Progressive Community Organizing: Reflective Practice in a Globalizing World

The second edition of Progressive Community Organizing offers a concise intellectual history of community organizing and social movements while also providing practical tools geared toward practitioner skill building. Drawing from social-constructionist, feminist and critical traditions, Progressive Community Organizing affirms the practice of issue framing and offers two innovative frameworks that will change the way students of organizing think about their work.

Progressive Community Organizing is ideal for both undergraduate and graduate courses focused on community theory and practice, community organizing, community development, and social change and service learning. The second edition presents new case studies, including those of a welfare rights organization and a youth-led LGBTQ organization. There are also new sections on the capabilities approach, queer theory, the Civil Rights movement, and the practices of self-inquiry and non-violent communication. Discussion of global justice has been expanded significantly and includes an account of a transnational action-research project in post-earthquake Haiti. Each chapter contains discussion questions, written and web resources, and a list of key terms; a full, free-access companion website is also available for the book.

Loretta Pyles, PhD, is an associate professor at the school of social welfare at the State University of New York at Albany and has engaged in community development and research focusing on economic justice, gender-based violence, and disasters for 18 years. She has been studying grassroots participation in disaster recovery in Haiti since the 2010 earthquake. She is cofounder of Building Bridges, a women’s antiviolence group in Albany, New York. She is also a certified yoga teacher.