Community Organizing: Strenghening local democracy

Community organizing – a positive trend
In Germany and Europe, community organizing is becoming more and more popular as a powerful opportunity to help shape things “from below”. There are now numerous movements and organizations that adopt these ideas or aspects of them and put them into practice, including trade unions and parties (FOCO, ECON, Verdi, Volt, etc.). We, the citizen platforms and DICO, have long been pioneers and an important part of this exciting and positive development, as we have been gaining practical experience and success with broad-based community organizing in Berlin, Cologne and Duisburg for 20 years. We are also connected to international CO networks and organizations in the USA (IAF), Australia, Italy and the Netherlands. . We have also begun cooperative efforts with organizations in East Africa. 

Our community organizations in Berlin, Cologne and Duisburg are unique participatory structures that - so far - have only existed in these three cities in continental Europe. We work according to the broad-based community organizing approach. This means that we are a long-term and sustainable association of very different groups in civil society (I suppose that the ‘broad’ part is what’s implied by the ‘very different groups’ claim). Through our relationships with each other, but also with people from politics, administration, business and other organizations of civil society, we organize the power that we need to develop and implement positive changes for our cities or districts. 

Our Values
 We are politically independent, advocates of democratic values ​​and non-violent, constructive debates. We are adept at dealing with diversity and are very experienced incultivating confident grassroots participation from those who are directly affected by the issues in question. We give space for active participation, e.g. not just during but also between election seasons, and we do so deliberately for all those who are not allowed to vote at all, including for those whom society has so far not trusted or allowed to participate. In financing our work, we aim to remain independent by relying on member groups' own funds and a wide range of donations, foundation and project funds. We avoid municipal funds.  

This is what your donation does
We use the raised money primarily to conduct campaigns of the community organizations. Building relationships and coalitions, as well as negotiating with decision-makers, requires resources that are as independent as possible, which are gathered through this crowdfunding.