ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I discuss two related examples of home-based child-care worker organizing projects in the United States: the Home Daycare Justice Committee in Rhode Island and the Unity Campaign in Alexandria, Virginia. Each of these were relatively successful efforts led by African American and Latina immigrant home-based child-care providers working with established, community-organizing groups. The organizations which began the projects practice a form of “bottom-up” community organizing, involving a variety of techniques which distinguish this organizing from other kinds. Such techniques include participatory research, direct action, participatory planning and evaluation, and rank-and-file-led lobbying and advocacy. Such an approach corresponds generally to the “women-centered” (as opposed to Alinksky-style) organizing typology identified by researchers of community organizing (Martin 2002; Stall and Stoecker 1998). Allie B. Smith, a home-based child-care worker and participant in the Unity Campaign, commented that in this kind of “bottom-up” approach to organizing, organizers “teach you how to do for yourself . . . They’re there to help you, but they’re not there to tell you ‘sit down and I’m going to do this for you.’ You’ve got to do it on your own.”2
