Introduction to Organizing

Key Concepts

• Mobilizing and organizing are two key approaches to creating change.
• Organizing is leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want.
• Organizing is a practice, and there are five key leadership practices within this practice: telling stories, building relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, and taking action.
• The first question an organizer asks is “who are my people?” not “what is my issue?”
• Strong relationships are the foundation of successful organizing efforts.
• Historical— Outmoded The snowflake model is an organizational structure that embodies leadership as that which enables others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty.

What is Organizing?

Organizing is leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want. As we’ll learn throughout this guide, 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 taking action. That is, to develop our capacity for effective community organizing, we must learn the five leadership practices.

The Five Leadership Practices

1. Telling stories 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. Building relationships as the foundation of purposeful collective actions.
3. Structuring leadership in a way that distributes power and responsibility and prioritizes leadership development.
4. Strategizing to turn your resources into the power you need to achieve clear goals.
5. Translating strategy into taking action that is measurable, motivational, and effective.

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

The Organizer’s Journey

The Organizer’s Journey is one way to conceptualize the five leadership practices in action. In the cartoon below, the organizer notices that the houses in a neighbourhood are in disrepair. They begin by approaching members of their community and telling stories about why this matters to them personally and to their community, and that if they work together, they can fix the houses.

Next they use the story of the problem and change they want to make as a foundation for building relationships within their community. Once they have recruited enough people they launch a leadership team and start strategizing.

The team will set a goal and the best strategy, weighing whether to fix the houses themselves, or to pressure their local government to invest in fixing them. Once they have a goal and a strategy, they decide how to structure their team to reach their goal. And finally, they will put their strategy into practice by taking action and mobilizing their people to use their tactics to implement their strategy.

While the Organizer’s Journey makes this all seem linear, it’s not. While it’s always a good idea to start with stories, you never stop telling stories. Likewise, you don’t stop building relationships once you have a strategy. Rather, each of these practices is used iteratively, over and over again until you reach your goal.

Mobilizing & Organizing

Organizing is leadership that enables your people to turn their resources into the power they need to make the change they want. Mobilizing is leadership that focuses on leveraging that capacity and power through immediate action. Understanding the differences between two main approaches, their limitations, and how they complement each other can help us more effectively approach a campaign.

	Mobilizing	Organizing
Strategy for building power	Builds power by building membership; take people where they are.	Build power by building leadership; transform motivations and capacities of members to take on more leadership.
Strategy for building membership	Build membership by getting as many people as possible to take actions; build a bigger, more targeted prospect list.	Build membership by developing leaders who can engage others; constantly develop leadership among new prospects.
Implications for structure	Centralize responsibility in the hands of staff or a few key volunteers.	Distribute responsibility out to a large network of volunteers.
Implications for types of asks made to volunteers	Focus on discrete requests that often allow people to act quickly or alone.	Focus on interdependent asks that are often more time-intensive, force people to work with others, and give them some strategic autonomy.
Implications for communications with volunteers	Focus on reaching out to as many people as possible by developing attractive “pitches” that will draw in the most people and new networks.	Focus on reaching out to people by building relationships and community with them.
Implications for support	Minimal resources needed for training and reflection.	Need extensive resources for training, coaching, and reflection.

This table based on How Organizations Develop Activists by Hahrie Han.

Both are important in creating change; however, some campaigns only use mobilizing to create actions without using organizing to increase capacity. If you skip the first three leadership practices (telling stories, building relationships and structuring teams) and go right to strategizing and taking action, you are probably just mobilizing.

If you only organize, your efforts will be deep but narrow. If you only mobilize, your efforts will be broad but shallow. Effective campaigns blend them both to achieve a combination of breadth and depth.

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 who you are organizing is just the first step. The job of a community organizer is to transform a community of people who share common values or interests into a community of people who are standing together to realize a common purpose.

For example, an organizer would move a community of undocumented people worried about being deported when they go to the hospital to take action by organizing a campaign to make hospitals safe spaces for undocumented people.

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. Dr. 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 a 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, votes, and money) that can be readily used to 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 community organizing to make hospitals safe spaces for undocumented people 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 community may realize that the local health authority is a key actor, that several health authority board members in this community have ambitions to run for political office and so value their public image, and in turn, the community holds the resources of people, relationships in the community and with the media, and an ability to tarnish their image 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, researching, 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, then it’s critical to define exactly what that change is by setting clear measurable goals.

In the case of the example campaign from above, the community seeking to make hospitals safe spaces for undocumented people must create clear, measurable goals. Note the difference between “our goal is for hospitals to be safe for undocumented people” versus “our goal is to enact a policy stating that hospital staff may not report the immigration status of a patient to Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA), and CBSA officers are not permitted in the hospital.”

You’ll learn how to come up with goals in the Strategizing section and how to achieve them in the Taking Action section.

The Snowflake Model: A distributed approach to leadership

Historical note: This subsection reflects the 2017 version; see Introduction to Organizing for current guidance.

This page adapts material from “Organizing: People, Power, Change,” Version 5.0 (August 2017). Credits: Originally adapted from the work of Dr. Marshall Ganz (Harvard University), the Leading Change Network, the New Organizing Institute; revised by contributors from Dogwood Initiative, Leadnow, One Cowichan, David Suzuki Foundation, Stonehouse Institute, and genius (Organize BC & Organize Ontario). Design/photography: Shelby Tay. See Rights and Use for the full terms (non‑sale, attribution required, include these restrictions, send significant modifications, and grant back a royalty‑free license).