Jim Diers

Jim has recently been appointed to the Expert Reference Group on Community Organising and Communities First, by Nick Hurd MP, Minister for Civil Society in the UK. His work in the UK over the last two years includes the delivery of workshops to a wide range of organisations (including NHS Trusts, Local Authorities, NGOs and think tanks including the Centre for Social Justice). More recently, he delivered capacity building workshops to all applicants of NESTA’s Community Challenge.

Participatory democracy has been Jim Diers’ preoccupation and his career for the past 34 years. Jim moved to Seattle after graduating from Grinnell College in 1975 and for six years Jim worked as an Alinsky-style community organiser in the low-income, racially diverse neighbourhoods of Rainier Valley. Bringing people together to take action on issues ranging from dangerous intersections to nuclear power plants, Jim helped the South End Seattle Community Organisation grow to include 25 member churches and neighbourhood organisations. Its annual meetings drew as many as 800 people.

Jim spent the next six years with Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound where he organised medical centre councils to review budget and quality-of-care issues from a consumer perspective.

In 1988, Mayor Charles Royer appointed Jim to direct the City of Seattle’s new Office of Neighbourhoods. Jim was reappointed by the subsequent mayors, Norm Rice in 1990 and Paul Schell in 1998. By the end of Jim’s 14-year tenure, the four-person Office had grown into a Department of Neighborhoods with 100 staff.

The Department’s mission is to decentralise and coordinate City services, strengthen communities and their organisations, and work in partnership with these organisations to preserve and enhance the neighbourhoods. The Department manages 13 Little City Halls that provide basic services to citizens and serve as meeting places for neighbourhood organisations. It supports about 400 community self-help projects each year through a $4.5 million Neighborhood Matching Fund that was recognised by the Ford Foundation and Kennedy School of Government as one of the most innovative local government programmes in the United States. Another programme of community empowerment involved 30,000 people in the development of 37 neighbourhood plans.

In 2001, Jim was named Public Employee of the Year by the Municipal League of King County. That same year he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Law from Grinnell College.
After leaving the Department of Neighborhoods in 2002, Jim Diers worked for a year as Interim Director of the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, for three years as Executive Director of the South Downtown Foundation, and for five years as Director of Seattle Community Partnerships for the University of Washington.

Currently, Jim teaches courses on community organising and community development at the University of Washington. Jim also speaks, conducts workshops and provides technical assistance to communities and agencies around the world as a faculty member of the Asset- Based Community Development Institute and as the author of ‘Neighbor Power: Building Community the Seattle Way’ which is available in English and Chinese editions.