Case Study: Organising in Rising Tide, 2022-24 

How Rising Tide organises and mobilises to achieve broad movement appeal in the current activist landscape.

Introduction

Rising Tide is a grassroots climate justice movement. Based out of Newcastle, New South Wales, but organising nationally, Rising Tide takes action with the goal of ending fossil fuel exports from Australia. In a changing activism landscape where established environmental organisations struggle to organise and mobilise in large numbers, Rising Tide turned out three thousand people to its People’s Blockade in 2023. In 2024, these numbers more than doubled, with over seven thousand people turning up to block the world’s largest coal port in Newcastle.

Written in late 2024, this case study seeks to investigate how Rising Tide organised and mobilised over a two year period to achieve this broad appeal across the climate movement. The entirely volunteer run, grassroots movement employs a range of mobilising and organising techniques and models, drawing from momentum organising, and using hub and spoke and affinity group organising to varying extents. 

Location

Australia, with a strategic, local focus in Newcastle 

Time Period

2022 relaunch – 2024 

Background

Rising Tide started as a climate action group in Newcastle in 2005. In 2022 the group was “relaunched” with a new organising model, campaign strategy and goals. The centrepiece of the Rising Tide strategy is Newcastle Coal Port. The largest coal port in the world, facilitating Australia’s export of millions of tonnes of coal every year, Newcastle Coal Port is both a prime target for direct climate action, and a symbolic centre of Rising Tide’s stated mission – to end the age of fossil fuels in Australia.

When it was founded in 2005, Rising Tide focused on non-violent direct action aimed at fossil fuel exports – including blocking railway and port infrastructure – alongside prosecuting public interest legal challenges to regulate the climate impacts of coal. While there are archival references to other Rising Tide groups around the world from the early 2000s, re-founding Newcastle member Shaun Murray notes that these groups were not globally coordinated – but rather arose from “parallel seeds” and had similar DNA. The original Newcastle group disbanded in 2012 as members moved into climate research and other campaigning spaces. 

The climate activists and Newcastle locals behind the 2022 relaunch of Rising Tide are Naomi Hodgson, Shaun Murray and Alexa Stuart – though only Naomi was involved in the organisation’s earlier incarnation.

The latest iteration of Rising Tide retains a core focus on civil disobedience and direct action. This is underpinned by a strong supporting infrastructure of strategy, campaigning, organising and mobilising and a desire to grow beyond Newcastle.

In an interview, Rising Tide organiser Zack Schofield explained that the impetus for this relaunch was the void of climate action created in the post-COVID years. The climate movement had seen strong public enthusiasm for direct climate action in the years before the pandemic, with hundreds of thousands turning out to School Strikes and other climate related direct action events. But mass climate protest declined in the early 2020s. This was driven by many factors, including the pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, successive conservative governments introducing anti protest legislation.

Rising Tide endeavors to combats both the perceived lack of mobilising power exhibited by many mainstream environmental NGOs, and the lack of targeted strategy in more grassroots disruptive actors. Rising Tide organisers describe a vision to re-energise climate activism with a clear-eyed strategy and campaign goals that balance ambition and realism and are supported by strong culture and group values.  

The Rising Tide DNA

The goal of Rising Tide is a simple one – to end the age of fossil fuels in Australia and pave the way with a just transition. Rising Tide have three key demands of State and Federal governments: 

1. Immediately cancel all new fossil fuel projects. 
2. Tax fossil fuel export profits at 75% to fund community and industrial transition and pay for climate loss and damage. 
3. End all coal exports from Newcastle – the world’s largest coal port – by 2030. 

To achieve these goals Rising Tide has a strategy focused around building up a movement of civil disobedience, informed by a range of strategic frameworks that draw from social movement theory.

Key frameworks include Story Based Strategy, Social License Theory informed by the “DWUNC” or Diversity, Worthiness, Unity, Numbers and Commitment principles; and the Momentum Model of Organising, drawing from the work of Paul Engler especially. 

