by Seth Borgos and Scott Douglas

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At the core of every strong community organization - its fundamental source of cohesion - is the conviction that it offers its members a unique vehicle for exercising and developing their capacities as citizens. Like many truisms, however, it is often asserted in a vague, rhetorical, even sentimental manner, as if it could simply be taken for granted. Community organizations have invested far more time in publicizing issues and campaigns than in articulating their contributions to democratic governance. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that political elites, the media, and the public at large tend to perceive organizing as a genre of public-interest advocacy, or special-interest pleading, rather than as a vital thread in the social fabric.

For the past several years, a circle of organizers from the southern US and institutional supporters of their work have been exploring strategies to enhance the resource base of community organizing*. This discussion has been informed by the burgeoning debate among scholars, pundits, and politicians over the health of civil society. We recognize affinities between the theoretical issues at play in that debate and the problems encountered "on the ground" in southern communities. At the same time, we've been troubled by the lack of reference to community organizing as actually practiced in the US, and by the tendency to treat components of civil society as interchangeable parts despite profound differences in orientation and value. These observations have prompted scrutiny into the way that organizing is understood outside its immediate circle of practitioners.

This article is one product of our inquiry. Its goal is to support the claim of community organizing to democratic significance by articulating this claim in a more precise and explicit form. This requires us to locate community organizing within the broader context of contemporary debate over the condition of civil society, to distinguish between community organizations and other kind of voluntary associations, and to provide a more vivid picture of how community organizations fulfill their role in practice. Although these ambitions extend well beyond the scope of a single article, we hope that our brief treatment will suggest some of the rich possibilities of the subject and the fundamental issues at stake.

The Great Social Capital Debate

The recent publications of Robert Putnam - a landmark study of Italian regional governments, followed by a series of papers devoted to the US - have revived a longstanding debate over the character of civic engagement in a democratic society. This debate has established a new framework for discussion, taking a vocabulary that was previously confined to academic use (civil society, secondary associations, social capital) and introducing it into common currency. These concepts, slippery as they are, offer a useful starting point for assessing the contribution of community organizations to civic life.

Civil society, as we understand the term, refers to a social domain that is distinct from the formal institutions of government, the profit-seeking activities of the market, and the intimate realm of friends and family. The institutions that inhabit this domain - churches, labor unions, sports leagues, Elks Clubs, Girl Scouts, PTAs - are variously knows as secondary or voluntary or mediating associations. Since de Tocqueville, many observers of American democracy have attributed the distinctive features of our politics to the density and vigor of these local institutions. But the link between civil society and democracy has become more tenuous in recent decades. Seeking to explain the growing cynicism of the American voter, the rise of "sound bite politics," and the incapacity of government to address fundamental social problems, some critics such as Putnam have pointed to the deterioration of civil society as a likely culprit.

In depicting the reliance of representative government on a healthy civil society, Putnam has adopted the tern social capital, coined in the 1980s by sociologist James Coleman, which, according to Putnam, refers to "features of social organization that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Many of these features are intangible like sentiments of trust, expectation or mutual obligation. Recent scholarship has applied the social capital concept to the institutions of civil society: voluntary associations, regardless of their putative function, provide their members with certain goods that enable them to participate more effectively in the realm of politics. These goods include:

• practical experience and skills in the "democratic arts" (how to conduct meetings, lead discussions, develop consensus, etc.);
• "safe space" to listen to each other and engage in sustained discussion of public issues;
• a sense of collective efficacy and competence, the conviction that problems can be resolved through cooperative effort;
• a broad sentiment of solidarity and social trust that spills over into other arenas of civic, political, and economic activity.

Putnam's findings focus on the quantity of civic activity, but say very little about its quality. Which kinds of social capital are most significant for the health of a democracy? Are certain types of associations especially productive in this respect, and what are the features that make them so? These issues have not been adequately addressed in the great social capital debate, but they are crucial to any assessment of community organizing and to the broader question of how democracy might be strengthened through the medium of civil society.

Community Organizations as Social Capital

"Community organization" is a notoriously elastic term, but its most common usage refers to organizations that are democratic in governance, open and accessible to community members, and concerned with the general health of the community rather than a specific interest or service function. For greater precision, practitioners sometimes use direct action or mass-based to designate organizations that empower their members to speak and act on their own behalf rather that through professional intermediaries. It is this type of organization, rather than the generic civic association, that is the subject of our inquiry.

