Elections can take a heavy toll campaigners, organisers, and anyone else working and hoping for social and ecological justice. Now is a time for looking after ourselves and each other, to get in good shape for what comes next.
This excerpt from the Community Organising Guide provides an introduction to community organising. Organising is about generating and wielding people power.
Stuck in a rut when it comes to campaign tactics? Explore Gene Sharp’s 198 methods of nonviolent action which are classified into three categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention.
US activist and educator Daniel Hunter shares important tips for sustaining ourselves and our movements in the face of challenging times. He outlines seven behaviors that we could incorporate into our groups so we can keep taking powerful and strategic actions.
Men frequently participate more than women in meetings, forums and other events. This article outlines practical steps facilitators and participants can take to ensure women are heard.
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.
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 […]
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.
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.
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.
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.
This article outlines some of the key elements of successful coalitions. Coalitions can vary, from ad hoc relationships to deeper, long-term, formal coalitions. Coalitions differ according to their common concern, structure, organisational commitment, capacity and culture.
Rick Warren focuses on five ‘circles of commitment’ – community, crowd, congregation, committed and core, and argue that it’s important to recognise where your supporters fall in these categories, and develop processes to move them from the outside in. An excerpt from Purpose Driven Campaigning.
A follow up article from a workshop presented at Progress 2015 by Holly Hammond and Sam La Rocca with a video presentation from Daniel Hunter. The workshop explored Daniel’s metaphor ‘politicians are like a balloon tied to a rock’.
In the 1970s Sydney builders labourers refused to work on projects that were environmentally or socially undesirable. This green bans movement, as it became known, was the first of its type in the world.
The Aboriginal Tent Embassy was established in 1972 when the Coalition Government failed to recognise the land rights of Indigenous people. From its inception, the Embassy has been interwoven into Canberra’s physical and political landscape, blending black politics, symbolism and theatre that opponents have found difficult to counter.
Case study of the Australian campaign against involvement in the Vietnam War. The emergence of popular protest in Australia during the 1960s presented a fundamental challenge to government decisions and the way those decisions are made. By taking to the streets people challenged the policy positions of government and, in some cases, the very legitimacy and authority of the state itself.
Case study of the long struggle for Samaon independence which was ultimately successful in 1962. The Mau movement had its origins, in 1908, in a dispute between the German colonial administration and the Maloa o Samoa, or Samoan Council of Chiefs, over the establishment of a copra business owned and controlled by native Samoans.