What Happens When Communities Organize

As a long time supporter of the city's vibrant community organizing and advocacy groups, often in their earliest stages, we wanted to illustrate how these organizations—large and small—are often the connective tissue between community members and campaigns to win significant public policy change. We wanted to capture the rich complexity of our grantees' experiences and suspected that the most interesting, compelling parts of what we knew to be true couldn't be easily explained by turning them into data sets.Determined to draw a fuller picture of what happens when community members come together around common concerns, we decided to ask our grantees directly, and found:1. Wins and accomplishments fell across a wide spectrum.2. Groups used multiple, sophisticated strategies to achieve policy wins and accomplishments.3. Each win or accomplishment had its own distinctive and instructive story with a strong human element