Organizing for New York - Incite at Columbia University

Completed Project

Organizing for New York

Trayvon Martin's father Tracy Martin and his mother Sabrina Fulton at the Union Square protest against Trayvon's shooting death. March 21, 2012. Photo by David Shankbone.
  • Timeframe 2015–2017
  • Project Team
    • Adam Reich Co-Principal Investigator
    • Terrell Frazier Co-Principal Investigator
  • Funded by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

In September 2015, Incite Institute launched Organizing for New York—the first comprehensive study of organizers across social justice struggles in New York City.

Using a respondent-driven sampling design, the goal of the project was to understand the sets of understandings and practices that make organizers most effective at social change work, and to see how these understandings and practices differ across different sub-networks of organizers.

"Die-in" in Manhattan on December 12, 2014. Photo by The All-Nite Images.

As a part of this project, researchers asked social change leaders to identify those leaders whose work they most respect. They then asked the same question, iteratively, to those to whom they were referred. Over the course of several iterations, they have been able to “map” the field of social change leaders in the city.

Network diagram in white, red, and black with many nodes.
Prestige Network of 546 Social Justice Organizers in New York City, 2013-2014

Subsequent projects related to organizing for New York included identifying and interviewing intersectional organizers to understand how their position impacts their ability to make social change.

Related Works

  • open website

    Adam Reich, "The Organizational Trace of an Insurgent Moment: Occupy Wall Street and New York City’s Social Movement Field, 2004 to 2015", Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, March 22, 2017

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