Community Organizing

Joyce Sheldon McKnight, D.Ed. is Associate Professor of Community and Human Services at the innovative Empire State College of the State University of New York.  She has over forty years of direct  community organizing experience in urban and rural place-based communities, communities of interest, diasportic communities and online social networks. She has taught community organizing principles and practices to hundreds of adult undergraduate and graduate students from around the world, many of whom have used participatory community organizing to implement exciting community-based projects including projects in Haiti, India, and South Africa. Since 2003, she has had major responsibility for the development and supervision of comprehensive community and human services and public affairs curricula for the burgeoning Center for Distance Learning of SUNY/Empire State College. In 2007 she received the college’s prestigious Altes Award for Community Service and Scholarship and in 2009 received the Phyllis M. Cunningham Award for Social Justice Research from the Adult Education Research Conference. She is a frequent contributor to national and international conferences and has reviewed articles on participatory research and popular education for the Adult Education Quarterly.  Her areas of expertise are participatory community organizing, self-directed learning, distance learning, prior learning assessment, open educational resources for developing nations and on-line community building.   Joanna McKnight Plummer is a recent  graduate of the State University of New York in community and human services with additional graduate studies in mental health counseling.   She brings practical experience in community-based organizing in both city and rural settings as well as the student perspective to the tone, content, and readability of this student-focused text.

Chapter 1. Defining Community
Chapter 2. Communities as Systems
Chapter 3. Living and Working in Communities
Chapter 4. Varieties of Community Organizing
Chapter 5. The Community Organizing Cycle
Chapter 6. Building an Effective Leadership Team
Chapter 7. Participatory Research
Chapter 8. Planning and Implementation
Chapter 9. Management and Evaluation
Chapter 10. Organizational Structure, Budgeting, and Funding
Chapter 11. Power and Empowerment
Chapter 12. Navigating the Political Labyrinth
Chapter 13. Value Systems and Ethics
Chapter 14. Community Organizing with Web-Based Tools
Chapter 15. Organizations that Support Community Organizing