Differences between community and political organizing
Wilson-Allen highlights the differences between community and political organizing. While political organizing offers a measure of training, the sustained efforts involved with community organizing allows people to "work through the system." Wilson-Allen goes on to point out the major issues community organizers face.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Tawana Belinda Wilson-Allen, May 11, 2006. Interview U-0098. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ELIZABETH GRITTER:
-
Sure. If you could talk just a little bit about the differences between
the community and the political organizing.
- TAWANA BELINDA WILSON-ALLEN:
-
The basic difference that I see: most of the community organizing issues
are long term, long term. The political, if you're doing nonpartisan
political organizing, you have a finite time frame to work from: say,
[the] primary through that election to do your voter education issues.
Working with those targeted areas constantly until
time to get out the vote. You don't go any further and voter education
you can't--. You can tell them who all the candidates are, but
you can't say vote for a specific candidate or anything like that. But
it was, it made a huge difference, people were a lot more informed. When
they went to the polls, they could choose for themselves if they knew
how to get information. So with the community organizing, I mean the
only thing I can think of that's really, really short term, for instance
if there was a neighborhood that had a very, very busy intersection. A
lot of times it was hard for people to get stop signs and stop lights in
particular because in this area there had to be at least five fatalities
before they would put a light up in some areas. So that was critical and
to teach people--. That was like teaching them to work through
the system. Thus it's kind of, it could be a short-term kind of thing.
But when you're talking about landlord/tenant issues, [you] are also
with trying to figure out who the allies are and who are the targets,
who are you actually going after. Sometimes it takes a lot more behind
the scenes work, and it's like the issue is, it doesn't have a finite
time. There may be more appropriate times than others to really quicken
the pace to get something done about it. But it's not like doing voter
participation at all. It's over and done. Actually [voter registration?]
is a good short [activity?] to start with when you're building a new
group because they can see success almost immediately, and that will
give them the strength and courage to go on and do something more long
term.
- ELIZABETH GRITTER:
-
What are some of the major issues with community organizing?
- TAWANA BELINDA WILSON-ALLEN:
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Around here it was like well, this strictly in terms of a lot of
groups but primarily seniors. CHOP took on the
utility increases. We were for a while with
Duke Power. Still goes on today, but [there
is] not a lot of mention of [it] is the redlining by banks, servicing in
some areas and not in others. We had what we call the Community
Reinvestment Alliance going on. As a matter of fact my husband was chair
of that when he was on the board of CHOP, and they worked on those
issues, and then the last set of issues were around landlord tenant
rights that CHOP did here. So those were the community organizing pieces
primarily.