Chapter 13 Organizing and Changing Systems13.1 Getting to the So.docx

Chapter 13 Organizing and Changing Systems
13.1 Getting to the Source of the Problem
We can think of no better way to start this chapter on
organizing and changing systems than by retelling a parable
attributed to the late Saul Alinsky, who was one of this
country’s most imaginative and dedicated community change
agents (Alinsky, 1969, 1971).
A Parable
A woman is taking a stroll along a riverbank. Suddenly she
hears a cry for help and jumps into the water to rescue a
drowning man. After saving the first man, she is forced to jump
back into the river to save another and then still another. After
she has dragged four men from the river, she looks around in
disgust and starts to leave. An onlooker says, “Hey, I see
another guy in the water, where are you going?” She replies, “I
can’t hang around here all day long rescuing drowning victims.
I’m going upstream to stop the son of a bitch who’s pushing
them all in.”
Stopping Problems at their Source
The point Alinsky is making is that it is never enough to just
rescue victims from their troubles, important as that is. We have
to try to change the situations that are creating their problems.
Then, hopefully, we can cut off the problem at its source so that
new victims are not constantly being produced.
For those of you who are mechanically inclined, visualize a
machine that makes Ping-Pong balls. Every once in a while, it
goofs and produces one that is not round enough. A worker
tosses the defective balls into a bin. Later on, another worker
takes the odd-shaped balls out of the reject pile and tries to
round them off. But it would save time and money in the long

run if they fixed the machine so that it did not make so many
mistakes.
To translate this analogy into human service work, we will
describe the case of Marty, a young adult of Mexican American
background. He was raised on a run-down farm on the wrong
side of the tracks in a rural community. He attended a
substandard elementary school that did not stimulate him. When
his mother needed surgery and his family lost their farm
because they could not pay the mortgage, Marty was forced to
drop out of high school and seek work. He soon discovered that
the few jobs available in his town were given to people who had
more skills or education than he did. He found that luck and
chance and connections played a part also.
Marty had always tinkered with old cars and was a natural
mechanic. But the garage owner held stereotypes about people
from the Mexican American community—he was convinced that
all Chicanos were lazy and dishonest. As a result, when a job at
the garage became available, Marty was rejected.
Marty became depressed about his bleak future and found
momentary relief in drugs. Once he became so frustrated that he
lashed out, vandalizing the garage. He got caught and was then
enmeshed in the criminal justice system. He spent two months
in jail, where he was brutalized by both his cellmate and a
guard. By the time the probation worker encountered Marty, he
needed a whole series of direct-care and counseling strategies to
overcome his addiction and rehabilitate his shattered self-
esteem. Now he also had a jail record holding him back.
This young man’s problems might have been prevented if there
had been:
Decent housing in an integrated area

Adequate education, both academic and vocational
Affordable health insurance
Mortgage assistance to save family farms
Drug and alcohol education
Job-training and placement programs
Protection from discriminatory employment practices
A criminal justice system with the resources to protect and
rehabilitate offenders
The lack of these basic services helped create and maintain
Marty’s situation. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, his
problems kept getting bigger. In their book Social Welfare: A
History of the American Response to Need, Axinn and Stern
(2007) conclude that poor people too often come off as second
best—scapegoats for circumstances beyond their control.
Human service workers cannot change all the dysfunctional
systems that impinge on the Martys of our country. Nor is it
likely that they can change one system in a massive way. But all
of us can, in our daily work, create small yet significant
improvements in the social systems that surround our clients.
What Can One Worker Do?
When working with Marty, we might find that helping him file a
complaint against a discriminatory employer has two major
outcomes. First, it gives him the feeling that he can take some
control over his destiny. Second, if he succeeds in winning the
case, not only will he get a badly needed job, but other Mexican
Americans who follow him may also find it possible to work
there. If this young man joins a group of citizens who succeed

in bringing bilingual and multicultural programs to the local
elementary school, that might improve the life chances of his
neighbor’s children also.
Filing a grievance when you believe a law or regulation is not
working properly and drafting a proposal and lobbying for funds
to start a program to fill an unmet social need are examples of
strategies for organizing and changing systems. They support
our efforts to deliver direct services to people.
These strategies rely on the same activities and skills as do
direct-service strategies. They start with carefully collecting
data, contracting, and building a trusting relationship. Worker
acts flow out of well-designed and well-monitored action plans
and are refined through reflection and evaluation. Although
there are many similarities between direct-care and systems-
change interventions, there are, of course, some significant
differences in emphasis.
13.2 Checking on the Mental Health Quotient (Mhq) of a
System
A counselor trying to help a child who is experiencing difficulty
in school begins by seeking information about the child’s
health, family situation, and scores on achievement and IQ
(intelligence quotient) tests. Many stop at that point, only
seeking out the causal factors within the child and the family.
But we believe that the hunt for relevant insights cannot stop
there. The competent worker must go on further, to look at the
system in which the child is functioning. The worker must
gather data about the MHQ (mental health quotient) of that
student’s classroom and school. We must always look at both
the internal and the external sources of stress. Ultimately we
will need to intervene in both sets of forces.
Traditionally, workers in this field have often neglected the

second step, looking at the system. It was the community mental
health movement, with its focus on integrating institutionalized
people back into the community that alerted us to the need to
seek causality beyond the client. The civil rights struggles of
the 1960s also convinced us that the problems individuals face
could be made better or worse by forces exerted by their
environments.
You can grasp this concept of the “system-as-problem-
producer” if you think back to a time when you watched people
rudely shoving each other in order to grab a cab at the airport—
tempers flared, and anxiety levels rose as each person struggled
to outmaneuver the others. Clearly, the environment with its
chaotic method of allocating benefits exerts a negative impact
on otherwise reasonably polite people. If a sensible airport
manager inaugurated a system in which numbers are assigned to
passengers in some equitable way, everyone could relax. It
might take time to get a cab, but each person would be sure that
his or her turn was coming. A passenger could risk leaving the
line for a moment to carry the luggage of an elderly man or to
help a harried mother with a toddler in a stroller and a heavy
suitcase.
The airport analogy holds true for the bakery, the baseball
game, the classroom, and any other environment in which
people seek services or goods. All of us have the potential to
act in a variety of negative and positive ways. What is it in an
environment that brings out the best and worst in you?
Human service delivery systems—their rules, routines, and
personality conflicts—all need to be examined. We must
develop our personal method of measuring the MHQ of a
system. For example, before we begin to plan counseling
interventions for the little girl who runs around her classroom
fighting with her classmates, we should check the
organizational climate of her classroom and school. Some

places are so disorganized or mindlessly rigid that they
encourage disruptive behavior in a child who has some tendency
in that direction. In a more sensibly organized environment, she
might behave quite appropriately.
After we observe a client in a classroom or in a hospital ward,
we might conclude that certain characteristics of the
environment seem to be producing problems rather than solving
them. Thus the system, rather than the client, should be the
major focus of our change efforts. Yet despite recognition of
this fact, research indicates that workers often continue to try to
change the client by counseling, rather than change the
environment by using organizing interventions (Brager, 2002,
Brager, Specht, & Torczyner, 1987; Kahn, 1995).
Ryan, in his classic book Blaming the Victim (1976), asserts
that focusing change efforts on the client rather than on the
system that is malfunctioning leads us to design social programs
that are at best irrelevant and at worst deceptively cruel. Why
are so many human service workers unable to confront honestly
the primary causes of a client’s problem? We think one reason
is that workers tend to accept society’s negative attitudes
toward social activism, even though social activism is required
if systems are ever to change for the better.
3.3 Attitudes Toward Systems-Change Interventions
As we grew up, many of us might have heard adults in our
families declare:
You can’t fight city hall!
It’s not what you know but who you know!
Good guys finish last!

Well-brought-up people (especially females) don’t make
waves or rock the boat!
These homespun bromides encourage us to believe that working
for change in a rational way is virtually impossible. Stereotypes
of change agents encourage us to shy away from that role. One
prominent stereotype depicts change agents as cartoon-character
1960s activists and bomb-throwing anarchists, bearded, grubby,
and deranged. Or they are depicted as naive Don Quixotes,
futilely tilting at windmills. On the other side lie the
stereotypes that depict change agents as saintly crusaders—Joan
of Arc or Mother Teresa. Perhaps you have assumed that change
agents must be charismatic leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther
King, Jr., or President John F. Kennedy. That, too, is a
stereotype.
change agents
Workers who use their skills to bring about change in an
unhealthy agency or situation, either alone or in concert with
others.
When people see human service workers walking a picket line
or speaking out at a school board meeting, they are often
shocked by such aggressiveness. Activists are often accused by
their own colleagues of behaving unprofessionally (Reeser &
Epstein, 1990).
The social critic George Bernard Shaw has given us a fitting
answer to that accusation. He often declared that reasonable
people adapted themselves to the world as it was. Only the
unreasonable ones persisted in trying to get the world to change.
Thus, all progress depends on unreasonable people! We agree
with Shaw and hope that there will be times when you decide
you must take a strong stand on behalf of a client, despite an
accusation that you are being “unreasonable.”

Bertha Reynolds (1963), one of the outstanding leaders in the
history of the profession of social work, argued that it is the
obligation of social workers to take partisan political stands and
work for structured change in the socioeconomic system.
To paint an accurate picture of change agents, we must discard
all our preconceptions of who they are and what they do. We
need to explore our ambivalent attitudes toward social change.
Then we will need to replace the unrealistic attitudes with the
conviction that each of us should use our skills to bring about
change in a system, just as we do in a counseling intervention.
Working to change an unhealthy system raises unique value
dilemmas for the human service worker, especially for one who
is accustomed to delivering direct services to clients. The
following is a look at what can happen to some of our basic
attitudes and values when a worker takes on an adversarial or
confrontational role. As you read about the day-to-day tasks of
a human service worker who uses all the techniques we will be
discussing in this chapter, see if you can spot the moments of
potential conflicts.
This statement is adapted from one written by a pastor who was
imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. It eloquently warns us
that if we do not try to stop injustice when it starts, it will
spread and eventually engulf each of us.
Interview Ed Wong: Staff Worker for Citizen Action for the
Environment (CAFTE)
Citizens Action for the Environment (CAFTE) is a citywide,
citizen-based environmental advocacy organization. We
combine independent research projects, practical ideas, and
tough-minded advocacy to overcome the opposition of powerful
special interests and the lack of knowledge (and often low
commitment) of the average town resident.