Drawn mainly from our collective experience, we have distilled several elements that distinguish the character and aspirations of direct-action community organizations from other kinds of voluntary associations:

A participative culture. Many voluntary organizations seek an active membership, either for practical reasons (the work won't get done otherwise) or as a matter of equity (everyone should pull their own weight). But community organizations are unusual in viewing participation as an end in itself. Under the rubric of leadership development, they devote considerable time and resources to enlarging the skills, knowledge, and responsibilities of their members. It is not an accident that the injunction, "never do for others what they can do for themselves," is known as the iron rule of organizing, rather than, for example, the iron rule of bowling leagues. The very purpose of direct action organizing is contravened when membership is comprised of passive supporters or donors rather than people actively engaged in the work of the organization.

Inclusiveness. Community organizations are generally committed, as a matter of principle, to developing membership and leadership from a broad spectrum of the community. Many are expressly dedicated to fostering civic participation among groups that have been "absent from the table," including communities of color, low-income constituencies, immigrants, sexual minorities, and youth; unlike other kinds of voluntary associations that, in most instances, tend to draw their membership from a narrow social base and their leadership from business and professional elites. Being genuinely inclusive and developing leadership capacity among historically marginalized groups require more than good intentions; they demand a high level of skill, a frank acknowledgment of power disparities, and a major investment of time and effort.

Breadth of mission and vision. In their work in rural Minnesota, organizers Ellen Ryan and Julie Ristau have observed the tendency of civic institutions to become stuck on certain functions while losing sight of the larger problems of the community. "Rather than encouraging broad and reasoned discussion of the urgent and important issues of the day, unions, religious congregations, business associations, political parties, schools, service, and special interest clubs focus on narrowly-defined tasks and offer their members narrowly-defined answers. Members are treated as clients and consumers of services, or volunteers who help the needy, rather than as participants in the evolution of ideas and projects that forge our common life."

In principle, every issue that affects the welfare of the community is within the purview of community organizing. In practice, strong community organizations have proven adept at integrating a diverse set of issues and linking them to a larger vision of the common good. As this holistic function has been abandoned by political parties, churches, schools, and other civic institutions, community organizations have emerged to fill the vacuum.

Critical perspective. Perhaps the most distinctive quality of direct-action community organizations is their critical orientation toward political, economic, and social institutions. Community organizations seek to change policies and institutions that are not working, and in many communities they are the only force promoting institutional accountability and responsiveness. Because community organizations take critical positions, they can be viewed as partisan or even polarizing in some contexts, and an obstacle to social collaboration. The current vogue for "consensus organizing" seems to reflect this view. But, it is worth emphasizing that Putnam, in his Italian research, found no correlation between the level of political conflict and the performance of the regional governments he studied. The key variable was "civicness," not consensus; regions with a rich base of civic activity had effective governance even when there was a high level of political polarization. A critical stance may generate conflict, but it can also stimulate participation and sharpen political discourse in ways that lead to deeper and richer forms of social collaboration.

Civic Life and Community Organization in the South

The South has not been immune to the trends in civic participation and political behavior that are being observed across the United States: declining voter participation; declining commitment to traditional secondary associations (PTAs, civic groups, etc.); increased distrust of government, the media, and civic institutions; and the growing appeal of simplistic responses to economic stagnation and political gridlock. However, civic life in the South also exhibits some features that are distinctive if not unique to the region:

• In many communities, particularly in the rural Deep South, white leaders have maintained the de facto exclusion of African Americans from effective participation in decision-making. The threat of economic and physical retaliation continues to be wielded to intimidate those who might challenge the status quo.
• In parts of the South that have been historically dependent on a single industry or national resource, civic leadership is often dominated by narrow cliques that are unwilling to enlist new energies and incapable of responding creatively to the decline of the economic base.
• Labor unions and other forms of association among workers remain extremely weak in most parts of the region. South Carolina, for example, has come closer than any state in the nation in creating a union-free environment, with only 3 percent of its workforce in labor organizations.
• Although religion is a powerful influence in southern society, the institutional participation of churches in civic life historically has been less explicit that in other regions of the country. This pattern is attributable to a number of factors, ranging from theological constraints (especially within the evangelical and pentecostal faith traditions) to racial exclusion (for African-American churches).
• Overall, the South is characterized by a combination of strong kinship ties and community identities with relatively weak civic institutions. As one organizer put it, "The churches, the communities, the kinship networks all operate in the same fashion. They respond to personal needs in a personal way, not in a structural or institutional way."

