Introduction
In April 2024 Leading Change Network ran a workshop on Orientation to Organizing. Drawing on the UK-based Refugees Welcome movement led by Citizens UK as a case study, this workshop outlined five core practices of effective leadership in community organising. These concepts are developed from the work of Marshall Ganz.
The five practices of leadership in organising:
- Creating a shared story (public narrative)
- Relational commitment
- Creating strategy
- Shared structure
- Effective action
In this article, we unpack core learnings from the workshop and the Refugees Welcome movement.
What is Community Organising?
Community Organising is:
- Recognising and reconfiguring power
- Finding leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want
Community organising recognises that power is not something that you either have or don’t have – power is relational. When we bring people and resources together they can become powerful.
Core questions for community organisers:
- Who are my people?
- What is the change they want?
- What is our strategic goal?
- What is our theory of change?
- What are our tactics?
- What is our timeline?
Successful organising has three types of outcomes:
- Society: reaching a clear and concise goal
- Organisation: increasing organisational capacity
- Individual: facilitating learning
Using the five practices of leadership can help us to achieve these core goals within our campaigns.
The Five Practices of Leadership in Organising
1. Creating a Shared Story (Public Narrative)
Public narrative is a leadership practice that enables campaigners to craft and share stories in a way that inspires action and change.
There are three key features to building a shared story for your campaign:
- Story of self (call to leadership)
- Story of us (shared values and experiences)
- Story of now (strategy and action)
You can read more about developing a public narrative in this article on the Commons Library.
How the Refugees Welcome campaign used public narrative
- Connect: to keep teams together and as a values glue for organisers
- Persuade: in their communications to politicians, to the media and to the country
- Recruit: people to the campaign: through emails, social media, one-on-ones and house meetings
Watch George Gabriel share his “story of us” from the Refugees Welcome movement.
Look for moments in the video where:
- George creates a shared story for the campaign by invoking the value of welcome
- George creates a sense of urgency for the campaign issue
- George builds a feeling of hope to inspire action
2. Relational Commitment
Organising is based on relationships. Organising teaches us to turn individual interests into collective interests, share resources and find common values.
It’s important to go beyond transactional or extractive relationships, and one method that organising teaches is the one-on-one meeting.
One-on-one meetings should have:
- Purpose: why are you meeting? What do you want to achieve from the meeting?
- Exploration: Provide plenty of opportunity for exploration by asking probing questions. Share who you are and find out who the other person is.
- Exchange: What do you have to offer each other? Share resources such as information, support and insight.
- Commitment: End the meeting successfully with a commitment to continue working together.
How the Refugees Welcome campaign used relationship building
- All organisers were required to have at least 15 one-on-one conversations each week
- These one-on-one conversations helped to find leaders and the issues they wanted to act on
- Refugee welcome teams were built around the country, and co-chairs were recruited through one-on-ones
- Co-chairs were added to a Facebook group where they could share resources, insights and support
3. Creating Strategy
Strategising is turning:
- what you have (resources),
- into what you need (power),
- to get to what you want (change).
A strategic goal is:
- Clear
- Has a measurable point that allows you to know if you’ve won or lost
- Meets the challenge your constituency faces
Creating strategy starts by asking the following questions:
- Who are my people?
- What is the change they want?
- What is our strategic goal?
- What is our theory of change? (If we do…, then… will happen, because…)
- What are our tactics?
- What is our timeline?
The Refugees Welcome campaign strategy
1. People
Citizens UK identified a few core constituencies for the Refugees Welcome campaign, including:
- Citizens UK members,
- The wider welcoming majority across the country – particularly university educated mothers
- Refugees in the Jungle in Calais
2. Strategic Goal
Citizens UK’s strategic goal was to:
- Welcome tens of thousands of Syrian refugees
This target number was chosen to make sure the campaign made a significant impact in the lives of refugees
3. Theory of Change
(If we do…, then… will happen, because…)
Citizens UK had a strong theory of change:
- If we prove there is space for Syrian refugees and apply pressure on the government through press, courts and MPS, then government will open the door because their political interests will be served by doing so.
4. Tactics
Tactics are specific actions through which strategy is implemented. Tactics shouldn’t be chosen at random, but need to get a campaign closer to its strategic goal.
Tactics should keep a balance between recruitment and deployment.
- If tactics are only focussed on recruiting, supporters will lose motivation
- If tactics are only focussed on deploying current supporters, they will become exhausted
The Refugees Welcome movement cycled between different tactics, including petitions, one-on-one recruitments, pledges and court cases, to ensure they were balancing recruitment and deployment.
Good tactics should be:
- Strategic (does it help us achieve our goal?)
- Motivational (is it fun and inspiring?)
- Builds leadership and capacity (does it support growth of people and bring in new people?)
4. Building Teams and Shared Structure
Developing shared structures helps ensure that teams are strong and sustainable.
Strong teams should be:
- Bounded (it’s clear who is and isn’t on the team)
- Stable (the same people keep turn up week after week)
- Interdependent and diverse (team members are working towards a shared purpose in different ways)
We can create these conditions in our teams by ensuring our teams have:
- Purpose (they know why they exist)
- Norms (rules about how the team behaves developed together)
- Roles (each person is responsible for a share of the work)
Many organising models use a snowflake structure of interdependent leadership.
The Refugees Welcome snowflake leadership model
The Refugees Welcome campaign used the snowflake model of leadership to build teams. These teams were built along both geographic and functional lines. Each team had its own distinct purpose and place within the campaign, but operated interdependently with other teams in the campaign.
Teams were built around identified leaders in different parts of the campaign, including:
- National partners
- Political allies
- Refugee Welcome team leads
- Citizens UK members
- Safe Passage team (refugees on the ground in Calais)
Outcomes of the Refugees Welcome Movement
The Refugee Welcome movement’s use of these core community organising principles helped to secure clear wins for refugee rights in the UK. As we outlined above, successful community organising measures outcomes at three levels: society, organisation and individual. For Refugees Welcome this looked like:
1. Winning Justice
- Government commits to welcome 20,000 Syrian refuges and 1,000 before Christmas
- Government commit to creating a new community sponsorship route
- Government commits to welcoming 3,000 more refugee children to UK from MENA region
- Government defeated and additional route for refugee children already in Europe to reach the UK created, 2,000 kids reach safety
2. Building Movement
- Trained 1,309 people in 10 weeks
- Built 96 teams with a local campaign plan and a national contribution
- Built an organisation from £0 to £2.1 million with 38 staff in five countries
3. Developing Leaders
- 180 leaders of local refugee welcome groups
- 90 housing leads, 90 language leads
- Calais team of refugees organising on the ground
You can read more about the Refugees Welcome case study in this article by George Gabriel.
Download Slides
Explore Further
- Join the Leading Change Network and explore the LCN Resource Center
- Scaling Organising: The Incubating and Cascading Approach by George Gabriel, sharing lessons from Refugees Welcome
- What is Organizing? An Introduction based on the Work of Marshall Ganz
- Organizing: People, Power and Change – The One on One 1:1 Meeting
- The Power of Story: The Story of Self, Us and Now
- Story of Self, Us and Now: Video Examples
- Organising: Start Here