These are the main tasks in my job description:
Build coalitions with local, state, and national environmental,
labor, farming, and consumer organizations; identify and
mobilize concerned citizens; and reach out to new
constituencies to build our base of support in this town and
state-wide.
While it is important for Edward and other environmental
activists to confront those who pollute our air, water, and soil,
it is equally as important to honor those who strive to undo past
damage and protect our planet for future generations.
Generate media attention and build public awareness.
Organize at least one major news conference per month; meet
with reporters throughout the town and the region; conduct TV
and radio interviews, update our blog and conduct workshops
with various groups, including schools, chambers of commerce,
other merchant groups, religious institutions, and civic
organizations.
Lobby decision makers and expand our political base by
building relationships with elected officials and candidates and
demonstrate broad public support for our positions through
letter-writing drives, e-mail activism, appearing at campaign
events, and conducting meetings with decision makers.
Build the organization by increasing membership and
recruiting and orienting volunteers and other small grassroots
groups that share our mission.
This looks like an overwhelming job description, but as with
every other job in the human service field, you take it one step
at a time, and of course I don’t work alone.

Although I am the only paid staff member of CAFTE, we have
an active board and an advisory committee. Both of these
groups include professors from the local colleges, engineers and
architects who specialize in environment issues, sympathetic
politicians, and merchants and other leaders of groups in town
who really care about what is happening not only to the town of
Riverside but also to the whole world.
You probably wonder how a recent college graduate who
majored in human services ended up in this kind of job. Well, I
have to admit I am also amazed at times by my choice. When I
was a student intern and in fact during most of my teenage
years, I was involved in issues of homelessness. I volunteered
for a food pantry and did overnight shifts at a shelter for men
and women who had no place to sleep. Some of my friends were
involved in environmental issues, and frankly I thought those
activities were a way to avoid dealing with the more important
problems of poverty, racism, mental illness, disability, and so
forth.
I have since learned that mine was a pretty typical response to
the word green. For many years the term green was defined—
probably by folks like me who disparaged it—as “ultraliberal,”
“elitist,” “tree-hugging,” “sissy,” a “girlie-man issue,” and
alarmist. In an article in the New York Times titled “The Power
of Green” (2007), Thomas Friedman argues that the wars in the
Middle East revolved so much about the supply of oil;
documentary films like An Inconvenient Truth (Gore & West,
2006) as well as popular books by Bill McKibben (2007a,
2007b) have pushed the terms green, global warming, and
climate change onto Main Street. The reality is that the earth’s
weather is changing with some alarming consequences, and the
supply of natural resources, such as fossil fuels, is not endless.
In some parts of the world, there isn’t enough water to sustain
agriculture, thereby increasing famine, and in other places, the
waters are rising and threatening to flood islands. The

implications of these changes are not just on a few people but
on the whole world. It might be that civil unrest will rise if
these consequences continue.
green
Those products, services, or other kinds of activities that
exert no negative impact on the health of people and on the
environment.
On a more individual level, the evidence of climate change and
its impact is reaching home. I read in a small-town newspaper
that the maple syrup harvesters in Vermont are complaining that
with the increasingly warmer weather in the fall, the yield of
maple syrup has gone down by as much as 10 percent. Most of
us couldn’t help but notice with surprise that within the last few
years in the United States, we have experienced some of the
hottest winters on record. Once very skeptical, Americans in
large bi-partisan numbers now say that the heating of the earth’s
atmosphere is having a serious effect on the polar ice caps now
or will soon, and they think that it is necessary to take
immediate steps to reduce its effects (Broder & Connelly,
2007).
My coming to understand the gravity of the situation was a
result of joining the Sierra Club and the Appalachian Mountain
Club because I love to hike with others. Both organizations
publish magazines for members. I began to realize that although
all human service issues are vital, our need to protect our
forests and rivers is not “elite.” It is a matter of keeping the air
pure enough so we can continue to breathe and so our kids will
have a livable planet.
Although my job description sounds monumental and I do work
hard, it is not overwhelming. I take my job one step at a time
and day by day. The members of my board set the priorities.

This keeps me from being spread too thin and ultimately not
accomplishing anything. Since I cooperate with a host of other
groups, their programs often determine where I will invest my
energy for a period of time.
These are some of the things I have worked on in the past few
months:
Helped publicize and recruit volunteers for a town-wide park
cleanup day.
Wrote an article and held three forums on ways to cut down
on energy consumption both in stores and in private homes.
Spearheaded a campaign to get the local big-box retailer to
cut back on packaging on some of its products and to promote
the sale of low-energy light bulbs.
Wrote a proposal that gained funding for the town to plant
400 trees in parts of town that are noticeably not very green.
(Naturally, these were in the more economically disadvantaged
areas.) This isn’t just for beauty; it helps the air we breathe and
creates shade in summer months.
Wrote an article for the local newspaper on new technologies
for solar and wind power. Many people don’t realize that the
costs of these technologies are decreasing, and other countries
are doing major projects using the sun and wind.
Attended a benefit screening of An Inconvenient Truth to
raise money for Earth Day activities in six different locations in
town.
Participated in a demonstration by the local biking advocacy
group to try to convince the town to set aside a bike lane each
time they have to do construction on the streets.

Organized a panel for the homeowners’ association on ways
to insulate homes and on the use of programmable thermostats.
Participated in a successful campaign to convince the
supermarkets to make paper bags more available to shoppers
and to have the checkout clerks suggest them as the first choice
in bagging (instead of the plastic bags that don’t biodegrade).
Attended board meetings of the town-wide recycling
committee to represent our group and lend support to their
efforts to increase recycling of cans, plastic, and paper.
Gave a talk at the high school on our need to cut carbon
emissions, highlighting the plans already proposed by a few
cities in the United States. This was an effort to let the future
generation know that the problems are not insurmountable and
to encourage the students to start a green club in their school—
and maybe choose environmental studies if they go on to
college.
I use all the strategies I studied in college, but of course it is
the organizing ones I use the most. Skills like active listening
come in handy when I am in a meeting with a company
executive. I also use preparatory empathy when I am in a
situation where I know I will be up against resistance. (I tried to
go in prepared with answers to questions I thought they would
ask when we lobbied for the bike lanes.) Proposal-writing skills
and research are vital in this job.
I am not sure what I am going to be doing in the future, but for
now, I could not be more excited about the job I chose. I feel
that I am working in a small way on a very monumental
problem. And I still have the time and incentive to hike in the
woods on the weekends.
13.4 Dilemmas of the Change Agent

Very Often, the Worker Must Choose Sides
If we believe that the needs of one group are being neglected
and the needs of another are given an unfair advantage or that
one of our clients is being punished by an unjust rule or an
unresponsive bureaucrat, we are making a judgment of right and
wrong. When, for example, a human service worker helps a
group of tenants who have been living with inhuman conditions
organize a rent strike, he or she is taking sides in the struggle
between landlords and tenants. Although he or she might realize
that the landlord will have a temporary cash-flow problem when
rent money is withheld, if he or she is convinced that the
tenants are being exploited, he or she cannot expend much of
his or her energy worrying about the landlord’s problems. But
he or she has been trained to be empathetic and caring to
everyone!
Of course, such adversarial situations can also occur when a
worker is counseling or doing recreation work. But in an
organizing advocacy job, they occur with alarming regularity.
The pull between competing needs and outlooks is painful. It is
often impossible to find a compromise. In Ed’s professional
role, he often feels more like a lawyer than a human service
worker. Having chosen to represent the interests of the town
residents for a clean environment, he advocates for them with
tenacity. He becomes adversarial when dealing with a factory
owner who will not acknowledge that he has dumped industrial
waste into a local stream, even though that is not Ed’s usual
inclination. It is a difficult balancing act.
Frequently, Workers Must Choose among Competing Values
In addition to choosing sides between adversaries in a dispute,
Ed is often forced to make almost impossible choices between
competing values. This is frequently the case for social change
agents.

For example, in writing about their experiences as welfare
rights organizers in the rural South in the 1960s, several
idealistic young human service workers described how they
found the maintenance needs of their organization conflicting
with the service needs of individual clients (Kurzman, 1971). In
order to recruit new members to the Welfare Rights
Organization, they would offer to accompany clients into their
eligibility interviews, coaching them right in front of the
welfare investigators. They were especially interested in
recruiting articulate, energetic clients—most often, young
single parents—who would be the most likely to give their time
and energy to expanding the welfare rights group. Yet, it was
frequently the elderly, infirm clients who begged them for help
with their welfare and disability applications or appeals.
Though desperately needy, they were also bound by the old
traditions and fears engendered by experiencing a lifetime of
segregation. They were sometimes the least likely to sign a
petition, attend a rally, or become leaders in the welfare reform
movement. Striking a comfortable balance between giving
services to the most needy and building up the social change
group gave many workers sleepless nights.
Workers Must Overcome Resistance to Change with No
Guarantees of Success
Most interventions encounter resistance. But social change
efforts exert a special kind of drain on our time and energy.
They follow unpredictable courses down twisting, perilous
roads that lead to many dead ends. There are dubious rewards at
the end of the path, and both client and worker can burn out
from their seemingly futile investment of time and energy.
Lodging a complaint of environmental abuse or neglect, for
example, can involve endless postponements and legal
maneuvers, resulting in years of waiting for a trial date. By the
time the trial rolls around, the litigants in the dispute have
probably moved away; and even if they win the case, the current
laws provide for few sanctions. Often it is cheaper for a store

owner or factory owner to pay the fine than it is to clean up
garbage he or she is dumping in our streams.
The laws that prohibit housing or job discrimination also have
few penalties for those who flaunt the laws. Many times, in
these kinds of disputes, the clients back off from pursuing
complaints, even when it looks as if they might win, because
they fear that their landlords or employers would retaliate. The
threat of eviction or shutting off their heat in the winter and
other forms of harassment often abruptly terminate protests. An
organizer cannot in good conscience promise people that he or
she can protect them. When a person files a discrimination
complaint against an employer or agency, for example, the
citizen litigant can fear being blackballed by other employers
that now view him or her as a troublemaker. Of course, direct-
service interventions also carry risks, but they are rarely as
consistently perilous as those in advocacy situations.
Given Ed’s slim chances of winning most of the protests his
agency is involved with, one wonders why he continues with so
much goodwill. But he feels that though the risks of failure may
be much greater in his kind of job, so too are the rewards for
success. When CAFTE wins one reform in the way industrial
wastes are disposed of, or when he convinces one company to
lower its energy consumption, the eventual improvement in the
quality of the lives of many people is incalculable.
Historically this has proved to be true. With the stroke of a pen,
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security
Act in 1935 and, since then, millions of elderly people have
been able to look forward to some measure of financial security
in their retirement years. An army of counselors working with
each of those older people, one person at a time, could not
possibly have achieved such positive changes in their emotional
lives. To live in fear of being destitute in one’s old age is surely
a gateway to depression.

