Advocacy for Social Change : Coalitions and the Organizations That Lead Them

This book portrays how small, geographically dispersed, progressive social change and social service organizations working within a coalition are able to influence national level social policies. Based on extensive empirical research focused on two national organizations that exist to protect lower income communities, and three more local organizations associated with them, it shows how such organizations achieve success by establishing professionally staffed national level organizations that coordinate coalition efforts, mobilize members into action, provide information and instruction to facilitate such action, and act as the public voice for the coalitions.

This book portrays how small, geographically dispersed, and progressive social change and social service organizations working within a coalition can influence national-level social policies. Based on extensive empirical research on two national organizations and their local affiliates, one focusing on affordable housing and the other working to protect lower-income communities, this book shows the ways in which professionally staffed organizations that coordinate coalitions come about, and describes their work to mobilize coalition members to lobby and advocate, providing information, analysis and instruction to facilitate such action and, in so doing, becoming the public voice for the social change efforts of coalitions. Advocacy for Social Change details the characteristics of these organizations that the author has labeled as focal catalytic coalition organizations and then provides numerous examples of campaigns led by them on affordable housing and economic justice; campaigns that illustrate tactics that other social change organizations can emulate. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology with interests in social problems, social action, political sociology, urban studies, community development and organizing while extending the literature on interest group lobbying.