stephanie
09-04-2008, 08:55 PM
ran across this tonight from a site I go to...it has part 1 and 2..
Excerpts from Saul Alinsky’s seminal work, Rules For Radicals, pp 63-81:
The Education of an Organizer
THE BUILDING of many mass power organizations to merge into a national popular power force cannot come without many organizers. Since organizations are created, in large part, by the organizer, we must find out what creates the organizer. This has been the major problem of my years of organizational experience: the finding of potential organizers and their training. For the past two years I have had a special training school for organizers with a full-time, fifteen-month program.
Its students have ranged from middle-class women activists to Catholic priests and Protestant ministers of all denominations, from militant Indians to Chicanos to Puerto Ricans to blacks from all parts of the black power spectrum, from Panthers to radical philosophers, from a variety of campus activists, S.D.S. and others, to a priest who was joining a revolutionary party in South America. Geographically they have come from campuses and Jesuit seminaries in Boston to Chicanos from tiny Texas towns, middle-class people from Chicago and Hartford and Seattle, and almost every place in between. An increasing number of students come from Canada, from the Indians of the northwest to the middle class of the Maritime Provinces. For years before the formal school was begun, I spent most of my time on the education as an organizer of every member of my staff.
The education of an organizer requires frequent long conferences on organizational problems, analysis of power patterns, communication, conflict tactics, the education and development of community leaders, and the methods of introduction of new issues. In these discussions, we have found ourselves dealing with quite a range of issues: internal problems of a clique in a Los Angeles organization out to get rid of its organizer; a Christmas tree selling fundraising fiasco in San Jose and why it failed; a massive voter registration drive in a Chicago project which was being 0 delayed in getting started; a group in Rochester, New York, attacking the organizer so that they could get their hot hands on the funds earmarked for organization—and so on.
read the rest
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/saul-alinsky-on-the-education-of-an-organizer
Excerpts from Saul Alinsky’s seminal work, Rules For Radicals, pp 63-81:
The Education of an Organizer
THE BUILDING of many mass power organizations to merge into a national popular power force cannot come without many organizers. Since organizations are created, in large part, by the organizer, we must find out what creates the organizer. This has been the major problem of my years of organizational experience: the finding of potential organizers and their training. For the past two years I have had a special training school for organizers with a full-time, fifteen-month program.
Its students have ranged from middle-class women activists to Catholic priests and Protestant ministers of all denominations, from militant Indians to Chicanos to Puerto Ricans to blacks from all parts of the black power spectrum, from Panthers to radical philosophers, from a variety of campus activists, S.D.S. and others, to a priest who was joining a revolutionary party in South America. Geographically they have come from campuses and Jesuit seminaries in Boston to Chicanos from tiny Texas towns, middle-class people from Chicago and Hartford and Seattle, and almost every place in between. An increasing number of students come from Canada, from the Indians of the northwest to the middle class of the Maritime Provinces. For years before the formal school was begun, I spent most of my time on the education as an organizer of every member of my staff.
The education of an organizer requires frequent long conferences on organizational problems, analysis of power patterns, communication, conflict tactics, the education and development of community leaders, and the methods of introduction of new issues. In these discussions, we have found ourselves dealing with quite a range of issues: internal problems of a clique in a Los Angeles organization out to get rid of its organizer; a Christmas tree selling fundraising fiasco in San Jose and why it failed; a massive voter registration drive in a Chicago project which was being 0 delayed in getting started; a group in Rochester, New York, attacking the organizer so that they could get their hot hands on the funds earmarked for organization—and so on.
read the rest
http://sweetness-light.com/archive/saul-alinsky-on-the-education-of-an-organizer