Understand Your Role in Social Change

Introduction

Here is a useful framework to help you understand your role in social change. It describes different social change roles: Helpers, Advocates, Organizers & Rebels. This explanation of the different roles is an excerpt from Daniel Hunter’s book, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: An Organizing Guide.

Social Change Needs Different Roles

To reach its goal, a movement must include different approaches to change and a great variety of people filling different roles.

Each of us prefer some roles over others. And we may play a range of different roles in different circumstances. Understanding our preferences and strengths can help us work with others more powerfully. A civil rights activist came up with a useful framework that describes different social change roles: Helpers, Advocates, Organizers, and Rebels.

There may be many other roles in social change, but it’s a helpful start to compare and contrast some roles that frequently show up in movements.

Helpers are people who see an individual in need and try to meet that need. Helpers often provide direct service, such as opening their homes, educating about job interviews, offering therapy for family members, or feeding hungry people. They open their hearts and respond personally with the resources they have available.

Advocates see a need but also see systems out there with resources, even if they’re broken and unfair. Advocates help people navigate those systems, perhaps doing social work, public advocacy, or impact litigation. They use knowledge of the system to help people fill their needs, bending the system so it provides every ounce of justice or resources it can provide.

Organizers have another approach. When looking at problems, their instinct is to bring together those who are hurting. They often organize people outside the system into groups to apply pressure to change the rules of the system. Unlike Helpers, who provide direct services, or Advocates, who tend to work inside the system, Organizers traditionally create pressure by building groups external to the current system.

Rebels, driven by passion and energy, speak truth to power and do so with conviction. They are associated with public protest and direct action, using tactics like sit-ins, marches, and civil disobedience. Rebels are impatient with small reforms and are uncompromising in their struggle for major changes in society. Rebels are often public in their work, even if it might carry personal risk for them.

The Four Roles of Social Change

Each role is important. Yet you probably have your own preferences about which roles most attract you. Knowing your own preferences can help you fulfill your role more effectively—and work with others who are in equally important, but different, roles.

Let’s look a little more closely at these four different roles in social change, including examples of their work and their different strengths and potential weaknesses.

Helpers

Helpers offer shelter, food, and caring to those in need. In the process, they make face-to-face and heart-to-heart connections with people. They try to offer services to help every single person they can. Helpers are immensely important to those getting services, and it can be very rewarding for them, too.

Helpers can also do things that are less effective. If Helpers are unconscious of the need for structural change, their work may be solely about feel-good band-aids. Helpers may treat it like a personal failing that someone out of prison cannot find a job—not recognizing structural components, such as the infamous “box” that requires job applicants to divulge their criminal history.

Helpers can therefore create cycles of dependency. To be effective, Helpers must also support people to see how the system places stumbling blocks in their lives. This helps people rise above individual self-sabotage and self-recrimination, potentially clearing the way for them to participate in movement work.

Take the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project (ACJP). They got their start doing the work of Helpers in a drop-in center. People working assembly jobs in Silicon Valley—the low-wage underside of the “tech bubble”—would get help and support.

Over time they became known for helping people beat false criminal charges and providing support through the justice system. A tally showed their efforts, through acquittals or reduced sentences, saved people over 1,800 years in prison! Yet ACJP strives to do more than just serve individuals. Take Gail Noble, whose son was swept up by police and charged with assault and battery, despite witnesses saying he wasn’t involved. Her son’s attorney was ill-prepared and shrugged off a “joke” made by the judge that her son’s summer job was probably just a cover for “going door to door selling drugs.”

At a Sunday meeting of the ACJP, Gail shared her story. Folks at ACJP listened and offered to help her file a motion to fire her son’s attorney. “Even though the judge refused my son’s motion,” says Gail, “it was important to get all the issues my son had [with the lawyer] on record and for us to feel that we could speak and say something.”

ACJP’s work with Gail could have ended when her son was sentenced to eight months. Instead they helped her write her story for their magazine and chose the case as a front page story. They asked her to join the Sunday meetings to help others with their cases. She began to work with ACJP to influence the selection process for the next police chief. And when the state tried to pass “tough on crime” legislation, she headed the march into the district attorney’s office.

