Consensus Organizing: A Community Development Workbook: A Comprehensive Guide to Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Community Change Initiatives

"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.

 Mary Ohmer has over twenty years of experience working in community organizing and development around the country with national and local nonprofit and community based organizations, foundations, and government.  Dr. Ohmer has taught consensus organizing approaches as part of macro practice and community organizing social work courses.  She received her Ph.D. in social work from the University of Pittsburgh in August 2004, and she is currently an assistant professor at the School of Social Work at Georgia State University.  Dr. Ohmer is also currently working with the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta to help them develop and implement an evaluation of the community training.

Karen DeMasi has over twenty years social work experience with nonprofit agencies with expertise in program development, strategic planning, fundraising, community development and administration.  Ms. De Masi later worked with the Consensus Organizing Institute developing and implementing new training and consulting opportunities in both the private and public sector markets across the United States.  She is a graduate of the University of Dayton, with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Work and a Master’s degree in Public Administration.  Ms. DeMasi currently works as an independent consultant to community building organizations throughout the Ohio/Kentucky region, including LISC.