Yet, surprisingly, remains much resistance after a new policy
has been enacted. Often nothing changes until informed
consumers rattle the cages of the bureaucracy. Implementation
should be a rational process, but barriers of community
indifference, lack of information, and bureaucratic rigidity often
slow down real progress (Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 2010). Social
Security is still, after all these years, under attack by some
political groups that believe it would be a sounder plan to have
the elderly depend on private pensions and investment schemes.
Workers Lack Models
Systems-change skills can be difficult to learn because we lack
role models in our personal and professional lives. There is also
a woeful lack of written material about successful social change
efforts. Not surprisingly, workers who thrive on the
unstructured, rough-and-tumble nature of social change often
resist sitting down and putting their thoughts on paper. Many
excellent change efforts go undocumented and unrewarded
(Rivera & Erlich, 1998). However, there are some written
materials, and we urge students to seek out those books that
give firsthand accounts of systems-change efforts (Bobo et al.,
2010; Boyte, 1986; Greenberg, 1969 reprinted 1990 Kahn, 1995;
Kurzman, 1971; Miller, M., 2009, Russell, 1990, Shaw, 2001).
Children of the St. Mary Center in Oakland are sheltered by a
massive puppet of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., created by a
group of senior citizens as a tribute to his memory. MLK, Jr.,
brilliantly employed the three escalating strategies of
organizing to overturn many of the practices of racial
segregation.
13.5 Changes Are Generated from the Top Down and from the
Bottom Up
Change flows in two directions. Like a giant waterfall, it flows
from the top down, dragging the stones and sand along in its

wake. Just as often, like a volcano, it simmers beneath the
surface and then bubbles up from the bottom, engulfing
everything in its path.
When change starts from the top of a system, it usually comes
in the form of an administrative or legislative fiat. A board of
directors, a supervisor, or an administrator announces a new
policy or reduces or expands a budget item. It occurs when new
legislation is passed. It can happen when the courts rule on a
landmark case. Change can be propelled by the writing of a
memo banning discrimination against one or another class of
tenants or the passage or repeal of a housing or zoning
ordinance. Sometimes seemingly benign words inserted in or
deleted from an official policy dramatically change the course
of life for many human beings.
Clients, workers, and students usually lack the formal authority
to change destructive policies. But they can force change from
the bottom up through the weight of their numbers and the
power that weight can mobilize. Sometimes bottom-up change
comes through the ballot box. Often it comes from citizen
initiative or agitation. When homeless squatters break into a
building that is boarded up and demand that city officials
rehabilitate it, they are attempting to create change. The
movement to accelerate the testing of new AIDS medications
was spurred on by public demonstrations by citizen activists.
Although these AIDS protests seemed to be unruly and angry,
they were a catalyst in forcing the Food and Drug
Administration to speed up the approval process of new
medications.
Case histories of change efforts reveal that most of the time,
struggles to create change and resistance against change are
going on simultaneously, at both the top and bottom of the
system. In the history of public welfare, for example, positive
changes in benefits emanating from the top of the bureaucracy

have often been initiated only after it looked as if the bubbling
up from the bottom, from the grass roots, would spill over into
uncontrolled disruptions. A fascinating analysis that links
protest to reform was written by Piven and Cloward (1993).
The recent congressional actions that dramatically scaled back
the social welfare system were spearheaded by many angry
conservative legislators. Whether there will be effective
grassroots opposition to these cutbacks as the U.S. economy
slows down will depend on how accurately the elected officials
have read the mood of their constituents. In any event, we can
expect much ferment at the top and bottom of the society as the
shifting away from post-Depression entitlements and the rise of
Tea Party Movement accelerates.
Tea Party Movement
The Tea Party is a political movement in the United States
that has sponsored locally and nationally coordinated protests
since 2009 and is generally recognized as conservative and
libertarian. It endorses reduced government spending, lower
taxes, reduction of the national debt and federal budget deficit,
and adherence to an originalist interpretation of the U.S.
Constitution.
Change efforts must be directed at all points of a system—the
top, the bottom, and in between. But rarely can any one group
or person spread thin enough to cover all the bases. Even if that
were possible, however, different styles of organizing are
needed to confront different parts of a system, for different
issues, and to keep up with the changing public mood and world
events.
Change agents come in two basic models: the in-fighter and the
outside agitator. Infighters are legitimate members of the
established authority who work for or administer a particular

system. They might be directors of hospitals, supervisors of
social service agencies, judges, or politicians. Outside agitators
are neither employed by nor beholden to any of the established
systems.
Ed is an example of an outside agitator. He stands outside the
bureaucracy of the public sector and private corporations. He
dresses, talks, and acts differently than he would if he were
working for the Department of Energy, Environmental
Protection Agency, or Mobil Oil Corporation. But sometimes Ed
and a worker at a state agency or an employee of a corporation
may share a similar change goal. Their techniques are different
because they work on different rungs of the change ladder. If
they build a coalition around a common goal using different
change strategies, they can create powerful momentum for
change (Seaver, 1971).
In the civil rights era, it was often said that the agitation of
militant grassroots groups, such as those led by Malcolm X and
Stokely Carmichael, provoked the established authorities into
dealing with the more moderate groups such as the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
and the Urban League. Malcolm X stirred the pot of protest in
the streets of Harlem, and Martin Luther King, Jr., organized
nonviolent marches, while the NAACP filed one lawsuit after
another.
It is important to realize that if they work alone, neither
enlightened leaders at the top of a system nor masses of angry
people at the bottom of it are likely to create major, permanent
changes.
Guarding Change
Change must be guarded after it has been won. Once instituted,
it must be constantly monitored. If left unattended, a new law or
policy can turn out to be totally ineffective. It can be “business

as usual” unless an organized constituency monitors the process
of implementation. The Supreme Court desegregation decision
of 1954 is a good example of this. Although the decision made
in Brown v. Board of Education outlawed racial segregation in
every public school in the land, it has taken hundreds of
individual lawsuits and the constant watchfulness of citizens’
groups to achieve even the modest amount of school
desegregation we now have, over six decades later. If a school
is segregated and no one complains about it, it is likely just to
stay that way (see Ehrlander, 2002; Patterson, 2001).
The Targets of Change
Changes such as the Supreme Court school desegregation
decision or the Americans with Disabilities Act must have two
thrusts. First, change agents must create new structures
composed of rules and regulations that translate the vision of
change into the new reality. But that is never enough. For
change to take root in a system, it must also become an integral
part of the consciousness of the people involved.
For example, when parents are committed to overturning racial
segregation in the local school system, they need to marshal the
evidence that it is segregated and bring it to court. They must
persuade a judge to order the school board to draw up an
integration plan. If the parents, school administrators, or some
other organization do not like the plan or the way it is being
implemented, they return to court to negotiate adjustments. If
the school board continues its opposition, the schools might be
taken over by the courts, as they once were in Boston.
However, no matter how good a plan is on paper, on the day a
desegregated school opens, the attitudes of the school and town
officials, parents, and teachers determine whether the elaborate
plans have any chance of succeeding. Ultimately, a new law is
only as effective as the feelings that swirl around it.

If women, former mental patients, immigrants, or people with
disabilities do not use the protection of the laws that guarantee
their rights, those laws are worth nothing. On the reverse side,
if a law is routinely circumvented by large numbers of people, it
cannot be enforced. This was the case with the prohibition of
alcohol in the 1920s. This law was consistently violated by the
usually law-abiding general public. Alcohol was legally banned,
which was a major structural change, but the desire
(consciousness) of the population to use liquor as a means of
pleasure or escape never changed. Today we face a similar
situation with marijuana. Though it is illegal, both a Supreme
Court judge and a two-term president, among other high-ranking
officials, admit to having tried it when they were younger.
Learning a lesson from the failure of prohibition, antismoking
advocates proceed on both fronts—structure and consciousness.
They have changed the structure of smoking by prohibiting
cigarettes from being advertised on television and passing
smoking bans in government buildings and in many public
spaces, such as movie theaters, workplaces, restaurants, and
airplanes and colleges. They have succeeded in placing warning
labels on cigarette packages. The antismoking change efforts
have also moved into courtrooms. In high-profile lawsuits, the
attorneys general of several states have sued the major tobacco
companies to recover the money the state health care systems
have expended caring for citizens who have sickened or died
from smoking-related illnesses. In many cases, they have
garnered large cash settlements for both individuals and states.
But, after the legal victories, alert citizen groups have had to
make sure that the cash is used for public health purposes, not
to fill in budget gaps in unrelated areas.
And antismoking advocates continue to target the hearts and
minds of smokers through smoke-awareness seminars and “I
quit” days. Although many Americans still smoke, by targeting
structure as well as consciousness, antismoking advocates have