As a growing movement, Rising Tide has core DNA that underpins everything they do. This DNA is outlined in their Handbook which includes key values, key strategic, cultural and decision making principles, and detailed change frameworks.

The handbook outlines five core values – Justice, Care, Community, Courage and Impact – as well as 10 core cultural principles which aim to avoid common cultural pitfalls in progressive movements and hold all members accountable for creating a positive culture. These principles are: 

1. ​​Assuming good intent 
2. Calling it in before calling it out 
3. Growth mindset 
4. Productive disagreement 
5. Challenging our privilege 
6. Organising for diversity 
7. Affirmative action 
8. Leaderfulness 
9. Prioritising systemic change 
10. Mutual Aid Organising & Mobilising 

The Rising Tide DNA seeks to make social movement theory accessible to anyone who believes in the cause of the group. Organisers stress that having solid foundational movement DNA is key to their growth strategy. The DNA is designed to be replicable by members who are entrusted to disseminate it in their own groups and hubs across the nation as the movement grows.

Newcastle will remain the strategic centre of Rising Tide’s work – as it hosts the landmark target of ‘The World’s Largest Coal Port’, as well as being a progressive city primed for transition with a strong local union presence. However, Rising Tide has begun to rapidly develop into a national movement, which brings new organising challenges and opportunities. 

Organising & Mobilising

Organising and mobilising members and allies is key to Rising Tide’s strategy. In interviews, organisers were clear that they do make a distinction between organising and mobilising, but that sometimes these acivities have to happen concurrently and are therefore not mutually exclusive. Shaun Murray referenced the Momentum model of organising, describing cycles of organising to increase leadership and capacity, followed by mass mobilisation and absorption, leading to more focus on organising. 

Organising, in their words, is the slower work of building relationships and connections between individuals within Rising Tide as well as other movements, groups and organisations, and developing leadership and capacity in their base.

In this sense, organising is the work of broadening and deepening the movement. Mobilising is work that demonstrates the group’s existing community power, usually by turning people out in person, in large numbers, to participate in activities or action-taking. Often, mobilising needs to happen more quickly than organising, and therefore draws on established, concrete relationships. 

An event like the People’s Blockade is a prime example of the cyclical and interdependent nature of  mobilising and organising. The People’s Blockade is a mass mobilisation,  intended to be a broadly accessible community event and an on-ramp to mobilise people who may not usually come to a protest, or don’t have an existing connection to the climate justice movement.

Once this mobilisation is over, new connections have been created between Rising Tide and those that attended the blockade. These connections can then be absorbed and the slower, deeper work of organising – deepening relationships and building leadership, takes priority. When the next moment of mobilisation comes up, this cycle will have extended Rising Tide’s capacity, allowing them to mobilise even more people than at their last action. The success of this approach is evident in the increase in numbers from the 2023 Blockade of 3,000 people, to nearly 7,000 in 2024. 

Rising Tide is entirely volunteer run and operates with minimal hierarchy between members. Members may hold specific roles as part of working groups or to clarify their responsibilities, but these roles are not concrete and there are no distinctions made about the value of this work and no attempts to quantify contributions.

All contributions are valuable and unquantifiable. Rather, there is a recognition that there are concentric circles of commitment in terms of the amount of time and work that members may be willing or able to offer.

There is therefore no definitive recorded number of current Rising Tide members. 

Organising – A ‘sort of’ Hub and Spoke Model

The organising model and structure of Rising Tide is not static, but continues to be developed iteratively, collaboratively and responsively as the group grows.

In the early stages of the relaunch, the group remained primarily Newcastle focused, propelled forward by the informal but dedicated leadership of a few committed individuals. After running Climate Camp in Newcastle in April 2023, Rising Tide had people from around the country keen to contribute. Initially these informal groups only helped to mobilise their communities toward the November 2023 People’s Blockade. However, over several months from the end of 2023 to early 2024, Rising Tide undertook a process to formalise a national model of organising these emergent groups. 