Far from a one-way service relationship, the approach of ACJP brought directly impacted people together. ACJP used the trust built by directly helping to move beyond individual struggles and into larger structural issues to create even bigger ripples of change.

Advocates

Advocates, such as lawyers or social workers, help individuals survive and navigate the rules and regulations of the current system. With their inside knowledge of policies and protocols, visionary advocates can offer meaningful changes to the current system or even comprehensive alternatives.

As with Helpers, Advocates can have their blinders. Their years studying the ins and outs of the courts or the public benefits system can get in the way. Unintentionally, Advocates can dampen people’s desire for radical change by urging that they accept the system as it is: “You can’t do that, because there’s a regulation against it!”

Instead of using their expertise to creatively and vigorously fight for longterm change, some Advocates can be guilty of focusing on all the barriers in the current system to new ways of working and thinking.

Eager to help, Advocates can get stuck in an attitude that they should be able to solve all their clients’ problems, without promoting their clients’ agency or vision. The client relationship becomes onedirectional: helping is something that happens to you, so you aren’t part of your own liberation. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Daryl Atkinson, a member of the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People’s Movement and a criminal justice lawyer with Southern Coalition for Social Justice, got his start through the mentorship of a transformational Advocate, James McConico. Daryl and James met while both were locked up in a maximum security facility.

“James was a jailhouse lawyer with a law collective on the inside,” said Daryl. “He was real good. When the yard call went out, there was a long wait for him. He would do a lot of work for people inside—but he did it conditionally.” Daryl describes one day when he and James were with a young man from the Crips gang. The young man sat across from James with a pillowcase full of cigarettes and offered the pillowcase as payment for legal advice.

James shook his head. “I don’t smoke. If you want my help, you have to drop your colors in the cell block. And you have to learn the Bill of Rights and you have to join us in this fight.” The young man was startled by the unusual request.

James wasn’t selling advice, he was using legal services to change men’s lives. He was building a group of people to change their lives inside and outside of prison.

Beyond filing writs in their cases, he was helping people find agency, hope, and purpose.

The young man agreed to the requests. People like Daryl now carry on that style of transformational advocacy, which creates a powerful ripple effect and grows the movement.

Organizers

Organizers often critique Helpers and Advocates for helping a broken system limp along—rather than abolishing or changing the system.

The classic Organizer story is that of a village near a river. Each day the villagers find an abandoned baby floating down the river, and each day the villagers take the baby in and care for it. After several weeks, one of the villagers gets fed up at the cycle. She walks around the village convincing everyone the problem will never stop unless they walk up the river and find out where all the babies are coming from!

That approach is fundamental to good Organizers: identifying root causes and bringing people together to solve problems, with a belief that they can build power to make change.

Organizers, however, can be ineffective when they get bogged down in the inner life of their groups. They might get stuck in a stifling nonprofit or in the belief that they should only go after goals they deem “winnable”—even when the people most affected are urging otherwise.

Organizers who are not directly impacted, especially, may fall into assuming leadership roles rather than empowering the people most impacted to take on leadership for themselves.

By contrast, take Steve Huerta, a formerly incarcerated activist and organizer in San Antonio, Texas. After conducting an electoral power analysis in his area, Steve learned that in Bexar County, the Democratic Party was relying on votes from incarcerated people and their families.

Research showed that almost 75% of the precinct chairs were formerly incarcerated, had misdemeanours, or had family members in prison. But when it came time to make policy, they consistently ran from their people and favored “tough on crime” legislation.

To solve the problem, Steve decided to out-organize the traditional party by building a group of formerly incarcerated people who had worked against such “tough on crime” legislation and having them run for local Democratic seats. Steve believed the shame of being incarcerated or even being related to “convicts” kept people from standing up for what is right.

Organizers understand that shame festers and breeds when people experience something as a personal failing they cannot overcome. He challenged that shame by getting people together and showing how their background made them experts on what needed to change.

