Session: Unleashing the Power of Collective Efficacy through Community Organizing: Results from Three Community Studies (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

Community organizers engage people to work together to address common public and community problems, focusing on strengthening their capacity to exercise power over those problems. There are many different forms and approaches to community organizing, ranging from consensus to more conflict-oriented approaches to address issues at local to global levels. Community researchers have increasingly focused on the ways in which community organizing approaches facilitate and strengthen collective capacity or efficacy. This symposium presents community research from three studies focusing on diverse methods of community organizing used to address community problems and their relationship to collective efficacy.

Collective efficacy is the ability to work together to address common issues or problems (Wandersman & Florin, 2000). More specifically, at a community level collective happens when neighbors trust one another and share norms and values and they are willing to intervene to address neighborhood problems (Sampson, Raudenbush & Earls, 1997). Collective efficacy includes mutual trust and social connections or ties among neighbors such as friendship networks, civic participation, or faith-based ties. When neighbors know one another other and share social ties and norms, they are more likely to intervene in common neighborhood or public problems (Sampson, et al., 1997). Prior research shows that in communities where collective efficacy is strong, crime and violence are low regardless of the socio-demographic characteristics and the level of disorder present in the neighborhood (Sampson et al., 1997). Collective efficacy is also connected to improved health, mental health and community wellbeing (Author et al., 2016).

While the power of collective efficacy is strong, there is limited research on how community organizing is connected to collective efficacy and ways in which various approaches to organizing can increase or strengthen it. This symposium helps to fill this gap. The first paper focuses on an intervention using consensus organizing strategies to facilitate collective efficacy among youth and adults for the prevention of youth and community violence. The study explored how intergenerational exchange may contribute to or fail to contribute to collective efficacy. Results from interviews and observation data found a mutually reinforcing relationship between collective efficacy and intergenerational exchange, which was shaped by neighborhood problems and participant and group characteristics. The second paper examines how community and relationships provide a context in which group members can engage in an organizing tactic that is inherently challenging: having emotionally vulnerable deep canvass conversations across political disagreement. Thematic analysis of focus groups with canvassers describes the “good challenges� made possible by creating intentional, supportive contexts that enhance collective efficacy. The third paper will tease out how the two components of collective efficacy, social control and social cohesion, complicate tactics of anti-displacement community organizing. Using three case studies across Boston, MA and Oakland, CA, this presentation discusses how community organizers across three spatial and tactical contexts grapple with the ‘contested terrain’ of collective understandings of social control and social cohesion in communities. Results from interviews and observations with mutual aid organizers, anti-displacement organizers, and organizations creating tactics to resist ‘green gentrification’ will be presented.