It is now more than a generation since Saul Alinsky developed his model of community organising focused on developing leaders, building organisations and claiming local power. One of the key themes of this book is to ask how far the community organising model has evolved over the years to take on board changing perspectives on development practice. We now accept that we are living in a globalised world and that ultimately our futures are linked together. This is a long way from a world where the focus of development work could be limited to what happened in one ghetto in one city. We now know that the global affects the local, and global perspectives and lessons from elsewhere must inform what we do. Indeed, the basic ideas of community organising have been taken up, explicitly or otherwise, and adapted to a variety of contexts in many countries outside of North America.

As well as specific local and global development goals, development practice is now informed by the ideas of fundamental rights and sustainability, by quasi-technical concepts around capacity building, social capital creation and developing capability. In addition, many practitioners are also thinking about seemingly more esoteric, but actually fundamentally important, ideas around human needs, quality of life, wellbeing and happiness.

This chapter briefly outlines these basic issues and ideas, which are used to provide a context from which to consider the relevance of the original community organising model. The case studies later in the book provide practice examples on how far the ideas and practice of community organising have responded to these broader agendas. (See Chapter Nine for a discussion on how successful the community organisations have been in delivering on these agendas.)

Current issues: global and local

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 2006), around 1.2 billion people in the world go to sleep at night hungry; 70 per cent of these people are women and children. A similar number of people do not have access to minimum standards of sanitation and clean drinking water. Over 500,000 women die at childbirth or within six weeks of delivery.