Diversity in Social Action

It is relevant to address diversity within social action movements. While social activism or social action is not synonymous to community organizing, often times effective community organizing will employ social action in order to accomplish goals for its constituency. When planning effective social actions there needs to be a cohesive community organizing practice where local stakeholders are trained to emerge as leaders, a variety of voices are considered, and community resources and strengths are assessed. 

Community organizing and social action are dynamic processes that ideally originates from within the pertaining community and its residents. The stakeholder's subjective experiences, shaped by race, gender, class, sexual orientation and disability, is crucial when assessing the origins of a social movement. In Celene Krauss article, Women of Color on the Front Line (2010), in Race, Class and Gender: An Anthology, women's differing roles in toxic waste protests and mobilizations are discussed. She employs a feminist lens to better understand how women's experiences and intentions in activism can be shaped by their roles and pre-existing social hierarchies.

White working class women were often drawn into toxic waste protests on behalf of their roles as mothers. A social work strengths based perspective is employed when Krauss considers how these women's extended social networks within their communities and families provided them with a vehicle for information dissemination and community organizing. Traditional female gatherings such as Tupperware parties, which might make most feminists including myself cringe, served as a catalyst when women in a Detroit suburb began to discuss negative health patterns in their community. Krauss's perspective allowed me to reconsider certain traditional female roles and expectation as potentials for strength and transformation. Kraus provided other examples of how white working class women tied their values to motherhood and democracy and these convictions helped them politicize and reconsider inequities related to power and gender. 

Pregnant women protest the use of harmful chemicals outside of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's office

(retrieved from http://www.greenpeace.org/eu-unit/en/campaigns/chemicals/)

Krauss points out that African American women's toxic waste protests originated from a different angle. Their involvement arose alongside issues of race inequality and political disenfranchisement. Similarly to the experiences of Native American women in environmental protests, their awareness of racial oppression connects to a wider political context where toxic waste is seen as "environmental racism". Within a social work perspective, its crucial to understand the subjective experiences of different groups of people and how they might approach and impact macro scale issues. Assessing strengths within different communities might vary according to people's experiences, roles and perceptions of themselves.