The Community Organizing Method from the US to Europe: Similarities, Differences, and Challenges Ahead

The approach of Community Organizing to building and empowering local communities has become increasingly popular in the last decades, both because of the past involvement in community organizing of popular personalities such as Barack Obama, and because of the crisis of more traditional practices of civil society building. The main promoter of this approach worldwide is today the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), based in Chicago, which was founded in 1940 by Saul D. Alinsky, who has also systematized the main principles of community organizing. Thanks to IAF activity, since the 1990s, the community organizing method has also spread to western Europe, first in the UK and Germany, and later in several other countries. After sketching the history and methodology of the broad-based community organizing approach adopted by the IAF, this paper will try to analyze the community organizing initiatives developed in Western Europe during the last 30 years under the supervision of (or inspired by) the Industrial Areas Foundation network, singling out the main problems and issues at stake in adopting and translating the method outside the US, in different social, political and cultural contexts. The analysis will be based both on semi-structured interviews with several US- and Europe-based organizers and on the participant observation carried out since 2019, during the development of a community organizing initiative in the city of Turin, in northern Italy.

近数十年来，用于构建并赋能地方社区的社区组织（Community Organizing）方法愈发流行，这一方面缘于巴拉克·奥巴马等知名人士此前曾投身社区组织实践，另一方面则源于传统民间社会建设实践遭遇的发展困境。目前，该方法在全球的主要推广主体为总部位于芝加哥的工业区域基金会（Industrial Areas Foundation, IAF），该基金会由索尔·D·阿林斯基于1940年创立，阿林斯基同时也系统化了社区组织的核心原则。得益于该基金会的持续运作与推广，自20世纪90年代起，社区组织方法逐步传入西欧，率先落地于英国与德国，随后扩展至其他多个国家。本文将首先梳理工业区域基金会所采用的基础广泛的社区组织方法的发展历程与方法论体系，随后分析近30年来在工业区域基金会网络的指导下（或受其启发）于西欧开展的各类社区组织实践，甄别在不同社会、政治与文化语境下，将该方法引入美国以外地区时所面临的核心问题与关键议题。本次分析将基于两类研究资料：一是对多位供职于美国及欧洲地区的社区组织者开展的半结构化访谈；二是2019年以来，在意大利北部城市都灵推进某社区组织实践期间所进行的参与式观察记录。