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Part 1. How Community Organising & Community Building can work together: the two-fisted fight
New forms of collective action are emerging in the UK. With growing frequency people are taking to the streets to defend the rights of citizens against outside forces; this trend is unfolding alongside an increasing and often jarring rhetoric of devolution and...
Would Saul Alinsky break his own rules?
Alinsky’s influence today is also present in networks such as PICO, DART, USAction/Citizen Action, the Gamaliel Foundation, and the former branches of ACORN. Collectively these organizations claim several million members, and the tradition has spread internationally...
How mod is your mob?
How can we build high performing mobilisation teams and strong engagement cultures to win bigger? It takes a continued investment of focus, resources and time to build mobilisation teams and engagement cultures. Greenpeace’s Mobilization Lab created this...
This month’s featured tactic…
We love the New Tactics for Human Rights website, especially their catalogue of innovative tactics that includes case studies of each tactic. This month’s featured tactic is building public and media awareness to change the minimum wage and policy for...
Beyond the win: Pathways for policy implementation
When it comes to policy, a lot of attention is given to “ the win.” Whether it is something new and big like the Affordable Care Act, a piece of legislation in a large federal omnibus bill, or inclusion of critical language in a state policy, seeing the fruits of...
Climate advocacy lab
Designed for climate practitioners—advocates, social scientists, data experts and funders—the Lab promotes effective tools and tactics for engaging Americans on climate change. The Interactive Tools provide easy access to helpful climate change information, while the...
10 tips for public health advocacy
There are many important principles and lessons that public health researchers and advocates who hope to influence policy and practice need to consider. In this paper, I set out what I consider to be 10 of the most fundamental of these. Together, these focus on the...
The trouble with stories
Chris Rose writes: “It concerned me that campaign groups adopting story-telling so enthusiastically seemed to have been influenced by the fashion for personal-story story-telling in ‘movement making’ in American politics (eg Marshall Ganz and the ‘story-of-me’,...
New Zealand Fellowship > applications open now
First round applications close on 15 December for our first New Zealand Fellowship – an intensive skills turbo boost in advocacy and campaigning for leading changemakers. The fellowship involves five evening webinars with expert presenters, and is book-ended by two...
THE ART OF STORYTELLING, ACCORDING TO THE FOUNDERS OF STORYCORPS AND HUMANS OF NEW YORK
Engage deeply. Interrupt kindly. People aren’t very good at knowing how to tell their own stories, says Stanton, and that means that they’re often vague and imprecise. Cutting through that is part of the interviewer’s job. “Interviewing someone is a very proactive...
Hahrie Han on how relationships improve mobilisation
I have shocking news for you: people are more likely to take action if a relationship exists. The are particular ideas associated with relational engagement, and using these ideas can improve mobilisation outcomes… “Responsiveness can take multiple forms,...
Learning from the ground up: Education for change
Aziz Choudry writes: “Social movements are not only significant sites of struggle for social and political change. They also represent important – albeit contested and contradictory- spaces of learning, knowledge production and research. Acknowledged or not,...
Bird-dogging
Bird-dogging has nothing to do with animals and everything to do with grassroots power in action! To bird-dog is to “observe, follow, monitor and/or seek out with persistent attention.” Basically, you show up at the candidates’ events, ask them to commit and ask them...
Politicians ignore people power at their peril
Nathan Elvery writes: Online petitions are redistributing power in the most fundamental way any generation has seen – away from a male, pale and stale elite minority and into the hands of ordinary citizens from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. If this accelerates...
Base building (CVH Organizing Tool Kit)
Why is it important to build a large base of people? An organization or a campaign builds a large base in order to have enough power to win. Numbers matter! The more people we can mobilize to show our power, the more power we will have to make policy changes to...
9 Ways We Can Make Social Justice Movements Less Elitist and More Accessible
Social justice and feminist culture are incredible positive forces that can transform the way we see ourselves and the world around us. But sometimes those same activist cultures can be unnecessarily exclusive – and worse, inaccessible and elitist. Here are nine ways...
The New Now: Working Together for Social Change
LGBT movement leaders know that the discrimination LGBT people face—embedded in cultural norms, policies, and laws—is still a part of the fabric of our everyday lives. This report highlights the intersectional approach through case examples in two states where...
Activist State (Documentary: 1968 San Francisco Student Strike)
The 1968 student-led strike in San Francisco was the longest campus strike in United States history. The five-month event defined the University’s core values of equity and social justice, laid the groundwork for establishment of the College of Ethnic Studies, and...