Community organizing is a process where people who live in proximity to each other or share some common problem come together into an organization that acts in their shared self-interest. Unlike those who promote consensus-based community building, community organizers generally assume that social change necessarily involves conflict and social struggle in order to generate collective power for the powerless. Community organizing has as a core goal the generation of durable power for an organization representing the community, allowing it to influence key decision-makers on a range of issues over time. In the ideal, for example, this can get community-organizing groups a place at the table before important decisions are made. Community organizers work with and develop new local leaders, facilitating coalitions and assisting in the development of campaigns. A central goal of organizing is the development of a robust, organized, local democracy bringing community members together across differences to fight together for the interests of the community.

Community organizers attempt to influence government, corporations, and institutions, increase direct representation within decision-making bodies, and foster general social reform more generally. Where negotiations fail, these organizations quickly seek to inform others outside of the organization of the issues being addressed and expose or pressure the decision-makers through a variety of means, including picketing, boycotting, sit-ins, petitioning, and electoral politics. Organizing groups often seek out issues they know will generate controversy and conflict. This allows them to draw in and educate participants, build commitment, and establish a reputation for advancing local justice.

Community organizers generally seek to build groups that are democratic in governance, open and accessible to community members, and concerned with the general health of a specific interest group, rather than the community as a whole. In addition, community organizing seeks to broadly empower community members,through mobilizing efforts, with the end goal of "distributing" power and resources more equally between the community members and external political and social figures of power. When adapting the goal of community empowerment, organizers recognize the uneven distribution of material and social resources within society as the root cause of the community's issues. The process of creating empowerment starts with admitting that power gaps and resource inequalities exist in society and affects an individual's personal life. Though community organizers share the goal of community empowerment, community organizing itself is defined and understood in a variety ways. There are different approaches to community organizing. These include:

Because of its focus on "local" issues and relationships between members, individual groups generally prioritize relatively local community interests by focusing on local issues. There has been an attempt to build a general community organizing practice model that ties the different types of community organizing together despite their differences. Scholars Shane R. Brady and Mary Katherine O'Connor construct a starting point for a general practice model, a model that defines community organizing as its own field of practice; however, this model depends on existing practice models adapted by the different types of community organizing. For example, FBCOs and many grassroots organizing models use the "social action approach", which is built on the work of Saul Alinsky from the 1930s into the 1970s. By contrast, feminist organizing follows a "community-building approach," which emphasizes raising consciousness to support the community's empowerment.

Grassroots organizing is distinctive for its bottom-up approach to organizing. Grassroots organizers are oftentimes members of the community, working to organize power collectively, rather than hierarchically. This type of organizing uses a process where people collectively act in the interest of their communities and the common good. According to scholar Brian D. Christens, grassroots organizing focuses on building and maintaining interpersonal relationships between their community members. Building social relationships allow community members to enhance both their collaborative and deliberative skills, to better handle conflict, and to strengthen civil engagement. Some networks of community organizations that employ this method and support local organizing groups include National People's Action and ACORN. Although efforts in grassroots organizing are significant in marginalized communities, it is specifically popular among marginalized communities of color.

"Door-knocking" grassroots organizations like ACORN organize poor and working-class members recruiting members one by one in the community. Because they go door-to-door, they are able to reach beyond established organizations and the "churched" to bring together a wide range of less privileged people. FBCOs have tended to organize more middle-class people, because their institutional membership is generally drawn from the mainline denominations. ACORN tends to stress the importance of constant action to maintain the commitment of a less rooted group of participants. ACORN and other neighborhood-based groups like the Organization for a Better Austin had a reputation of being more forceful than faith-based (FBCO) groups, in part because they needed to continually act to keep their non-institutionalized members engaged, and there are indications that their local groups were more staff directed than volunteer) directed. However, the same can be said for many forms of organizing, including FBCOs. The "door-knocking" approach is more time-intensive than the "organization of organizations" approach of FBCOs and requires more organizers who, partly as a result, can be lower paid with more turnover. Unlike the existing FBCO national "umbrella" and other grassroots organizations, ACORN maintains a centralized national agenda and exerts some centralized control over local organizations. Because ACORN USA was a 501(c)4 organization under the tax code, it was able to participate directly in election activities, but contributions to it were not tax-exempt.

Grassroots organizing is vulnerable, being dependent on the support of more powerful people; its goals can be easily thwarted. Because grassroots organizing focuses on building relationships within the community, scholars note that grassroots community organizing can be passive and depoliticizing. This approach to building community empowerment does not aim for a specific political or social goal. In other words, building relationships do not always directly confront institutions, though it might challenge an individual's views through one-on-one conversations with other individuals in the community.

Feminist organizing, also known as women's community organizing, is community organizing with a feminist motivation. The goals of feminist organizing include: increasing women's employment opportunities; improving women's physical and mental well-being; and, raising consciousness. Organizers prioritize raising consciousness for women to understand how their personal struggles are interconnected with societal inequalities. While women have participated in grassroots organizing, the characteristics of feminism distinguish feminist organizing from other forms of grassroots organizing.