Community Organising as a technique making solidarity Community Development practices in East London

Abstract

This paper aims to reveal the characteristics and the significance of community organizing (CO) of Citizens UK, which is a technique of solidarity used in the many community development practices in East London. The essence of CO is to build relationships between people, that is, relationships of trust and cooperation by revealing the self-interest of people and constructing collective interests that can be shared in different actors in order to build the power to enable social change. Then, in the actual action, after breaking down the abstract and ambiguous problem into concrete issues which have clarified targets, CO strategically plans effective social action that can get reaction from the target people. CO's process is continuing learning and trial and error for social change. Such CO can be an important technique of solidarity for Japanese civil society, which is not good at creating cooperation between different actors. Also, with the prevalence of "political alienation" today, CO can contribute to the formation of a true "democratic populism" beyond the "populism of separation".