“Power in Numbers”: Marginalized Mothers Contesting Individualization through Grassroots Community Organizing

Abstract

This chapter documents how the process of grassroots community organizing through a family-focused model of local contestation liberates participants, mainly Black and immigrant Latina mothers in Chicago, from the constraints of individualization. While much philanthropic and academic interest focuses on the policy and quantitative “impacts” and “outcomes” of local social movements, the current study looks to local organizers to better understand their experiences and how they construct meaning through their participation. In-depth interviews and participant observations show how leaders gained collective purpose and voice through family-focused collective action. Community Organizing and Family Issues, a non-profit organizing institution, supported and propelled participants (leaders) to organize locally to create change in their communities, while it also facilitated conversions in self-perceptions. Leaders often discovered a sense of capacity, which contested gendered, raced, and classed oppression and self-doubt. Through the process of community organizing, leaders exercised power and dignity, facets that for the women in this study, were often ignored and devalued in society. These understudied social effects of collective action help us to better understand how marginalized women experience local social movements that cannot be quantified to fit narrow measures of movement “impacts” and “outcomes.”