Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

===The Industrial Areas Foundation===
{{See also|Industrial Areas Foundation}}
In 1940, with the support of Roman Catholic Bishop [[Bernard James Sheil]] and [[Chicago Sun-Times]] publisher and department-store owner [[Marshall Field III|Marshall Field]], Alinsky founded the [[Industrial Areas Foundation]] (IAF), a national community organizing network. The mandate was to partner with religious congregations and civic organizations to build "broad-based organizations" that could train up local leadership and promote trust across community divides.<ref name="IAF-WhoWeAre">{{cite web |url=http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org |title=Who We Are |website=Industrial Areas Foundation |access-date=January 21, 2020}}</ref> For Alinsky there was also a broader mission.

In what sixty years later, with publication of [[Robert D. Putnam|Robert Putnam]]'s ''[[Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community]]'',<ref>{{cite book |last=Putnam |first=Robert |date=2000 |title=Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community |location=New York |publisher=Simon & Schuster |page=19 |isbn=978-0-74320-304-3}}</ref> would have been understood as a concern for the loss of "social capital" (of the organized opportunities for conviviality and deliberation that allow and encourage ordinary people to engage in democratic process), in his own statement of purpose for the IAF, Alinsky wrote:
<blockquote>In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity—to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care for their neighbors. This course of urban anonymity...is one of eroding destruction to the foundations of democracy. For although we profess that we are citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them—that they do not 'count'.<ref>{{harvp|Horwitt|1989|p=105}}</ref></blockquote>

Through the IAF, Alinsky spent the next 10 years repeating his organizational work--"rubbing raw", as the ''[[The New York Times|New York Times]]'' saw it "the sores of discontent"<ref name=":0">{{Cite news|last=Fowle|first=Farnsworth|date=June 13, 1972|title=Saul Alinsky, 63, Poverty Fighter and Social Organizer is Dead|page=46|work=New York Times|url=https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1972/06/13/80792597.html?pageNumber=46|access-date=January 9, 2022}}</ref> and compelling action through agitation--"from [[Kansas City metropolitan area|Kansas City]] and [[Detroit]] to the farm-worker [[barrio|barrios]] of Southern California."{{sfnp|Norden|1972|pp=59–60}} Although Alinsky always had rationalizations, his biographer Sanford Horwitt records that "on rare occasions" Alinsky would concede that not all of his mentored projects were "unequivocal successes". There was uncertainty about "what was supposed to happen after the first two or three years, when the original organizer and/or fund-raiser left the community council on its own." Recognizing that the IAF could not be "a holding for People's Organizations", Alinsky thought that one solution would be for community-councils, under their native leadership, to constitute their own inter-city fund-raising and mutual-assistance network. In the early 1950s, Alinsky was talking about "a million-dollar budget to carry us over a three-year plan of organization through the country." The usual corporate and foundation funders proved decidedly cold to the idea.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=263–265}}

Successes could also be problematic. In Chicago, the Back of the Yards Council set itself against housing integration and offered no objection to a pattern of "urban renewal" with which Alinsky professed himself "fed-up": "the moving of low-income and, almost without exception, Negro groups and dumping them into other slums," in order to build houses for middle-income whites. There being "no substitute for organized power," Alinsky concluded in 1959 that what the city needed was a powerful black community organization that could "bargain collectively" with other organized groups and agencies, private and public.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|pp=367–368}}