India and Community Organizing

Reading about community organizing, theory and practice, as well as models and the major approaches to community practice is what reminded me of my phenomenal experience in India. 9 years ago I traveled to India and lived in Madurai where I taught English to orphan boys between the ages of 4 and 18. These children had been placed in the Boys' Home for many different reasons, but a significant number of them had been placed in the home after their parents had committed suicide after years of low crop yield due to droughts and economic devastation in the village. Unable to provide for their families, some of the parents killed themselves and left their children to fend for themselves.

In many rural villages, farming and growing crops is the way to not only make a living, but also support your family. The impact of globalization and the quest for industrial development has left developing nations feeling the effects of climate change on a massive scale. With millions of families relying on successful crops to eat, the more Western nations continue to consume, the more climate unpredictability we will see. The children I worked with had lost everything because there simply wasn't enough rain.


 Local organizations and international ones like the YMCA saw an opportunity to work with rural communities. In the recent L.A. times article we read about the prestigious Macarthur Foundation genius grant. Rick Lowe makes a point to really discuss a crucial piece of community organizing and practice: "You have to spend years developing relationships to be able to do something like this ... It’d be an arrogant disregard of a community to come in and think you can grasp all the complexities of a place in a short time.” (Miranda, 2014). If we want to have an inclusive process that includes human rights, it is important to recognize the very extensive and diverse experience that all human beings share: a shared humanity (Weil, 2013). 

Successful community organizing involves engagement and praxis: taking the theories we've learned and putting them into practice and reflecting on that action (Weil, 2013). When organizers visited one rural village, it was populated with mostly women and children. The majority of men had committed suicide leaving the families to have to learn new skills that they had not been allowed to learn before due to oppression and expression of gender roles. The women had mostly done house work, gathering food, and any domestic work while the children went to school in the village and the men farmed and produced goods and services not only for their community, but for neighboring communities, too. Left without any knowledge of how to farm, the women spoke to organizers about the kind of help they really wanted. 

Last week in class, Dr. G mentioned that for our group community engagement projects we may hope to start one project, but find that the organization we want to work with does not need or even desire that project. This is what happened in this village. Organizers had come hoping to provide sanitary outhouses and help rebuild homes, but the residents were assertive and insisted that the help they needed was learning how to grow food and create goods that were high in demand: enough to make a sustainable living without having to remarry or send their children away. The women began to experience a sense of empowerment that can only come from practicing advocacy for oneself. 

The local agencies and the YMCA needed cultural brokers to assist with bridging the social capital to help facilitation and program planning (Weil, 2013). Switching focus from infrastructure rebuilding to job training and farming experience was focusing on the group interest and the local context. The goal from them on was community development, improving the standard of living and well being of this disadvantaged population (Weil, 2013). Organizers worked with community leaders, or the village elders, to discuss how to move forward with bringing in laborers to teach the women a new skill and professional farmers to educate the women and older children how to sustain and grow crops for food. The residents went from feelings of dependency: on their men or husbands to provide for them, to feelings of self reliance, self confidence, and a sense of pride in their work and new found skills.

Volunteers from all over the country and state of Tamil Nadu came to hold classes for the women. Over a period of a year, the village was back at supplying its own food supply as well as selling to local communities. The women had also learned new skills like basket weaving, sewing, and jewelry making, all sold to traveling tourists or wealthier citizens in the state. Over time, the village did decide to accept assistance from local agencies and the YMCA to improve sanitation as well as rebuilding the village school. 


Throughout the progress of this organizing, it was important to have the right model of practice and each model needed to be "adapted and tailored to local contexts, culture, needs, and aspirations" (Weil, 2013). In this case study, organizers focused on neighborhood and community and chose a population based on geographical proximity. Their goals were aimed at providing social, economic, and sustainable development and it was an inclusive model. The women and children of the village became active participants in the development and wanted it to be successful,

In terms of what I mean by development, it is important to emphasize that although the community changes that occurred were about creating a sustainable environment for these women and their families, but it was also a feminist development that in the end resulted in better livelihood, food security, dignity and income, as well as the radical change in gender roles of women in such a rural village becoming the "heads of their household".

Had local organizers and agencies just gone in and not listened to the wisdom of the community they were hoping to serve, they may not have helped the village become the sustainable and thriving community that exists today.