Developing the Head, Heart and Gut
Book Review By Lewis Finfer
Social Policy Magazine, Summer 2006
Building Powerful Community Organizations: A Personal Guide to Creating Groups that can Solve Problems and Change the World by Michael Jacoby Brown
A Manual for Grassroots Organizing: Second Edition by Lee Staples

What experiences grow organizers' effectiveness and commitment? What engages our head, our heart, and our gut in the tough battle for justice?

As organizers and leaders, we must see ourselves as we see the issues we organize around. How do we develop ourselves to be better organizers? What we learn from our organizing work and how we study the larger world of politics, religion, history, and economics can inform that work and help us better engage people on issues we care about.

Community organizations continually move through a cycle of outreach, issue development, strategy, action, and evaluation. Organizers and leaders learn from each step of the organizing process. But we need to do more than that. We need to understand the wider world. ...

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By Paul Graham
Mr. Graham is an organizer for United Interfaith Action.
New Bedford Standard Times - 9/9/06

With the summer heat and humidity still heavy at 7 p.m., a handful of parishioners from Our Lady of the Assumption Church in New Bedford gathered in the parish center to discuss their deeply felt concerns for their families, neighborhoods, workplaces and their church. The stories shared were about issues with neighbors and gangs, the high dropout rate, the lack of jobs for our youths and the disappearance of well-paying jobs for our families - and many more stories that revealed hope and grief, love and pain. This small gathering of "family" to discuss issues is called a "house meeting."...

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By Lew Finfer
Published in Social Policy, Summer 2004 Issue

From 1932-1980 the Democrats controlled the Presidency most of the time and Congress almost all of the time. This was accomplished by something called the New Deal Coalition composed of the urban ethnic white working class, blacks, southern whites, union members, Jews, the “liberal” professions and others. These groups obviously didn’t agree on all the issues. They held together in the Democratic Party with the glue of the common Depression experience and the role of the Democratic Party in making government a supporter of economic rights and benefits for average working people. The multi-racial and ethnic industrial union movement, with its emphasis on working-class unity, was a key part of the New Deal Coalition...

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By Lew Finfer

This guide is intended to help community organizers, clergy, and lay leaders better understand Judaism and Jewish congregations (synagogues) so that you can better develop relationships with congregations in the Jewish Community. It is my hope that as these relationships deepen, current synagogue work will become more effective and new synagogues will begin to get involved in faith-based community organizing. I write as a community organizer with 36 years experience, as a Jew who belongs to a synagogue, and as organizer with interfaith community organizations for the past 16 years.

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By Lew Finfer

Massachusetts has one of the nation’s worst housing cost problems. Its rents and home prices have risen at one of the steepest rates in the country in recent years, due to cuts in state housing funding, the end of rent control in four cities, a widening income gap, lower interest rates, and suburban policies to discourage housing construction.

Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO) – a broad-based organization of 95 religious congregations, community organizations, CDCs and labor unions, affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation – took on the housing crisis in 1999-2000, winning a $100 million state appropriation for affordable housing.

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