1.1: What is Organizing?

Note

This is an introduction to what community organizing is from the legendary farm worker organizer Marshall Ganz.

Organizing is leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want. Community organizing is all about people, power, and change – it starts with people and relationships, is focused on shifting power, and aims to create lasting change. Organizing people to build the power to make change is based on the mastery of five key leadership practices: telling stories, building relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, and acting. That is, to develop our capacity for effective community organizing, we must learn:

The Five Leadership Practices

1. How to articulate a story of why we are called to lead, a story of the community we hope to mobilize and why we’re united, and a story of why we must act.
2. How to build intentional relationships as the foundation of purposeful collective actions.
3. How to create structure that distributes power and responsibility and prioritizes leadership development.
4. How to strategize turning your resources into the power to achieve clear goals.
5. How to translate strategy into measurable, motivational, and effective action.

Though organizing is not a linear process, organizers use the first three practices (stories, relationships, structure) to build power within a community, while the last two practices (strategy, action) are about wielding that power in order to create change.

People

The first question an organizer asks is “Who are my people?” not “What is my issue?” Effective organizers put people, not issues, at the heart of their efforts. Organizing is not about solving a community’s problems or advocating on its behalf. It is about enabling the people with the problem to mobilize their own resources to solve it (and keep it solved).

Identifying a community of people is just the first step. The job of a community organizer is to transform a community – a group of people who share common values or interests – into a constituency – a community of people who are standing together to realize a common purpose. The difference between community and constituency lies in the commitment to take action to further common goals.

For example, a community could be residents of a town that are against a new dam project, while a constituency would be residents of the town against the dam who have signed a petition to take action to stop the dam from being built.

Power

Organizing focuses on power: who has it, who doesn’t, and how to build enough of it to shift the power relationship and bring about change.

Reverend Martin Luther King described power as “the ability to achieve purpose” and “the strength required to bring about social, political and economic change.” 

In organizing, power is not a thing or trait. Organizers understand power as the influence that’s created by the relationship between interests and resources. Here, interests are what people need or want (e.g. to protect a river, to stay in public office, to make money), while resources are assets (e.g. people, energy, knowledge, relationships, and money) that can be readily used to, in the case of organizing, achieve the change you need or want. Understanding the nature of power – that it stems from the interplay between interests and resources – and that we must shift power relationships in order to bring about change, is essential for the success of our organizing efforts.

From the example above, the constituency against the dam may ask questions aimed at ‘tracking down the power’ – that is, inquiring into the relationship between actors, and particularly the interests and resources of these actors in their struggle. For instance, they might ask questions like: what are our interests, or, what do we want? Who holds the resources needed to address these interests? What are their interests, or, what do they want?

In doing so, the town residents may realize that their local town council is a key actor, that local councillors want to stay in office and need votes to do so, and in turn, the constituency holds the resources of people, relationships, and votes that could shift this power relationship and bring about change.

Change

In organizing, change must be specific, concrete, and significant. Organizing is not about ‘raising awareness’ or speech-making (though these may contribute to an organizing effort). It is about specifying a clear goal and mobilizing your resources to achieve it.

Indeed, if organizing is about enabling others to bring about change, and specifically, securing commitment from a group of people with shared interests to take action to further common goals, then it’s critical to define exactly what those goals are.

In the case of the proposed dam project from above, the constituency against the dam must create clear, measurable goals. Note the difference between “our goal is to stop the dam” versus “our goal is to put pressure on town council in the next 3.5 months – through door-knocking, events, and local newspaper op-eds aimed at getting 1 / 3 of town residents to sign our petition – to pass a motion to stop the dam project.”

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Reading Response Questions:

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling.  Writing Activity: This will help you further connect to the text in this section and your own experience

1. Write a sentence about each of the five leadership practices that explains why it is an important part of creating community change.

2. Share an insight that came to you from reading this section. 

Attributions

Adapted from “What is Organizing? An Introduction based on the Work of Marshall Ganz” by Commons Social Change Library, Et al., Leading Change Network, Marshall Ganz, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA.