Daniel K. Zismer, Associate Professor and Director of Executive MHA Programs at the UMN School of Public Health argues that the specifics of health care reform are relatively not as important as the fundamentals. In this guide Zismer focuses on the likely fundamentals of reform and how reform fundamentals of health care affect (and challenge) our “system” of health care delivery in the U.S.

Since the tech boom and rise of neo-conservatism in the early 1980’s, a fundamental structural change occurred in society. Instead of looking to business or government to solve societal issues, citizens began to “innovate for social good” using the same entrepreneurial acumen driving new business ventures. Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, founded by Bill Drayton in 1980, was an early fosterer of this movement, funding and connecting social entrepreneurs from around the world. Ashoka has now grown to an association of over 2,000 Fellows in over 60 countries on the world's five main continents. Meg Wheatley and Deborah Frieze have recently merged this concept of social entrepreneurship with systems thinking in their “Walk Out, Walk On” model, dubbing social entrepreneurs as “Walk Outs” that refuse to work from negative dominant values or paradigms, “walking on” to become social change pioneers. Similar to Ashoka, Walk Out, Walk On seeks to organize individual entrepreneurs for collective impact.

FBCO has its roots in the organizing of Saul Alinsky. In his organizing work in Chicago’s working class neighborhoods in the 1930s and 1940s, Alinsky drew on the Jewish community for both human and financial capital. However, following Alinsky’s 1972 death, Ernesto Cortés, Jr., a young organizer from San Antonio, began to explore the benefits of going beyond Alinsky’s use of religious institutions as sources of people to a model of organizing that integrated faith traditions into the organizing itself. Through his efforts organizing among the lay leadership, mostly female, of Hispanic Catholic parishes in San Antonio, Cortés developed a unique model of organizing. This model– traditionally local in nature – has grown in prominence on the national level since 2008, building political power through new alliances and national organizing tactics.

Researched and produced by: UMN Center for Intergrative Leadership, Spring 2012.
See following link to view all eleven community organizing models: http://www.incommons.org/node/6591

Consciousness-raising (CR) as an organizing model originated in 1967 with the New York Radical Women’s organization (NYRW) and became the predominate organizing model of the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Though it represented a unique theory for bringing about radical change, CR drew on the experiences of the earlier labor and civil rights movements. In fact, the term “consciousness-raising” came from NYRW member Anne Forer recalling that labor movements had spoken of raising the consciousness of workers who did not know they were oppressed. She asked the other women to give her examples from their lives of how they had been oppressed, because she needed to “raise her consciousness.” This model of a dozen or less women gathering to each discuss problems of collective oppression quickly spread from New York to Chicago and then across the United States. At the movement’s peak in 1973, it is estimated that 100,000 women across the U.S. belonged to CR groups. As CR gained momentum in the feminist movement, gay rights activists also adopted the model.

Researched and produced by: UMN Center for Intergrative Leadership, Spring 2012.