Behind the success of any CO organization or effort are community organizers. Many have called organizers the "driving force" of CO,³² though CO's principles require that they facilitate the people's work, not lead it.

Just what organizers do can sound like any standard job description - "administration, planning, policy decision-making, program and leadership development and action implementation, public relations activities, and service activities."³³ But CO work takes form within the dynamics of community and struggle, requiring organizers to have an extraordinary range of competencies.

The organizer must thoroughly understand the characteristics and the power patterns of the community through extensive interviews and discussions with community members. The organizer is a listener. The organizer identifies and trains potential leaders. These potential leaders are not necessarily the titular heads of organizations. Through an extensive listening process issues or problems of concern to the people are identified. People must be encouraged to talk about their views of the community and it is important that they realize that the organizer does not come with a preconceived program. An organizer must also be able to agitate people to act. "Until the people recognize that it is they who must do something about their own problems, and that it is only THEY who can be trusted to do the right thing - and until they realize that only if they organize enough power in their community that something can be done about these things, nothing will get done."³⁴

As a committed CO funder, Regina McGraw, executive director of the Wieboldt Foundation, is keenly aware of the extraordinary efforts put forward by many community organizers. For what they do and accomplish, they are often underpaid. McGraw recommends that funders examine grantee wage scales and benefits packages to see if they are appropriate to the level of skill, management responsibilities, interpersonal skills, and public presence that are needed for success. She believes that if nonprofits are to pay full benefits, funders must support the expenditure by giving operating support whenever possible.

Organizers challenge people to act on behalf of their common interests. Organizers empower people to act by developing shared relationships, understandings, and tasks which enable them to gain new resources, new understanding of their interests, and new capacity to use these resources on behalf of their interests. Organizers work through "dialogues" in relationships, understanding and action carried out as campaigns. They identify, recruit and develop leadership, they build community among that leadership, they build power out of that community.

Organizers develop new relationships out of old ones - sometimes by linking one person to another and sometimes by linking whole networks of people together.

Organizers deepen understanding by creating opportunities for people to deliberate with one another about their circumstances, to reinterpret these circumstances in ways that open up new possibilities for action, and to develop strategies and tactics that make creative use of the resources and opportunities that their circumstances afford. Organizers motivate people to act by creating experiences to challenge those feelings which inhibit action, such as fear, apathy, self-doubt, inertia and isolation with those feelings that support action such as anger, hope, self-worth, urgency and a sense of community. ...

Organizers work through campaigns. Campaigns are very highly energized, intensely focused, concentrated streams of activity with specific goals and deadlines. People are recruited, battles fought and organizations built through campaigns. Campaigns polarize by bringing out conflicts ordinarily submerged in a way contrary to the interests of the organizing constituency. One critical dilemma is how to depolarize in order to negotiate resolution of these conflicts. Another dilemma is how to balance the work of campaigns with the ongoing work of organizational survival.

Organizers build community by developing leadership. They focus on identifying leaders and enhancing their skills, values and commitments. They also focus on building strong communities: communities through which people can gain new understanding of their interests as well as power to act on them. Organizers work at constructing communities which are bounded yet inclusive, communal yet diverse, soladaristic yet tolerant. They work at developing a relationship between community and leadership based on mutual responsibility and accountability.³⁵