Community organizing, schools, and the right to the city

Abstract

One of the central tenets of the neoliberal world view is that there is no alternative to market-based societies with their focus on competition, individualism, and the abandonment of social safety nets and environmental protections. This vision has become the new common sense. As neoliberal policies and practices have spread across the planet, communities and regions have been turned into winners and losers with seemingly little voice in the matter. Alternatives, however, are in fact being invented in places that have been most victimized by this process. Much can be learned from them. Non-formal and formal educators in Detroit, Michigan and Roxbury, Massachusetts are demonstrating how young people can become participants in efforts to resist this vision and join with their communities in inventing solutions that promise to be healthier for human beings and the natural world.

Keywords:

• youth development
• community organizing
• decolonization
• reinhabitation

Notes

1. An important exception to this assertion can be found in the process of issue analysis advocated by Cheak, Volk, and Hungerford (2002) and described in detail in their 2002 study of research projects conducted by students at the Aka’ula School on Molokai.

2. Michael Corbett’s (2007) volume, Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community, describes the way schooling prepares rural students for occupational opportunities that don’t exist in their own communities. The same can be said of students growing up in impoverished urban neighborhoods for whom school success often requires moving elsewhere if they hope to pursue higher education and their vocational ambitions.