Community involvement too often becomes a patronising, paternalistic process designed and delivered by professionals to control rather than enable and empower. What alternatives are there? Pat Thomson argues that within the international radical tradition we have some important answers and urges us to draw once again on the work of people like Saul Alinsky who encouraged those made poor by economic, demographic and social changes can take an equal part in designing solutions for their problems. In addition to those wider solidarities she also reminds us of our own traditions of community organising that have deeper roots and more tangible relevance to local concerns and everyday lives than the "manufactured civil society" we are in danger of creating.