In the words of a judge he worked with, “The system likes to make your mistakes count against you. But you flip it. You make it not a list of a record of past mistakes, but a resume of how you’re an expert on a policy that exists.”

Steve uses that resume to build up a group of people with classic community-based organizing. “My approach is basically door-todoor and face-to-face,” he explains. “We hang out at grocery stores. ATMs. Food Stamp offices. Wherever people get things they need. And we explain to them who we are. When we first explain we are former prisoners, that gets their attention. Then when we tell them we are recruiting them to be active in challenging the Democratic Party—they really take notice.”

Through this approach, Steve and his coworkers have helped formerly incarcerated people get elected as local precinct chairs. In 2014, Steve was elected as a senate district committeeperson representing about half a million people. Having people who are bought in to policy changes on mass incarceration has made a major shift in the Democratic conventions. “We’re getting people to show up to these conventions,” Steve explains, “And they see people they respect being engaged and having a voice. It’s very empowering.”

Those wins come because he’s modeling what good organizers do: gathering people together, creating space for people to tell their stories, and putting them in the leadership of the movement. With his face-to-face style and “we’ll-out-organize-you” know-how, he’s putting formerly incarcerated people with a change agenda directly into power positions—both inside his group and in positions of official policy decision-making.

Rebels

Lastly, there are the Rebels. Rebels bring fire and energy and are willing to take risks that others may never even consider.

They can be unyielding in pursuit of justice and willing to go through great personal sacrifice to make their point.

Many political prisoners, for example, are Rebels who came out of political and social movements and have gone on to teach people that deep change is needed and it often takes sacrifice to make it happen. However, Rebels can become ineffective when they are too attached to a marginal identity, use tactics without a realistic strategy, or self-righteously view everyone else as less radical or less moral.

Rebels can be guilty of too often tearing down ideas and saying “No!” rather then being constructive. They do their best work when they are well connected to people in other roles who can give context to Rebels’ unique, bold, and essential contributions.

As an example, after one organization’s high-profile lobbying efforts had fallen short, they brought in a trainer to teach them how to run a direct action campaign. The trainer described the four roles of social change and asked people to cluster with others in the same roles. They had a handful of Helpers, many Advocates, and a good number of Organizers—but no Rebels.

When asked about this, the group admitted that there used to be Rebels, but they were hard to work with and over time had been encouraged to leave. The trainer promptly announced that they could end the workshop now, explaining, “Without Rebels, you can’t run a direct action campaign.”

Rebels point fingers at problems that may go unnoticed, and they can be decisively bold about it.

At a national gathering of correctional personnel, a group called Sisters Inside decided to dramatize the harassment of women in prisons. They seized the stage and acted out a strip search, with some people playing prisoners and others the guards.

Telling the story, Angela Davis writes, “The gathering was so repulsed by this enactment of a practice that occurs routinely in women’s prisons everywhere that many of the participants felt compelled to disassociate themselves from such practices…. Some of the guards…simply cried upon watching representations of their own actions outside the prison context.”

Rebels’ boldness can shock, awaken, and help stoke anger for change.

Respect the Many Roles for Change

Each role is vital in movement-building: Helpers’ direct services, Advocates’ accessing resources inside the system, Organizers’ pulling people together to struggle for their own solutions, and Rebels’ inyour-face actions that speak truth to power.

Again, these four are not the only roles—but they are a sampling of different roles played in social change.

Each role has its own approach to change—and that’s important, because movements need these varied approaches. Yet these approaches can be a source of tension.

Organizers often get frustrated by Helpers who don’t connect their service work to larger issues. Or Rebels can get angry at Advocates who don’t dream outside the current system. Advocates may be frustrated with Organizers who don’t value the real ways their advocacy helps make change. Or Helpers can feel discounted by Rebels and feel the Rebels’ pounding insistence turns people off.

Yet movements are best when all the roles are appreciated, recognized, and filled. Our job is to contribute our particular gifts to the movement, knowing that all are important and trusting that others will fill in the spaces we’re not called to fill.

