More than the Sum of Its Parts: Cooperation and Mutual Commitment in Multi-Issue Congregation-Based Community Organizing

摘要

Congregation-based community organizing (CBCO) federations play an important role in uniting a diverse array of religious congregations and community-based organizations in movements for social justice at the neighborhood, regional, state, and national levels. Metropolitan-level CBCO federations provide a novel and noteworthy example of meso-mobilization contexts as described in the social movement literature in that many such federations engage in multiple concurrent issue campaigns. This study examines collaboration among organizational members of Communities Creating Opportunity, a CBCO federation based in Kansas City, Missouri. Qualitative interviews with organizers, clergy, and lay-leaders, together with an analysis of organizational records, reveal a cooperative structure of interorganizational relations built upon specific organizing activities, roles, and relations. These activities, roles, and relations are in turn conditioned on each member organization's own level of connection to a particular organizing issue. Findings suggest that this innovative form of cooperative relational structure affords multi-issue federations an enhanced capacity to mobilize voluntary labor resources and turn-out at public events relative to single issue organizing.