The organising model was generated through an iterative process with those who had worked informally with Rising Tide in previous months. Rising Tide ran training weekends for interested groups, during which they proposed a new hub model to be developed in collaboration with attendees. As a result, the new hub model was co-developed by those already active in emerging, organic hubs. 

Formalised hubs were nominated based on minimum requirements that the group decided on collaboratively – namely their capacity to self-sustain and hold strategic alignment with Rising Tide. The hubs function autonomously and send nominated delegates to fortnightly meetings where they participate in decision-making on a consensus basis. The hubs have contributed to capacity building, training and mobilising people to the 2024 Blockade, while also acting as a “sanity check” for strategic decisions, drawing from the deep and varied experience of the hub members. Hubs have carried out their own protest actions and community events in 2024, and there is scope for hubs to carry out more autonomous actions in the future. 

By late 2024 Rising Tide had 7 of these hubs around the country, constituting a “sort of” hub and spoke model. These hubs are Brisbane, Northern Rivers, Newcastle, Sydney, Canberra, Victoria/Melbourne and Adelaide, with “nascent” hubs also forming in the Central Coast, Western Sydney, Blue Mountains, South Coast, regional Victoria and Darwin. 

With nationalising came the question of localised hub-run campaigns. As of late 2024, hubs do not run their own local campaigns, however this is a live question within Rising Tide. There is interest within the hubs to run their own campaigns locally, while others believe that the focus should remain on Newcastle. Regardless of the final decision, organiser Zack Schofield takes a movement ecology approach.

The intention is that the skills learned by Rising Tide members are transferable to local contexts, regardless of whether or not those campaigns remain under a Rising Tide banner. 

The emergent structure of the hubs also introduced some “growing pains” as attempts were made to backfill policy and process to support this new model. In 2023/24, there was recognition of the need for more formalised leadership that included people outside of Newcastle. A National Steering Team was proposed in early 2024.

Through another iterative process in close collaboration with hub members, this team was established and currently includes seven of the most active and experienced Rising Tide members from across the country. The team meet once or twice a week, and its primary role is to develop core strategic proposals to take to the broader group, allowing the movement to build consensus. It also acts as a snap decision-making team when consensus decision-making is not viable. 

If your strategy involves mass numbers of people they need to feel supported and empowered and safe in the culture in order to enact your strategy.

This model is currently working for Rising Tide, but it is clear in their DNA that their structure will grow and change shape in order to accommodate further evolution over time. The growth the group has seen in the last two years alone is impressive, and the flexibility to accommodate change is undoubtedly a part of that success. 

Organiser Zack Schofield quotes Paul Engler, saying “culture eats strategy for breakfast”, and elaborates “if your strategy involves mass numbers of people they need to feel supported and empowered and safe in the culture in order to enact your strategy”. Further, he says

so if everyone is aligned on purpose, strategy…goals, culture – …these are really, really important things that allow the security to then iterate on the structure to facilitate, all of those outcomes that everyone’s already signed up for.

Organising for Diversity

One of Rising Tide’s cultural principles is to “Organise for diversity”. Rising Tide organiser Zack Schofield paraphrased author Stephen MR. Covey saying “this work moves at the speed of trust” when working to organise across cultural or political boundaries. 

Rising Tide is intended to be an intergenerational movement. The age diversity of Rising Tide groups is strong across all their hubs around Australia. The goal is for both new and experienced activists of any age to be able to find a home in Rising Tide, including those completely new to climate justice activism.

The strategy is easily understood and digestible, the culture open and clearly embedded, and goals are ambitious but grounded in the realism of ‘intent to win’.

This approach does attract diverse members – experienced activists, young people moving on from the School Striker movement, and  ‘dyed-in-the-wool greenies’ who may have seen bad culture, unwinnable campaigns or unclear strategy devour earlier movements. 