begun to tip the balance. Now it is often the smoker who is on
the defensive, shivering outside the doors of office buildings
and restaurants, puffing away almost furtively.
The feminist movement pioneered the use of consciousness-
raising techniques. Out of this movement have come step-by-
step procedures for conducting consciousness-raising groups in
which members examine their current situation by thinking
about the impact of current structures and by suggesting
necessary structural changes (Culbert, 1976).
Feminist organizers have long understood that laws redressing
gender inequality were a necessary first step but would not be
enough to bring about major changes. Many women had to be
convinced that they had a legitimate right to demand equal pay
for their labor. They also needed to build up courage and group
solidarity in order to press for remedies when equality was
withheld from them.
The struggle of American women for liberation, social
justice, and self-development has been waxing and waning for
160 years yet, not surprisingly, pioneers of social work and
community organizing were women. They included Jane
Addams, Dorothea Dix, Julia Lathrop, and Florence Kelley. Yet,
despite this rich heritage, men came to dominate the field of
community organizing as they did other fields.
In general, feminist organizing tends to be concerned with the
quality of interaction between the members of the group and
with their individual concerns, rather than focusing only on
results. With a single-minded focus on results, leaders might be
tempted to view members as faceless creatures who can be
manipulated to achieve outcomes. Trying to avoid this trap, Ella
Baker, who organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement, always
started each meeting by asking if members had any personal

concerns that needed to be dealt with before they settled down
to planning organizing strategies. Only after they dealt with
their own pressing issues would their minds be free enough to
turn to the needs of the movement.
Now, on college campuses, both administrators and student
activists work to change the definitions of appropriate sexual
conduct. Policies defining date rape and sexual and gender
harassment, with stiff penalties for transgressions, have been
drawn up. And seminars and workshops are conducted to
sensitize students and staff to new definitions or their rights and
to inform them about the way to protest if they think their rights
are being abridged.
13.6 Methods of Organizing and Changing Systems
Change methods fall into roughly three categories of escalating
intensity: educating, persuading, and pressuring. We always
start out by trying to educate the public and the powers that be
about the need for change. If that is not sufficient to bring about
change, we try to persuade them. Finally, if change is still
resisted, we resort to pressure.
Educating to Create Change
When a change effort begins, we point out the problems (the
GAPs), systematically document them, and suggest solutions.
Ed spends a large amount of his time compiling statistics about
the increasing incidence of certain diseases in areas with a great
deal of industrial pollution. He reads journals and checks out
web sites from all over the country and goes to conferences to
find out what other groups are doing to solve the problems of
carbon emissions and overdependence on fossil fuels. He
digests the material and helps produce a monthly newsletter that
is sent to members, politicians, and businesspeople.
Whenever a new ordinance or program is proposed, a committee

from CAFTE reviews the plan to make sure it protects the
interests of ordinary people. Then they testify before the
planning board or selectmen to give their opinions and suggest
changes.
Ed has learned the importance of having facts ready when he
visits a legislator to lobby for change. Often he is competing
with real estate developers who have assembled their own set of
data printed in a fancy booklet. Although he complained about
having to study statistics and research methods in college, he
has come to appreciate their power and is grateful that he can
read and interpret budgets, architectural plans, census data, and
other weighty documents. The volunteer lawyers who work with
CAFTE do much of the actual negotiating, but he needs to
understand enough to explain the CAFTE position and answer
questions about it.
lobby
An attempt to convince decision makers to support one’s
ideas or proposed actions.
Sometimes as a result of an educational campaign, people
realize how destructive a certain rule, policy, or action is and
agree to change it. If that happens, then the change effort is
successful and it terminates. But many times, exposing an
unhealthy situation and suggesting ways of dealing with it are
not enough.
So the change agents turn to the second, more powerful change
method.
Persuading to Create Change
Persuasion strategies use both the carrot and the stick. They
reward constructive changes and threaten sanctions for
continued negative practices. For example, if employers lack

the resources but are willing to hire workers who have
disabilities (as they are legally bound to do), they might be
granted the “carrot” of tax reductions or be given loans to build
the ramps or install the special phone and computer equipment
they will need. Or, if developers are willing to build affordable
housing in low-income communities, they might be given
grants-in-aid, tax abatements, and special technical-assistance
programs. Factory owners who agree to retrofit old polluting
equipment or restaurant owners who agree to eliminate trans
fats from their food might be given technical assistance and
even some funds to help in the switch. But even with incentives,
change does not come about easily. Systems need money and
technical knowhow, but they also need goodwill to forge new
ways of thinking and acting. It is always easier (and,
sometimes, more lucrative) to do “business as usual,” even if it
results in harm to many.
If, despite all the incentives, change does not happen, then the
“stick” might be threatened or used. Sanctions on this second
level usually involve withholding money, denying permits, or
causing public humiliation. For example, some towns list in the
local newspaper the names of landlords and restaurant owners
who have been cited for health and safety violations. There are
lists on some post office bulletin boards of the names and
pictures of noncustodial parents who have not paid their court-
mandated child support payments.
A little fish swimming alone can easily be gobbled up. But
when lots of little fish get organized, it’s amazing what they can
accomplish.
CAFTE has used persuasion by organizing public rallies
supporting or opposing a proposed housing plan or industrial
complex, has collected signatures on petitions, and organized
letter-writing campaigns.
Pressuring to Create Change

When education and persuasion strategies fail to bring about
change, the CAFTE board resorts to using pressure tactics. They
go into court to punish, restrain, or force compliance. If these
formal channels of appeal are too weak or slow, the pressure
tactics of direct action are used. They picket or boycott an
office, or conduct a sit-in and refuse to move, or find some
other way to disrupt “business as usual.”
direct action
An action that interferes with the orderly conduct of a system
that is the target of change.
Believing they answer to a higher code of ethics, the agents of
change sometimes take the law into their own hands. The
Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., encouraged people to do this
when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to yield her seat on a
bus to a white passenger. In accordance with the laws of
Montgomery, Alabama, she was wrong. But she and the other
members of the black community believed that they had the
right to disobey an unjust and morally repugnant law. In order
to force change, they boycotted the buses for almost one year.
Faced with the possibility of a bankrupt bus company as well as
many bankrupt stores, the town officials capitulated, and the
segregation law was changed.
Forty years later, those who believe that abortion, although
legal, violates religious or ethical principles, formed Operation
Rescue. They chained themselves to the doors of family
planning clinics, blocking the entrances. They have intercepted
people walking into the clinics and attempted to disrupt the
functioning of these agencies to rescue the “unborn children.”
As the Supreme Court and state legislatures have debated the
pros and cons of abortion, these activists have taken direct
action on their convictions. The issue of stem cell research

using human embryos has now taken center stage in public
debate. The sides are shaping up on this issue. In the next few
years, we will see many groups—pro and con—using all these
change methods.
Choosing Which Method to Use and Who Should Lead the
Struggle
We make no value judgments about which set of change
strategies is better, more appropriate, or more professional.
Obviously Ed, like other change agents, always hopes that
exposing the facts about a problem will lead to solutions. But he
knows that change comes slowly and often encounters a great
deal of resistance. An elderly woman soon to be evicted from
her apartment or a family whose baby is eating lead paint chips
cannot keep waiting for help as the wheels of a bureaucratic
grievance procedure grind on.
Thus, each strategy plays a role at a particular time with a
particular problem in a change campaign. The important point to
remember is that in order to maintain credibility, change agents
must climb each step of the ladder before escalating to the final,
most aggressive one. Each set of strategies must be carefully
mapped out and executed, using the kind of planning models we
have already described.
Frequently, visionaries or charismatic people take a prominent
role in a change effort. They become identified with it. Mr.
Pulashnik is an activist in a local housing group that is part of
the CAFTE coalition. He is a recent immigrant from the
Ukraine. He has the ability to rivet an audience with his
eloquence and his rage. When a group of homeless families
broke into a boarded-up apartment house, vowing to stay until
the city made the apartments habitable, he was their
spokesperson. It might have seemed to the public that he was
the person who galvanized the city council into action. But that
was not so. A phalanx of law students and their professor, a

priest, a candy store owner, three housewives, and the members
of eight homeless families all played significant roles. Before
the news of the takeover made a front-page splash, many people
had spent months collecting information, negotiating, and
forging coalitions. If there had not been widespread
participation and support for “Operation Move-in,” it could
have been swept aside with one quick police action or simply
ignored until the squatters gave up and left. All change efforts
must be group endeavors.
coalition
A loose amalgam of people or groups who support a similar
idea or goal.
When he first began his job, Ed was brimming over with energy
and enthusiasm. Occasionally those wonderful qualities got in
the way of careful planning. At one point, he helped organize a
rally to protest the mayor’s deletion of money needed to fix up
three local parks, which the city council had promised. To his
great embarrassment, reporters outnumbered neighborhood
residents at the demonstration, and one of the speakers never
showed up. Ed did not realize then that he first had to prepare
the ground very well before the seeds could grow into an
effective intervention. He learned that preparation consists of:
Learning about the history of the problem and the systems
involved in it
Locating the sources of power and estimating their potential
for change
power
The capacity to influence others to achieve certain desired
ends.

Getting to know the local community through both formal
and informal channels of information
And of course he needed to learn the “rule of three”: double-
check, double-check, and then double-check some more to make
sure that everyone potentially involved knows the exact details
of the mission and the strategy.
Learning about the History of the Problem and the System
Whatever the nature of the change we hope to bring about—
more responsive routines in a day care classroom, more humane
treatment for victims of domestic violence, changes in the
governance of a recreation center—we need to learn about the
full dimension of the problem. We accumulate the hard facts of
the situation by asking questions such as:
How widespread is the problem?
How long has it been like this?
How did this problem come about?
Is it getting better or worse?
What evidence backs up our estimate?
Who benefits and who loses from this situation?
What will happen in the future if the situation does not
change?
What solutions have others suggested? Which ones have been
tried?
During a campaign to scale down a proposed development that

would bring too many cars into an already overcrowded area, Ed
located an investigative reporter who was also interested in the
problem. Both of them believed there was corruption in the
housing authority that had approved these plans without an
environmental impact study. The reporter uncovered valuable
information and brought it to the attention of the public. The
developer’s plans are still on hold while this situation is being
further investigated by the attorney general of the state. Ed also
recruited assistance from a business professor. He and his
students studied the feasibility of creating bike lanes and
employing shuttle buses to reduce the crush of cars (and carbon
emissions) in the center of town.
Locating the Sources of Power and Potential for Change
Before CAFTE begins a change effort, the members need to
know just where the power lies to make the proposed changes.
Ed has discovered that this is more complex than it at first
appears. When dealing with city government, several agencies,
bureaus, and commissions have overlapping jurisdiction. Ed
worked with a committee trying to clean up a vacant lot and
turn it into a playground. He soon found out how Alice felt
when she went down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. Everyone
who answered the phone was eager to pass him along to another
person. After many calls, he was right back with the first person
again.
In trying to get that vacant lot cleaned up, he discovered that
the health department was concerned about it only if he could
prove it was rat infested (rat bites are health hazards). He
discovered that the sanitation department could not clean it up
because it was private property. They said they would be happy
to clean it after it became a park. Finally, he discovered that the
lot had been condemned for nonpayment of taxes many years
earlier. In addition, no one at city hall could find a record of
who held the title to the land.

