Tuesday's primaries in Texas and Ohio are crucial in determining the Democrats' candidate in November's race to the White House. The front-runner is Barack Obama, whose vision of bringing communities together to achieve change is capturing voters' imaginations

Barack Obama was in the third year of primary school when he wrote an essay saying that he wanted to become president. His teacher later told the Chicago Tribune that the reason he gave was that he wanted to make everyone happy. At the age of 24 the first step he took towards this goal was to become a Community Organiser.

This job involved building connections between people at grass-roots level and encouraging them to act together in their common self-interest. Long and painstaking work, but by all accounts he tackled it with discipline, imagination and humour. At the turning point of his presidential campaign, on becoming the first African American ever to win the Iowa caucus, he said: "I will never forget that my journey began on the streets of Chicago."

A generation earlier, on those same Chicago streets where poverty, homelessness and criminal gangs ruled, Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) worked out the method of community organising that Obama would later practise. Born of immigrant Russian Jews and educated in the University of Chicago's renowned sociology department, Alinsky became politicised by the events and conditions of the Depression. Witnessing widespread poverty, together with the rise of demagogues from Capone to Hitler, he felt compelled to act.

Alinsky struck up a friendship with the great labour leader John L. Lewis, whose work with the United Mine Workers was winning better working conditions and fairer wages for its members. He enlisted Bishop Bernard Sheil and leaders of the Catholic Church who wanted to achieve similar benefits for families of all nationalities in their congregations. Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"), Pope Leo XIII's encyclical of 1891, was relevant to the situation in the Chicago stockyards and provided the theological basis for organising to "secure a just wage".

Out of the sweatshops and slaughterhouses of the 1930s Chicago slums an unlikely coalition of congregations and community groups emerged. Alinsky's "organisation of organisations" won concessions from industry, reduced crime and increased cooperation between rival ethnic groups. He had invented a new political form: the People's Organisation.

His work influenced the struggle for civil rights as well as the nature of political protest. From Alinsky the Mexican American Catholic union leader César Chávez learned many of the tactics of non-violent direct action that he would later employ as leader of the United Farm Workers union. Chávez worked for Alinsky for a decade, carrying out successful voter-registration campaigns among migrant workers who were United States citizens. He improved his own English, became an effective public speaker and went on to study law. He then helped the farm workers petition the growers for toilets, clean housing, safe drinking water and better conditions.

Along with Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, Alinsky was a leader of what is sometimes termed "the non-socialist Left". Hillary Clinton wrote her senior-year thesis on his organisational theory. She interviewed him three times and concluded that his agenda did not sound radical. Even his tactics, she decided, were often non-radical, even "anti-radical". "His are the words used in our schools and churches, by our parents and their friends, by our peers," she wrote. "The difference is that Alinsky really believes in them and recognises the necessity of changing the present structures of our lives in order to realise them." To Alinsky a more just society may not be inevitable, but it is possible. As he once observed: "We'll see it when we believe it."

In 1940, Alinsky's vision became formalised by the creation of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). His heir at the IAF, Ed Chambers, has developed and improved the "universals of organising" in a more reflective style. People's Organisations have proved their staying power, and many have a long track record of developing new leaders, strengthening institutions and acting for social change on a multi-issue agenda.

From east Brooklyn to south Bronx to Baltimore and beyond thousands of affordable homes have been built as part of the "Nehemiah" scheme. There are currently more than 60 interracial, interfaith coalitions working to renew the fabric of community life in inner cities across the US, and several other national offshoots. Faith-based community organising has also had an impact in other countries, including South Africa, Germany and Britain.

My own first experience was as an adviser to Bishop Victor Guazzelli in London's East End. One government initiative after another had failed to deliver positive change in our local neighbourhoods. In an era of globalisation, when even the power of governments was compromised, Guazzelli realised that the Churches acting alone would no longer have an impact on civil society. What if, he thought, an "organisation of organisations" - could bring power to his beloved people in east London?

Bishop Guazzelli met Neil Jameson, who pioneered Alinsky's community organising methods in the UK through the Citizen Organising Foundation. He went on the same training course that Barack Obama later attended. He urged priests, sisters, imams and other leaders to work together. Telco (The East London Communities Organisation) was formed. In the intervening years, thousands have trained as active citizens. Congregations of all faiths, schools, colleges, unions and neighbourhood associations now work side by side for the common good.

Telco is just one of three assemblies of the umbrella group London Citizens, which now includes South London Citizens and West London Citizens and has brought together more than 90 diverse institutions across the capital in a dues-paying, non-partisan, permanent alliance. The many ambitious campaigns launched include the first UK Living Wage Campaign and the Strangers into Citizens Campaign, calling for a pathway to citizenship for the many undocumented, hardworking migrants who live in fear of the future.

So what of Barack Obama? Long after his stint on Chicago's south side, organising remains central to his thinking. Like Alinsky, he is convinced that whatever their income level, ethnic origin, or political affiliation, ordinary people can solve their own problems, given a measure of power. "Organised power" is the primary currency. It cannot be "given" to people, like handouts, but must be experienced and grasped. This "power with" rather than "power over" is one of the great joys of our existence. We may affect only a small neighbourhood, but in doing so we find that the world is changed.

Hillary Clinton didn't accept Alinsky's offer of a job as an organiser in 1968, but went straight to law school. By contrast, after graduating from Columbia University, Obama took the job. He has drawn inspiration from his experience ever since. When he announced his candidacy for president, he claimed "the best education" he ever had was not his undergraduate years at Occidental and Columbia or even his time at Harvard Law School, but rather the four years he spent learning the science of community organising in Chicago.

In the 13 years between his return to Chicago from law school and his senate campaign, he was deeply involved with the city's range of community-organising groups. He served on the board of foundations that support community organising. He taught Alinsky's concepts and methods in workshops. While at Harvard, he spent 10 days in Los Angeles training with the IAF. He frequently refers to lessons he learned as an organiser. Imagine if these strategies were combined with progressive electoral politics.

In a 1995 interview in the Chicago Reader, Obama said, "What if a politician were to see his job as that of an organiser, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short but who educates them about the real choices before them?" He concludes: "We must form grass-roots structures that would hold me and other elected officials more accountable for their actions."

This is new. An elected politician keen to be held accountable by those who put him in office. Whether or not he manages to achieve them, these ideals animate Obama's presidential campaign. Perhaps they may even prove the key to his success. While Clinton invites the voters to elect her so that she can fix the country for them, Obama invites people to vote for him to demonstrate the power of people to fix the country for themselves.

Whatever the outcome of the elections, the real choice lies in the kind of politics we espouse in the future. Obama may shift the mood and the style, but we can no longer leave the transformation to others. In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, he records his early conviction: "Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilised grass roots." If elected, will Obama be able to make us happy? No. Will he be a positive force for change? Probably.

Back to homepage