3. Why organising?
For me, community organising stands out
because of:: listening, democracy, and people
take the lead..
➔ Starts with listening
To explore latent motivations to take
collective action - not pushing an issue.
➔ Democracy
Organisers facilitate meetings so
people can decide what to do fairly
➔ People take the lead
Organising aims to support leaders to
emerge who need us less and less
4.
5.
6. Organising in
Coldharbour
Listened to 600 people, 385
joined a community network,
dozens actively. Eight leaders
emerged who confronted
power for first time and fought
for, and won, a new road
crossing.
7. Angell Town
This summer trained eight
emerging leaders in
community organising. Group
felt frustrated that despite
many projects to improve the
estate most don’t feel
involved. Some want to start
their own listening campaign
to build a powerful community.
8. Mobilising
• Engaging people en masse
• Getting those already
interested involved
• Can be paper or e-petitions,
low level actions and more
deeply engaged activism
12. My questions
Can community organising and
mobilising be combined?
So that campaigns don’t only involve
those who already do this sort of
thing and are more people-powered
and unstoppable!
And so organising can be done at a
bigger scale - to win changes
borough-wide, London-wide, or U.K-
wide or globally?
So first of all I want to speak for a bit about what community organising is. It’s a phrase that can be taken to mean all kinds of things.You have community organisers in NGOs co-ordinating existing groups, or working like union organisers. The kind of organising I do at London Community Action starts with no campaign but with a particular community that we go into with this simple aim. I know organising isn’t the only way to bring people together, so in the next slide I’ll unpack this.
Community organising starts with listening.This is active listening not listening to do a survey. Nor is it pushing an agenda. It’s to uncover people’s motivation to act. A motivation that grows stronger when they meet others who feel similarly to them. I’ve seen people who never did things like petitioning or confronting the powerful take action as a result. It then, crucially, involves democratic decisions. Community leaders often have large personalities that can lead to the less extrovert feeling unheard. And lastly it involves support and advice from organisers - with a view to us not being needed any more. People take the lead. Let’s see in a drawing in the next slide what this process looks like.
We see the first two stages:listening, people starting to meet. I am often asked, what is the purpose of community organising? Is it to increase community and reduce isolation? To increase participation in civic life? Is it to deliver projects or start campaigns? Well, it does all these things: but they aren’t the main aim. That is to build a strong community network so that a community can act collectively. So you are building power and don’t have self-appointed leaders or projects or campaigns most people had no say on. On the next slide we see the result.
So we see some leaders in the middle and some less involved but still listened to and able to become involved. And it’s the community that has the information from listening and therefore the power. In the next two slides I’ll give you a couple of concrete examples.
First, in the ward of Coldharbour in Brixton in south London with a colleague…
And in the next slide,
London Community Action’s most recent project was this summer, and here’s a couple of images.
I want to wrap up with a couple of questions on the last two slides.
Firstly, for me it’s as much about personal growth of those emerging leaders as it is about the growth of the network, and both the people and the communities need to find their strength and become powerful. I am posing a question here for discussion as to whether NGOs do the same - not simply giving activists tools to win campaigns, but developing people’s consciousness, helping someto see for first time that they do have a voice and power to act. My second to last slide -
And a couple more questions…
Then, on the last slide, just to say...
Thanks for listening, I’m looking forward to the discussion, and also happy to talk more afterwards - get in touch!
