Results tagged “community leaders” from LTG Blog

After our 200-person book launch at Hunter College School of Social Work, Willie Tolliver and I were lucky enough a week later to be invited to speak about our book Stories of Transformative Leadership in the Human Services: Why the Glass is Always Full by our good friend Emily Rubin at the Supportive Housing Network of New York’s (SHNNY) 9th annual conference at the New York Hilton.

It went well; hell, it went really well. We started with 100 people in the room and ended with 125 folks, some of them crammed against the exit door. Nobody left, we got thoughtful questions, lots of folks wanted to buy the book. All good. Emily had ensured a well-organized event, and she came through. We felt honored to have been there; happy to see some former students’ faces, equally pleased that most came for the topic and not because we were known to them at all.

Barack Obama was a community organizer before he moved on to do somewhat different things. Sarah Palin was a small town mayor, a job she describes as “like an organizer, only with actual responsibilities.” So what exactly is a community organizer? So far from this election, you’d think it was a short-term job for young people, waiting around to grow up.

As a long-time professor of community organizing at City University of New York’s Hunter College School of Social Work, I’d like to offer for counterpoint a few stories on who community organizers are, what they do, and what happens to them as they move along in their careers. Some folks might be surprised.