Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement

William J. Traynor, Jessica Andors . Shelterforce 2005.

Across the country there is a fundamental condition that consistently undercuts even the most successful community development efforts: chronic disengagement. In most cities, public or civic life is a hostile environment for the average person, ruled by cynicism and division, and dominated by entrenched habits of isolation and detachment. Unfortunately, while our community development field is engineered to build the physical things communities need — new homes, community centers and small businesses — and to some extent, to influence the policy that supports those products, we are not designed to attack this condition.

The author describes how his organization — Lawrence CommunityWorks (LCW), a CDC based in Lawrence, Massachusetts — is using a “network organizing” strategy to overcome this situation. This strategy connects people to each other and to opportunities for people to step into public life — from the neighborhood group to the City Council — in a way that feels safe, fun and productive. LCW’s approach is a hybrid of many of the established practices of community organizing. The principal twist is the application of network theory, a set of ideas that come from the technology and economics fields but that are proving useful for understanding and shaping our community environments. Applying this thinking helps challenge some of the common obstacles to genuine engagement and helps shape a strong demand environment for change.

via KnowledgePlex: Network Organizing: A Strategy for Building Community Engagement, March/April 2005.