Editing Saul Alinsky (section)

===Community action in the federal War on Poverty===
While in Rochester, Alinsky had been employed four-days a month at the federally-funded Community Action Training Center at [[Syracuse University]].{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989}}{{pn|date=June 2023}} The 1964 [[Economic Opportunity Act]], passed as a part of [[Lyndon B. Johnson]]’s [[War on Poverty]], committed the federal government to promoting the "maximum feasible participation" of targeted communities in the design and delivery of anti-poverty programs.<ref>{{cite book|last=Capp|first=Glenn R.|title=The Great Society A Sourcebook of Speeches|year=1967|publisher=Dickenson Publishing Company, Inc.|location=Belmont, CA|pages=164–174}}</ref>

This appeared to acknowledge what Alinsky insisted was the key to social and economic deprivation, "political poverty":<blockquote>Poverty means not only lacking money, but also lacking power. ... When ... poverty and the lack of power bar you from equal protection, equal equity in the courts, and equal participation in the economic and social life of your society, then you are poor. ... [An] anti-poverty program must recognise that its program has to do something about not only economic poverty but also political poverty<ref name="Alinsky 1965">{{cite journal |last1=Alinsky |first1=Saul |title=The War on Poverty--Political Pornography |journal=The Journal of Social Issues |date=1965 |volume=22 |issue=1 |pages=41–47 |doi=10.1111/j.1540-4560.1965.tb00482.x}}</ref></blockquote> Alinsky was sceptical of Community Action Program (CAP) funding under the Act doing more than provide relief for the "welfare industry": "the use of poverty funds to absorb staff salaries and operating costs by changing the title of programs and putting a new poverty label here and there is an old device". If it was to achieve more than this, there had to be meaningful representation of the poor "through their own organised power".<ref name="Alinsky 1965" />

In practice this would mean that the federal sponsor for community action, the [[Office of Economic Opportunity]] (OEO), should bypass city halls and either fund existing militant organisations such as FIGHT in Rochester (although these could never allow the federal government to be their core funder) or, in communities not already organized, seek out local leadership to initiate the process of building a resident organization. Amendments to OEO funding in the summer of 1965 ruled out any such "creative federalism". These gave city halls the right to select the official Community Action Agency (CAA) for their community and reserved two-thirds of the CAA boards for business representative and elected officials.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Davidson |first1=Roger |title=The War on Poverty: Experiment in Federalism |journal=The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science |date=1969 |volume=385 |issue=Evaluating the War on Poverty |pages=1–13 |doi=10.1177/000271626938500102 |jstor=1037532 |s2cid=154640268 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/1037532}}</ref> There was no prospect of a federal mandate favoring Alinsky's organizing model.

The one-year OEO grant for the program at Syracuse that had hired Alinsky was not renewed.{{sfnp|Horwitt|1989|p=48}} When the program trainees began organizing residents against city agencies, the mayor withdrew cooperation.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Kifner|first=John|date=15 January 1967|title=Saul D. Alinsky; A Professional Radical Rallies the Poor|url=http://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1967/01/15/133018222.html?pdf_redirect=true&site=false|access-date=2022-01-09|website=timesmachine.nytimes.com|language=en}}</ref>