CHAPTER 5

THE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING CYCLE

COMMUNITY ORGANIZING CYCLE

• Community Organizing is a non-linear process. It begins with the

emergence of a leadership team. The leadership team guides the
organizing effort through a cyclical process that includes:
• Research
• Planning
• Implementation
• Management and Monitoring
• Evaluation
The Community Organizing Cycle
The Heart of the Organizing
Cycle
THE SIX COMMON LEADERSHIP APPROACHES

• Single Leadership
• Power Elites
• Representative Democracies
• Self-selecting Teams
• Cells
• Connectivities
Distributed
Management
CHAPTER 6:
BUILDING AN
EFFECTIVE
LEADERSHIP TEAM

Jeramos, Anna Mae C.

cruiting a Leadership Team
• There are two primary strategies you might use to
locate initial team members and build
organizational momentum.
a. Large-scale strategies often begin when a few
interested, relatively powerful people organize an
initial organizing meeting or rally.
b. Organic strategies begin with a small core group
that grows slowly through personal invitations
and involvement of member’s social networks. 9
Large-Scale Strategies
For Leadership
Recruitment
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Used in social innovation,
community advocacy, social
movements, and collaborations.

Large meetings can be

advertised as rallies,
workshops, information
gathering, or community
conversations. 11
Advantage and Disadvantage
• They can make a • They can create
significant number problems if people
of people aware of come to simply vent
shared concerns, their anger, push their
promote media own agendas, or
attention, and jump- expect immediate
start action on an solutions.
issue.
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 Leadership Arising
From
“Organic” Initiatives
13
Organic Initiatives begin with a
single individual or a small group
who share mutual concerns and build
their organizing efforts slowly by
word of mouth, adding a few people
at a time.

The strengths of the organic growth

are its stability and deep
commitment within its core group.
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The Evolving Leadership
Team: The Form, Storm,
Norm, Perform, and
Adjourn Cycle
15
 FORM

ADJOURN STORM

PERFORM NORM
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FORM
• Participants began to build positive
relationships and mutual trusts.
• Tensions will begin to emerge as
participants realize that they have different
viewpoints, different ways of approaching
the problem, personality quirks, and
different levels of commitment and energy.
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STORM
• Tensions that are inevitably formed
during form stage.
• Storm periods can be aggravated or
prolonged by individual behaviors so
your own self-awareness and self-
control are very important.
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NORM
• An on-going process throughout the
life of the group, but most is done
during and shortly after the storming
phase.
• Group norms typically cover everything
from the simple to the complex.
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PERFORM
• Leadership teams have become
working units that are able to
accomplish their goals fairly
smoothly.

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ADJOURN
• Community organizing efforts end.
• Reasons for endings: a clear
conclusion when a problem is solved,
a law is enacted, or an agency is
founded; or the effort withers
because there is no real neeed for it.
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LEADERSHIP TEAMS
AS LIVING
SYSTEMS
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Leadership Teams can act, learn, and decide.

Communication in leadership teams are both

complex and dynamic.
It is complex because various systemic
dimensions operate simultaneously and their
influence changes as interaction occurs.
It is dynamic because it changes over time.

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Leadership Teams can act, learn, and decide.

Communication in leadership teams are both

complex and dynamic.
It is complex because various systemic
dimensions operate simultaneously and their
influence changes as interaction occurs.
It is dynamic because it changes over time.

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COMMUNICATION PATTERNS
• Leadership teams develop typical patterns of
communication, the wheel, overlapping, and all-channel
types.
• Wheel-type Communication: members communicate
through a single leader.
• Overlapping type: group members communicate mostly
with those closest to them either physically or emotionally.
• All-channel Group: the most effective but also the hardest
to maintain because everyone must make an effort to
speak. 25
Interactional
Processes
26
Exchange
• Participants exchange goods or
services and are guided by the
norm of reciprocity, an unwritten
social rule that if I help you, you
will help me sometime and vice
versa.
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Cooperation
• When people work together to
achieve common goals.
• Teamwork
• Collaboration

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Competition
• A struggle over scarce resources
regulated by shared values.
• Competition implies “winners” and
“losers”

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Conflict
• They occur because many people
believe that there are inevitably
winners and losers in life and that
they must fight hard to be winners.
• Mitigated by written or unwritten
norms
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Roles Team Members Play
• Community leadership teams operate very
much like sports teams. They are developing
skills and are expected to know when to use
them.
• No single person can effectively hold all of
these positions or effectively play all of these
roles, but they are not static. They move from
person to person.
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