CHAPTER 5

THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING CYCLE

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING CYCLE

• Community Organizing is a non-linear process. It begins with the emergence of a

leadership team. The leadership team guides the organizing effort through a cyclical
process that includes:
• Research
• Planning
• Implementation
• Management and Monitoring
• Evaluation
The Community Organizing Cycle
The Heart of the Organizing Cycle
THE SIX COMMON LEADERSHIP APPROACHES

• Single Leadership
• Power Elites
• Representative Democracies
• Self-selecting Teams
• Cells
• Connectivities
Distributed Management
CHAPTER 6:
BUILDING AN
EFFECTIVE
LEADERSHIP TEAM

Jeramos, Anna Mae C.

• There are two primary strategies you might use to
locate initial team members and build organizational
momentum.
a. Large-scale strategies often begin when a few
interested, relatively powerful people organize an
initial organizing meeting or rally.
b. Organic strategies begin with a small core group
that grows slowly through personal invitations
and involvement of member’s social networks.
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Used in social innovation, community
advocacy, social movements, and
collaborations.

Large meetings can be advertised as rallies,

workshops, information gathering, or
community conversations.

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Advantage and Disadvantage
• They can make a • They can create problems
significant number of if people come to simply
people aware of shared vent their anger, push
concerns, promote their own agendas, or
media attention, and expect immediate
jump-start action on an solutions.
issue.

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Organic Initiatives begin with a single individual or a
small group who share mutual concerns and build
their organizing efforts slowly by word of mouth,
adding a few people at a time.

The strengths of the organic growth are its stability

and deep commitment within its core group.

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FORM
• Participants began to build positive relationships and
mutual trusts.
• Tensions will begin to emerge as participants realize
that they have different viewpoints, different ways of
approaching the problem, personality quirks, and
different levels of commitment and energy.

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STORM
• Tensions that are inevitably formed during form stage.
• Storm periods can be aggravated or prolonged by
individual behaviors so your own self-awareness and
self-control are very important.

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NORM
• An on-going process throughout the life of the
group, but most is done during and shortly after
the storming phase.
• Group norms typically cover everything from the
simple to the complex.

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PERFORM
• Leadership teams have become working units
that are able to accomplish their goals fairly
smoothly.

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ADJOURN
• Community organizing efforts end.
• Reasons for endings: a clear conclusion when a
problem is solved, a law is enacted, or an agency
is founded; or the effort withers because there is
no real neeed for it.

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Leadership Teams can act, learn, and decide.

Communication in leadership teams are both complex and

dynamic.
It is complex because various systemic dimensions operate
simultaneously and their influence changes as interaction
occurs.
It is dynamic because it changes over time.

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Leadership Teams can act, learn, and decide.

Communication in leadership teams are both complex and

dynamic.
It is complex because various systemic dimensions operate
simultaneously and their influence changes as interaction
occurs.
It is dynamic because it changes over time.

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COMMUNICATION PATTERNS
• Leadership teams develop typical patterns of
communication, the wheel, overlapping, and all-channel
types.
• Wheel-type Communication: members communicate
through a single leader.
• Overlapping type: group members communicate mostly
with those closest to them either physically or emotionally.
• All-channel Group: the most effective but also the hardest
to maintain because everyone must make an effort to
speak.
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Exchange
• Participants exchange goods or services and are
guided by the norm of reciprocity, an unwritten
social rule that if I help you, you will help me
sometime and vice versa.

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Cooperation
• When people work together to achieve common
goals.
• Teamwork
• Collaboration

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Competition
• A struggle over scarce resources regulated by
shared values.
• Competition implies “winners” and “losers”

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Conflict
• They occur because many people believe that
there are inevitably winners and losers in life
and that they must fight hard to be winners.
• Mitigated by written or unwritten norms

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Roles Team Members Play
• Community leadership teams operate very much like
sports teams. They are developing skills and are
expected to know when to use them.
• No single person can effectively hold all of these
positions or effectively play all of these roles, but they
are not static. They move from person to person.

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