Religious Communities and Empowerment in Community Organizing: The Case of Turin

The approach of community organizing to building and empowering local communities has become increasingly popular in the last decades, both because of the past involvement in community organizing of popular personalities such as Barack Obama, and because of the crisis of more traditional practices of civil society building. The main promoter of this approach worldwide is today the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), based in Chicago, which has been founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, who has also systematized the main principles of communities organizing. Since the beginning of this approach, religious communities have played a crucial role in it, because they often represent key institutions in run down social and urban contexts marked by the lack of other kinds of civil society organization. This paper, based on a community organizing project recently started in the northern periphery of the city of Turin under the coordination of the local university, aims at casting light in particular on the role of religious institutions and organizations in processes of community empowerment. The paper, based on about thirty interviews to local religious leaders, will try to analyze the different conceptions of power and community empowerment put forward by religious leaders belonging to different faiths: both the majority Catholic tradition, and old and recent minorities.