Policy and Organizing Complementarity in Community Change Campaigns

This paper analyzes the intra-organizational partnerships in the Sweet Home Chicago Campaign for affordable housing. It outlines how this particular community change campaign effectively brought together the policy and community organizing traditions of campaigning. After outlining the general histories of various campaign strategies, it identifies Kristina Smock's model of complementarity as a way of partnering disparate traditions. From Smock's work and the example of Sweet Home Chicago, the paper identifies five elements that mark the potential for a policy-organizing partnership driven campaign.