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OBJECTIVES

By the end of this session you will be able to:

  1. Know who Saul Alinsky was, and what he tried to do
  2. Explain something about one of the organizations that helps social workers (and others) do macro practice.
  3. Recruit people into an organization.
  4. Interview people in a way that helps you determine whether they are likely to want to get involved with an organization.
  5. Learn about negotiation

Tasks for this session

Before the beginning of our fifth class meeting please do the following:

Read

Read pages 123-145 in  Building Powerful Community Organizations by Michael Jacoby Brown (2006) 1h 30m.

Tasks

Activity One

Post in the discussion board, using about 3 to 3.5 hours in total reading and posting in the discussion board combined with the time you spent in class at the start of session four (we usually spend about two hours in the classroom/Zoom meeting at the start of each session, leaving you about 1.5 hours for discussion board posting).

Activity Two

I suggest you spend about an hour this session on your second experiential learning assignment, so you should probably be contacting the most influential or powerful persons you know this week, or at least one of them.

Activity Three

By now I hope you have chosen a group to be more involved with this semester, so you can analyize the group from the position of a person who participates in its activities. You should probably allocate about an hour for being engaged with this group and noticing ways it functions, and comparing its practices to those you are learning about in our class and Michael Jacoby Brown’s text.

Activity Four

I would like you to spend about an hour watching some of these YouTube videos in which you would learn more about Saul Alinsky, one of the founders of the field of community organizing. I offer you several options, and you could put together a few of these to approximately fill an hour or two:

The Democratic Promise: Saul Alinsky & His Legacy is the standard documentary about Alinsky, and that by itself would get you to the target time of one hour, but you may find yourself curious to learn more, or you might want to focus more on what Alinsky himself said, and that is why I offer you a menu from which you could choose whatever seems most interesting to you.

Activity Five

I would like you to spend about an hour studying one of the websites or organizations dedicated to helping macro practitioners. As you explore what the website or organization offers, I want you to consider the useful services or information it offers macro practitioners, and you will be using this in the fifth session for one of the discussion questions.

There may be many other organizations and websites you are welcome to find on your own, but here is a list of more than a dozen websites and organizations I know about and can recommend:

  1. The Center for Community Change.
  2. The Industrial Areas Foundation.
  3. The Gamaliel National Network
  4. Macro Social Work (MacroSW)
  5. The Association for Community Organizations and Social Action (ACOSA)
  6. The Association of Government Relations Professionals (AGRP)
  7. The Center for Association Leadership (ASAE)
  8. The National Association of State Lobbyists (NASL)
  9. The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP)
  10. The American Public Human Services Association (APHSA)
  11. The Network for Social Work Management
  12. The Social Welfare Action Alliance
  13. The National Association of Non-Profit Professionals (NANPP)

Activity Six

This fourth session is our time to take our second course with the United States Institute of Peace. Take the course “Negotiation: Shaping the Conflict Landscape” this week. This will take about three hours of your time.

Session Time Budget

3h 30m

Class meeting on Zoom/classroom and Canvas Discussion Boards

1h 30m

Reading Brown, pp. 123-145

1h

Assignment related to 2nd experiential learning, contact the influential persons you know to set up brief conversations.

1h

Assignment related to 3rd experiential learning, become active in group

1h

Learn about Saul Alinsky by watching YouTube interviews or documentaries (Democracy’s Promise, Saul Alinsky’s Legacy).

1h

Exercise in exploring websites of organizations to learn how they support macro practice and what they offer you as a macro practitioner.
3h Go to the USIP website and take the course
Negotiation: Shaping the Conflict Landscape

 

Discussion Board Questions (Activity One)

Go into Canvas, log in, and respond to the discussion questions for this session.

These are:

Discussion Question 4-1: Check In

We have finished three weeks of the semester, and now we are in the fourth week.  Check in to let us know how you are doing.  What is on your mind? 

Discussion Question 4-2: Values Statement

In the assigned reading for the third session you learned about structure, values, and roles in an organization.  At the end of Section 1, Chapter 4 (on page 119) you can see that Michael Jacoby Brown has shared a list of values used by a desegregation campaign in Birmingham, Alabama from back in the 1960s.  Take a look at that list.  Now, imagine you are part of a group of friends and associates creating an organization in your community.  Think about what sort of a statement of values for your organization could look like.  Share a draft of a statement of values for your hypothetical organization, and then offer the class some sort of an explanation for why you decided on those particular values.  Comment on the statements of values shared by your classmates.  Think especially about how the shared values would help your organization succeed.

