Social Work with Communities and Social Action I: Community Organisation, its Concept, Definition, Scope and History in India, the United Kingdom and the United States, Community-Based Organisations, Human and Social Capital, and the Process of Community Organisation

In the United States community organisation began with the coordination of charities by the Charity Organisation Societies and with the neighbourhood work of the settlements. Federated fund-raising followed: Denver organised joint fund-raising for its charities in 1887, and the community chests, which spread after the Cleveland federation of 1913, became the United Way. Councils of social agencies planned services. The Lane Report of 1939 established community organisation as a method of social work alongside casework and group work. The same year Saul Alinsky organised the Back of the Yards neighbourhood in Chicago, beginning a more conflict-oriented tradition. The War on Poverty of the 1960s, with the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and its call for "maximum feasible participation" of the poor, brought community action to national policy.

In the United Kingdom the Charity Organisation Society and the settlements again came first, followed by councils of social service, including the National Council of Social Service founded in 1919. Community development was exported to the colonies as a strategy of the Colonial Office. The Gulbenkian Report, Community Work and Social Change (1968), defined community work as a field, and the Home Office's Community Development Projects, launched in 1969 in deprived areas, concluded in their reports that local poverty had structural causes that local projects could not remove, a conclusion that fed radical community work in the 1970s.

In India rural reconstruction experiments preceded independence: F. L. Brayne's work in Gurgaon from 1920, Spencer Hatch's YMCA centre at Marthandam in Travancore from 1921, Rabindranath Tagore's Sriniketan, and Gandhi's constructive programme at Sevagram and Wardha. After independence, the Nilokheri project for refugees under S. K. Dey and the Etawah pilot project of Albert Mayer (1948) led to the Community Development Programme, launched on 2 October 1952 with 55 projects, and the National Extension Service of 1953. The Balwantrai Mehta Committee (1957) found that the programme had failed to secure people's participation and recommended democratic decentralisation, which produced Panchayati Raj, inaugurated at Nagaur in Rajasthan on 2 October 1959. The 73rd and 74th Constitutional Amendments (1992) gave rural and urban local bodies constitutional status. Voluntary organisations, Gandhian institutions and, from the 1970s, social action groups made community organisation a field of practice outside the state as well.

Community-based organisations are formed by and accountable to community members themselves: self-help groups, mahila mandals, youth clubs, farmers' clubs, water users' associations, village health, sanitation and nutrition committees, school management committees and slum dwellers' associations. They differ from non-governmental organisations, which are usually registered bodies with staff, often working in many communities and accountable to boards and funders. In community organisation, CBOs are both the means and the result: the organiser works through existing ones, helps new ones form, and measures success partly by whether they can carry on without the organiser.

Human capital is the knowledge, skills and health that make people productive; the concept was developed by the economists Theodore Schultz (1961) and Gary Becker (Human Capital, 1964), and it justifies investment in education, training and health as development. Social capital is the value that lies in social relationships: networks, norms of reciprocity and trust that enable people to act together. Pierre Bourdieu (1986) treated it as the resources available through membership of a group, which reproduce class advantage; James Coleman (1988) stressed its role in creating human capital, as in the support a close community gives to children's schooling; Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993; Bowling Alone, 2000) linked it to civic engagement and effective democracy, and distinguished bonding social capital (within homogeneous groups) from bridging social capital (across groups). Michael Woolcock added linking social capital, ties between communities and people in positions of power, such as officials and banks.

The steps of community organisation follow Ross's definition and are usually taught as: study of the community (its history, structure, leadership, resources and problems, through a community profile or survey); identification and analysis of needs; prioritisation, done by the community; discussion and building of the community's confidence and will; organisation, forming or strengthening committees and CBOs; resource mobilisation from within and outside; action; evaluation; and modification and continuation, since community organisation is a continuous rather than a one-time process. Methods include community surveys and participatory rural appraisal (associated with Robert Chambers, using social and resource maps, transect walks, seasonal calendars, timelines, Venn diagrams and wealth ranking), meetings and group discussions, community education and awareness campaigns, planning, negotiation and lobbying, networking, and cultural methods such as street theatre and songs.

Ross set out principles concerning the organisation through which the community works. Among them: discontent with existing conditions must initiate and nourish the organisation, and must be focused and channelled into action on specific problems; the leaders, formal and informal, accepted by the major sub-groups must be identified and involved; the organisation must have goals and methods of high acceptability; its programme should include activities with emotional content; it should seek to use the manifest and latent goodwill in the community; it should develop active and effective lines of communication; it should support and strengthen the groups it brings together; it should be flexible in procedure; it should move at a pace relative to the existing situation in the community; it should seek to develop effective leaders; and it should develop strength, stability and prestige in the community. His assumptions were that communities can develop the capacity to deal with their own problems, that people want change and can change, that people should participate in the major changes in their communities, that self-imposed changes have a meaning and permanence that imposed changes lack, that a holistic approach succeeds where fragmented ones fail, that democracy requires cooperative participation, and that communities, like individuals, often need help to organise.

Ross described four roles for the community organiser: guide (helping the community find its own way to its goals, taking initiative but not control), enabler (facilitating the process by focusing discontent, encouraging organisation and nourishing good relationships), expert (providing data, technical advice, research and knowledge of other communities' experience) and social therapist (helping the community understand and deal with tensions, beliefs and practices that block cooperation). The skills needed are relationship-building, communication, facilitation of meetings, analysis and research, planning, resource mobilisation, negotiation and conflict resolution, leadership development and recording.

Records in community organisation include the community profile (demographic, social, economic and resource data, often with PRA maps), a register of community groups and leaders, minutes of meetings with decisions and responsibilities, process records of key events, activity and monitoring records, financial records of community funds, and periodic reports. They serve accountability to the community as much as to the agency: minutes read aloud at the next meeting, and accounts displayed publicly, are themselves instruments of transparency and of the community's ownership. Social audit, the public verification of a programme's records by the people it serves, pioneered by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan in Rajasthan through public hearings (jan sunwai) and later required in the rural employment guarantee programme, shows how records become tools of accountability.

Non-governmental organisations bring to community organisation trained staff, funds, technical knowledge, links with government and donors, and experience from other places. Involving them well means that the NGO facilitates rather than substitutes for the community: it helps CBOs form and grow, builds local leadership, connects the community with government schemes and panchayats, and plans its own withdrawal. The risks are the ones the "NGOisation" critique names: dependence on the NGO, upward accountability to funders, project cycles that end before capacity is built, and competition between NGOs in the same area. Partnerships among NGOs, CBOs, panchayats and government departments, and coalitions for wider issues, are the subject of the next chapter.