Consensus Organizing: A Community Development Workbook
A Comprehensive Guide to Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Community Change Initiatives
- Mary L. Ohmer - University of Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States)
- Karen DeMasi - Independent Consultant
Community Organization & Planning
"The world is changing rapidly and the practice of community organizing needs to change with it. Representing both an homage to, and a departure from the "alinsky traditions" of organizing, Consensus Organizing offers techniques that are specifically designed for urban and rural communities struggling to succeed in the global economy and the information age. Ohmer and DeMasi are experienced organizers who offer a relentlessly thorough examination of the process of bringing diverse communities together to make change and to bridge the ethnic and economic divisions that keep many communities from succeeding."
—Bill Traynor Executive Director, Lawrence CommunityWorks Inc.
A person doesn't have to be a consensus organizer to think like one. Consensus Organizing: A Community Development Workbook—A Comprehensive Guide to Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Community Change Initiatives helps students and practitioners begin to think like consensus organizers and incorporate this way of strategic thinking into their lives and their work. Through a wide range of exercises, role-play activities, case scenarios, and discussion questions, this workbook presents the conceptual framework for consensus organizing and provides a practical and experiential approach to understanding and applying consensus organizing to address a range of issues. This workbook is designed to be used by itself or along with Mike Eichler's text Consensus Organizing: Building Communities of Mutual Self Interest (SAGE, 2007).
Key Features and Benefits
- Provides a step-by-step guide on how to conduct a community analysis of both internal and external neighborhood resources
- Brings consensus organizing to life through case studies based on the real-life experiences of the authors
- Offers field exercises that engage the reader in applying and practicing consensus organizing
- Provides practical tools that community organizers and practitioners can use in their daily work
- Includes a sample job description, work plan, monitoring report, and field report for hiring and supervising consensus organizers
- Presents tools for describing and evaluating consensus organizing and community-level interventions
Accompanying Website
Instructors and students have access to the many activities and cases on the accompanying website at http://www.sagepub.com/ohmerstudy/.
Supplements
"The world is changing rapidly and the practice of Community Organizing needs to change with it. Representing both an homage to, and a departure from the "alinsky traditions" of organizing, Consensus Organizing offers techniques that are specifically designed for urban and rural communities struggling to succeed in the global economy and the information age. Ohmer and DeMasi are experienced organizers who offer a relentlessly thorough examination of the process of bringing diverse communities together to make change and to bridge the ethnic and economic divisions that keep many communities from succeeding."
"The case studies and class activities are excellent. The concise summary of consensus organizing would be useful."
"Mary Ohmer and Karen DeMasi have carefully (and possibly lovingly) written a book that can be used as a workbook and/or a resource in both the classroom and for staff trainings, and with some adjustments, in community settings to enhance resident capacity and skills."
It does what it says in the title in that it is a comprehensive guide. Once again it has an American context which means a degree of transaltion is needed especially around a local government context. However the principles remain appropriate and useful.
This book in a very detailed manner presents a practical approach to organize consensus. However, it requires the reader to have quite a bit of basic knowledge of community development.
The material in this book was beyond the scope of the course I was teaching.
This workbook allows students to complement lecture with hands-on practical experience through discussion questions, case studies, and field exercise. The book is a great addition to traditional classroom lecture.
This is an excellent blend of theory and practice which will be a valuable resource for trainee community development workers on our programmes.
It is a particularly useful book for the UK context as it illuminates approaches to practice which are currently being developed through the government's Big Society initiatives
It will likely be adopted for Fall, 2010 Thanks!
I like the consensus approach presented here and feel the book introduces substantive ideas in a very accessible manner.
Sage College Publishing
