CHL 620 Week 5 Community Organizing Strategy Example

One-on-Ones, a Bus Count and a Packed Council Meeting: Organizing East Side Residents to Win Evening Bus Service and a Lit River Path

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

CHL/620: Community Health Engagement and Organizing

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The coalition, organizing team, meetings, counts, city council and outcomes are composites written for a model paper modeled on Yakima, Washington; research findings come from the sources cited.

In a focus group during the community health assessment, a farmworker said the last bus left his stop at 7 p.m., while his shift at the packing plant ended at 8. He walked home along the river path, which had no lights. Other residents told similar stories. The Active Places action team of the east side coalition decided to organize. This paper describes the campaign.

Organizing Versus Other Approaches

Community organizing differs from service delivery, which provides help to individuals, and from professional advocacy, which speaks for a community. Christens and Speer describe organizing as a field of practice in which residents collaboratively investigate and undertake sustained collective action on issues of mutual concern, and their review of research finds it has often been effective in changing policies and systems at local, regional and national scales, while also producing psychological changes among participants (Christens & Speer, 2015).

Power and Empowerment

Organizing builds power. Drawing on a national organizing network, Speer and Hughey describe organizing principles and a cycle of organizing activity and conclude that a reciprocal relationship exists between developing power for community organizations and individual empowerment for their members (Speer & Hughey, 1995). The campaign aimed to win changes and build residents' capacity to win more.

Organizing and the Ladder of Participation

Organizing aims at the top of the participation ladder. Arnstein placed partnership, delegated power and citizen control above the tokenism of informing and consultation, and she argued that participation without redistributed power is an empty ritual (Arnstein, 1969). Where the coalition's earlier work consulted residents, organizing asks residents to hold power themselves by building an organization officials must reckon with.

Step One: One-on-Ones

The organizing cycle begins with relationships. Over six weeks, eight resident leaders held 140 one-on-one conversations with neighbors at homes, after Mass and at the soccer fields, asking what made daily life hard and whether they would act. Transportation and safety came up in more than half. Twenty-two people agreed to join a campaign team.

Step Two: Choosing Winnable Issues

The team weighed issues by how deeply people felt them, how many were affected and whether they could be won. Housing costs were deeply felt but too large for a first campaign. The team chose two specific, winnable demands: extending the east side bus route to 10 p.m. on weekdays and installing lights on a one-mile stretch of the river path.

Step Three: Identifying the Target

Organizing targets people, not institutions. The transit agency's board, which includes three city council members, controls route hours; the city council approves parks capital projects. The team identified two council members as swing votes.

Step Four: Research Actions

Residents did their own research. They counted riders waiting at the last stop over two weeks, finding an average of 31 people each evening at the 7 p.m. bus. They surveyed 90 workers at three plants about shift end times. They met the transit agency's planner, who estimated the cost of two added evening trips, and the parks director, who had a lighting design already drawn up but unfunded.

Framing the Demands

The team framed both demands around work and safety rather than health jargon: people who pick and pack the valley's fruit should be able to get home safely after their shifts. The frame connected to values council members shared, work and family, and made the demands hard to oppose. Health data appeared as support, not as the headline.

Step Five: Building the Base

Before the public action, the team held house meetings in eight homes to share findings and invite neighbors. Congregations announced the meeting after services. Youth from the photovoice project prepared a slideshow of the dark path.

Step Six: The Public Action

Two hundred residents filled the city council's evening meeting. Residents, not staff, spoke: a farmworker described walking home in the dark, a mother described her daughter's fear on the path and a teenager showed the photographs. The team presented its rider count and shift survey and asked each council member directly whether they would support funding both changes in the next budget. Seven council members heard the question; five said yes on the record.

Step Seven: Negotiation

After the meeting, team leaders met the two swing council members and the transit planner. The council agreed to fund path lighting from parks capital funds and to ask the transit board for a one-year pilot of evening service, with ridership targets.

Step Eight: Reflection

The team met a week later to reflect, over dinner at the community center. Members named what worked: the rider count, residents speaking for themselves and the direct ask. They named what did not: the Spanish interpretation at council was inadequate, and some members felt unprepared for hostile questions. Leaders set goals for training.

Leadership Development

The campaign produced new leaders. Of the 22 team members, eleven spoke publicly for the first time, four trained as one-on-one organizers and two joined the coalition's steering committee. Leadership development is as much a result of organizing as the policy win.

What Members Said They Gained

In the reflection meeting, members described changes in themselves. A packing plant worker said she had never spoken to an elected official and now had the council member's phone number. A teenager said the photographs made him see his neighborhood as something worth fighting for. These are the individual changes that research on organizing links to building collective power.

Risks

Organizing carries risks. Residents worried about immigration status and public exposure; the team let people choose visible or behind-the-scenes roles. Staff had to resist taking over. Some officials resented pressure, requiring relationship repair.

The Role of Health Staff

Health department and clinic staff provided data and training but did not speak at the action or set strategy. Their restraint kept the campaign resident-led and protected the department's neutrality.

Media and Allies

The team invited a reporter from the Spanish-language weekly and the local newspaper to the council meeting, and prepared two residents to speak to them. Allies, including the packing plant's human resources manager and a pastor, sent letters supporting evening service. Allies added weight, but residents remained the public face of the campaign.

Outcomes

The river path lights were installed eight months later. The evening bus pilot began the following spring and exceeded its ridership target in three months, leading the transit board to make it permanent.

Building for the Next Issue

The team is now researching housing inspections, a larger issue that needs more power. The 140 one-on-ones, trained leaders and relationships with council members are the foundation.

Conclusion

Residents organized to win evening bus service and a lit river path by building relationships, choosing winnable issues, researching, acting publicly and negotiating, then reflecting and developing leaders. Research on organizing shows it can change policies and systems, and on the reciprocal link between organizational power and individual empowerment. The campaign won both demands and built the capacity to take on harder issues.

References

Arnstein, S. R. (1969). A ladder of citizen participation. Journal of the American Institute of Planners, 35(4), 216-224. https://doi.org/10.1080/01944366908977225

Christens, B. D., & Speer, P. W. (2015). Community organizing: Practice, research, and policy implications. Social Issues and Policy Review, 9(1), 193-222. https://doi.org/10.1111/sipr.12014

Speer, P. W., & Hughey, J. (1995). Community organizing: An ecological route to empowerment and power. American Journal of Community Psychology, 23(5), 729-748. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02506989