Green Book Reviews

Author Bill Lee has covered a great deal of ground in the fourth and much-updated issue of Pragmatics of Community Organizing, a classic in the field of community organizing in Canada. In an up-to-the minute discussion of the wider social, political, environmental and economic contexts in which community organizing takes place, the author expends a great deal of effort in having the reader understand the ‘nitty gritty’ of community organizing in 21st-century Canada.

The book is based on the author’s four decades of direct experience in social issues and community organizing in Canada, Africa, Central America, Europe and Japan, as well as a comprehensive reading of the important literature on the subject. Lee provides a comprehensive overview of the history and the conceptual basis of community organizing before launching into the specifics of the practice. It this practical nature of the book as a “how to” tool for community organizers that is its greatest strength. The practitioner is provided with specific tools: how to recognize the motivations of the funding body, how to work with the community – set up a meeting, run a meeting, identify and address the issues – how to deal with conflicts within the community group, and how to disengage positively once the mission has been achieved and the group has built up internal strengths.

This is a practical book, but it is not short on guiding principles, most obviously: social justice, non-violence, environmental consciousness, respectfulness and humility.

Not coincidentally, Lee quotes the classic work The Great Transformation, by Karl Polyani on several occasions. Polyani was concerned with the pendulum swings from right to left and back again since the early days of the Industrial Revolution in England. He was also concerned about the potentially negative effects of capitalism on the environment. Lee is no less concerned with these swings and his overall thesis is that community organizing, if done effectively and with knowledge of the wider social, economic, political and environmental realities, can be an important force in redressing the current swing to the right.

The author ends the book with a section that asks the bigger questions about community organizing in what is primarily a capitalist society, one in which the rich seem to be getting richer and the marginalized are increasingly pushed to the margins; a world where responsibility to the community is seen as increasingly irrelevant to many economic decision-makers.

This book is primarily addressed to the student or practitioner of community organizing: They will find it an invaluable tool in honing the wide diversity of skills and understandings so essential to the effective practice of community organizing. A more general audience of readers will find this book enlightening and useful, particularly those interested in how change at the local level can be linked to wider systemic change, especially change that leads towards greater social justice for marginalized populations such as those living in poverty and racialized groups. This is also relevant for environmentalists. Bill McKibben, the American environmentalist and author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future and many other books on environmental issues, has said that addressing the environmental crisis is no longer simply a problem of science but is also a political problem. Accordingly, the pragmatics of organizing at the community level will increase the effectiveness of every environmentalist by helping him or her directly address the political dimensions of environmental issues.

Pragmatics of Community Organizing should be in the hip pocket of every community organizer and every student who wishes to become one.

(Book published by CommonAct Press, Toronto, 2011. 304 pages.)

Jim Ward, PhD, has been developing community organizing strategies with numerous stakeholder groups since the early 1970s. An educator, consultant, public speaker and book author, he lives in Toronto with his wife Catherine.