This toolkit is a short guide to strategic communications, based on extensive research and building on the experience of activists and communicators from around the globe. It aims to provide a framework rather than a blueprint; helping you to ask the right questions rather than giving you the right answers.
Directed-network campaigns combine self-organized people power with enough centralized structure to focus on clear political and cultural targets. The Networked Change Report maps out the strategies and practices that made today’s most successful advocacy campaigns work.
Not all coalitions are made equal. While alliances between unions and community organizations are an important and useful strategy for social change, their power and success varies greatly depending on the strategic choices of those involved.
Social change can be messy and challenging work! It helps to have frameworks to make sense of the situations we find ourselves in and plan for the way ahead. This article outlines four models, by Martin Luther King, Jr, George Lakey, Bill Moyer and Tim Gee.
Resources for inducting new volunteers into a peacebuilding community project. Includes insights into how one voluntary group operated, consensus decision making, and internal conflict resolution processes.
Community organisers need to continually analyse their communities. What’s going on that has implications for our issue and campaign? Which groups do we need to be connecting with? How is power being exercised?
This article outlines three frameworks of organising. They are broad based organising; social movement organising; and community development informed organising.
This article summarises findings from a survey that Plan to Thrive did with nearly 200 activists in 2014. This post covers all the nuggets of wisdom elicited in response to the question ‘what have you figured out about sustaining yourself as an activist’? We think there is something for everyone here, happy reading. As with […]
Group morale is a key contributor to the success of a group, increasing cohesion, reducing burnout and preventing activist turnover. Build team relationships; resolve conflicts and improve communication; and celebrate success.
This handbook is a resource for trainers focused on community safety and peacekeeping. It includes training resources for practical ways to intervene in violence, to transform conflict and to build peace. Many parts of this manual may be translatable to other contexts.
The goal of this book is to help become more aware of your own relationship with power. Despite the many negative associations and memories we have about power (mostly it’s misuse), power isn’t good or bad, and it is necessary.
This handbook is a handy and unique resource for activists and community workers engaged in work for peace at a community level throughout Australia. It includes practical ways to intervene in violence, to transform conflict and to build peace.
This guide is intended to be an introduction to the Senate and its procedures. It is designed to give NGO staff an understanding of the basics of the Senate and how to best achieve policy and campaigning goals.
Need to contact Australian Members of Parliament? Here’s the contact list and even some handy mailing labels.
Where to find more tools for social change – check out this list of awesome websites featuring tools for social change.
Allies work is key to building strong and diverse groups and social movements. An ally is someone outside an oppressed group or identity, who commits to standing alongside those people.
Decolonizing Solidarity is a book by Clare Land which offers directions (and knotty dilemmas) to people seeking to support Indigenous Struggles. This article includes suggested guidelines for book clubs discussing Decolonizing Solidarity which are also beneficial for other groups doing anti-oppression and ally work.
We need to talk about how we both prepare ourselves for, and support each other through our responses to stress and trauma, whether it be from police brutality, another institutional force, or from conflict within our own communities.
The RAINBOW framework draws on Amanda Tattersall’s extensive research and experience around building coalitions. Successful coalitions are built on strong relationships and clarity of purpose.
Community organising is a way of working that trains and builds citizen leaders inside community-based organisations. We need to build strong and vibrant civil society organisations that act for the common good.