An answer to the question “What is a community organizer” from community organizers themselves . . .
Community first: Organizers explain what they do
Elana Wolowitz, communications director for Wellstone Action!,
“A community organizer is everything from someone who brings people to meetings …[to someone who] reaches out to a large group of people by having conversations with them either door to door or in coffee meetings or where they work or where they live,” Wolowitz said. “A community organizer then tries to harness all that information that they gather from listening to people’s stories and what they care about and what they want and what they need, then use that information to move toward change while building the leadership [skills] of others and not putting themselves first, and not taking the credit, but by giving other people opportunity to participate in helping their own community.”
Chuck Repke, longtime executive director of the District 2 Community Council in St. Paul, said
“The big thing of a community organizer is empowering the citizens to be able to take control of their communities, to give a voice to people who normally are voiceless, to empower those people who tend not to have much power and to facilitate the development of leadership in the community. It’s about making other people have power, not power for yourself,” Repke explained.
Michelle Martin, executive director of Minneapolis’s PEACE Foundation,
. . . a community organizer has to be able to write a budget, understand and make organizational flow charts, maintain good relationships with government officials, secure funding, speak publicly, manage personnel and volunteers, and much more.
Gary Bennett, a board member and past chair of the Kenwood Isles Area Association — a neighborhood group in southwest Minneapolis
His own organization is made up of volunteers “who want to take the time to serve the community, specifically their neighborhood. People doing this kind of work are what creates the fabric of a community.”
Note that the only coherent explanation involved obtaining funding.
Hey – he stole our plan!
You forgot registering dead people to vote.
And, I see you got Nancy Pelosi’s before her morning apple in that photo. Her good side is from behind, I understand.
Investor’s Business Daily has a pretty good explanation of their own.
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=305420655186700
Hey hey! Did Cadet Happy just make a good post? WOW!
Hmmm … it seems like Community Organizer is a pretty flexible vocation. I looked up the job descriptions for some of these positions that were open around the area and found things quite different than the descriptions above.
Most of them seemed much more agenda-driven and all were heavy on the racial justice component.
I really think the first picture says it all, a picture is worth a thousand words, you know.
What is a picture worth after it is cropped?
I think Barry Hussein is facing that reality that some confront after they puff up their resume and then get to the job and need to actually perform.
Not to mention another site but comparing that to a certain Iowa based site make this all the more hilarious.
Community organizer = minor league hack politician
It sure sounds to me like a “community organizer” is a person who enables ordinary citizens to continue being lazy by doing for them the kinds of community-building exercises they should be doing for themselves– networking with other community members, getting together to improve the community– only moving those things not in the direction the community wants or needs to go, but in the direction his paymasters want.
Where I come from, when there’s a community garden to be built or a farmer’s market to organize, some person in the community who cares about gardening or farmer’s markets steps up and does the organizing, not some paid hack with a social justice agenda. And we would be offended by the suggestion that we weren’t capable of doing it for ourselves without a professional “community organizer” pulling the strings, whether he took credit or not.
community organizer = smallish cog in a political machine.
“community leader” = larger cog that turns smaller cogs in a political machine (may be someone like jesse jackson, or a chicago alderman).
“boss” = bigger than “leader” cog that turns all the other cogs in a political machine and spends time granting favors and denying that the machine exists (e.g. mayor daley)
obama just couldn’t stand being a smallish cog (which makes him a typical, chicago machine politician).
community organizer = head gangsta.
community organizer: grabs the free government cheese, then “redistributes” to the worthy.
A community organizer is what used to be called a rabble rouser
So, in other words, a “community organizer” listens to the people who contribute the least to society bitching about how there aren’t enough tax dollars redistributed to them, then tries to propagandize their views to appear to be the shared views of honest, hardworking Americans. Yep, that’s Obama.
And yes, Rubeus, I was pleasantly surprised as well.
That is one mighty cute donkey-hote you have there. I do not have a donkey-hote but I am hung like one!
I’m pretty sure I had the same experience being in a fraternity… except we actually DIDN’T want credit and DIDN’T get paid.
#13 beat me to it. Gotta get up pretty early around here to best the IMAO Commenters.
And again, love the photo.