Community organizers

According to David Burge, Community Organizer and Presidential candidate (no I don't know what party he is the candidate of) this is what community organizers do:

* reach out and work with communities in various ways.
* liaison with, and for, community agencies for service within affected areas.
* fight to make a difference.
* raise awareness.
* deal with community issues.
* raise awareness in the community of how we are making differences about undealt-with issues .
* when necessary, refer inquiries to outreach coordinators.
* Help coordination agency administrators identify and address outreach opportunities.
* model timetables and conceptualize benchmarks.
* issue guidelines for poster contests and interpretive dance festivals.
* Gather voter registrations, win valuable prizes.

I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume this is not an exhaustive list. After reading it I guess I know what a community organizer does, but that doesn't really help me understand how that benefits anything beyond the organizers own ego. If this were a business plan it would have to be redone as none of these items is specific, and there are no goals involved.

The last two are my favorites. It is hard not to smile or even chuckle a bit when issuing guidelines for poster contests and interpretive dance festivals, and winning valuable prizes are part of your job description.

The rest of the article is extremely helpful, you can read it here.

Ok, so it's satire. And I still don't know what a community organizer does. The one description I found talked about registering voters for ACORN, but since they tend to have dubious methods that is surely not all that is involved.