Community Organizing and Coalition-Building

The Right Question Strategy has proven to strengthen community organizing efforts. 

RQI’s strategy is particularly effective as a tool for investing not only in emerging leaders but also in the other 99% of a community’s population, who are not part of the leadership cadres that run so many community organizations.

The late Jim Drake, a long time organizer who worked with Ceasar Chavez and helped build the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, once participated in a RQI workshop and described RQI’s educational strategy as better than anything I’ve seen at helping people think for themselves.

Examples

• RQI on the Isleta Reservation, New Mexico. An Isleta Reservation resident and RQI facilitator in New Mexico taught RQI’s methods for formulating questions at a conference focused on the needs of youth in her Native American community. One hundred thirty youth and adults came to sessions on using questions to identify what youth want and could benefit from in their schools, health care, and community services. She described the change that occurred in this way:

Isleta pueblo people find it hard to be vocal, ask questions. RQI is nonthreatening. People feel more comfortable knowing there’s a process that can help them. It’s really hard for people in my culture to be verbal in a meeting, but this process is breaking that down. People say, I can use this at school, at home with my children. I feel it’s been effective in my community, and to help me work with parents one-on-one.

• Lawrence Community Works (LCW), in Lawrence, MA where we began our work, is one of the premier examples of community and neighborhood-based multi-issue community organizing efforts in the country. LCW has featured the use of RQI’s methods in their PODER Leadership Development Institute. LCW now makes the teaching of RQI skills a core component of their leadership development program for emerging leaders. RQI has helped LCW’s leadership design strategies for holding accountable local decision-makers, for recruiting more people to the organization and for including more citizens in the municipal budgeting process.

Voices From the Field 

You can just see the difference in any meeting. The people who learned RQI's skills are able to focus right away on the key decision, they ask questions, and this is really important: they are persistent, they don't give up, they're not intimidated, they keep pressing until they have made their point or get the information they need. They apply all that they had learned about decisions and questions and accountability. 

Alma Couverthie, Director of Organizing for Lawrence Community Works, Massachusetts

I have been working in this field for quite a while now and the tools that I have learned are truly something I wish I had heard about a long time ago.

Community organizer, Ontario, Canada