A role story: Emergent tensions during the socialization of staff community organizers

Abstract

In this paper, I seek to understand how staff members of Faith in Indiana (a Midwestern federation of the national faith-based community organizing network Faith in Action) perceive and talk about navigating their new roles during their staff training period. I ask the following questions: (1) What do new staff members of this federation perceive as the tensions in their new roles? and (2) How does their manner of navigating those tensions impact staff retention? To answer these questions, I analyzed staff members’ perceptions of Faith in Indiana’s staff training period as documented in staff member’s weekly reports. To explore patterns of staff retention, I divided staff members into two groups: those that stayed less than and at least one year. First, I used open and deductive coding with the subset of reports covering the first three months for each staff member. I then interpreted staff reflections on their roles through the Ganz (2009) lens of stories of self, us, and now, leading to the identification of six key role tensions. Finally, I used multidimensional scaling of key role tensions to explore the relationship between these tensions and staff retention. These analyses offered an opportunity for individual- and team-based reflection on (1) how new staff members navigate some of the tensions inherent to community organizing in their early days in staff roles and (2) the underlying influences behind staff retention.