doula services, then doulas would be accessible to the people who need them most and potentially have an impact on reducing the maternal mortality and infant mortality disparities. The skills that I learned in the Community Organizing class will help me organize people around this Reproductive Justice issue.

Community Organizing Project

Story Circles

Story circles allow participants to tell a short story with no reaction from the rest of the group. Story circles generate a unique experience for each person and help the group develop deep listening skills. During story circles, community issues may arise which give the participants an opportunity to join together as a momentum for change. The point of the story circle is to develop a collective and co-create knowledge for the group. Modeling sets the tone and expectations of the circle. Story Circles are an important tool that I can use when I am organizing around cultures or issues. Story Circles give the group the opportunity to respect our humanity together.

Forms of Community Organizing

I also learned about the forms of community organizing. If you think of community organizing on a continuum of the individual to the collective, you begin to understand whether your community organizing is working “for” or “with” someone. This continuum also allows the organizer to understand the power dynamics in each area. Direct Action is the area of organizing that allows for the greeted amount of people impacted and realigns the power while advocating with the affected community. Opportunity for direct action exists in all spheres. Recognizing forms of community organizing has given me the ability to better understand how each dimension of organizing affects the community and will help me to infuse direct action into all the forms of community organizing.

Social Capital

This course also helped me to identify and build on three main aspects of community organizing. First and most importantly, is being able to develop social capital. Social capital is the relationships we build around an issue or culture. Social capital makes up the bulk of the constituency, or the people that show up. In building social capital, it is essential to build alliances. These alliances are social capital outside of the constituency and are connections to other entities. Alliances are also known as “bridging capital”. Alliances are particularly important around sharing funding and resources. Without building social capital in community organizing, you cannot move the cause forward.

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