Working in Groups: Start Here
A guide from The Commons Social Change Library with collated resources to help groups work together better.
Tag
Teams
Gamestorming: A Set of Innovative Co-creation Tools
Do you need to be more creative and innovative? Gamestorming uses games to come up with ideas and solutions. Here is a list of games to get started.
Team Effectiveness Conditions Framework
A 7 page handout about the six conditions needed to create a great team based on the work of Richard Hackman and Ruth Wageman.
Designing Powerful Teams with Ruth Wageman
Watch this recording of Ruth Wageman to learn how you can put in place the 6 conditions that make it more likely to create a great team.
ChangeMakers Organising School – Season Four, 2021 – How Small Groups Make Big Changes
ChangeMakers Organising School – Training (videos and slides) to connect and deepen knowledge to organise for social change.
What does it take to build people power?
People power – Learn about the the five different, dynamic strategies that can create powerful change when mixed together.
Behind the scenes of Sunrise’s volunteer-led phone bank program
Want to know how to run a large scale volunteer led phonebank? Learn from the Sunrise Movement and how they managed their teams.
Creating a Team Culture: Worksheet
Use this Engagement Pyramid from the Mobilisation Lab to visualise the different ways a person might get involved with your campaign.
Do Better and Win Bigger by Taking on Marginalisation
Change the world with boycotts, workplace action and memes, political campaigns, disaster relief, civil disobedience and more.
How to Build a Team: Online Course by Marshall Ganz
Do you want to know about building leadership teams and organising? 12 videos by Marshall Ganz that will help you learn all about setting up a team.
Resources for decentralised organising
A list of resources about decentralised organising collated and shared by Richard D. Bartlett finding lessons across diverse contexts, from social movements to formal workplaces.
Check list for affinity groups
Checklist for affinity groups – looking out for each other and yourself when participating in a blockade or protest.
Holding our groups together in hard times
When social change campaigns experience setbacks it’s understandable this can lead to difficulties in activist groups. Here are some tips and further resources for holding groups together in hard times.
Purpose Driven Campaigning: 40 key principles for Growing Social Movements
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.
Action group meetings
This tip sheet has been written to help you and your group work well together and achieve your objectives and highlights some group habits and actions that resilient community groups have relied on: effective meetings with an agreed agenda; clearly-defined roles; mindful decision-making; accountability; and inclusiveness.
Nonviolent Community Safety and Peacebuilding Handbook
Resource for activists engaged in work for peace including practical ways to intervene in violence, to transform conflict and to build peace.
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.
Affinity Groups for Non-Violent Direct Action
Affinity groups are a feature of many large scale non-violent actions. An affinity group is a small group of people (eg: 5-15) who have something in common who take action together. Groups could focus on a specific theme eg street medics or legal observers or more commonly it is a group of people that take action as a team.