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Campaigning Wiki

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Summary

Broad-based organizing is the Alinsky / IAF tradition of building coalitions across congregations, unions, and neighborhood associations so that no single institution can be isolated by the target. The model is the parent tradition of US faith-based organizing, UK Citizens UK, German DICO, and most contemporary community-organizing training programs.

Body

Broad-based organizing is the response to a specific failure mode: a single-institution campaign (a single church, a single union local) can be isolated and outlasted by a determined opponent. The Alinsky solution, developed in the 1940s-60s and institutionalized by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940, is to organize across institutions — a “broad-based” coalition of congregations, unions, schools, and neighborhood groups that share a common target and a common negotiating committee. The IAF’s Foundations of Community Organizing curriculum teaches the five-step method (one-to-ones → research → negotiation → action → evaluation) inside this broad-based frame [source: iaf-foundations-organizing]. The Wegweiser Bürgergesellschaft Praxishilfen adapts the method in German: the four-step method (Tür-zu-Tür → Recherche → Aktion → Organisation) plus the institutional-mapping step that makes the coalition “broad” [source: buergergesellschaft-community-organizing].

The Latin-American counterpart is the MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) model, where the base is the landless-family association, the method is the mass meeting + base committee, and the “broad” frame is the rural-worker federation plus the urban-land-reform allies (cross-link only; mst-manual-militante source page deferred per T1 partition.). In South Africa, the LCAT toolkit adapts the broad-based frame for a community-development context, where the institutions are civic associations rather than congregations [source: community-organizing-toolkit-africa]. Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals (the source side is T5; the [source:] marker resolves once T5 ingests the source) is the original philosophical statement: the organizer builds the organization by finding leaders, developing them, and chaining them to a common action.

The failure modes are: (1) single-institution drift — the broad-based coalition narrows to the loudest member, and the target isolates the rest; (2) leader-burnout — the same 5 people carry every action; (3) target substitution — the coalition wins a small win and the next target is chosen poorly; (4) process tyranny — the coalition’s deliberation takes longer than the political window allows.

Use it for

Diagnosing a single-institution campaign; building a cross-institutional coalition; running a broad-based committee through the Alinsky / IAF method; training organizers in the broad-based tradition.

Worked examples

  • cicc — Chicago Interfaith Committee on Capital
  • citi-uk-living-wage — Citizens UK Living Wage campaign
  • mst-brazil — MST land occupations

Open Questions

  • How does the broad-based model adapt in secular or post-Christian contexts (Germany, France) where the congregation is not the natural organizing unit?

Sources & verification

Verified 2026-07-01 by llm-qc.

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