Discussion Question 4-3: Assertive Responses to the Director from Hell

There is a scenario described in the session 3 guide in which you are a social worker in charge of a Early Head Start and Head Start Program run by the Community Alliance for Progress (CAP, a rural social services non-profit corporation that won a grant to deliver Head Start services in a 7-county rural area of a Midwestern state). The CAP delivers many other services as well (housing, elder care, day care, substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, foster care and family support services, family counseling, etc.), but the Head Start program is an important part of the service mix.
You need to request funding for a new bus to pick up children and bring them to the Head Start program, but the Director of CAP is likely to deny your request.  What are some assertive things you could say or do if, when you tell the Director you need the money for a Head Start bus, and want the issue brought to the Board of CAP, if the director does any of the three following:

1) The director says, “you’re coming to me with a request for more money for a new bus? $40,000?  That’s just not going to happen.  There is no way. You’ll need to find some other way to solve your problem.”

or
2) [you have made a suggestion that you would like to look at the agency budget or have someone look at it to see whether there might be a way to compromise, (as you can get the budget from the staff in the accounting department you don’t need to ask for this, but you’re giving the director a chance to agree with you and work with you on solving the problem)].  The director responds, “No, I don’t want you to do that.  You people don’t understand the funding situation or the intricacies of running this agency, and you’ll make some crazy suggestion about cutting some vital program from another division, and that will cause internal problems with the agency, and you wouldn’t find anything to cut or transfer to your transportation budget anyway. We’re not negotiating the whole agency budget here, we’re just looking at your old bus.”

or
3) The director says, “Look, why don’t we talk about this over dinner? I’ll treat you. There is a good seafood restaurant and I’d love to take you out and we can negotiate there tonight.  How about tomorrow night? Maybe afterwards we can work out the details over a drink? It would be friendlier that way.” He is transparently trying to put on some romantic charm. 

Discussion Question 4-4: Assertive Responses to a Cruel Director

In the same scenario using CAP and the Head Start program’s need for a bus to transport children to classes (used in DQ 4-3), prepare assertive responses to these responses by the director:

The director says, “I’ll see what I can do, but no promises,” and doesn’t seem very interested.  You have the distinct impression that the director doesn’t care about the transportation situation you’re facing in Head Start, and you have no faith that he will follow through.

[The director has been uncooperative, and you suggest that the board of directors could help, and you want to have the president of the board give you a spot on the next Board of Director’s agenda.]  The director responds defensively, “No, that won’t be necessary. The Board is very busy, and they don’t want to hear about old busses or details like that. Let me handle this. I can talk to the board. I’m normally the one who sets the agenda for board meetings anyway, and I know the board already has a full agenda for the next couple meetings.”

Discussion Question 4-5: Assertive Responses to a Damaging Director

In the same scenario using CAP and the Head Start program’s need for a bus to transport children to classes (used in DQ 4-3 and DQ 4-4), prepare assertive responses to this response by the director:

The director attacks, “This request for an increase to pay for a new bus was not handled properly. These sorts of expensive single-item purchases need to be handled well in advance, and you’ve waited until the last moment, and this puts me in a bad situation, and makes me look bad.  I’d swear you did this intentionally to put me in a difficult spot.  Now I can’t fund the bus, and you’ll make me out to be the bad guy, but really this is your fault for bringing this to our attention and requesting that half of the money be set aside last year.” [His response is unfair. You have mentioned in written annual reports that the replacement of the bus would soon be a necessary expense.  You could not anticipate that the bus would fail this year rather than failing after another few years of service. Also, you cannot be blamed for the sudden failure of the bus and the urgency of the need. It is in fact the director’s responsibility to prepare for such expenses, and for years in annual reports you have given him written warning about the aging fleet of busses and vans in the Head Start division.]

DQ 4-6: News related to Macro Practice

You have probably by now looked online and found an article that describes community organizing, administrative issues in human services, or policy practice. You need to eventually collet at least six such articles to mention in your learning journal (where you combine all your narratives and analysis of your experiential learning projects). Share in this discussion question any article you have found, and comment on it (and please offer a link so we can read the article as well).

DQ 4-7: Negotiation

What are some of the main points you have learned about negotiation from taking the USIP course on negotiation? How might you use what you have learned in social work practice?

 

Interesting Stuff To Explore

Do not forget to look for some articles related to macro practice so you can add some of those into your learning journal. These are some examples of the sorts of articles you might use.

Article Examples concerning Macro Practice:

 

Come to the next class ready.

The Fifth class meeting is going to be a Zoom/classroom session, so you can either come to the classroom or attend on Zoom. In either case, in the fifth session you should also post on the discussion board, and you should be devoting a total combined time of about 3.5 hours to zoom/classroom meetings and discussion board posts, so if we meet for two hours in the classroom/Zoom, that should leave you about 90 minutes for reading and posting on the discussion board. To read many posts, study discussion questions, and then post four or five quick responses and two or three deeper and more thoughtful responses would probably take about 90 minutes for most students; a few more posts if you allocate two hours, and fewer if you allocate one hour.

We will meet again on Zoom or in the classroom (your choice; both are options) as a class during our sixth class meeting on February 22.