Last week we looked at “facilitators” and earlier there were “planners” (some are more like consultants) and in capacity building the “mediators”; this week we are asked to look into the role of “organizers” and “leaders”.
The biggest difference between an organizer and a facilitator is that an organizer has the authoritative voice in the problem solving/goal reaching process. Facilitators possess the “trust” from others to create the most efficient environment for the participants to exchange informations and solve problems. In this case facilitators are only responsible for building a strong enough relationship among participants to reach the consensus needed. Organizers, according to Marshall Ganz, seem to have a lot more responsibility and should be not only “trusted” but “respected” by their members because they possess the knowledge and skill to help the members increase their engagement and challenge them to be a stronger person. In another word, the members are dependent on the organizers to continuously empower the members, which is the “leadership” of the organizers.
I thought Osterman’s analysis and the example of IAF stroke me in many aspects. First, the entire process of training and educating members to me is very similar to how religions work, and what is tricky is that IAF earns almost nothing but memberships and the mobilization power from the members. The members, on the other hand, seemed to gain much experience from the personal level, and according to Osterman, do have the ability to contest the organizers and reorient the group goal. My biggest concern for IAF is that there does not seem to be a connection on a community level since many of the conversation are between members and organizers (or the organizers of lower levels), and therefore the geographical context is missing. In this way, what kind of problems are this group of people who live next to each other solving? Is this kind of community not geographically based?
My other questions for the organizers are:
How does their leadership different from the beliefs generated by faith?
For those people who joined and later left the organization, what were their feelings and reasons for leaving?
If there comes a situation that the organizer has to choose either to keep the members engaged(empowered) or keep the group attach to their goals, what should the organizer put as priority?
I have a lot of thoughts with this weeks readings and the organizing methods; hopefully I’ll come up with more organized questions to ask in class.