Abortion in the United States' bible belt: organizing for power and empowerment

Over the last 30 years, conservative power in the United States, financed and organized by Christian fundamentalist sects, the Catholic Church, and conservative corporate and political leadership, has become more threatening and potentially destabilizing of progressive democratic principles and practices. Powerful interlocking political, financial and social forces are arrayed against women in many Southern and Western states. They are having destructive effects on women's ability to control their fertility and maintain bodily integrity and health. Poor women and women of color are disproportionately affected by restrictions on abortion services. Strategically developed interventions must be initiated and managed at every level in these localities. It is urgent to coordinate and empower individuals, multiple organizations and communities to engender effective changes in attitudes, norms, behavior and policies that will enable women to obtain reproductive health services, including abortion care. This paper describes contextual factors that continue to decimate U.S. women's right to health and, then, describes a community organizing-social action project in a number of US' states aimed at reversing the erosion of women's right to have or not to have children

Reimagining community health psychology: maps, journeys and new terrains

This special issue celebrates and maps out the ‘coming of age’ of community health psychology, demonstrating its confident and productive expansion beyond its roots in the theory and practice of small-scale collective action in local settings. Articles demonstrate the field’s engagement with the growing complexity of local and global inequalities, contemporary forms of collective social protest and developments in critical social science. These open up novel problem spaces for the application and extension of its theories and methods, deepening our understandings of power, identity, community, knowledge and social change – in the context of evolving understandings of the spatial, embodied, relational, collaborative and historical dimensions of health

Alinsky Style Organizing

This chapter provides an overview of how Saul Alinsky’s practices of building democratic power have shaped modern day community organizing. It explains why the Alinsky tradition is useful to the study of community organizations through a description of his enduring core principles of collective power, “native” leadership, and confrontational politics. The chapter makes the case for the continued relevance of Alinsky’s main tenets as well as the need to critique and adapt those methods to new contexts in the 21st century. While it focuses primarily on Alinsky-style organizations, this chapter takes into account a larger ecosystem of organizations and the varying schools of thought that influence the practice of community organizing. It also offers a critique of where Alinsky’s approach falls short in confronting racial and gender barriers to engagement in building power for social change. In addition to exploring the development of Alinsky’s organization, the Industrial Areas Foundation, the chapter features themes of organizational structure and process as they relate to Alinsky’s core principles that are reflected in similar types of organizations. The chapter brings together the theoretical underpinnings of Alinsky’s approach with the practical implications for how community organizing has progressed. It describes where community organizing today diverges from traditional Alinsky-style organizing, especially in trends towards the professionalization of practice, new organizing practices, and the nationalization of grassroots organizing through intermediaries