With patience, time, persistence, and lots of help from friends,
CAFTE finally unraveled the threads that led to the desk of the
person who could cut through the red tape and say, “Okay!” A
bit of green grass and trees now exists where only rubbish grew
before. Ed often eats his lunch in that park and grins with pride
(and scowls at children who try to pick the flowers).
Formal and Informal Sources of Power
Finding the genuine movers and shakers is complicated by the
existence of two types of power hierarchies: (1) the formal
power structure, which is composed of people who have the
official authority to make decisions, and (2) the informal power
structure, which is composed of people who actually make the
decisions.
If you think about how decisions get made in your family
system, in your college, or in a social agency you have worked
in, you can grasp the complex reality of power. Locating the
real decision makers in any system is a skill gained from many
years of going down blind alleys and returning to try again. It
develops out of having the courage to ask everyone involved
with the system a lot of concrete questions, thinking about the
answers, and then relying on your own intuition.
Ed has learned how to ask questions that might unveil the
realities of power. Compare the following two questions. Which
one is likely to yield the clearest picture?
Mr. Knight, who makes the policy decisions about hiring staff
in your agency?
or
Mr. Knight, would you please describe exactly how the hiring of
the project manager was done?

Of course, good questions do not guarantee accurate answers.
But if you have ever watched a skilled television interviewer,
you can appreciate the art of phrasing questions that elicit rich
information.
Power and Change
Ed has discovered that power is in a state of perpetual flux, and
change is always possible. If he gets turned down on a request
one day, he tries again later, as the situation or the cast of
characters changes. An election, a turnover in staff, or a
downturn in the economy can change a “yes” into a “no” and
vice versa.
No system is ever totally closed. Every system, no matter how
rigid it appears, is vulnerable to change. When Ed gets
frustrated and begins to believe the looming threat of global
warming will never improve, he reminds himself of the dramatic
international changes of the recent past. Ed’s mother describes
signing petitions and demonstrating for nuclear disarmament. At
that time, the world tottered on the brink of nuclear destruction,
as the United States and the former Soviet Union faced each
other from opposite corners. But almost overnight, the Soviet
Empire came apart at the seams, and “Ban the Bomb” buttons
became collectors’ items. After seventy years of power, the
“evil empire” became a supplicant, coming to the West for
advice and loans. On the other hand, while Ed’s mother is
pleased to see that China, where she was born, has opened up its
economy and now has a thriving middle class, she also fears
that China is making all the mistakes we have made. The roads
are clogged with cars, and many factories make the skies gray
with the smoke from coal-burning furnaces, smoke that destroys
cities and human lungs.
Getting to Know the Resources of the Community
Just as each client is rooted within a variety of systems—home,
school, workplace, and peer groups—so too are systems rooted

within communities. Before we attempt to change one part of a
system, we must learn about its context. Communities are the
sum total of their history, ethnicity, economics, geography, and
relationships with the larger city or town.
The word community is often used in two ways. First, it is used
to describe a physical entity. The Riverside community, where
CAFTE’s office is located, for example, has homes, shops,
streets, and boundary lines. However, we might also use the
term to describe a community of interest, a group with which we
identify. It need not have a geographic boundary. Perhaps we
see ourselves as belonging to the gay community, the Christian
community, the university community, or the macrobiotic
community. In this section we will be dealing primarily with
understanding the geographic community.
Understanding the physical layout of a community as well as its
spirit helps us design strategies to cope with its problems. When
Ed was a student, he helped conduct an attitude survey in
Riverside. Crime and vandalism had been escalating, and one
summer evening, a near-riot occurred when the police tried to
disperse a group of teenagers congregating on a corner. When
the surveys were tabulated, the researchers found that a major
complaint of community members was the lack of decent public
transportation. Because they could not get to the stores and
factories of the nearby city, many residents had given up hope
of ever obtaining steady, decent-paying employment.
Hopelessness led to frustration, which then led to
aggressiveness and destructiveness. When the Riverside
Citizens Committee was formed, obtaining transportation was
its major priority. Each community has its own agenda. Human
service workers have to learn to read it.
When Ed takes a job in a new community, he will have to start
learning about it from scratch. He will not be able to
communicate with the people he works with if he does not have,

at his fingertips, the details of their daily lives (see Kahn, 1995;
Vollbracht, 2002). He will begin his education by creating a
community profile. He does this by searching out answers to the
following kinds of questions:
Where does this neighborhood begin and end?
What are the differences between what the map defines as the
neighborhood and how the community describes its boundary
lines?
Which is considered a central location?
Where do different age groups and interest groups
congregate?
Where is the “other side of the tracks”?
Where are the significant dividing lines between the rich and
poor and between one racial or religious group and another?
What are the main industries and in what way does each
impact the environment?
Before scheduling any meetings, Ed needs to know how the
neighbors feel about coming out at night or entering certain
areas. He needs to know if in this community parents are likely
to bring their children to meetings. If so, he needs to arrange
child care. He needs to know what significant events his
meetings might conflict with (such as the local church bingo
game or ethnic holidays).
Ed needs to find out what languages people speak so he can
arrange for translators, if needed. In Riverside, many of the
elderly speak English but cannot read and write it, having
emigrated from Greece as adults. The newest residents are

Chinese, whose primary dialect is Mandarin. Ed speaks a bit of
Cantonese, the two dialects are almost totally different. He has
to find some community activists to translate CAFTE’s meeting
notices into the languages of community residents. CAFTE has
a phone message about upcoming activities it is sponsoring or
supporting that is spoken in three different languages.
Even the refreshments Ed serves at meetings tend to mirror the
preferences or dietary restrictions of the Greek and Chinese
members. And their festivals and holidays are celebrated and
acknowledged.
Formal Channels of Information
Even though Ed had volunteered in the Riverside community
and helped to conduct its community survey, when he started
this job, he still had much to learn. He found many valuable
sources of information at the library and on the Internet
(Kjosness, Barr, & Rettman, 2004). He looked up the census
data, read reports written by different city agencies, and read
the town budget. He even looked back over old copies of the
Riverside News.
Then Ed made a list of the people in town he needed to meet.
His list included politicians, school board members, clergy,
directors of social agencies, and especially the local heroes and
town characters. Although he did not formally interview each
one, he did have a series of questions he tried to work into
conversations whenever he got a chance to meet a person on the
list.
Informal Channels of Information
The formal channels of information were valuable, but Ed found
that walking and driving slowly in and out of the community’s
streets was just as important. Often the official version of the
economic or recreational life of the community contradicted
what he saw with his own eyes.

The boarded-up stores he observed and the neighborhood park
strewn with beer bottles and sleeping men and women told him
more about its spirit and daily life than did the statistics on
parks and unemployment. Through the use of the senses—
looking, listening, feeling, smelling—human service workers
can round out their profile and identify glaring GAPs in
services.
Whenever possible, Ed drops into a service at a local church,
attends a parents’ association meeting, and stops by the
American Legion fair or the police versus firefighters challenge
baseball game. He makes a point of doing his laundry near the
office because the Laundromat is a great place to chat with
folks, and it has a bulletin board full of notices about events he
might never hear of otherwise.
Making Sense of What We Have Found
After observing an institution or a slice of community life, we
try to make sense out of what we have seen and heard. This
process involves three steps:
Observation—What exactly did I see?
Speculation—What might it mean?
Reaction—How do I feel about it?
Observation We describe exactly what we have seen, with no
interpretation or evaluation. This guards us from jumping to
premature conclusions. As a famous television detective used to
say, “Just give me the facts, Ma’am!” after a visit to a local
public school, for example, Ed describes what he has seen:
At the school I saw a lot of students milling in the hallways.
There was a lot of noise, and some small fights broke out while

I was there.
instead of
I visited the public school, and it was a zoo.
Speculation We propose alternative interpretations of what we
have seen and heard. By observing a place or person for only a
few moments, Ed cannot possibly know what might have led to
whatever behavior he has observed. Later on, after learning
more about that school, he may find out which one of these
interpretations is more accurate. These are his speculations on
his observations:
13.7 Planning and Implementing a Change Effort
Reaching Out to the Public*
*For further step-by-step organizing techniques, see Dale
(1978); Kahn (1995); Mitiguy (1978); Mizrahi and Morrison
(1993); Morse (2004); Rivera and Erlich (1998); Russell (1990);
Shaw (2001); Speeter (1978a, 1978b); Weissberg (1999); and
Wharf and Clague, 1997. For organizing manuals, contact the
Center for Third World Organizing, 1218 East 21st, Oakland,
CA 94606.
No matter how brilliant our ideas, they are destined to fail if we
do not have active, broad-based support. We always seek
coalitions with groups of clients and their families, influential
community members, other human service workers, and the
ordinary, not-to-be-ignored taxpayers.
Imagine that you were assigned the job of establishing a new
family residential center in the Riverside community for
mothers who have AIDS. First, you found the latest information
on AIDS treatment and committed yourself to keeping current.
(The POZ and A+U magazines are excellent ongoing resources.)
For two years, you have been working with a citywide coalition

to get funds. You gathered thousands of signatures on petitions.
You went to the state capitol and spent days meeting with your
legislators. You helped organize a sit-in demonstration on the
steps of the capitol with people with AIDS. Finally, a bill was
passed and funds were appropriated. Your group has written a
program proposal. It wants to manage one of the three facilities
that will be funded. Now you should be able to start the
program. Well, not quite yet!
Assuming that you are lucky enough to find an affordable
building in an accessible location, you still must negotiate a
complex maze of obstacles. You will need to use all your
understanding of the formal and informal power systems of the
community to obtain the permits and licenses needed to
transform a private house into a nonprofit group home. You will
have to get permits from the building department to make
renovations. You will have to meet the fire and health
department regulations. The police department will probably be
concerned about neighborhood safety and the extra cars the
center will bring into a narrow street with limited parking.
You and your group (and your lawyer) will have to appear
before the town zoning board to convince them to grant a
variance to its usual rule that prohibits anything but a private
home in a residential neighborhood.
Then you will have to face the members of the block
association. They are planning to protest that the proposed
center will lower the value of their houses. They are also
terrified that their children might get AIDS from the children
who will live at the house. At an emotional meeting, they pour
out their fear and rage. Renting or buying a house for a
community-based human service program is almost always a
politically sensitive issue. Inevitably you will run up against the
NIMBY syndrome—“I agree that those people need a place to
live, but

