What is Organizing?
An introduction to community organising by Marshall Ganz, a key thinker and educator in the field.
Tag
Organising – Models
Community Mapping
What is community mapping? Learn from organisers that have used the community mapping model to empower their own communities.
Resilience based organizing
Resilience-Based Organizing departs from traditional organising approaches to address the reality of the ecological crisis. It involves 3 core ingredients: Reclaim Our Labor; Contest for Power, Create a Crisis of Governance; Lead With Vision.
Purpose Driven Campaigning
Australian Progress has prepared this 40-point summary of Pastor Rick Warren’s bestselling book The Purpose Driven Church. The resource is based on Rick Warren’s experience of growing his church, Saddleback, from scratch to 20,000 members attending every week. Saddleback is now the eighth biggest church in the United States.
Organizing: People, Power, Change
This handbook, based on the work of Marshall Ganz, aims to support you in developing your capacity for effective community organizing. It covers five key practices of organizing to build people power for change.
What is Community Organising?
This excerpt from the Community Organising Guide provides an introduction to community organising. Organising is about generating and wielding people power.
Introduction to Community Mapping
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?
Three Approaches to Organising
This article outlines three frameworks of organising. They are broad based organising; social movement organising; and community development informed organising.
Listen to Becky Bond on Big Organising
The big organising approach utilised in the Bernie Sanders campaign offers several valuable rules to scale up your efforts, empower members and supporters, and catch the fire of momentum. Hear from Becky Bond, co-author of Rules for Revolutionaries.
Community organising aims to win back civil society’s rightful place
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.
‘Tactics for Mobilisers’ A Review of Rules for Revolutionaries
Amanda Tattersall cautions campaigners, organisers and activists to not take Bond & Exley’s rules” as gospel. While the book puts forward valuable insights into the Bernie Sanders campaign the focus is tactics and mobilisation rather than deep organising.
Being Purpose Driven
Nothing precedes purpose. The starting point for every organisation or movement should be the question ‘Why do we exist’? A number of tips for focusing an organisation on vision and purpose. An excerpt from Purpose Driven Campaigning, based on Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church.
Levels of Commitment from Community to Core
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.
The Community Organising Guide
The Community Organising Guide is 296 pages of training resources to deepen our understanding of core organising skills: relational meetings and self-interest, the power of story in organising, building alliances, coalitions and networks, holding decision-makers accountable, leadership development, recruitment, doorknocking and phonebanking.
The Role of Stories in Organising
Joel Dignam reviews Marshall Ganz’ approach to story as fundamental to organising. Through story we understand happenings, communicate our values, and make sense of our choices.
Circles of Commitment: A model of engagement
This article outlines a model for thinking about the different levels of engagement of people involved in a campaign; what kinds of things people at each level can do, and what support they need to do those things; and how people can move from one level to another, aka a ‘ladder of engagement’. It also has implications for how we think about events and capacity, and for how well a campaign can scale.
How to Structure Teams for Organising
Joel Dignam reviews Marshall Ganz’ treatment of structure as a craft of organising. As Ganz notes “Developing leadership requires structuring the work of the organization so it affords as many people as possible the opportunity to learn to lead.”
Hahrie Han on How Relationships Improve Mobilisation
Insights from The Organizational Roots of Political Activism: Field Experiments on Creating a Relational Context. In her paper, Han demonstrates that a relational context affects civic engagement, arguing that decisions like voting or other forms of activism aren’t based upon a simple cost-benefit analysis.
Book review of This is an Uprising: How nonviolent revolt is shaping the twenty first century
Joel Dignam reviews Paul and Mark Engler’s 2016 book This is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-First Century. TIAU is an analysis of social change, how it has occurred, and how contemporary campaigners may make it occur again.
Relationships are the Glue of Organising
This post reviews Marshall Ganz’ approach to craft of relationships in organising. Relationships foster the commitment that is needed for success and allow us to understand the interests, values and motivations of others.