Ten Steps in Building People's Organziations 1. Integration - a Community Organizer (CO) being one with the community in order to: (a) immerse himself in the poor community and (b) understand deeply the culture, economy, leaders, history, rythms and lifestyles of the community.
2. Social Invetigation (SI) - the process of systematically looking for issues around which to organize the people. There are three ways to conduct the SI, namely:
- study the documents/reports that talk of the people's problems;
- learn from the people themselves; and
- study the problem as it is affected by the power structure within the community.
3. Tentative Program - Co chooses one issue to work on in order to begin organizing the people.
4. Groundwork - involves going around and motivating the people on a one-to-one basis to do something on the issue that has been choosen. Sometimes called "agitation" or "animation", to motivate people to carry out possible actions to solve the problems identified.
5. Meeting - people collectively ratifying what they have already decided individually. The meeting gives people the collective power and confidence. Problems are issues are discussed.
6. Role playing - acting out the meeting that will take place between leaders of the people and the government representatives. It is a way of training people to anticipate what will happen and prepare themselves for such eventualities.
7. Mobilization and action - actual experience of the people in confronting the powerful and the actual exercise of people's power.
8. Evaluation - the people evaluating and reviewing steps 1 to 7 have to determine whether they were successful r not in their objectives.
9. Reflection - dealing with deeper, on-going concerns to look at the positive values the CO is trying to build in the organization.
10. Orgnization - the people's organization is the result of many successive and similar actions of the people. A final organizational structure is set up with elected officers and supporting members.
- Source:
- Extracted from a paper prepared by PhilDHRRA (Source: IRED Forum)
Hari Srinivas - hsrinivas@gdrc.org
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