Resolving the Dilemma between Organizing and Services: Los Angeles ACORN's Welfare Advocacy

The issue of providing individual services historically has been a major dilemma for social action, Alinsky-style community organizations (COs). The literature is replete with examples of confrontational COs that lost their militant edge and mass base and became little more than government-funded social services agencies after engaging in services provision and development activities (see Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 2001; Gittell, 1980; Perlman, 1979; Piven, 1966; Stoecker, 1995a). Most empirical evidence and practice wisdom suggests that COs wishing to maintain a direct action focus should avoid providing individual services. Although some literature suggests that COs can provide services and maintain a political focus (Rubin & Rubin, 2001), this literature offers scant detail on how this is done and few empirical examples of successfully combining Alinsky-style community organizing and services. For much of its 35-year history the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) followed the warnings in the literature and maintained its focus on direct-action confrontational organizing to empower low--and moderate-income citizens. ACORN's original organizing model did not include services as a significant part of the model (see Delgado, 1986; Kest & Rathke, 1979; Staples, 1984). Because most literature documents ACORN's first 15 years rather than its past 18 years of organizing, it is not widely known that ACORN's model has grown more complex and now incorporates services and development activities in many of its offices. This article addresses the question: How can a direct-action CO provide individual services without losing its organizing focus and militant edge? To document ACORN's approach, I present the case of Los Angeles ACORN's recent workfare organizing. From 1997 to 2001 Los Angeles ACORN organized general relief (GR) recipients around a variety of workfare issues. In 1998 ACORN began providing individual advocacy services by means of a telephone hotline for welfare recipients with case problems. From 1998 to the present, ACORN has maintained this these services while organizing direct-action campaigns on welfare issues, tenants rights, predatory lending, child care subsidies, and numerous other issues. The primary aim of this article is to document how ACORN maintained this two-pronged approach without having the services provision take over, redirect, diminish, or fundamentally change their direct-action organizing. LITERATURE REVIEW The tension between providing services to oppressed populations or organizing them to challenge the power structure has been a fundamental dilemma since the beginning of social work. The language of the debate has changed over the years from wholesale versus retail social work (Richmond, 1930), to cause versus function (Lee, 1937), to clinical versus community (Specht & Courtney, 1994), to services versus organizing (Bobo et al., 2001). Although terminology has changed over the years, the fundamental issue is whether it is best for social workers to provide direct services to address immediate problems, or to bring large numbers of oppressed peoples together through organizing and pressure the power structure (typically government bodies or corporations) to make policy changes that will ameliorate individual suffering. A parallel question running through the debate was whether one organization (or social worker) can successfully provide services while organizing for institutional change. Much of this debate has taken the form of a polarized dichotomy, and social workers typically had to decide if they were going to learn and practice macro or micro social work. Although some argue that this is a false dichotomy (Fisher & Karger, 1997; Lewis, 2003; Rubin & Rubin, 2001), most schools of social work have reflected the dichotomy and either specialized in clinical or community practice or offered different tracks within a school. …