Movements at the Station gathers the writing of Joel Dignam from the blog of the same name, his earlier blog Scit Necessitas, Medium, and other sites including the Change Agency, Australian Progress and Plan to Win.
Joel is an organiser and campaigner with broad experience in non-profits, unions, and electoral politics in Australia and the UK. He is currently the Director of ‘Better Renting’, a renters rights charity that he founded in 2018.
The collection includes book reviews and articles on campaign strategy, the craft of organising, organisational structure and leadership.
Joel Dignam reviews Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s ‘The Starfish and the Spider’. The book delves into ideas and language around decentralisation with useful examples from history, social movements and commerce. It also includes practical tips for putting decentralisation into practice.
Joel Dignam analyses two campaign moments: Stop Adani’s targeting of the ALP in the 2018 Queensland state election and the UK women’s suffrage campaign targeting of Liberals in 1905. The lesson? Target those most likely to give you what you want, and sometimes that means creating political risk for them.
Joel Dignam reviews Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organising for Power in the Gilded Age. McAlevey outlines a critique of most contemporary union campaigning, using case studies and other analysis to argue for a deeper more rigorous approach to organising.
For volunteers or staff to be driven to do their work, it must be motivational, both ‘extrinsically’ and ‘intrinsically’. However, we often the intrinsic elements of the work. Read on to learn about how to design tasks to make them more intrinsically motivational. Your staff and volunteers will benefit!