It is in this environment that hundreds of organizations have emerged in communities across the South, from urban neighborhoods in fast-growing cities to impoverished rural counties in Appalachia, the coastal lowlands, and the Mississippi Delta. The illustrations that follow hardly do justice to the diversity or organizations in the region, but they offer some representative images of southern community organizations at work.

Tallahatchie County, Mississippi

For those who might assume that the "Old South" died around 1965, a visit to Tallahatchie County is instructive. Located on the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta, with a population that is 59 percent African American, the county has a long history of racial terrorism; the men who lynched Emmitt Till in 1957 were acquitted by an all-white jury in the county courthouse. As of 1990, nearly a generation after the Voting Rights Act, no Black person had ever won a county-wide election, and Tallahatchie remained one of the ten poorest counties in the nation.

These conditions were in part due to the intransigence of the white minority, but they were also the product of internal strife, turf battles, and unaccountable leadership within the Black community. The unity of purpose achieved in the civil rights movement had dissipated into "mischiefs of faction" during the 1970s and 80s, as a multitude of organizations, clubs, and networks pursued their own divergent agendas. The prevailing opinion in the county was that it was impossible to unite the Black community around any issue of importance.

In January 1991, a Jackson-based organization, Southern Echo, conducted a weekend-long workshop in Tallahatchie on redistricting opportunities in the wake of the 1990 census. Community residents heard presentations on the technical aspects of redistricting, dissected the issues in small groups, and engaged in a "role-play" presentation to the County Board of Supervisors. By the end of the workshop, contrary to all expectations, the participants had formed an umbrella organization encompassing all the major factions within the African-American community, and they had agreed upon a plan to take a redistricting proposal to the County Board.

After a six-month organizing campaign, the board agreed to hold public negotiations - the first time the supervisors had ever agreed to negotiate with a Black organization. The negotiations stretched out over more than a dozen sessions, but by the end of the process, the supervisors had acquired a grudging respect for the expertise and commitment that the community negotiating team brought to the table, and they were talking face to face about demographic details. Finally, supervisors and community negotiators shook hands on a plan that was designed to create three "electable" Black districts for the five-member board.

Although this plan subsequently was rescinded by the supervisors under pressure from their white constituents and then restored, in a somewhat different form, by a federal court, the habits of unity and risk-taking that had been acquired in the process were not lost to the African-American community. In 1993, three residents who had led the redistricting struggle ran for the County Board and, with the help of a strong get-out-the-vote effort, two were elected to office. While they do not comprise a majority, their presence has fundamentally altered the culture of Tallahatchie County government. In the past two years, the county has attracted several new industries, created two public parks, and has won designation as a federal Enterprise Community. Community activists have also formed a nonprofit housing corporation and have become involved in state legislative and Congressional redistricting.

The Tallahatchie County story differs in significant respects from the usual pattern of racially charged battles over redistricting in the South. Typically, voting rights strategies are pursued by attorneys and other experts on behalf of the disenfranchised communities. In Tallahatchie, community members took control of the redistricting process. Direct involvement in redistricting gave members of the African-American community a higher stake in the outcome and a greater investment in the political process. And the experience of face-to-face negotiation created a public relationship between Black and white leaders for the first time in the county. These benefits will endure in the community long after the current districting plan is superseded by demographic changes or new interpretations of the Voting Rights Act.

Floyd County, Kentucky

The domination of a civic life by an insular, self-serving, complacent elite is not limited to the racially polarized communities of the Deep South. Floyd County, nearly 100 percent white, lies at the heart of the eastern Kentucky coalfields. Since the turn of the century, the county has been shaped mineral speculators, company towns, and the boom/bust cycles of the coal industry. This history has left a legacy of structural unemployment, a political system ruled by patronage and kinship ties, and a school system that, in recent years, ranked dead last in student achievement among Kentucky's 180-plus districts.

