Digital Arts Service Corps - community organizing

Community Organizing

admin — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 01:14:30 +0000

This area contains resources about Community Organizing.

Month 9: Curriculum & Program Development

Stephen Fonzo — Sat, 09 May 2009 20:40:53 +0000

Through March-April, a very intense month, I guided several initiatives to create new training programs for youth and adults, to build volunteer activities at the IMC, and to make general improvements to our facilities. The most involved of these is the Champaign, IL Don Moyers Boys & Girls Club (DMBGC) Teen Computer Lab project, a partnership between the Boys & Girls Club, the Independent Media Center, the University of Illinois, and the local, private computer consulting firm SupporTech. During the first month of planning, the partnering organizations agreed to a vision and mission for the new computer lab and training program to be offered by the DMBGC, which will be an ongoing program available to youth ages 6-18, throughout the year. The IMC has led the development of surveys, curriculum, and budget, informing the design and staffing being organized by the other partners. Our Program Development Intern Jason Keist wrote the surveys to assess the children's experience and interests, and I have been composing the lab budget and compiling a variety of technology and media tutorials and activities, all of which will also be stored with the IMC as documentation.

Along with IMC member Danielle Chynoweth, I presented a workshop on producing radio news for Free Speech Radio News (FSRN), a grassroots independent half-hour newscast available online and syndicated to over 100 stations worldwide. Please see the attachment for the training guide I wrote (geared towards Audacity, though any audio editor is appropriate). Anyone can pitch a story, headline, or feature to FSRN, and once you produce the content, FSRN pays you and includes your piece in one of its daily newscasts. I strongly recommend that other VISTAs encourage members, customers, and trainers in your organization(s) to learn and participate in FSRN as a resource for citizen journalism, media reform, smearing the digital divide, and earning income for a job well done.

I also participated in a roundtable discussion on social media presented at the University of Illinois by Chicago's Community Media Workshop (CMW), a group devoted to training news producers and journalists, and strengthening ties between media and populations in Chicago and the midwest. I recommend CMW as a useful resource to anyone working in these geographic areas. They inspired me to create a Twitter account for the IMC - simple, but necessary.

Spring was productive in even more ways at the IMC, and I organized three volunteer workdays - one for the Shows/Booking group to troubleshoot, repair, and re-organize the PA, mixer, stage, and cables; one for WRFU 104.5FM to produce new station IDs and clean and paint the studio; and another for just plain spring cleaning of the building. Along with volunteers in the Librarians and Tech working groups, Nicole and members of the Community Connections group, I setup a staffing desk with a computer workstation, IMC merchandise tables, and staff storage space in the entry to the main space of our building.

For the Production group, I offered three more workshops on video editing, wrote Terms of Use and Borrowing for our production room and public equipment, and upgraded one of our video workstations with funds we raised during the Film Festival. Finally, following Nicole's hard work to obtain summer youth (ages 14-24) positions at the IMC through the Champaign Consortium, I defined one of the positions, a WRFU Audio Trainer and Archivist, who will join us soon to produce regular on-air content, update our public affairs automation, train members on live and studio broadcast, and archive our existing audio materials.

And then there was all the planning for another major fundraiser, the IMC Fest... (see next month)

Let's Try This Again!

Renae Smack — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 05:07:05 +0000

Last week as I sat and I wrote, I was so impressed by the new set up to go with my brand new second term and so I added the picture and wa-la everything went away. So here I am again going to bring you up on what's been happening with Renae.

Back in April a group of us went to conference in Baltimore hosted by NeighborWorks.

