While wasting time on the political blogs, I ran across this interesting comment in the comments of an anti-community organizing article: Community Organizers are the same thing as Community Outreach Ministers :

The problem with the title “community organizer” is that most Americans are not familiar with it because it is an inner city position/term.

HOWEVER,people are familiar with the title of someone who does exactly the same job in the rural areas of America: the Community Outreach Minister.

This person is employed by a church to find and then help people who need it. Example: the poor elderly lady who needs a new roof; the family who has holes in their floor; the population pocket (community) that has no street lights or a recreation area with a hoop and with a baseball diamond; the extremely rural area that needs a paved road so that the school bus can pick up the children that live along the road.

I hope that this clarifies the job “community organizer.”

I tried googling: +"Community Organizer" +"Community Outreach Minister" and only got one hit, which makes it a North/South split, rather than an Urban/Rural one (though it could be the same commenter since its essentially the same set of examples---or I'm just adding to the echo chamber):

You all don't know your lingo. A community organizer is the same thing as an community outreach minister in a church. The former is yankee and the latter is southern. The last church I belonged to did exactly what a community organizer does: got the (church) community to put a roof on an elderly (poor) lady's house, put a floor in a poor man's trailer, clothed a family whose home had burned down, and organized a group of families who lived on a dirt road to petition their senator for C-funds to pave the road so that the school bus could come up it and get their children. So what is your problem? Ignorance?

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