In 1981, the Kentucky Fair Tax Coalition (KFTC) was established as a "citizens social-justice organization using direct-action organizing to challenge unjust institutions." Based in Prestonsburg, the Floyd County seat, KFTC made explicit its intention to be statewide and locally based. For the next decade, KFTC members in Floyd County helped to lead the organization in successful local and statewide battles over natural resource issues, including coal mining, oil and gas drilling, water protection, and forestry.

The outcome of these battles showed that average citizens could challenge entrenched power brokers and win. It also showed that success depended as much on a democratic process within the community organizations as in the public institutions that were the targets. In the highly fictionalized political culture of Floyd County, KFTC was one of the few civic associations that was genuinely open and inclusive - and the only one that was challenging the status quo in a principled and constructive fashion.

KFTC's reputation attracted a group of local community college students--mostly single mothers receiving some form of public assistance who were upset about the closing of a student resource center. They joined the Floyd County chapter in 1994 to receive skills training, support for their immediate grievance, and a vehicle to pursue their broader ambitions for compassionate and meaningful welfare reform. They subsequently met with social service officials, members of the Governor's staff, and state and federal legislators. For many of these policymakers, it was a novel and challenging experience to debate welfare reform with people who were "living the system" rather than with professional advocates and policy wonks.

The impact of these women was equally significant within KFTC. This small group of members from Floyd County was able to convince the organization to adopt new platform planks on welfare and make the issue a statewide priority in 1997. What made this possible? In part, they were able to appeal to a set of explicit organizational values: democracy, equality, economic justice. Equally important, however, was the space created by the organization for dialogue among members grounded in a presumption of mutual trust and solidarity. Meeting one-on-one, in small groups, and in larger organizational forums, the women of Floyd County were able to confront stereotypes, change perceptions, and open up KFTC to a new set of social and economic concerns.

In seeking to replicate this dialogue within the public at large, the members of KFTC are swimming against a powerful tide. It will be a challenge for the organization to influence welfare reform in Kentucky as it takes shape over the next several years, but given the poisonous quality of the debate, the capacity to promote discourse that is reasoned, principled, and respectful is in itself a notable contribution to the state's political culture.

Fleming County, Kentucky

Fleming County lies in an agricultural region approximately 45 miles northeast of Lexington, where tobacco, a labor-intensive, high-value-per-acre crop, has long been the mainstay of the economy. Tobacco has traditionally supported a broad base of family farms, and Fleming lacks the history of extreme income disparities and political polarization that characterizes Tallahatchie and Floyd counties. Nevertheless, the community is under considerable stress because demand for tobacco is declining, and alternative sources of farm income have not been developed. The community is also facing an environmental challenge; Fleming Creek ranks among the top three watersheds in the state in pollution from "non-point sources," and runoff from family farms is the principal source of contamination.

The Community Farm Alliance (CFA) is a 12-year-old membership organization dedicated to improving the quality of life in Kentucky's rural communities. Several years ago, CFA's Fleming County chapter launched a special project to identify long-term strategies for restoring local waterways that would not endanger the livelihood of farmers. The project reached out to a wide range of people in the community, including local public school students who formed an environmental committee with several dozen members and became deeply involved in the project. Among the activities undertaken by the young people are:

• monitoring water quality on a weekly basis at six sites along Fleming Creek;
• evaluating a variety of "low-tech" pollution abatement methods that are being tested by local farmers, and researching methods that have been successful elsewhere;
• organizing a community education day on water quality issues;
• developing a paper and multi-media presentation on the project for the annual meeting of the National Soil Conservation Society;
• conducting video interviews for an oral history of the watershed and its inhabitants.

The involvement of the young people has given the watershed project greater visibility and impact in Fleming County, and it has also helped CFA to recognize young people as an underutilized resource for community problem-solving. In a new initiative to address the outflow of youth from rural Kentucky, young people are planning to interview their peers, consult with teachers and job counselors, and conduct a forum for state legislators and policymakers. The aim is to devise specific proposals for expanding economic opportunities and enhancing quality-of-life assets that will encourage Kentucky's youth to remain in the state.

