What is community activism? 

As with all terms coined by the communitarians, "community activism" can mean whatever we want it to mean.  It could mean "an activity designed to enhance the community." To a Hegelian thinker, it could also mean using local talent as a front to achieve international communitarian goals. It is generally expected that anyone who speaks out in defense of their neighborhood or neighbors can also be convinced to become a communitarian thinker. 

Community activism, from what I have witnessed on the US west coast, operates primarily as a front organization for Local Agenda 21. Activists raise the "issues" used to justify revising land use laws (with the ultimate goal being regulating all citizens and all private property). New local citizen councils are created every day only to write and pass new laws that will micro-manage all land and people. Whatever their stated purpose, they are all charged with incorporating sustainable development principles into the "local" economy.  Sustainable development is the justification for reinventing the complete structure of every nation in the world, including the U.S. government

Our wisest neighbors join the "new" group or council or committee of "stakeholders," who always "partner" with UN scientists, major NGOs, banks, employers, corporate stores, and contractors/developers. They use lovely new language and always appear very smart, official, righteous, and beyond the reach of the little (uneducated) people.  Unprepared for the onslaught of expert, slick presentations mixed with a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how important their work really is, and then told how hard these goodhearted people worked on the plan because they "care" so much about the community, most locals give up on arguing and just get stuck going along with the entire show. Since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, almost every inch of the world has become communitarianized in this way. (But there are a few places where the locals defeated the plans, and I will find time to link to them here!)

The leaders of these community "visions for the future" are trained in exclusive international communitarian programs. Local dissent is often not even allowed by the communitarian faciliatators during these meetings. Their stated goal is always to "include" the locals in creating a "new" vision  for their home community. But the  truth is, these plans use a method called a "dialogue to consensus," a newfangled Soviet way of making decisions that eliminates the need for an actual debate, or a vote. It just requires everyone to "agree." So the only actual locals who get to have any input are the ones who agree to go along with the whole plan. 

Dissenting opinions? Anyone with a real stake in the community (homeowners, business people, service providers, etc) who openly challenges the authority of the committee to make such drastic changes to U.S. government policy are ridiculed into shutting up, or labeled as "constitutionalists" for clinging to such a silly, outdated concept as nationalism. Anyone mentioning the more sinister aspects of the policing Agenda are summarily discounted as conspiracy theorists or tin-foil-hats and  sucessfully excluded from speaking when attending any future meetings.

What is alternative community activism?

When I first started going to my American neighborhood "meetings" I was a complete novice in Soviet style bureaucracy. I was confused and unsure about what was going on. I began by asking simple questions about the terms the leaders were using to descibe their "vision." This opened Pandora's Box, literally, because much to my suprise and dismay, my Seattle government representatives did not know what their terms meant either!

I was absolutely floored to find out somebody, somewhere had come up with this bizarre idea that a few of my neighbors should partner with the Pentagon, the KGB and the Mossad, and together they would form neighborhood policing "task teams." These new neighborhood committees, led by "new" Community Policing Officers trained in communitarianism, were empowered to rewrite Seattle Municipal Code. They claimed revisions to the law were necessary to "balance" our constitutional rights against the "health and safety" of the community. Yet, these "experts" couldn't tell me the definition for any of their terms, and couldn't tell me where these new ideas had originated. It took me a year of intensive research to find their source: Dr. Amitai Etzioni.

I've learned a lot about the community agenda since March of 1999. Since then I've amassed over 4000 hardcopy government and NGO planning documents, volunteered thousands of documents and work hours to the Dawson v. Seattle lawsuit, built a massive research website with over 10,000 exit links to direct government and NGO sources, and today I'm planning on using some of that accumulated knowledge to "help out" in my new local community, which just happens to be a designated "buffer zone" for a World Heritage Site.