This diversity can, however, at times lead to ‘culture clash’ between different schools of thought, communities of practice and generations within the climate movement. Rising Tide employs tools such as spokescouncils and consensus-based decision making to attempt to work through differences and ensure diverse opinions are heard. These tactics seem to be effective in reaching consensus and creating middle ground, however how this will play out as the movement grows is not certain. 

In the two years since its relaunch, Rising Tide has developed relationships with local Aboriginal leaders and organisers, as well as creating space and providing resources for a growing People of Colour Caucus. The Caucus provided strong feedback to Rising Tide after the 2023 Blockade, particularly with regard to interactions and attitudes towards the police that had the potential to alienate people of colour and other marginalised people.

This feedback was integrated into various aspects of the culture, workshops and training for the 2024 Blockade. In addition, Rising Tide train their base in principles of diversity and inclusion and have provided training around privilege and oppression.

The DNA and adaptability of Rising Tide as a movement is a strength, allowing it to incorporate new ideas and new ways of working as it grows. 

Worker justice is also an active area of work within Rising Tide. Zack Schofield, Union Relations Lead for Rising Tide, spoke at length about the work Rising Tide had been doing in coalition with the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA). After the Daily Telegraph published unflattering remarks from the secretary of the MUA’s Newcastle Branch about Rising Tide, the group organised a meeting between local and national members of the MUA, Rising Tide and other climate organisers in Newcastle. The meeting was to discuss a more productive relationship going forward and to consult with the MUA on what they would want to see for their future. 

The result was an update to one of Rising Tide’s core demands to include a clearer call for taxation to fund a just transition, as well as embedding class and worker justice more deeply in demands and messaging.  Reaching a level of mutual understanding with the MUA is a clear example of how organsising for diversity and working at the speed of trust can result in productive outcomes. The impact of this work was abundantly clear at the 2024 People’s Blockade. In the last moments of the Blockade, while the last coal ship was coming into port, all the activists on the water chanted in solidarity with the MUA workers onboard. 

However, Rising Tide’s work on diversity is ongoing. They currently have no explicit strategy on organising for diversity and how this would be resourced, which seems out of alignment with their stated values.

Rising Tide’s membership, as with much of the climate movement, remains majority white and middle-class. Rising Tide’s strategy and theory of change centres those who are able to engage in civil disobedience with less consequence and risk – those that are white, able-bodied, and middle-class. Their strategy allows people to leverage that privilege to create systemic change. While training on privilege, oppression and cultural values can create awareness among their base of this inherent privilege, it does not necessarily create space for people of diverse backgrounds or from marginalised communities to fully participate. 

Affinity Group Mobilising & Organising

As Rising Tide aims to mobilise increasingly large numbers of people, it needs additional tools. An affinity group model with facilitated spokescouncils was utilised at the 2024 People’s Blockade.

These affinity groups – comprised of a small number (5-15) of people who know each other – are autonomous and agree to take action and self-organise either within the broader movement or towards a specific event such as the People’s Blockade. Each group nominates a “spokesperson” to represent the group at regular spokescouncils where decisions are made by consensus. 

This model allows adaptability and action at scale based on shared understanding and principles. The spokescouncils are guided by the 10 decision making principles outlined in the Rising Tide Handbook, which establish group norms for each event to ensure equitable participation.

Decisions and consensus are reached by the spokescouncil and relayed to affinity groups via the spokesperson. Through this process affinity groups can decide how they want to operate, such as the actions they will engage in at the Blockade and the risks they are willing to entertain.

By outsourcing the peer-to-peer organising, or ‘relationship holding’, to people within their own affinity group, this model aims to allow more people to feel safe and able to take direct action.

This appears to have been successful, with thousands of individuals taking action at the 2024 People’s Blockade. 

An Unmissable Invitation – From Relational to Attractional

We need to pivot from a primarily relational model to a primarily attractional model where people are brought in because it’s the place to be, you know, because it’s where history is being made because they want to be part of it.