CFA did not set out to organize youth. Young people were drawn to the organization because of its inclusive orientation, and they were welcomed because they had something valuable to offer. In contrast to many youth agencies, young people were treated, in Ristau and Ryan's formulation, as "active participants in the evolution of ideas and projects" that will shape the future of Fleming County. These projects may resemble conventional service activities, but what makes them distinctive is that they are focused on systemic problems and systemic solutions. In that respect, they embody a critical stance toward the existing order rather than acceptance of the status quo.

Conclusion

These brief descriptions illustrate some of the basic features of direct-action community organizations. They also provide glimpses of how these disparate elements can combine, under favorable conditions, to generate social capital of unusual value to a democratic society.

First, because community organizations are both relational and inclusive, they can be highly effective at fostering trust among people divided by culture, class, self-interest or ideology. Like other secondary associations, community organizations promote solidarity among their members, but these solidarities tend to bridge difference rather than reinforcing them. At a moment when social identities are proliferating, and social trust continues to decline, this bridging capacity seems a particularly useful asset.

Secondly, community organizations can be a powerful vehicle for political education, providing insight into civic issues and political institutions that is far deeper and more nuanced that the information offered by the mass media. In community organizations, people learn by doing, and knowledge applied is far more likely to be absorbed than knowledge that is passively received. At the same time, the critical orientation and broad purpose of community organizations give them the opportunity (not always realized) to enlarge the sensibilities of their members in ways that go beyond practical knowledge.

Finally, community organizations have shown a knack for addressing divisive issues that often seem intractable in other contexts: conflicts between environmental protection and economic livelihood, between the welfare and working poor, between freedom and regulation, between individual rights and group representation. In recent decades, American governance has oscillated between legislative and regulatory mandates that often seem excessively rigid and laissez-faire policies that inevitably favor the most powerful interests. When they have had the power to do so, community organizations have demonstrated a capacity to fashion solutions that are sensitive to local conditions yet attentive to broad principles of justice.

Community organizations, at their best, have a transformative effect on individuals and communities. While the classic secondary association seeks a stable niche within civil society, and evolves chiefly to survive, the community organization is a change agent. Through the medium of the organization, people move from passivity to leadership, from fear to boldness, from cynicism to a wary sort of faith.

Of course, community organizations are hardly alone among voluntary associations in making a distinctive contribution to social capital, and there are many dimensions in which they fall short. Few community organizations can match churches in providing personal support to individuals and families. While some community organizations are taking young people more seriously, they are unlikely to substitute for youth-led and youth-serving institutions. And workplace organizations are sorely needed not only to protect against exploitation, but to help shape the economy in ways that permit workers to develop their full capacities.

If our claim for the significance of community organizations is at all compelling, it has several implications. Social critics and scholars should examine the issues raised here in a more comprehensive and rigorous fashion. Community organizations should evaluate their community-building functions with the same critical attention they have devoted to issue campaigns and organizational development, and funders who support community organization should do the same. Finally, anyone who is concerned with the health of our democracy should think about what it might mean to have a much thicker web of sophisticated community organizations in this country, a web that touched ten or fifty or one hundred million Americans rather than the half million or so who are engaged now. It would take considerable investment to build this infrastructure, but is there a better investment we could make?

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* Participants in the discussions that shaped this article, in addition to the authors, include: John Humphries, West Virginia Organizing Project; Leroy Johnson, Southern Echo; Ann Johnson and Corry Stephenson, South Carolina United Action; Burt Lauderdale, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth; Maureen O'Connell, Save Our Cumberland Mountains; Shirley Richmond, JONAH; Joe Szakos, Virginia Organizing Project; Bill Troy, Tennessee Industrial Renewal Project; Deborah Webb, Community Farm Alliance; Jim Sessions, Highlander Research and Education Center; Naomi Swinton, Grassroots Leadership; Walter Davis, Rosemary Derrick, Vicki Quatmann and June Rostan, Southern Empowerment Project; Millie Buchanan, Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation; Sandra Mikush, Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation; Kathy Partridge and Chuck Shuford, Needmor Fund; Christina Roessler, French American Charitable Trust; and, Alta Starr, New World Foundation. The discussions were convened under the auspices of the Southern Empowerment Project.