I was very impressed by the commitment of the kids. In Baltimore their kids are doing really innovative things. I heard poetry, skits, role playing and a lot of other things they were involved in. Their community was a very big deal to most of the teens who attended the conference and I came away with this wonderful feeling. Some of the things they said in the role play made me examine myself. One young man was the executive director of a center. He had asked one of the teens at his center to come to the board meeting, when the teen arrived he handed him the agendas to hand out. He asked him to greet people at the door, the adult was the child in this role play so the adult actually never became apart of the meeting because the adult (young man) kept coming up with different things for the child to do. I had to ask myself do we really listen to them when they speak, do we treat them as if they should be grateful for the attention we give them, or do we appreciate their since of style, the fresh way they look at things, their ability to move on after they have been disappointed yet again by an well meaning adult who after all thinks they don't really know what they want. We don't give them enough credit, and we don't give them a chance to use the tools we give them. I'm am blessed to be working with a group of kids who are intelligent, trustworthty, honest and creative.

They might be young but they are more reliable then some adults I know and they work just as hard as everyone else at our center to make it the great place it is. Hat's off to you Yasmine, Soncerae, Lisa, and the rest of the Youth leadership program for all you do!

Our trip to Baltimore also produced another eyeopener. After we went through the classes we had to come up with a project to bring back home that would represent Being the Bridge You Want to Build. We were so hipe about it we planned it at the airport. It is titled Neighbors Helping Neighbors. We came home and began working on it even though we had another event planned for a week before this one would kick off.

So guess what, the Celebration Of Your Gifts to Us was a success. (The one planned the week before.) We celebrated the partners we have made over the last year and we had food served by the hospitality committee (man can they cook!) and we gave away some pretty neat stuff, certificates, magnets these neat cups I created while in Home Depot looking for flowers for my garden. Yes, and she gardens when she can find the time.

Well anyway needless to say , it was a wonderful event.
Then one week later our Neighbors Helping Neighbors Week kicks off. We were suppose to have a jump castle, all kind of fun stuff for the kids and It rains. We're hoping for this great neighborhood turnout because we've partnered with the City of Charleston, Family Services, Lowcountry Housing and Trust and a host of others to bring to the people all this great information and prizes and it's pouring down rain. IT WAS GREAT! People still came out the, Mayor of Charleston proclaimed it National Neighborworks Week and off we started.

I have literally been on roller skates since then. ( I take that back, I never took off the roller skates! ha-ha.) We identified eight houses in the neighborhood that needed small construction jobs done to get them to the point that they could get effective weatherization offered by another group called The Sustainability Institute. The identification of the houses came from a partnership we made last year with The Lead Base Initiative with the City of Charleston. We have a group name Mission Fuge who did all the work on the houses for the last 6 weeks. We have seen so much community growth and community pride since we began our mission one year ago, Rev. King and I. Then guess what? Summer camp opened. Here we go again!

Meetup.com - A Site for Organizing Communities

Morgan Sully — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 20:42:04 +0000

Here are a few GREAT resources for developing communities online and connecting and organizing constituents to each other.

For a small monthly fee, you can set up an online community that regularly meets offline for all sorts of topics and interests. This is an invaluable solution for capacity building at your project.

Benefits include:

shared filing system
event calendar
automatic event notification (set by you)
photo sharing
poll creation
your own listserv

Start a coalition for rural housing, connect with other VISTA Alumnis, start an electronic music meetup. There are endless possibilities.

here's the site:
http://www.meetup.com

here's a map to visualize ones close to you:
http://americorpsalumni.meetup.com/about/

2 examples started by a a former VISTA are:
http://lgbtfriends.meetup.com/58/
http://electronicmusic.meetup.com/49/

And The Beat Goes On!

Renae Smack — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:20:31 +0000

Hi everyone,

Hey Pink House, say what!

Well the kids at the Pink House continue to amaze me with their dedication to the programs hosted there.

They are growing leaps and bounds due to the different programs offered here at the Neighborhood Resource Center. I can honestly say I can see this community beginning to embrace the PINK HOUSE in their community. Dondre and Darius Simmons presented a service learning project called Zig the Pig to the Ardmore/Sherwood Forest neighborhood association on last month. They are the get this ZIG Ambassadors for the project representing two schools ( St. Andrews Middle and Stono Park Elementary).They are also my newphews (oh I'm just so proud of how far they've come since they came here!) This is a first in the history of the community to have children as a part of the community meeting. Check out the first video we made!

