Why Community Organizing Matters Today
America today is replete with forces that simultaneously bring people together and tear them apart. Community organizers and activists can and should be “norm entrepreneurs” who connect disparate people with one another based on values and interests – people who otherwise feel helpless and “the only voice in the wind,” as one woman recently wrote to me. The alternative is to submit to the centrifugal forces of dislocation, violence, and susceptibility to scapegoat-seeking and demagoguery that is the result in the breakdown of democracy.