TY  - CHAP
AB  - Abstract This chapter documents how the process of grassroots community organizing through a family-focused model of local contestation liberates participants, mainly Black and immigrant Latina mothers in Chicago, from the constraints of individualization. While much philanthropic and academic interest focuses on the policy and quantitative “impacts” and “outcomes” of local social movements, the current study looks to local organizers to better understand their experiences and how they construct meaning through their participation. In-depth interviews and participant observations show how leaders gained collective purpose and voice through family-focused collective action. Community Organizing and Family Issues, a non-profit organizing institution, supported and propelled participants (leaders) to organize locally to create change in their communities, while it also facilitated conversions in self-perceptions. Leaders often discovered a sense of capacity, which contested gendered, raced, and classed oppression and self-doubt. Through the process of community organizing, leaders exercised power and dignity, facets that for the women in this study, were often ignored and devalued in society. These understudied social effects of collective action help us to better understand how marginalized women experience local social movements that cannot be quantified to fit narrow measures of movement “impacts” and “outcomes.”
VL  - 27
SN  - 978-1-83867-383-3, 978-1-83867-384-0/1529-2126
DO  - 10.1108/S1529-212620190000027007
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S1529-212620190000027007
AU  - Cossyleon Jennifer E.
ED  - Vasilikie Demos
ED  - Marcia Texler Segal
ED  - Kristy Kelly
PY  - 2019
Y1  - 2019/01/01
TI  - “Power in Numbers”: Marginalized Mothers Contesting Individualization through Grassroots Community Organizing
T2  - Gender and Practice: Insights from the Field
T3  - Advances in Gender Research
PB  - Emerald Publishing Limited
SP  - 115
EP  - 127
Y2  - 2024/05/08
ER  -