Every action’s in the Reaction

Training Report written by EFA London

Over three days in July the Migreat! team met for the three day training on community organising with half the team working face-to-face in Trento, Italy and the rest, including the trainers, working remotely from different corners of the continent. The result was an intense learning experience, as useful technologically and pedagogically as it was in terms of developing our knowledge of community organising.

On Day 1 we addressed the question “what is community organising?” We co-constructed a definition, pooling our knowledge and experiences. We can say that community organising is an approach to bringing about social change that centres on building the power of ordinary people. It can be compared and contrasted to labour organising that builds power of workers by organising them at work. Instead of focusing on the workplace, community organising organises people in the neighbourhoods – although with digital community organising developing fast this is also changing. The basic premise is that people have more power to effect change when they are in relationship with other people.

We looked at one of the inspirations of community organising, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky is known as a great political strategist as well as one of the architects of community organising and his seminal text, Rules for Radicals (1971) is admired by people from across the political spectrum not least for presenting tactics for grassroots groups to take action and effect change. What are these rules?

1. “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”
2. “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
3. “Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
5. “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counteract ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
6. “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
7. “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
8. “Keep the pressure on.”
9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. “
10. “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.”
11. “If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside; this is based on the principle that every positive has its negative.”
12. “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
13. “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. “

Alinsky developed and spread something called broad-based community organising. These are urban civil society alliances, joining faith organisations with labour unions, schools and community groups to engage with the powerful people in their cities in order to bring about social justice.

In our training we developed understanding around the key concepts of community organising: listening, power, strategy, learning, leadership, action. We shared some tools to put these concepts into practice. Perhaps the building block of community organising is the 1-1 meeting. This is because a community alliance is sustained by its relationships between people in the alliance. These are public relationships, not intimate ones. We’re not building a network of friends but a diverse network of people in our neighbourhoods committed to working together on the collective common good. The 1-1 meeting helps a community organiser identify leadership and it helps non-organisers, the ordinary people learning how to organise, to develop relationships across their groups and their alliances without depending too heavily on their community organisers. At EFA teacher-organisers do these with their students, with their colleagues, with people from partner organisations and with our potential allies. Good 1-1 questions:

• How are you? How have you been?
• What brings you to this kind of work?
• What motivates you to do this work?
• Why is X important to you
• Tell me a bit about your background
• What do you think about X (issue of the day)
• Let me tell you a bit about myself…….what about you?

On Day 2 we turned our attention to the concept of ‘power’ which is absolutely central to community organising. We used a tool called the ‘power analysis’ to map power in communities and our campaigns. When we want to change something, for example EFA wants more and better quality English classes for migrants in the UK we need to understand who has the power to bring about this change and how we can reach them. A realistic power analysis helps prevent groups bite off more they can chew and get into a long, exhausting and ultimately hopeless campaign. It’s also important to personalise the target of a campaign: “We are asking you, Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, to provide a website to support new arrivals to find an English class”. We also use a power analysis to be realistic about our own power and how we can build it.

This leads to action – the fuel of community organising. Action must become ‘a habit’ In the training we talked about what we mean by action and shared examples of actions we have taken and their impact. Alimsky teaches that every action is in the reaction – and draws a distinction between aimless protest and strategic action designed to increase tension and force powerful people to react. Organising actions with groups of people not in the habit of action can be hard and it can be good to start with do-able, accessible actions within the experience of the group and build towards more daring, disruptive action. Actions are always evaluated by the group, asking questions like “what reaction did we get?”, “what leadership did we develop?”.

So how does this all relate to counter-narratives? We discussed this question on the final day of the training and felt there was a lot of cross-over. Firstly, one of the issues that emerges most strongly when organising in diverse urban areas is migrant rights and anti-racism. People quickly voice their opposition to the stereotypes and racist dominant narratives around migration that are sadly only too prevalent in the press and mainstream political circles. We need to develop tools to counter these damaging narratives in order to bring about change. So the tools and knowledge we have gained and are still gaining due to our participation in Migreat! are extremely valuable in our organising. Conversely organising teaches us how to get our messages out there and how to attach them to winnable campaigns. Secondly, community organising is about reaching out of our bubbles and silos in order to build power. Learning how to tell our stories in a way that connects with a range of people takes us square into the world of narrative and counter-narrative. Both these ideas are brilliantly explained by Chardine Taylor Stone in this short video:

“Let’s go to speak to people who don’t agree with us because that’s how we’re going to build power”.