NOT IN MY BACK YARD.”
Anticipating all these obstacles, you and your board have
carefully laid the groundwork to defuse the protests. For six
months, you have been actively reaching out to everyone who
might be an ally. You have been presenting accurate data about
AIDS, hoping to show that the risk of contagion from the
mothers and children who will live in the house is minimal. You
have also been reassuring the community that the house will be
so well maintained that it will add to the value of the
neighborhood, not detract from it. These are just a few of the
outreach activities your group might do:
Speak at every church, mosque, and synagogue in the
community
Appear on a panel discussion about the proposed residence
on local cable television
Run public-service announcements on the radio
Recruit an advisory committee of local influential people
Set up an interview with the local newspaper
Run a series of workshops at the local high school
Speak at a parent–teachers association meeting
Convince a famous sports figure who is HIV positive (and
heterosexual) to speak at a neighborhood rally
Organize a walkathon to raise money for AIDS research
Speak to the Chamber of Commerce to assure them that the

center will patronize local businesses
Publish a monthly newsletter of your activities and progress
Organize and keep current a web site about the house
Even after successfully working your way through red tape and
most of the resistance, you will need to continue to stay in close
touch with the community. Some of the typical ways social
programs do that are:
Have an open house
Become members of the block association and other civic
groups in town
Offer free, anonymous AIDS tests or another benefit to the
neighborhood
Encourage the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and other groups to
use your backyard for their fund-raising events or to use your
living room for meetings
By keeping the channels of communication open in both
directions, you will be able to accomplish several of your goals.
Your staff will:
Receive constant, current feedback so that complaints can be
dealt with before they explode into conflicts
Recruit volunteers and obtain donations of materials and
services to supplement the scanty budget of the program
Obtain referrals of clients
Mobilize supporters for your grant renewal or to protect the

program when budget cuts are threatened
Involving the Public in the Decision-Making Process
The most potent vehicle for creating significant change in any
sector of the community is the ongoing, genuine participation—
the give and take of ideas—of those who will be affected.
Psychologists and sociologists have found that when workers
are asked to help design changes in their work routine, they
tend to be receptive to innovation. When they feel excluded
from decisions, they are likely to resist even positive change,
subtly sabotaging and undermining it (Klein, A.F., 1953;
Mondros & Wilson, 1994).
As change agents, we encourage people to articulate their
complaints and visualize solutions. Yet some human service
workers fear putting too much power in the hands of clients or
citizens. This is especially so when the clients are emotionally
troubled, physically handicapped, or burdened with the daily
problems of getting food, clothing, and shelter. Although the
professional’s hesitations are understandable, there are at least
three excellent arguments in favor of giving clients and citizens
key roles in maintaining and changing systems (Fisher, 1997):
Client and citizen involvement is efficient and effective.
Time and again, clients complain that social researchers spend
needless time and money arriving at conclusions about social
causation that the clients themselves could have supplied gratis.
Although this is a pretty cynical view, it carries a kernel of
truth. No matter how troubled or disorganized they may be,
clients do have enormous insights into their problems,
aspirations, culture, and lifestyle. No matter how skillful we are
at understanding systems, clients undoubtedly know their world
better than we ever can.
Rather than sit in the office wondering why so few tenants

attended a workshop on applying for fuel subsidies or replacing
high-wattage appliances with energy-saving ones, a worker can
visit the Laundromat, school playground, and local park and ask
folks why they didn’t come. Workers often find that one-shot
research projects or twice-a-year open meetings are not enough
to mobilize the ideas or energy of the neighbors. So community
workers must constantly work at sharpening their program’s
ability to solicit ongoing client and community feedback. This
feedback has to be a regular part of the planning of every
workshop and the evaluating of it after the workshop is
completed.
Client and citizen involvement has therapeutic and protective
value. Many of the people who arrive at the doors of human
service agencies have already been overwhelmed by
bureaucracies, unresponsive cumbersome institutions, urban
ghettos, and suburban isolation. Feeling alienated and
vulnerable—one small ant on a very big hill—they desperately
yearn to play a significant role in the systems that affect their
lives. When we counsel clients, we carefully guard their right to
choose their own path. We must also do that as we pursue
change.
Viable decision making about the administration of prisons,
mental hospitals, counseling agencies, community residences,
day care centers, nursing homes, and the like helps release
positive forces for change. These forces might have lain
dormant, but they have not atrophied. Participation in change
efforts as equals rather than as passive recipients guards clients
against the further development of their sense of powerlessness.
It also protects change efforts from the self-interest of
entrenched leaders and workers who might perpetuate their own
powerful roles. One of the few truths we know that has no
exceptions is power tends to corrupt, and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.

We always have to be careful of our capacity to manipulate.
Brager, Specht, and Torczyner (1987) point out that client trust
in us is shaken when the worker engages in manipulative acts.
Client and citizen involvement in decision making is both a
moral right and a legal obligation. Juggling the rights of
individuals and neighborhoods with the rights of the larger
society requires the wisdom of Solomon. Advocates try to find
answers for questions that probably have no definitive answers:
Why should landlords be forced to abide by rent controls
rather than charge whatever the traffic can bear, as in other
nonregulated industries?
Why should people who work hard and save money have it
taxed by the government to support programs for mothers who
have children and no ability to support them?
All sides of these controversial issues have strong proponents.
Although social policy issues are perplexing, they must be
decided in an open marketplace of ideas. In some towns,
legislation constricts the size of new buildings and taxes
businesses differently than homeowners. In some towns, in
order to fund improvements to the green belt, each time a house
is sold, a portion of the proceeds goes into a fund to purchase
open space for parks. Some towns spend tax money on building
subsidized housing units, and other towns do nothing and hope
that low-income people will move away. Whatever the
arrangement, it is always open to change. The public can vote to
change policies, and they can vote for candidates who espouse
their positions. Thus, participation is built into our system at
every level, either directly or indirectly.
In public education, for example, the federal government leaves
to local jurisdictions a great deal of freedom to teach the
curriculum as they choose. But, with the passage of Public Law

94-142 (the Education for All Children’s Act) in 1974, the
federal government assumed a central role in deciding what
kind of services must be offered to students with disabilities.
The Education for All Children Act also mandates citizen
participation. Every educational plan created for a child with
special needs requires parental consent. If the parents withhold
their consent, they can mediate with public officials, then
arbitrate, and then finally go to court. If the lower court
disagrees with them, they can go to a higher court. Currently
there is a growing push for mandated academic testing and an
effort to require passing a standardized test in order to graduate.
Parent groups have mobilized on both sides of this hotly
contested issue. Local school boards now grapple with federal
legislation.
Many health and environmental laws require the approval of
community planning groups. Social welfare and housing laws
require advisory or review panels of citizens and consumers.
These panels periodically review the work of public agencies
and have some say in whether their funding is expanded or
downsized.
Thus, whether or not human service workers are convinced that
their clients can handle the responsibility or that participation
has intrinsic value, they have no choice but to include it in most
publicly funded programs. The challenge is to learn how to
implement the mandate for participation so that it works well.
Decision Making and Participation
Citizen decision making is essential in a democracy, but both
skeptics and supporters of participation agree that many barriers
stand in its way. Citizens often lack time, self-confidence,
specialized knowledge of resources and alternatives,
articulateness, and objectivity. No less an authority than
Thomas Jefferson, however, offered an answer to the public’s
unreadiness to assume power. In a letter to William Charles

Jarvis, dated September 28, 1820, he wrote:
I know of no safe repository of the ultimate powers of this
society but the people themselves; and if we think them not
enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform
their discretion.
An in-depth examination of several day care programs that had
strong parental and citizen participation identified five crucial
building blocks that help inform the discretion of citizens
(Schram, 1975). Let’s look at each of them (Figure 13.1). You
can use them in the future when you are given the task of
building a strong advisory committee, house council, or board
of directors.
Commitment. After the third meeting in a row when a vote
cannot be taken on a grant proposal to fund a solar panel
installation in the neighborhood hospital because there is no
quorum, a legislator might be tempted to throw up his hands and
yell, “Damn it, I’ll decide myself!” But even if shared decision-
making is not working very well, it still cannot be abandoned.
Figure 13.1
The building blocks of participation
The agency director mandated to check out proposals with a
citizen’s advisory board must grit her teeth and try a new
approach to solicit the opinions of the members. She could call
each one and take a telephone poll, or she could write a letter
(and enclose a stamped, self-addressed postcard) and ask for
written feedback. She must continue to believe that six hesitant
citizens will eventually make a sounder decision about the
proposal than she could make alone. She understands that there
are low points in every group’s participation history.

