Community Organising and Digital Campaigning Webinar Series

Introduction

The Community Organising and Digital Campaigning Webinar Series by Australian Progress explores the winning case studies and insights from Australia and around the world on how to best organise and lead digital campaigns. Learn from expert organisers and campaigners who’ve engaged in powerful campaign tactics, mobilised first-time voters, pivoted strategies during the pandemic and won big in progressive change.

• US Election Debrief
• Lessons from the Northern Territory (Australia) election
• Lessons from Aotearoa New Zealand
• Lessons from the US: Scaling up through functional organising
• Hahrie Hahn
• Alicia Garza

US Election Debrief

Reflections on what was learnt from the US election and key insights from some of the organisations involved, such as Organising Corps, the Working Families Party, coworker.org, Jobs With Justice and Momentum. This was followed by a series of structured conversations by organisers and campaigners to discuss their thoughts and insights about the outcome of the 2020 US Presidential election and what it has meant for movements in Australia.

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Lessons from the Northern Territory

GetUp’s First Nations Justice team travelled over 40,000km between Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory (Australia) to listen to the key issues that matter to them, in a state-wide campaign to increase voter engagement and turnout in rural and remote communities for the August state election. First Nations Justice Campaign Director Larissa Baldwin  shares lessons, tactics and strategies on how to mobilise communities across the NT to enrol to vote on election day.

Larissa Baldwin, First Nations Justice Campaign Director, GetUp
Larissa Baldwin is a widjabul woman from the Bundjalung Nations and currently First Nations Justice Campaign Director at GetUp. She dedicates her life to fighting for First Nations justice and Self-Determination. From staunch grassroots resistance, to building the Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network, to starting First Nations Justice campaigning at GetUp. Larissa has a passion for mentoring young people, and crafting brilliant campaign strategies.

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Lessons from Aotearoa

In October, the Green Party’s Chloe Swarbrick contested and won the local electorate seat of Auckland Central with almost 35% of the vote, becoming the second Green Party MP in history to win the seat since 1999 and the first to win without support from the Labour Party. From drag shows, stand up comedy shows, cookbooks and nationwide social media engagement, hear from Campaign Manager Leroy Beckett on what it took to beat the odds and engage the majority young voting population to turn the blue seat green.

More than 10,000 people working in essential services called upon the NZ Government for safer sick leave, increasing the legal minimum from five days to ten days a year. In another win, the Labour Party in late September announced major changes in Workplace Relations & Safety policies including the doubling of current minimum paid sick leave as well as an increase to the nation’s minimum wage. NZ Council of Trade Union’s Strategic Campaigns Coordinator Jennifer Lawless offers insights into the success of their campaign, including how they leveraged the pandemic, online petitions and the stories of workers’ experiences to win.

Speakers

Leroy Beckett, Campaign Manager, Office of Chloe Swarbrick
Leroy is the Campaign Manager of Chloe Swarbrick. Previously, he ran Phil Goff’s 2019 re-election campaign in Auckland and before that was a key figure at Generation Zero, a climate change advocacy group, as their Media and Campaign Advisor. Leroy has also run campaigns against digital threats to democracy. He is passionate about the planet, its people and the cities we live in.

Jennifer Lawless, Strategic Campaigns Coordinator, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions
Jennifer Lawless is the Strategic Campaigns Coordinator for the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions. She has spent the last 15 years in political, communications and advocacy roles in the New Zealand parliament and union movement. She works at the NZCTU as part of a small, collaborative communications and campaigns team, on a small budget, to try to affect big legislative change for working people.

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Lessons from the US: Scaling up through functional organising

Founder and President of Accelerate Change (US) Peter Murray conducted research on hundreds of organisations across the world on what enabled them to scale. He found that all organisations that successfully scaled had achieved it through the functional organising model, which combines service delivery and organising. But what exactly is functional organising, and how can it amplify your organisation’s impact and shift policy wins? Hear from Peter about how Accelerate Change is using digital technology to both serve and build powerful constituencies of marginalised communities to win with functional organising, with examples from AFL-CIO, Planned Parenthood and more.

For more see:

• Article – The Secret of Scale, Standford Social Innovation Review, 2013, Peter Murray
• Article – The Promise of Lean Experimentation, 2015, Peter Murray and Steve Ma
• Book – Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good, 2018, Ann Mei Change

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Peter Murray, Founder and President, Accelerate Change
Peter Murray is the President of Accelerate Change, an incubator for innovative progressive civic engagement ventures. Accelerate Change works with startup and established progressive civic organizations to dramatically increase experimentation with new citizen organizing models. Peter spends most of his time helping progressive entrepreneurs build less, talk to constituents more, and fail faster. And every once in a while, after many iterations, he helps these entrepreneurs scale organizing models that build deep relationships with constituents and are financially self-sustainable.

Alicia Garza

Alicia Garza shares insights from her latest books in community organising and people-powered movements.

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“Alicia is the co-creator of #BlackLivesMatter and the Black Lives Matter Global Network, an international organizing project to end state violence and oppression against Black people. The Black Lives Matter Global Network now has 40 chapters in four countries. She also serves as the Strategy & Partnerships Director for the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the nation’s premier voice for millions of domestic workers in the United States. Additionally, Alicia is the co-founder of Supermajority, a new home for women’s activism.

Alicia has become a powerful voice in the media and frequently contributes thoughtful opinion pieces and expert commentary on politics, race, gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Her work is featured in Time, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, Elle and Essence.

In addition, Alicia has received numerous accolades and recognitions, including being on the cover of TIME’s 100 Most Influencial People in the World issue (September 2020), named to TIME’s 100 Women of the Year list (March 2020), Bloomberg 50 (2020), BBC’s 100 Women 2020, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Fast Company’s Queer 50 list, Politico 50 and 3x recipient of The Root’s list of 100 African American achievers and influencers. Alicia has received the Sydney Peace Prize, Adweek Beacon Award, Glamour’s Women of the Year Award, Marie Claire’s New Guard Award, and was honored as the Community Change Agent at BET’s Black Girls Rock Awards.

Alicia’s first book, The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, released October 20, 2020 with One World (Penguin Random House.) She shares her thoughts on politics and pop culture on her podcast, Lady Don’t Take No.

Alicia warns you: hashtags don’t start movements — people do.” Source

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Prisms of the People with Hahrie Hahn

Hahrie Hahn shares insights from her latest books in community organising and people-powered movements.

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Hahrie Han is the Inaugural Director of the SNF Agora Institute, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Political Science, and Faculty Director of the P3 Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University. She is an award-winning author of four books and numerous articles published in leading scholarly outlets including the American Political Science Review, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), and elsewhere. She has also written for outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. She is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a 2022 Social Innovation Thought Leader of the Year by the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation. She is currently working on a fifth book, to be published with Knopf (an imprint of Penguin Random House), about faith and race in America, with a particular focus on evangelical megachurches.

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Explore Further

Stay tuned to the Australian Progress event page for other webinars, training programs and conferences.