Scaling Organising
This blog was first published by Act Build Change. Also posted by the CPC & Iron Rule.
Through deep local work organisers can develop exactly the strategies needed to achieve change at scale in moments of crisis. This approach, incubating and cascading, is how we built the backbone of the Refugee Welcome movement.
2017, action in support of child refugees with Lord Alf Dubs
In the summer of 2015 the then Prime Minister David Cameron was adamant, the UK wouldn’t take any more Syrian refugees. The country was full, and urgent action was needed to stem the “swarm” of migrants struggling to reach the UK from the Calais Jungle.
Then one image arrived that changed everything, a picture of young Aylan Kurdi washed up dead on a beach in Turkey.
The outpouring of grief and the demand for action from the general public was immediate and overwhelming, and five days later David Cameron announced the UK would take 20,000 Syrian refugees.
At the time every major NGO - from Save the Children to the Refugee Council - had petitions going and fundraisers rolling, but if you as a member of the public wanted to do something to help resettle actual Syrians to your town there was precious little you could do.
At Citizens UK though we had been working in five local areas for two years prior, building coalitions to try and boost resettlement. Cameron had kept to his line that the country was full since the start of the war, so we had set about trying to persuade individual councils to step forward and say publicly that they could take twenty, ten, fifty.
Through that patient work we learned the main blocker would be the availability of housing and so developed tactics for finding willing private sector landlords. We set up pods of people to welcome the families and help them settle, found local translators, got pledges from schools and GPs to help.
I stepped in to lead this work just as Aylan’s death moved the country. The challenge was to take this work and massively scale it at speed, not something community organising is known for and one of the principle critiques of it as an approach to social change. To borrow a framework from Amanda Tattersall we wanted to do “big & slow”, fast.
With the strategic template clear - and a simple step by step playbook for local groups to follow developed - the challenge was to recruit at scale and speed, to help turn a crowd of activists into teams, and to build the support structures needed to help those teams thrive.
We turned to friends at 38 Degrees to help build the funnel. They started a petition in every local authority area in the country and where a petition hit 1,000+ signatures people were invited to sign up for a training. Wherever 15 or more people signed up, and someone offered to find a host venue, we committed a Citizen UK Organiser to attend.
In ten weeks we trained 1,309 people in over 100 locations across the UK, from Pitlochry to Totnes.
Those two hour sessions were part training, and part kick starter. We spent the first half giving context on the crisis, and coaching people to begin to articulate why helping Syrian refugees mattered personally. Everyone in every training could see it mattered, what we asked in the first half was why it mattered to them.
Through this mini crash course in public narrative we built the levels of trust and shared commitment in the room, and then literally formed the teams that would go on to run the campaign. We’d help identify co-chairs, build working groups for homes, for liaising with the council, for a warm welcome and then ended with planning - where people would make specific commitments and pick the next date to meet. A continent away and one year later this approach also emerged in the “barnstorm” meetings from the Sanders campaign’s Big Organising.
With the strategic template and the funnel in place the last critical piece of infrastructure was to provide the teams with ongoing support through a relational architecture. With a team of just 2 organisers and over 100 teams to support we tried to strike a balance between central support and peer to peer.
We’d intentionally selected co-chairs in each location, so it would never all stand on just one person’s shoulders, and then placed all of them in a Facebook Group so they could connect, share learnings & resources.
Alongside that teams got a 1:1 coaching call each month, co-chairs were invited to a fortnightly campaign call which we ran centrally - featuring key politicians like Alf Dubs, or highlighting key wins and tactics they could use, and were each invited to our annual national residential training. Through that support offer we both made sure local leaders could get what they needed, and made sure they felt like part of a greater whole that was delivering impact across the country.
By incubating local campaigns that could together make a difference nationally we were able to build a network of teams that would form the backbone of the Refugee Welcome movement. With that movement then in place we were then able to take further national issues, break them down locally, and use that grassroots power to deliver real wins.
When in March 2016 Lord Dubs, himself once a child refugee, brought an amendment which would require the UK to take a share of the refugee children reaching Europe, it was these teams that stepped up to secure pledges of places from councils across the country. These pledges helped win the national argument while teams brought pressure to bear on specific Conservative MPs, helping build a threat of rebellion credible enough that the government eventually backed down - MPs like Will Quince, representing Colchester, did not have a long track record on refugee rights, but when his local team led by Jean Michel Knutsen turned out 500 people he backed the amendment.
Community organising is often criticised as too slow and too low - it is patient people and place focused work that can struggle to achieve change of the scale that feels demanded by many of the challenges facing us today - inequality, climate change, the housing crisis.
Through incubating and then cascading organisers don’t have to walk away from a focus on people or place in order to respond to crisis or to take advantage of major events. It is precisely their deep local work through which they can create the strategic templates that then scale - whether resettling Syrians, pushing for a Living Wage, or persuading police forces to police misogyny as a type of hate crime.
Incubating and then cascading approach enables community organisers to stretch for impact greater than the power resources of their existing organization, through building a peripheral (sometimes ephemeral) layer of organisation. In that layer new leaders can be spotted and the seeds of future deep organisation sewn, all while delivering the type of impact that is needed to win the argument for organising to begin with. Supporting and sustaining it does require different approaches however, ones that provide:
A clear and evolving strategic template that continues to provide meaningful local campaigning opportunities that enable major national wins
A funnel through which recruitment can be driven at scale and speed
A relational architecture providing support that focuses on training while doing, peer to peer connection, and continued injection of energy.
I want to contrast this work with two other approaches - the “can we find some people in a marginal” and the “activist schools” both of which are increasingly popular.
Some organisers head to constituencies considered marginal in the run up to a general election, trying to generate local traction in support of their campaign. That approach instrumentalises local participants and does little to build long run power. Movement building through incubating and cascading isn’t one and done, it continually seeks out new strategic templates discovered at the local level or created by breaking down an issue from the national. Resourcing won’t always remain constant, there will be ebbs and flows, but there is at least an intent for an ongoing reciprocal relationship with the potential for strategy to flow both up and down.
Modern mass training organisations by contrast, offer training at decent volumes to leaders & communities with less power than others. These organisations have often seen the need for ongoing support and so develop loose memberships and their training may be fantastic, but without meaningful strategic templates on the issues that matter to people that together add up to a greater whole - these organisations are driving lessons without a car. The skills of participation may be spoken about in a training, but they are learned through application. As Marshall Ganz describes it, it’s like learning to ride a bike - you have to get on, fall off, get back on.
