Organising builds power by engaging and connecting people in collective action. The resources gathered here educate and inform about the craft of organising. You’ll find case studies, articles, practical tips, and training materials.
Joel Dignam reviews Hahrie Han’s How Organizations Develop Activists. A key finding of Han’s research is that high-engagement organizations practise both organizing and mobilizing. The Voice for Indi campaign is considered as an Australian example of combining these two approaches.
To support organizations rolling out distributed organizing efforts, NetChange have put together a new campaign design framework drawn from best practices of the dozens of successful networks they have advised or studied closely.
‘Feedback’ is a communication to a person or a group which gives that person information about how they affect others. It is important to be able to give feedback in such a way that people can hear it, take it in, evaluate it, and change behaviour which affects their relationship with others.
Active listening is a fundamental skill for peacebuilding and social change. It is more than hearing, it involves processing what has been heard and skilfully selecting a response. Active listening serves to encourage the person to tell more and most importantly, communicates to the person that you are interested and listening.
What does it take to build a civil society coalition with the power to shift a city? This interview with Amanda Tattersall, Founder and Coalition Director of the Sydney Alliance, gives some good clues.
Denisse Sandoval shares insights from Amanda Tattersall’s book Power in Coalition: Strategies for Strong Unions and Social Change. We may have seen token coalitions with simple community support in the form of logos on letter heads, but how do we build real power to live out the values of the organisations involved in alliances?
Joel Dignam reviews Hahrie Han’s Moved to Action. Han tackles the question of what motivates political participation by people who face significant barriers. Han provides a toolkit for those seeking to empower and work with, or within, marginalised communities.
Joel Dignam reviews Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s ‘The Starfish and the Spider’. The book delves into ideas and language around decentralisation with useful examples from history, social movements and commerce. It also includes practical tips for putting decentralisation into practice.
Community organisers (and other change agents) have some excellent tools that can maximise the likelihood of making healthy goals a reality. This article will tune up your organising smarts as well as your health and wellbeing.
Decentralised, grassroots-led digital campaigning has taken off in the last decade. This report looks at the impact these campaigns are having, what lessons we can learn from them about success, and what these new campaigns platforms mean for the future of social change.
This MobLab report examines innovative volunteer engagement work by 35 organisations empowering people to scale change and win by learning and doing more. Featuring video and audio from the practitioners.
Overturning the abortion ban in Ireland meant equipping people to share their stories and spark conversations with their friends and family.
An overview of the tools and tactics Greenpeace offices around the world use to ensure their office teams are working seamlessly together. Explore by Country/Region and Trait to find the successful practices or “bright spots” highlighting ongoing experiments in team integration.
This free course covers core elements of a ‘people-powered’ campaign, when to use them and what to mix them with. Based on real-life campaign examples, you’ll also cover practical tools needed to create your own campaigns.
Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Founder and former Executive Director of SumofUs, at Progress 2015 with a series of movement case studies challenging us to be technological innovators and to bring our social change work to the cutting edge of the current century.
Whether you are looking to recruit members or talking to voters in far-flung electorates, these are some basic guidelines for getting the most out of phone conversations.
Joel Dignam reviews Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts: Organising for Power in the Gilded Age. McAlevey outlines a critique of most contemporary union campaigning, using case studies and other analysis to argue for a deeper more rigorous approach to organising.
Anita Tang reflects on meeting Daniel Hunter and reading his book Strategy and Soul. She shares insights from his work which can contribute to strategic and soulful campaigning.
Community organising is a term that is being used more and more in Australian social movements – but what does it really mean? Here’s a brief introduction to some of the key principles.