Alinsky, Saul

Alinsky's Biography and Legacy

Alinsky grew up in Chicago's rough-and-tumble neighbourhoods of the early 1900s, earning a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago. He started graduate school as the Great Depression took hold across the country, but then decided to take a paying job. He eventually ended up working in the Back of the

[Page 36]Yards neighbourhood of Chicago, so named because it was located next to the infamous Chicago Stockyards. He had gotten connected with union organizers, who were organizing the stockyard workers living in the neighbourhood, and became enthused about the possibilities of adapting union organizing to a neighbourhood setting. The combination of union organizing and community organizing proved powerful, winning a union for the stockyard workers and significant influence in city politics for the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council.

That started Alinsky off on a long history of community organizing from coast to coast. From the famous organizing campaign against Kodak Company in Rochester, New York, to the creation of multiple neighbourhood organizations in Chicago, to many lesser known efforts across the county, Alinsky became larger than life. He built community organizing into an institution, founding the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) to train and support a nationwide network of community organizers. His organizing strategy was equally effective in extreme and varied times, such as the Great Depression or the 1960s.

Organizers whom Alinsky trained or otherwise influenced went on to found other community-organizing networks and training centres, such as the Pacific Institute for Community Organization (PICO, now People Improving Communities Through Organizing), the Direct Action Research and Training (DART) Center, the Gamaliel Foundation, National People's Action, the Midwest Academy and even the United Farm Workers.

The Alinsky Model of Community Organizing

Even though Alinsky's most famous book implied that there were ‘rules' for community organizing, most of those rules actually reinforced his adamant philosophical pragmatism. In the Alinsky model, the community organizer's job was to organize the ‘have-nots'—people who were not getting their fair share of the fruits of American society—to refine their resentment at their plight into organized action. The organizer then built a community organization around those resentments, using whatever existing organizational networks were available—churches, civic clubs, unions and so on. The goal was to build an enduring organization that would not just win on a few issues but could wield power and influence just like the ‘haves' were already able to.

For Alinsky, the community-organizing process started with an organizer entering a community to find out what people were angry about. As Alinsky refined the model, he required some network of local resource providers to invite the organizer in and provide financial support. These networks were often composed of clergy and other community leaders and came to be called sponsoring committees. Their job was to raise the money to support the organizer, legitimize the organizer in the community and connect the organizer to grass-roots people. The sponsoring committee, then, was to sponsor the effort, not lead it. The organizer's job was to build a people's organization using the sponsoring committee's resources.

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