Those who are working for particular reforms to be accomplished immediately will not be interested in neighborhood organization; only those will be interested who think that it is far more important for us to find the right method of attacking all our problems than to solve any one. We who believe in neighborhood organization believe that the neighborhood group is a more significant unit to identify ourselves with than any we have hitherto known in cities. People have been getting together in churches, in fraternal societies, in political parties, in industrial and commercial associations, but now in addition to these partial groups communities are to get together as communities. The neighborhood organization movement is not waiting for ideal institutions, or perfect men, but is finding whatever creative forces there are within a community and taking these and building the future with them. The neighborhood organization movement is a protest against both utopias on the one hand and a mechanicalized humanity on the other. It consists of the process of building always with the best we have, and its chief problem is to discover the methods by which the best we have can be brought to the surface. Neighborhood organization gives us a method which will revolutionize politics. ----- Footnote 80: This movement to form societies based on our occupations is of course, although usually unconscious, part of the whole syndicalist movement, and as such has real advantages which will be taken up later. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ XXIII AN INTEGRATED NEIGHBORHOOD -------------- HOW can an active and fruitful neighborhood life be brought into existence and fostered and nurtured? How can we unclose the sources within our own midst from which to draw our inspiration? And then how can the vision which we learn to see together be actualized? How can neighborhoods learn to satisfy their own needs through their own initiative? In other words how can the force generated by our neighborhood life become part of our whole civic and national life? How can an integrated neighborhood responsibility become a civic and national responsibility? There is no such thing as a neighborhood in its true sense, something more, that is, than the physical contiguity of people, until you have a neighborhood consciousness. Rows of houses, rows of streets, do not make a neighborhood. The place bond must give way to a consciousness of real union. This neighborhood consciousness can be evolved in five ways: 1. By regular meetings of neighbors for the consideration of neighborhood and civic problems, not merely sporadic and occasional meetings for specific objects. 2. By a genuine discussion at these regular meetings.