Community Action Against Poverty: Readings from the Mobilization Experience

A Class Assignment:  Survey of Community Organization -13-042-61
Graduate Department of Community Planning, University of Cincinnati
Gladys Turner Finney
Instructor: Mr. Bailey Turner, Assistant Professor of Community Planning

Community Action Against Poverty:
Readings from the Mobilization Experience

This book is an anthology of articles describing largely the operation and experiences of Mobilization for Youth (MFY,) a community demonstration project developed and funded under the sponsorship of the President's Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime. Among the seventeen contributors of the twenty articles, twelve including the editors held key positions in the project. George A. Brager was formerly Co-Director of Mobilization for Youth and Associate Professor of Social Work at Columbia University. Francis P. Purcell was formerly chief of training for Mobilization for Youth and professor of Social Work at Rutgers University.

Throughout the articles there is an emphasis on social advocacy as a strategy for affecting institutional changes and expanding opportunity structures for the poor.

Major contributions made by the Mobilization project were its espousal of systematic inclusion of social-class variables in program planning and the concept of social worker as an advocate. Poverty is viewed as the problem, and power, through organized social action by the poor, as the solution.

Experiences of the project revealed that a local demonstration, with no jurisdiction over public institutions, could alter in a comprehensive way employment conditions or the school system.
Consequently, the project focused on such approaches as work training for out-of-school youth and adult employment programs which could be generated out of its own resources.

Institutional change was pursued by the alternate strategy of criticism and protest, each of which strained the other.  Criticism and protest damaged informal relations through which negotiation was facilitated, whereas a concern with persuasive efforts weakened the force of protests.

Some conclusions:

The project failed to carry out the federal mandate to scientifically evaluate social action approaches to juvenile delinquency.

- that a demonstration operating in a limited area, under protected auspices, does provide a justifiable federal entry into local affairs for reform.

- that the problems of the poor require political action and political action requires power.

-that the poor must be enabled, encouraged, persuaded and enticed to use organized social
action to affect institutional changes.

- that strategies for increasing the participation of the poor include social brokerage, integrative mechanisms, and social protests to support movements.

Persons interested in social policy, planning and community organization will find this a useful book to read from the standpoint of planned change through social advocacy. A principal issue for me, raised by the book involve the credibility of the government's use of demonstration grants to increase the power of the poor during periods of high social unrest, such as the 1960s. These demonstration grants were temporary, palliative measures whose accomplishments could not be permanently assured without the continuing support of the federal government.