Jerry Elster’s journey exemplifies how many different roles can make positive impacts toward movement-building. His story starts in the rough streets of South Central Los Angeles. After spending some time in a juvenile camp for petty vandalism, Jerry tried to get his life on the right track, deciding “I was above the gang stuff, I was through with that foolishness.”

To send himself through college, he tried a variety of odd jobs. None were steady. He resorted to selling weed. From there he slipped into gang life and all-too-familiar patterns. During a fight he shot and killed a rival gang member, for which he served 26 years.

“It’s sad that two young African-American underprivileged youth played out this scenario,” he wrote later. “It happens almost every day in the United States. One goes to his grave and the other to the penitentiary. It’s horrible. It’s something I’ll never get over.”

The first years in prison, Jerry was angry and, like many, “learned a whole lot more criminal skills in prison than I had outside.” He was regularly in and out of solitary confinement.

After five years, he decided to change course. His first influences were Rebels who took the time to mentor and educate him—grandfathers from the Black Panthers and Black Guerrilla Family. From these elders Jerry learned to see his own life choices as part of a larger structure.

In reading and discussing, he saw his story as a reflection of patterns. He was responsible for his own choices, but his options were restricted and shaped by systems much bigger than himself—systems of poverty, racism, and exploitation that meant there weren’t jobs in his neighborhood, or intervention programs, or family wealth to help him through the hard times.

Rebels’ direct and tough talk moved him, despite his own anger and frustrations. “For me it was infuriating, because I had to learn about the degradations that my people went through…. [I learned that the] enemy was not whites or Mexicans, it was the structure, the system that had created slavery and bondage and poverty.”

Jerry was understanding a key part of movement-building, seeing the world not only through the eyes of individual responsibility, but as a larger structure that needed to be changed, too. An awakening was afoot.

Helpers offered spiritual guidance in dealing with his anger and feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness. “It brought me back to my Christian beliefs.… I had to realize that, again, I didn’t have to control everything. Some things I just had to submit to.

So, as an example, you’ve got this guy, he just has to walk on this side of the compound when we come out, this is his part: OK, respect that. ‘You have it, it’s your space, brother.’ But coming from a position as a gang member inside prison, from a leadership position this wasn’t so easy a lot of times, because now people started to question where my loyalties lay.

To do it subtly, as I thought I was going to initially, is not easy: you’re not given that kind of space and time in prison by the administration or by your peers. So I had to just be straightforward, cold turkey, ‘I’m through with this, this is how I’m living now, don’t bring that to me.’ After a while people started to respect me for that position.”

He joined a victim-offender group, drawing from the restorative justice model. The group, run by Advocates, prepared prisoners to speak with their victims or their victims’ surviving relatives. It’s a tremendous alternative to the dehumanizing practices of the current criminal justice system.

People speak to each other, take responsibility, and help make “right relationships” by supporting healing for all involved. For Jerry, that program made a huge difference.

“When I go to court I’m no longer Jerry Elster, it’s the State of California against the defendant. Everything is geared toward dehumanizing. The person who was assaulted or fell prey to this crime is not that person no more, they’re the victim of the crime or the plaintiff. I didn’t violate the rights of any individual. I violated the rights of the state. So what [the victim-offender group] was able to do was to humanize that process again.”

Jerry had moved from thinking individually to structurally—and as good as those steps were, he wasn’t satisfied. In his words, the group “helps individuals move forward with accepting their accountability, but it doesn’t help the system or society move forward with theirs. There’s torture going on in prison, but [they’re] not going to sit the warden down or the staff and tell them you got to be more accountable with how you’re dealing with people from a restorative justice approach. It says the system’s flawed but it doesn’t hold the system accountable.”

For that, Jerry needed to find groups who were waging campaigns to change the system. He needed to join with others to solve problems and take on the system.

“A lot of people get caught up trying to build a campaign without a group. We talk about issues and assume people will automatically come together to resolve that issue. They don’t. We have to plug people into groups.”