Because of our deep commitment to the process of citizen
input, we need to find ways to make it work. When it does not
work (e.g., by not acting soon enough, they lose money the
grant would have provided), we do not resort to blaming the
members of the board. Their lives are complex, and we believe
that they do the best they can. During the next funding cycle we
will give them more advance notice, tack one meeting onto
another, or take a telephone survey to obtain a vote. And there
usually is a next time.
Clear mandate. Participation has the best chance of working
when the contract governing the process is clear. Discussing
each of the details of by-laws or personnel practices seems to
most of us like tedious nitpicking. However, carefully written
rules of the road are the backdrop against which rational
participation can take place. Vague generalities doom shared
decision making. Compare the following statements in the
bylaws of two different community residences for adults who
are in recovery from drug addition. The clarity of the second
statement offers residents more of a chance of gaining
significant participation than the generality of the first:
Residents will play an active role in running the house.
Compare that vague mandate with this very clearly specified
process of decision making:
Once a week, there will be a two-hour meeting during
which activities for the next seven days will be planned. Each
member will have one vote. All activities must get the majority
of votes and must fall within the recreation funds allocated for
that week.
Appropriate structure. Every participation effort needs a
tailor-made participation structure. The format must be the right
one for the mix of purpose, participants, and set of tasks.

Unfortunately, most of us know of few alternative models of
structure. We drift into the familiar, having elections for
president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer. Then we
establish a weekly or monthly meeting.
But not all groups need the same kind of officers, nor do they
need to meet on a regular, arbitrary schedule. Some decisions
need the face-to-face interaction of a meeting; many just need a
polling of opinions in a variety of ways. Some tasks need not be
done by everyone but can be delegated to committees. A
neighborhood resident who recently returned to school was
given the job of rewriting the Recycling and Waste Disposal
Handbook. She sold ads to local merchants and churches. The
proceeds from the ads and the small purchase price for the book
covered her two-week salary. Once a year, CAFTE sponsors a
citywide Earth Day conference. The fees from renting booths
cover the small stipend paid to the member who does the
secretarial work involved.
Some committees can be ad hoc, taking on one task and then
disbanding when it is completed. Ed has found that it is much
easier to ask a resident to take on a task if it has a beginning
and an ending time attached to it. Although she turned down the
job of chair of the fund-raising committee, for example, Ms.
Kazantakis was willing to run two bake sales a year. That was a
role that did not overwhelm her.
Carving out a structure is like sculpting a face. No two are
identical. Experimentation and imagination are the keys to
success. But if the structure is not designed, an informal one
will evolve anyway, with all its attendant fuzziness and
potential for conflict.
Knowledge and skills. Few of the citizens in Riverside have
ever made the kinds of decisions that organizing a social change
movement entails. Ed has often passed on to the members the

knowledge and skills he has learned in college courses as well
as the skills he has acquired from volunteering in local political
campaigns.
When the board of CAFTE was hiring an architectural
consultant and an engineer to help evaluate a developer’s plans
for a shopping mall in what is a wetlands area, Ed showed them
how to use the role-playing he had learned in counseling classes
to prepare for the interview. Ed has brought in sample budgets
from other groups to show them what is usually included. When
they wrote their by-laws, he invited a guest from an older,
established neighborhood association who had already gone
through the process. And now that they have been meeting for
several years, they can reach out and help other fledgling
groups.
Supports that enable participation. No matter what the
issue—a tenant council is lobbying for legislation to control the
spread of condominiums in a low-income area or a community
residence for retarded adults is planning its first open house—
some people will inevitably invest more time, energy, and
enthusiasm than will others. Those who do the work need to be
warmly thanked, whether with a letter of appreciation, a dinner,
or a certificate of appreciation.
Less active people also need encouragement. Resources can
support the growth of democracy. Perhaps if child care were
provided during meetings, more people might come. Ed has
found that if he rotates the locations and schedules of meetings,
it becomes easier for some folks to attend. Sometimes he
suggests to one member that he or she carpool with someone he
knows is coming. He always makes it a point to offer rides to
members because very few of them can afford to maintain a car,
and walking long distances at night can be frightening.
Ed also tries to remember that as important as CAFTE is,

each member and coworker has a personal life outside the
organization, and that life also needs to be nurtured. Ed builds
time into meetings so members can swap news of job openings
or available apartments. The group often has potluck birthday or
wedding celebrations. He takes the time to visit a sick colleague
or member. It is these touches of warmth that provide tangible
rewards for the members’ investment of energy.
Because CAFTE is often on one side of a confrontation, it is
especially important that the human service worker and
participants form strong supportive relationships. They will
need to shore each other up when they become discouraged or
fearful. While social networking sites such as Facebook and
Twitter are effective means for mobilizing large numbers of
people to raise funds, attend a rally, or protest, they create only
“weak ties” among people. Malcolm Gladwell (2010) points out
that the people with whom you might engage in risky behavior,
such as social activism, need to have strong, real (not virtual)
relationships with you.
Changing the Rules, Regulations, and Power Arrangements of a
System
Just as every worker has a boss, so every public or private
organization has some type of governing body. Decisions are
generally made in a boardroom, courtroom, or legislative
chamber. It is to these groups that the members of CAFTE turn
when they become frustrated trying to cope with a problem that
is not getting solved at the local level. After they determine
where the next level of power lies, they try to educate those
officials.
For many years, the citizens in Riverside had been complaining
about garbage collection that was very sporadic. When garbage
was collected, the empty cans were often thrown in the street,
where buses would reduce them to junk metal. The smell of

garbage, especially in the summer, hung over their
neighborhood. Letters written to the manager of the sanitation
department got polite answers but no improvement. A petition
demanding regularly scheduled and more careful sanitation
service was circulated. More than 200 people signed their
names, but nothing changed. So, for three weeks, an elderly
homebound CAFTE volunteer sat by her window, marking down
the times the trucks arrived on her corner and what the
sanitation workers actually did. She noted their numbers so
drivers could be held accountable.
Armed with all these credible data, Ed helped to arrange a
meeting with the regional director of sanitation who listened
courteously and promised to discipline his staff. For two months
the situation improved, but it drifted back to its original sorry
state. Summer came, and the stench of garbage increased. The
fear of rat infestation increased along with it.
Appealing to Elected Officials
Ed realized they had to go over the head of the regional
sanitation director. One of the experienced members of CAFTE
suggested that the group members appeal to their local town
council. Ed panicked a little. Since his public school social
studies lessons, the legislative process had always seemed very
overwhelming. But, as he soon discovered, in day-to-day
practice, social change agents must inevitably deal with local,
state, and federal elected officials. And when taxpayers have
complaints that are not being taken seriously, they have a right
to expect that those who are paid by their tax money will
respond to their legitimate requests.
Ed made the appointment with Councilor Irene Haupt, who
represented the Riverside neighborhood. The committee
members practiced stating their demands in a tense late-night
session. They went in with a written agenda, with evidence
collected by the homebound volunteer, and with their petitions.

Ms. Haupt, anticipating an upcoming hotly contested reelection
campaign, seemed very impressed with the 209 signatures. Each
of those signatures represented a potential vote she might
capture.
To remove the “Whites Only” signs in public accommodations
in the southern states, advocates went all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court. Our society still must deal with the legacy of
humiliation and resentment such segregation engendered.
Ms. Haupt investigated the sanitation department’s operations.
Eventually the regional administrator was censured and put on
probation. Ed was surprised to find that Ms. Haupt genuinely
appreciated the feedback she got from the residents. She
encouraged them to return to discuss their suggestions to
improve the derelict park in their area and increase recycling
efforts. She listened to their complaints about the lack of police
foot patrols and promised to begin working on that GAP. Ed has
found that legislators often depend on citizen groups. They
cannot know everything that is going on in their districts, and
the voters are their eyes and ears.
CAFTE is often consulted by a town councilor or by a state
representative who wants to hear their ideas or solicit support
when legislation that might have an environmental impact is
proposed. The members have established credibility as people
who do their homework. They have also built a reputation of
having good memories, especially on election day!
Although they might think of themselves as apolitical, human
service workers cannot be. They visit their statehouse when
budgets are being discussed by legislators. If they do not lobby
for the funding of social welfare programs, perhaps no one else
will! The opponents of affordable housing, humane correctional
programs, or shelters for battered women are likely to be there,
telling their side of the story. They are demanding that money

be diverted from social programs to fund their priorities. They
too will have research documents and signatures on petitions.
Thus, as Ed has learned, understanding how to present a case to
a legislator is not a skill reserved just for community
organizers. It is a skill he will take with him into every human
service job he does. He will also use it in his personal life as a
citizen of his own community.
Turning to the Courts for Redress of Grievances
Although the sanitation complaint was resolved on the
legislative level, at other times Ed has needed to follow the path
to the courthouse. If he is convinced that an inequity in the
wording or practice of a law stands in the way of citizens
getting fair treatment, CAFTE either tries to get the law
repealed or asks a judge to change the way it has been
interpreted or implemented.
Lawyers from legal services programs (many of them initially
funded by the federal poverty program), private attorneys doing
pro bono work, and nonprofit groups such as the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU), the Southern Poverty Law Center, and
the Sierra Club carry these cases into court. They work on
behalf of both individuals and communities, especially when
they are convinced that their civil rights or health and safety are
being violated. When homeless residents of Riverside were
being routinely gathered up by the police and forced to go to
shelters against their will, lawyers from one of these groups
filed a suit on their behalf.
Although the volunteer lawyers do the actual juggling of the
incomprehensible legal words and motions, Ed plays a role, too.
Because he had met many of the homeless residents when they
were working on getting the parks cleaned up, he was the one
who talked to them about participating in the lawsuit. He
provided them with information at every step. And he also gave
them the emotional support that helped them hang on through

the endless delays before their case was finally heard.
Rewards of Social Change Interventions
Most human service jobs do not require as much time, energy,
and skill at social change as Ed’s role at CAFTE. But all
workers will, at some point, encounter an unyielding barrier that
stands between their clients and the services they need. Then,
even on a very small scale, the worker acts as a change agent.
As the federal government continues to shift away from publicly
funded programs and the slack is picked up by the private
sector, human service workers will have to continually monitor
the output of social programs. Would you stand by quietly if:
… a disoriented elderly woman you counsel was being
evicted from her home because the landlord wanted to sell her
apartment as a condominium?
… a young man just released from prison wanted to find
work as an electrician, and the union representative told him the
union would not take anyone with a prison record?
… the mother of a Cambodian youngster was told that she
would have to wait six months for an educational assessment
because the school psychologist was too busy?
… a person was running for office in your town on a platform
of cutting out all the frills and was targeting the only teenage
recreation center, a Meals-on-Wheels program for elderly shut-
ins, and a van to transport adults who were physically disabled
to their sheltered workshop?
We hope your answer is a resounding, “Of course not!” Walking
a picket line and knocking on a stranger’s door to explain a
community problem can at first be intimidating. Licking stamps,
stuffing envelopes, handing out leaflets, and making endless
phone calls is tedious. And losing a struggle after months of

