STEPS IN COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION PROCESS

This section presents the different steps needed in

community organization process.

Area Selection

Though site selection must follow the general design of your

program, certain criteria have been used to determine the
project areas. This site must be a depressed area with majority
of the population belonging to the sector your program wishes
to organize. An area with about 150-250 households would be
ideal if the Community organizer is working with a partner. The area must not have a serious
peace and order problem.

Initially, the organizer can gather Socio-economic, demographic and geographic data
selected municipalities from the municipal agencies to assist the organizer in the selection of the
project site. The organizer can also inquire from friends or contacts regarding the characteristics
of possible project areas. It is also best to consider your level of commitment, as well as that of
the other project staff, which could affect your personal adjustments to Situations in the field.

Community Entry

Once the area has been selected, the organizer is now ready to enter the community. Begin with
a visit to the local community officials to inform them of the objectives and nature of the objectives
and the nature of the organizer's stay in the community, Select a home to live in which will
facilitate the organizer's work. Choose to stay with a family of good reputation. Adapt a lifestyle
and personality that is in keeping with the community. When talking of the program avoid raining
the people's expectation. Keep a low profile. Avoid attracting unnecessary attention to yourself,
be honest and sincere and share strengths as well as weakness to the people.

Community Integration

The first and basic step in community organizing is integration or becoming one with the poor
community to get to know the culture, economy, they visit people, engage in small talk, share
the people's work, take part in informal group discussion, share the people's housing, food
entertainment, and meetings. Integration is a continuing effort to immobile community life. It is
accomplished by living with the people and sharing the some experiences with them; the
organizer can participate in economic activities, share in their household work, or join them in
social activities.
In the process of integration certain things should happen to the integration:

1. He or she should come to respect the people and see the liberating aspects of their culture
that gave them the strength to struggle. The so-called culture of silence is a sociologist's
abstraction. The poor are though, determined, full of good naturedness. They also have the
weakness of other gunman beings.

2. The organizer should see how the social analysis he or she may have made of the national
situation is concretized in the people's lives. He or she can see to what extent the social analysis,
too, is only an abstraction. Reality is much complex and complicated.

3. The organizer should try to see or intuit God's activity among the poor, since the poor are the
privileged site of god's work today, according to the teaching of the churches.

4. He or she should in the end be accepted as member of the community

5. Finally, the organizer's values and lifestyle should change. He or she should become more
understanding and intolerant, more dedicated, more realistic and a poor man or woman as much
as possible.

To integrate well, the organizers should live in a poor urban or rural community in an
ordinary house and eat the food the people eat. Integration guarantees that a person's
commitment to change society is attuned to what the people want by a way of change and not
to some theoretical model or ideological or religion. Integration is basic to all others steps. If the
organizers are not one with the people, they can never really learn the true dimensions of the
people's problems or how to motivate them to change.

Social Investigation

Social investigation is the process of systematically looking for issues to organize the people
around. The organizer, immersed in the community, looks for problems that the people feel
strongly about to the extent that they will act on them. He or she looks for something concrete,
for example, sater and latrine problems, that are objectively problems that are obvious forms of
community integration. The organizer's few months will be spent on getting to know the
community well to be able to draw up a program that will maximize the participation of the
community members. A community study must be regarded both as phase of a long process and
as a long process itself. As a process, it is a continuing activity set to fulfill definite expectations
as definite periods. Making a community study can take several forms, including: gathering and
reviewing secondary date sources such as records and documents, holding personal interviews,
conducting a survey, and observing people and their environment.
Initially, the organizer can prepare a guide for a community study which can be divided into major
areas of investigation Such as the physical environment, economic, socio-political and cultural
aspects of the community. The organizer can also look into organizational aspects by getting a
list of existing organizations in the community, their nature, objectives, leadership membership
and activities. The organizer's preliminary can include the community's:

1. Physical characteristics (e.g. location, area size, natural resources, climate, etc.)

2. Demographic characteristics (e.g. population size, age, and sex composition, occupational
groupings)

Once the organizers have been integrated to the community, he or she can conduct an in-depth
study to explore the community's different economic, political social structures and their various
interrelationships. This can also include an assessment of the people's levels of consciousness
based on their socio-economic classes. Once you do this you are now doing social investigation.
How to do social investigation? There are three ways in general: the first is to study the
documents and reports that talk of the people's problems. The second way is to learn from the
people themselves how they feel about the problem, how they see a problem's details,
complications and significance. The third way is to study the problem as it is affected by the
power structure of the Community, that is, to study how prevalent usury is in slum areas.

He can see for himself and learn from the people how common it is and what a weight it is put
on people. He should also see how it serves certain specific needs of the community that are not
served by government or other agencies and how the local leader is often the principal usury.
This last piece of information warns him that action against usury will be opposed by the leader
and his friends. A piece of advice though avoids excessive drinking as well as courting or flirting
with men and women in the community. Do not gamble. Remember, too, that an important
component of organizing is documentation. Hence, it will be an advantage to keep the diary of
daily activities, experience as well as impressions of and reflections of interactions with the people
in the community. This can be a use for reference in the future, which can also be share with
other organizers. After a period of about one or two months, the organizers are now ready to
write the result of the community study. Community data can be reported and the initial phase
of community organizing can be documented. This will also help the community organizer to
evaluate the feasibility of the program in the community.