Empowering Communities: Benefits of Organizational Participation

C. Benefits to the Educational Dimension

1) Organizational experiences are a social space and a key instrument for learning: Organizational processes are a real crucible for the formation of skills. The programs and activities of an organization produce situations and raise issues that create fertile ground for learning: learning to express oneself, to assume the exercise of responsibilities, exchange information, develop the practice of planning, etc. Both the successes of the organization and problem-solving enhance the ability of people to deal with others.

2) There is a social space and an instrument to promote the structuring of people's daily lives to create a stable frame of reference. Organizational activity becomes a powerful reference point for personal action; from it, more routine activities acquire meaning.

3) They are a space and a tool that can deal with the modesty and timidity of the popular classes. Let's build the confidence to claim participation in decisions. What P. Freire calls the culture of silence (not having a word on what concerns us, a lack of interpretation) or as L. Milani called the timidity of the poor, etc., are conditions of marginalization and oppression.

4) There is an opportunity to learn to express and enhance the ability to expose a problem that goes beyond individual preoccupations and concerns a wide group.

D. Benefits in the Political Dimension

1) Organizations are a social space and an instrument that is a source of power to solve problems.

They create a collective subject that may be related to other subjects in the form of collective collaboration, conflict, etc. You get voice, dialogue, negotiation possibilities, and protest. Independence and participation are strengthened.

S. Alinsky expresses it powerfully: "Change comes from power, and power comes from the organization. Power is the raison d'etre of organizations.

Therefore, the aim of the organizer, as soon as it engages with the public, is trying to build a power base, an organization.
Without a power structure, without organization, you cannot attack any fundamental problem. Without organization, it is not possible to talk of participatory democracy.

2) The organization permits participation in the daily management of projects, effectively increasing the autonomy of the people against professional prescription.

The group enjoys safeguards that allow you to take risks that a lone individual could not assume. In the group, each team can make new experiences, develop new skills, etc.