hard work can be devastating. Ed does all these tasks and has
faced many disappointments. Yet he has also had incredible
highs when desperately needed services were begun or
reinstated after being cut back. The day the first tenants move
into the demonstration “green” housing development he has
worked on for so long will be filled with indescribable joy.
Every organizer can tell stories about coworkers or citizens
who, after experiencing a new sense of their own power, went
back to school to finish their degree, took a more responsible
job, conquered an addiction, or returned home feeling more
hopeful about their children’s futures.
Deborah Rosenfelt sums up the legacies of a social change
campaign in her study of the aftereffects of a dramatic labor
dispute in the mines of New Mexico in the 1950s. A group of
poor Chicana (Mexican American) women defied years of their
community’s machismo tradition and the prospect of spending
several days in jail and walked a picket line for months. Their
husbands and sons had been forbidden to strike by a court order.
Thirty years later, Rosenfelt interviewed those women. That
strike had been the most significant event of their lives. For
most, the relationships with their husbands had changed
dramatically when their roles reversed during the strike. But
afterward, their roles in the family gradually regressed to the
old inequality. The women’s feelings of self-confidence had
also gradually faded, they said, but not completely (Wilson &
Rosenfelt, 1978).
Although it often appears as if the field of human services has,
like the field of social work, moved away from social change
and become enmeshed solely in clinical and direct-service
practice, that might not be the full picture. With a shaky
economy, questionable welfare reform, and a world community
reeling from the impact of globalization, terrorism, and

dramatic climate change we cannot afford this. Community
efforts to work for positive change have never been more
necessary. And they need not be gigantic efforts. Stopping at
Every Lemonade Stand (Vollbracht, 2002) and Deep Economy
(McKibben, 2007) describe the host of small acts all of us can
take to build up a safer and more satisfying community, one that
nurtures children—and everyone else.
Finally, one of our former students, remembering our oft-
repeated injunction: Don’t Mourn, Organize! sent us this
obituary from her local newspaper. It seems to epitomize what
we have urged beginning students to do, when there is a
problem; join together with others and try to tackle it. More
importantly, it illustrates an ordinary woman taking an active
role in her community, and doing it for a lifetime!
Pat Cody, Bookstore Owner, Pioneering Feminist and Health
Advocate
My First Teacher
October 5, 2010*
*Used by permission of Anthony Cody, first published in the
Berkeley Daily Planet on October 1, 2010, and then in a smaller
version on his blog. With thanks also to Nora Cody.
My mother, Pat Cody, passed away last Thursday, at 87 years of
age. She was quite a woman. Here are some of the lessons she
taught me over the years.
If you see something is wrong, speak up and try to change it.
Join with others and raise your voices together. In the early
1960s she helped found Women for Peace, which took a stand
against nuclear weapons and the slowly expanding Vietnam war.
Years before protesters marched by the millions, my mother was
marching every week at Berkeley’s city hall, protesting the US
advisors that would wind up leading the nation to war. The fact

that most people had not heard of Vietnam did not stop her from
speaking out. More recently, she helped found a group called
Grandmothers Against the War, to call for peace once again.
Respond to the immediate needs of those around you. In 1967
the summer of love blossomed around the world, and Berkeley
became one of the places where youth gathered. Every week,
hundreds of youngsters would arrive with their belongings on
their backs, looking for a new scene. My mother and father had
a bookstore in the midst of this scene on Telegraph Avenue.
Some of the local business owners wanted to make life as hard
as possible for the youth. But my parents helped found the
Berkeley Free Clinic in 1969, and for many years my mother
served as the treasurer for the organization. This clinic has been
a lifeline for thousands of people, and operates mostly on
volunteer labor. Much of the funds for the project came in the
form of spare change collected by young people on the street,
who cajoled donations from passersby and split the proceeds
with the clinic. My sisters and I did our part by counting and
rolling the coins on the dining room table every Sunday night
for years.
When personal tragedy strikes, build community with others and
face it together. In 1971, my mother learned that DES, a drug
she had taken to prevent miscarriages, actually caused
reproductive damage to the children who were in utero. She
discovered there were millions who had been affected, but there
was very little public information available. She connected with
others and started DES Action, a group devoted to informing
people about the effects of the drug, advocating for research and
support for those affected. This group grew to have chapters in
more than thirty states and in other countries as well. My
mother was the linchpin of this group, and built a powerful
network that included doctors, medical researchers, and the
people affected by the drug. She personally responded to
thousands of people seeking information and support, and was

like a second mother to many. Finally after her husband died
Pat realized that there were very few support groups for those
living with devastating grief from losing a close family
member. She founded the Grief Support Project and created a
model that paired a trained counselor with a layperson who had
coped with such a loss to lead groups for those recently
widowed or otherwise grieving.
Don’t preoccupy yourself with credit or awards or power. Just
do what needs to be done, and enjoy the company of others
while working towards common goals. She gave me the example
by which I have lived my life, and I will miss her.
Crusaders for Justice
“There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present
moment we will continue to see. We forget how often in this
century we have been astonished by extraordinary changes in
people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against
tyrannies by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed
invincible…
To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is
based on the fact that human history is a history not only of
cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will
determine our lives. If we only see the worst, it destroys our
capacity to do something. If we remember those times and
places—and there are so many—where people have behaved
magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the
possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different
direction.”
—Howard Zinn
Activist, historian, writer

Summary
Individual problems are often caused by factors rooted in the
social environment.
Changes in the social environment can help one troubled
individual and, more importantly, they can prevent the
development of similar problems in others.
Systems-organizing and systems-change strategies rely on the
same basic activities and skills as the direct-service strategies.
They begin with data collection and terminate with evaluation.
Before forming an action plan to counsel a client, a human
service worker must check out the mental health of the systems
within which the client lives and works.
Human service workers need to explore their ambivalent or
unrealistic attitudes toward change agents.
Momentum for change generates from the top down through
legislative or administrative fiat. It also generates from the
bottom up through the actions of organized citizens and clients.
Often it is generating from the top and bottom of the system
simultaneously.
Human service workers attempt to change both the structure
of an unhealthy system and the consciousness of the people in
it.
The three escalating methods of organizing for change are
education, persuasion, and pressure.
Before a change effort begins, organizers research the
background of the problem and locate where the power to make
change really resides. They need to prepare a community profile

to assess resources and understand the lifestyles of the people
involved in the organizing.
Organizers use outreach techniques to solicit public support
and participation in generating ideas and making decisions and
to overcome resistance to change.
Citizen participation depends on obtaining strong
commitment, clear mandates, appropriate structure, knowledge,
skills, and participation supports.
To change the rules, regulations, and power arrangements of
a system, organizers disseminate information, rally support,
lobby decision makers, and take direct action when other
techniques have not worked.
Working to change systems is time- and energy-consuming,
frustrating, and often fruitless. But even very small changes can
result in dramatic improvements. The potential rewards of all
our change efforts can have widespread ramifications that
change many people’s life situations.
Change efforts can be undertaken by anyone and can continue
for a lifetime, bringing great satisfaction to both those who
initiate and those who benefit.
Discussion Questions
George Bernard Shaw, a social critic of his times, is reported
to have said that only unreasonable people will not accept the
world as it is and, therefore, all change depends on
“unreasonable people.” How do you feel about that statement?
Does it make sense to you? Would you feel comfortable in the
role of “an unreasonable person”? Can you think of some
famous people who might fit that description?

What kind of change efforts have you been involved in
within your own hometown or on your college campus? Who
started them, what techniques did they use, and how did the
effort work out? Remember that these change efforts need not
be major campaigns. If you can’t think of any change efforts in
your own experiences, what kind of change efforts have you
heard of or seen in your community or on your college campus?
Have you seen or read about any groups that asserted their
position for or against a woman’s right to an abortion or for or
against gun control? What kind of tactics did they use to
influence the public or legislators?
Is there any form of student governance on your campus?
Where would you go to find the sources of power that might be
able to change a rule or regulation that you feel is unfair or not
fairly implemented?
Who were your first teachers? What lessons did they leave
with you?
Web Resources for Further Study
Neighborhoods Online
www.neighborhoodsonline.net
This is an online resource center for people who work through
grassroots organizations as volunteers, and in government. It
provides fast access to information and ideas covering all
aspects of neighborhood revitalization, as well as to create a
national network of activists and people in government working
on problems that affect us where we live.
Net Action’s Virtual Activist Training Guide
www.netaction.org/training/reader.htm
A training guide for using the Internet to organize. It shows

how to build and maintain a web site and become a virtual
activist.
Websites on community organizing
www.nfg.org/cotb/Websites-4.pdf
Website listings including community organizing resources,
toolkits, manuals, and an organizing game.
Nonviolent organizing
www.nonviolence.org/support
Many web sites on nonviolent organizing.
Write your Representative
www.writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
This service will assist you by identifying your Congressperson
in the U.S. House of Representatives and providing contact
information.
Writing to government officials
USA.gov
This web site encourages you to contact your elected officials
and share your thoughts on current events and government
policy. Links are provided to the president and vice-president,
U.S. senators and representatives, state governors and
legislators, how to tweet a message to your representatives, and
how to contact government agencies.
Comm-Org: The Online Conference on Community Organizing
http://com-org.wisc.edu/node/27
COMM-ORG conducts an e-mail list and a List-Serve to help
connect people who are interested in community organizing,

including organizers, scholars, and scholar-organizers, and to
provide information about organizing. The e-mail list, with over
1,000 members across more than a dozen nations, is moderated
by Randy Stoecker at the University of Wisconsin.
MoveOn.org
www.moveon.org
MoveOn organizes on the Internet as well as in communities. It
has a Facebook page and it sponsors MoveOn Councils, local
teams of committed members who organize in their community
and build leadership among MoveOn members. They work on
national campaigns to push for progressive change.

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