And that’s when he met other Organizers. After a talk he gave about his own story, an organizer with All of Us or None came up to him. She heard his story and was moved, and encouraged him to join their group, which had just launched a new campaign to eliminate the box on employment forms asking about prior convictions.

He threw himself into the campaign and joined All of Us or None and a raft of other groups, including the American Friends Service Committee. They lost some campaigns, like a bill against shackling of pregnant women in prison, which was vetoed by the California governor. They won others, like the “Ban the Box” campaign.

Each step Jerry took was supported by different roles:

• Rebels’ tough talk about structural oppression,
• Helpers assisting his personal growth to take more responsibility,
• Advocates creating alternative models, and
• Organizers connecting him with others trying to change the system.

Understanding the different roles in social change helps us see that we each have a special part to play. That part may shift with changing circumstances. Sometimes we’ll play multiple parts simultaneously. But strong movements always include a mix of many roles.

To craft a movement to eliminate the cycle of caste in the US, including its current form of mass incarceration, we need all of us playing our roles well.

Next Steps

• What role(s) are you drawn to in movement work?
  • What’s a personal strength you bring to that role?
  • What’s a challenge you frequently experience in that role?
• When do you experience conflict or tension with the other roles?
  • What bothers you about them?
  • What are you learning from this chapter that can help you minimize tensions when working with the other roles?
• Is there a person or organization from a different role that would be strategic for you to build a relationship with?
  • What would be a first step toward building that relationship?
  • How could the different approaches from your roles complement each other?
• In your group, you may want to introduce these four roles and have people cluster to see where they identify. In coalition meetings or groups, it can help ease tensions between the roles to see them in the open like this.
  • Where might you introduce the four roles as a tool to help a group work better together?

Access Full Book

This booklet is for people who want to act for change. It offers tools and activities you can use in groups. It’s filled with practical tips and strategic principles, with real-life examples of campaigns around the country. Each section ends with guiding questions to help think about next steps.

• Chapter 1: Roles in Movement-Building
  Looks at different roles played in movements, examining our own strengths and those of others.
• Chapter 2: Building Strong Groups
  Focusses on building strong groups. Groups generate social power and are a building block of movement work.
• Chapter 3: Creating Effective Campaigns
  Examines creating change through campaigns.

  Campaigns harness the power of groups and direct that power toward a single goal. With intention and focus, campaigns create pressure to enact specific, concrete changes. By making these changes, we can chip away at the larger oppressive system and hone our ability to transform society.

The book also comes with a Study Guide – The New Jim Crow Study Guide and Call to Action. This study guide provides a launching pad for groups wishing to engage in deep, meaningful dialogue about race, racism, and structural inequality in the age of mass incarceration.

Other Languages

• Spanish – Español – Cómo construir un movimiento social para abolir el Nuevo Jim Crow: Guía para la organización comunitaria

About the Author

Daniel Hunter is an organizer and strategist with Training for Change, an activist training organization. He’s sought all over the globe for his expertise at organizing and direct action, having trained tens of thousands of activists in over a dozen countries.

He has previously authored a compelling narrative bringing to life the vibrancy of direct action campaigning in Strategy and Soul. He is also a contributor to the books Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution and We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. More about the author at: www.DanielHunter.org.

Easy Read Version

Here is an Easy Read Guide made by the Commons Librarians called, Working together to make a better world about the four different roles.

• Click to open PDF: Working together to make a better world
• Click to open Word version (no pictures): Working together to make a better world

Easy Read uses clear, everyday language matched with images to make sure everyone understands. – Council for Intellectual Disability

Easy Read documents are helpful for:

• people with disability
• people with English as a second language
• people with lower literacy levels
• people who want to learn about a topic quickly

Explore Further

• Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan and Four Roles of Activism
• The Four Roles of Social Activism by Bill Moyer
• Exploring Roles in Social Change Movements
• Four Roles in Palestine Solidarity Activism
• Movements and leaders have seasons – it’s important to know which one you are in
• Frameworks for Winning Change
• Campaign Strategy: Start Here
• Daniel Hunter Collection
• Books to Read if you are Interested in Activism, Social Change & Justice