What's A Zig Ambassador?

Go PINK HOUSE, SAY WHAT!

This group of kids created a commercial with the help of our parent involvement program here hosted at the PINK HOUSE. One of the parents used countless hours to assist the children in creating a video which they spliced and diced until they got Zig II.

The PINK HOUSE KIDS are now working on a computerized radio show to be hosted on Blogtalkradio.com. Wait to you see (or should I say hear) all the hard work these kids have put into this project.

Our prospective date to air is April 20,2007. Yes, that tomorrow, and boy am I nervous! I can only image how the kids are feeling about know. The time will be 4:30pm til 5:30pm.

On last week the local radio station who has partnered with us to make the radio show a reality, invited our kids to the radio station to see how radio shows work behind the scenes. They really got a lot of good information and they got a chance to talk on the radio to see how it feels. Hats off to Citadel Broadcasting for their involvement in the community. Thanks Ms. Toby Smith from Heaven Talk 1390 am and Gentry Via for his time and dedication to the community and to the PINK HOUSE KIDS!

Listen out for WPHK that those (WONDERFUL PINK HOUSE KIDS).

The Ardmore/Sherwood Forest Newsletter has a new face thanks to Rev. C. King and our new edition Ms. Shirley Washington. They took my amaturistic attempt at community reporting to a whole new level of community organizing, and communicating with the community. Hats off ladies, You did a great job!

Our next event is an appreciation meeting for stakeholders in the community. The meeting will be the first of it's kind. It will be hosted outside with food and awards to say thank you to businesses in the neigborhood who care about The Ardmore/Sherwood Forest community.

Well, I got some much to do and so little time.......

Renae Out...........

Hey PINK HOUSE Say What.......

What is An Community Portal?

Colleen Kelly — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:10:18 +0000

Community portals are now emerging as a new industry in cyberspace as Internet access spreads throughout the country. Their growth is likely to increase significantly over the next few years. The Community Network movement of the early 1990's failed in large part because there was no source of ongoing financial support. Now that businesses at every level are using the Internet as a marketing tool, it becomes possible to build a community portal around local advertising. LongBeachOnline.net which won GoldenWeb awards in 2003 and 2004 describes itself as Long Beach’s retail business portal and charges $850 a year for banner ads on the site. Just as advertising has been key to the success of local newspapers, so it will be for community portals.

Yet if there is a weakness in many of these emerging portals, it lies in the area of democracy. It is reasonable to expect a strong community portal to include at least one well-organized page that citizens could use to gain easy access to the web resources that they need. Such a page would include the following:

Links to all levels of government - Just about every township, city, county, and state government in the United States now has a web site. A strong community portal should make it easy to find the ones you need.
Access to elected officials - Most local and state officials now have web sites, along with every member of Congress. It would be especially useful to use the Vote-Smart profiles of Representatives and Senators since these include voting records, interest group rates, recent public statements, along with fast access to the representative's web site.
Access to public agencies and community organizations organized by areas of civic concern - These would include housing and code enforcement, public safety, education and youth development, health social services, and aid to the poor. Here is where linking directly to the City Departments related to specific concerns becomes especially helpful. There's a well organized Community and Neighborhood page on the City of Chicago site, as an example, but it's buried in the site. A good civic engagement portal should link to it directly.
Access to the School District and organizations related to education - School Districts have their own web sites with a wide range of resources aimed at students, parents, and the general public. There are a wide range of after-school programs, community groups, and advocacy organizations related to kids. They're all over the internet. A civic engagement web site should link to each of them directly.
Access to information about elections, political parties, and partisan politics - Minnesota's E-Democracy web site created in the early 1990's to expand participation and build stronger democracies and communities is a good model with an email list of more than 5,000 e-citizens and a wide range of discussion forums covering local and national issues. For all the attention now paid to politics online, there aren't many web sites that even come close to Minnesota's E-Democracy.

