Greater than the Sum of Its Parts: The Northwest Community Organization and Sustainable Structures for Neighborhood Organizing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.71057/tpehav20Keywords:
Neighborhood organizing , issue-based organizing , hybrid model , block clubs, door-to-door, micro campaigns , bottom-up leadership developmentAbstract
This article examines the historical development and organizational structure of the Northwest Community Organization (NCO), a neighborhood-based community organization founded by Tom Gaudette in Chicago in 1961. From the late 1970s onward, congregation-based organizing, where congregational institutions are the formal members of organizations, became dominant within the Alinsky organizing tradition. Neighborhood organizing efforts, focused on recruiting individuals one by one, were often critiqued at the time as insufficiently stable and powerful, among other limitations. NCO, however, represents an example of a powerful, durable alternative to the congregational approach, in part because its multilayered structure facilitated organization, action, and stability on different levels. While the organization drew on churches and settlement houses, it was not institutionally anchored in them. Through a detailed analysis of NCO’s structure, which included micro-local campaigns, semi-autonomous civics, and organization-wide committees, this article shows how the connections between these levels supported leadership development, issue escalation, and organizational resilience. NCO’s model enabled residents to move from addressing immediate block-level problems to contesting challenges in their local multi-block area to engaging in large-scale neighborhood-wide struggles over issues like housing, urban renewal, and zoning. Partly as a result, NCO became one of the strongest community organizing groups in the nation and remained so for decades. In fact, NCO was the key founding organization of the current national organizing group People’s Action. The article concludes that NCO’s interlocking substructures produced unusual durability and power and that the NCO model offers valuable lessons for contemporary organizers seeking sustainable, people-centered organizing models adapted to present conditions.
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