Toward a Theory of Readiness for Community Organizing.

Community organizing is one way that social movements are begun. Activists who organize movements must build many relationships within a constituency and identify, recruit, and develop leaders who can mobilize constituents to work together on behalf of their common purposes. It is a highly labor-intensive leadership process requiring substantial investment of both time and material. Activists who work with communities to launch and sustain movements, therefore, must make choices about when and where to invest their resources with the best chance of accomplishing intended outcomes. One way of thinking about assessing the likelihood of success in advance of the development of a campaign is to assess the readiness of a constituency for organizing. In this paper, we develop a theory of readiness for community organizing. Based on qualitative data from 21 interviews with experienced community organizers, we advance existing theory by identifying a set of observable positive (enabler) and negative (barrier) signs that may indicate the readiness of communities for self-organized change. These features are analyzed at the individual, group, and contextual levels. We also examine three mechanisms through which these enablers and barriers impact campaign success: effort, strategy, and knowledge & skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]