Long Beach, as an example, provides easy access to local news, restaurants, entertainment, shopping, and resources for children. But when it comes to helping the citizens of Long Beach connect to government, there are only two pages: one where people can volunteer for community services and a page of links to the City of Long Beach web site and election information.

There's a much more civic minded portal in nearby San Diego, SDcommunities.net, that offers wide range of resources to people who want to get involved. This portal features searchable links to municipal, county, state, and federal governments, along with civic groups, public safety agencies and organizations, schools and youth service organizations, and a wide range of social services. In addition to these resources, SDCommunities.net offers resources for shopping, real estate, employment, movies, restaurants, and even bars. But these resources are secondary to the civic mission of the site. And no matter how interesting the global aspect of the Net was, and still is, in most cases it is not as relevant as the 10 square mile radius that we live in. As a result, one of the most useful aspects of the Internet has long been eclipsed - its ability to make you more aware of your own neighborhood and town.

Let's make sure democracy is not lost in the shuffle.

Editorial: Organizing LOCALLY Online

Colleen Kelly — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:07:07 +0000

When I became aware of the Internet in the early 1990's, after more than 30 years of involvement in social movements and politics-- it was clear to me that this new technology would have a profound impact on community and political organizing at every level of this society. The combination of listservs that enabled large groups of people to communicate with one another simultaneously on matters of concern; search engines that offered easy access to information about issues of concern; and web sites that would enable individual activists and small groups to gain widespread attention for causes simply by promoting them online clearly had the potential to turn the entire political process on its head. We have not come quite that far yet. Yet the Internet has already had an even greater impact on democratic politics that we would have dared to predict ten years ago.

Of course, at this moment, it is the bloggers of America who captivate our attention. Many of them write quite well. They speak clearly and forcefully about the critical issues of the day: Iraq, health care, civil liberties, the electoral process itself. They promote one another. In 1776, Thomas Paine wrote the anonymous pamphlet called "Common Sense" that sparked the American Revolution. Bloggers are carrying this tradition forward.

Yet the Internet has done far more for activists than simply providing an online soapbox for their causes. It has made it possible for just a handful of activists to mobilize to recruit literally thousands of people into movements of common concern.

The best known example, of course, is MoveOn.org. Here just two software developers in the Bay Area, Joan Blades and Wes Boy, launched a well written online petition opposing Bill Clinton's impeachment that wins support all over the United States. The petition likely contributed to the Senate's ultimate decision not to convict the President at their trial. Three months later, MoveOn.org emerged as a fund-raising network, collecting thousands of dollars online to support candidates who voted for impeachment. Today, MoveOn.org has emerged as a national organization with 3.3 million members who are now mobilizing voter registration and get-out-the-vote drives all over the United States.

Unfortunately, the phenomenal success of MoveOn.org and activist groups on the Right like the Christian Coalition may intimate people working entirely at the local level that they cannot compete in this process.They're wrong.

In February, 2006, a single activist opposed to legal immigration, an Orange County retiree named Jim Gilchrist, decided to take matters into his own hands and organize a citizens patrol of his own between the Arizona and Mexican Border which he called, The Minuteman Project. He set up a web site, expecting to recruit another four or five people to help him. Instead, he was deluged with emails from hundreds of people pledging their support. By April, more than 1,000 people had joined Jim Gilcrist's Mexican Border Patrol. For better or worse, Jim Gilchrist made this happen, but the Internet made it possible.

Although MoveOn.org and Gilchrist's efforts are impressive, they are only early examples of how groups can use the Internet in politics. The greatest online organizing opportunities right now are not national, but local. Both major parties are now struggling to build grassroots organizations that help get voters to the polls on election day. They have recognized that the most persuasive mobilizer is the one who lives down the street.

