The Four Strategies to address community problems

 Four fundamental strategies are available to neighbourhood groups to address community problems: community organizing, advocacy, service delivery or development. There is no right or wrong strategy - each organization has to choose among them constantly. Each group should specialize - the skills needed to do a good job in one are seldom those required by another. Sometimes, groups use a combination of strategies. What is important here is that you know what you're doing - that the method matches the strategy you've chosen, and that they both match the mission the group has adopted.  

Community organizing: is characterized by the mobilizing of volunteers. Staff roles are limited to helping volunteers become effective, guiding the learning of leaders through the process, and helping create the mechanism for the group to advocate on their own behalf. Community organizing almost always includes confrontation of some sort. The people who want something get themselves together to ask for it, often the people who could give them what they wish to get jumpy. Community organizing strategies include meeting with corporate or government decision-makers to hold them accountable for their actions, designing programs for others (not the group) to implement that meet the needs of the community, and aggressive group action to block negative developments or behaviors (highway construction that leads to neighborhood destruction, etc.).

Advocacy: It is important to distinguish between “Individual Advocacy,” which can be understood as “Service Delivery,” and Advocacy Campaigning (Social Advocacy), which is about broad transformative change to laws, legislation, corporate accountability, etc. Most Campaigning is Advocacy-based as it seeks a specific change (i.e. Making texting illegal, stopping corporations from polluting, making housing accessible, raising the minimum wage, etc.) You advocate FOR BROAD CHANGE, not individuals

Service Delivery is characterized by doing FOR people. Often, professionals like lawyers or social workers will attack a problem on behalf of those perceived as unable to speak for themselves. This is understood as being an “advocate.” Job referral services, counselling, client referrals, social work, training for job readiness, homeownership counselling, and business plan preparation training are methods that fit into the Service Delivery strategy.

Development is a strategy that gets the group directly into the business of delivering a physical product. Generally, groups select a development strategy because the normal course of events is not meeting the area's needs. The profit motive either does not bring private developers into the area - they can't make enough money - or it brings them in to do the wrong thing - they are converting moderate-cost rental units into yuppie condos. Development could mean housing, commercial or even industrial development. Development methods require, like the other two strategies, particular skills. Many groups have struggled to achieve good results in housing development with staff whose training, experience and interests are in community organizing, causing pain and suffering for the group and the staff. This is unfair. If we understand the distinction between the strategies, we can see the different resources needed for the methods that fit within them.

Adapted from “Community Organizing: People Power from the Grassroots,” D. Beckwith & C. Lopez