Collective Action for Social Change An Introduction to Community Organizing

Community organizers build solidarity and collective power in fractured communities. They help ordinary people turn their private pain into public action, releasing hidden capacities for leadership and strategy. InCollective Action for Social Change, Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy draw on their extensive experience participating in community organizing activities and teaching courses on the subject to empower novices tothinklike an organizers.

Aaron Schutz is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has taught courses on community organizing and worked with community organizing groups in Milwaukee for more than a decade. His series, Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing, can be found at OpenLeft.com, and his website is at EducationAction.org. He is also the author of Social Class, Social Action, and Education: The Failure of Progressive Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan). Marie G. Sandy is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Policy and Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has organized campaigns on issues of nontraditional employment of women and family economic self-sufficiency while employed at Wider Opportunities for Women in Washington, DC. She has also provided financial support and leadership development for the Ontario Grassroots Thinktank, a collaboration of residents, community-based organization leaders, and higher education partners in southern California that focused on making positive changes in their community. Her work focuses on the practice and theory of community-based participation, teaching, and research.