The power of local mobilization creates a tremendous opportunity for people to wield real genuine political power right where they live. If they create an email list for just ten to twenty voting neighbors and use this list to build solidarity and recruit new members, then every politician running for office in their District will be soliciting their support. Close elections can be decided by people who make this commitment. In the hotly contested elections of 2006, it is likely that one or more stories like this will be told. That's when the battle to use the Internet achieve enduring political power in the America will begin.

Organizing Using New Technologies/Media

danielle martin — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:16:58 +0000

What are some ways to organize or advocate for your non-profit organization or cause by using new media and/or technologies?

1. MySpace [to manage volunteers/fundraise.] - see Tech Soup article "How to Use MySpace to Raise Awareness"

2. Mobile Phones - see MobileActive Strategy Guides

Check out more links on this subject at:
http://del.icio.us/CTCVISTA/communityorganizing

Introduction to Community Organizing

admin — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 21:48:56 +0000

Most of us will be entering into new communities and workplaces where we will have to undergo some sort of community organizing to accomplish the tasks on our VAD. This post hopefully can act as a starting point as we try and reach out to our new communities.

Community Organizing activities involve bringing people together to act in common self-interest, in the pursuit of a common agenda, with populist goals that build upon the ideal of participatory democracy.

There are a few central questions for DASCorps members as we focus our work in community organizing:

How do we define "community"? What are the power centers and interest groups?
How does government work, in relation to organizing the community?
How are civic values at the core of community organizing?
What are the ongoing, central issues at a local and neighborhood level?
How can the Internet be used as a resource to engage community members civically? What can we do as community activists online?

Resources:

The Citizen's Handbook - http://www.vcn.bc.ca/citizens-handbook/welcome.html
Marin Institute - Community Organizing Action Pack http://www.marininstitute.org/action_packs/community_org.htm
National Housing Institute - Community Building & Community Organizing Issues in Creating Effective Models http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/85/combuild.html
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development http://www.hud.gov/organizing
University of Kansas - Community Toolbox http://ctb.ku.edu/

Further Reading:

There are two major schools of community organizing:

Saul Alinsky: This focuses organizing on existing organizations. His book "Reveille for Radicals" (1946, updated 1969) describes how to build coalitions of groups within communities. Over the past ten years, the Industrial Areas Foundation has built organizations around churches. His last book, "Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals," was published in 1971.
Fred Ross: Ross is not known nearly as well as Alinsky (a point which his partisans say is important in itself. A "real" organizer is not a leader. He/she stays in the background.) Ross is the guru of organizations that believe in building membership organizations one at a time. Ross himself had a great influence on Cesar Chavez (a point I make on a piece I did on Chavez years ago that appears on the Institute for the Study of Civic Values site). The National Welfare Rights Organization (a group active from 1966 to 1975) again, built on chapters of welfare recipients--is out of the Fred Ross tradition. And today, the leading group inspired by Fred Ross is Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).

Happy New Year and All That Jazz! Jingle,Jingle,Jingle!

Renae Smack — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 03:07:01 +0000

Happy New year everyone. I hope everyone had a happy New Year. My new year is as busy as my end of the year events were. First let me say that the Pink House kids are great. The staff I'm working with are great. My supervisor is great and as busy as I am. We just recently got 20 Dell computers from a group who wanted to give our kids computers for Christmas. This is the second group that has donated computers to our kids. A local group in our area also gave our kids some great christmas gifts. We are offering a webcasting class to the children and parents in our community. We also had a group donate some dictionaries to our kids.

On the community level, we are working on our goals to intergrate the community into the center and we have more traffic everyday. We had a neighborhood breakfast that was a smash hit for the seniors it was sponsored for as well as the younger set of residents who attended. We had the usual southern breakfast but we also had great speakers and singing by the local youth choir and gulla poetry by a local poet.

Our new service project will have a lot of techie things attached to it, webcasting, podcasting, possibly even radio broadcasting. We plan to make our own commercials and advertisements. Stay tune for the next phase. Fun, Fun Fun!

Renae Out..........