Rising Tide organisers characterise their organising model as primarily relational – creating and holding deep relationships with people. This is an important foundation of Rising Tide’s work, which requires committed people driven by the moral imperative of climate justice. However, as Rising Tide intentionally grew into a national movement, organisers recognised the need to employ an “attractional” model of organising as well.

To grow to the numbers needed – on their website 10,000 is the goal of their Climate Defense Pledge – Rising Tide needs to attract people of all backgrounds and abilities. In this sense, as organiser Zack Schofield says, people enter the movement not necessarily through a direct relationship but “because it’s the place to be… because it’s where history is being made because they want to be part of it.” 

The “vibes” and culture that Rising Tide creates is a significant part of this approach. The “vibe” of a movement or organisation can greatly affect its ceiling for impact.

The People’s Blockade is an excellent example of the vibe that Rising Tide cultivates – to attract those who may not already be connected relationally to the movement but looking for a way into action. While the People’s Blockade is an opportunity for direct action, it is promoted as a ‘Protestival’, with opportunities to participate in workshops, meet like-minded people, see live music, performance and art, and participate in legal paddle-outs off Horseshoe Beach. The intent is to offer something for everyone who may be interested in attending, even if they do not yet feel comfortable taking direct action.

This model again allows Rising Tide to act as an “onramp” into the climate justice movement for new people and facilitate their entry into action taking. The approach seems to be working, with the 2024 People’s Blockade turning out seven thousand people over the course of a week, more than double that of the previous year. 

Impact

Rising Tide references two historic case studies that demonstrate impact. The first is the Bentley Blockade, where a groundswell of people took direct action together and won – becoming “politically unpoliceable” via sheer numbers. The second is the Franklin River Dam Blockade, a landmark campaign that saw direct action combined with a national movement to successfully influence electoral politics. They use these case studies to demonstrate that there are precedents for the type of change and impact Rising Tide is seeking and argue that mobilising people power at scale is key to this success. 

We will build a community, an empowered community of resistance that will have so much more agency to deal with whatever is thrown our way over the coming decades. Folks, who will have an experience of campaigning, of action design, of community organizing, of having hard political conversations. That grows the agency of you as a citizen and that in itself is a good.

Rising Tide’s approach to organising and mobilising has already shown great success. They are employing a range of tactics, models and organising strategies at various scales to grow into a national movement.

The 2024 Blockade saw legal action against protest in the Supreme Court and at the state level, but 7000 people still turned out and the Blockade went ahead, almost exactly as planned. If this reaction by government and industry is anything to go by, Rising Tide is already succeeding in challenging the status quo. 

In addition to its stated goals of ending the age of fossil fuels, destroying the social license of the fossil fuel industry and transitioning to a clean energy future, Rising Tide is also committed to building the climate justice movement. In the words of organiser Zack Schofield, “We will build a community, an empowered community of resistance that will have so much more agency to deal with whatever is thrown our way over the coming decades. Folks, who will have an experience of campaigning, of action design, of community organizing, of having hard political conversations. That grows the agency of you as a citizen and that in itself is a good.” 

Zack continues “Despite not knowing exactly what victory looks like at this point, I do…really think…it looks like jumping into the abyss with people who have your back.” 

Rising Tide Resources

Rising Tide Website
The First Wave – Rising Tide Documentary

References & Sources

• Interview with Zack Schofield, organiser with Rising Tide 
• Interview with Shaun Murray, refounding member of Rising Tide 
• Rising Tide Handbook 
• Rising Tide Website 

About the Author

Isabella Todd is an organiser and activist, with a background in conservation biology, who has worked in the climate justice space for seven years. Isabella became a research fellow with the Commons Library in 2024 as part of the Movement Monitor Project. 

Movement Monitor Fellows Project

This resource was produced as part of the Movement Monitor Fellows project. Three climate activists were given support to produce resources that promote knowledge and understanding of the Australian climate movement, its practices and its impacts. 

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