organising Archives - Thoughtful Campaigner

Lessons in movement building from an evangelical megachurch

You might assume there isn’t much that campaign movements here in the UK can learn from an evangelical megachurch in the Midwest USA, but you’d be wrong.

You might assume there isn’t much that campaign movements here in the UK can learn from an evangelical megachurch in the Midwest USA.

But academic Hahrie Han’s latest book, Undivided explores the experience of a group of church members who follow a racial justice programme as part of the churches activities, and it has a whole range of lessons for those of us looking at building people powered movements for change.

On a personal note, as someone who has grown up in and around churches since a young age, and at times has worked with colleagues and organisations who’ve been part of US evangelical community it was fascinating to have someone play back somethings that have always felt instinctive to how I’ve approached my organising.

I was reminded of this brilliant pamphlet Purpose Driven Campaigning, which draws on the lessons from the hugely influential Purpose Driven Church book which was all about how churches grow and applies those to movement building.

Some of us had some time with Hahrie when she was over the UK at the end of November for a book tour organised by the brilliant team at Act Build Change – and I took away the following reflections:

We need to stop seeing people not wanting to get involved as the problem – they do, so it’s not a demand side issue, it’s a supply side one, and that’s on us. We need to be thinking about how we create replicable and attractive opportunities that people want to join.

Megachurches think a lot about the design of the experience that people have as they come into their spaces, and how they use small group to connect people into meaningful community.
Getting involved in public life is not a natural instinct – People are hungry to be in community, but they can find that in lots of other spaces well away from getting involved in change making. We should always remind ourselves of that when thinking about the design of the opportunities we offer.

We need to supply meaningful ways people can get involved, and think deeply about the design of them given the competing demands.
Start with belonging before belief – the church that Hahrie studied didn’t expect people to believe in their creeds before they were able to belong – their logic is that finding belief comes from finding a place of belonging, and beyond that there will be issues/topics where people don’t agree, but they still find a community.

The book explores this around racial justice, but you could apply this to other issues where there was deep disagreement. Too often we put barriers in the communities that we create which prevent people from belonging unless they agree across a whole range of issues. That means our movements will always struggle to grow.
We need to develop asks that allow people to grow their own agency – many of the asks that we make as campaigners are ones that can be carried out in isolation, and are low risk for the people who take them, as there is little impact on them in terms of their time/money/effort if they don’t succeed. Actions like signing a petition reinforce to individuals that they are cogs in a machine.

We can make a choice to develop an offer that need to be created in community, and higher risk for those that take them – i.e. they might put in lots of time/effort and the outcome does not get achieved. It’s in those asks that individuals grow as leaders, but also build community with others.
Invest in leaders – megachurches invest a huge amount in their volunteer leaders, inspired by the example of Jesus who spent much of his time teach/training his 12 disciples.

Go to where people are – we are at risk of getting drawn into a context where there is a political class – who are driving the political system but amounts of a small % of the population, and a non-political class who are increasingly not speaking or understanding each other.

Megachurches have thought deeply about how they go to where people are – designing programmes and activities to reach all types of people – take a look here at the sheer range of groups available at the church Hahrie’s book is based.

Remember what you measure is what matters – if you’re not measuring it and accountable for it, then you’re less likely to prioritise it.

More on the book here if you’re interested – it comes highly recommended.

Organising to build power – reflections on Hahrie Han skillshare

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend a day learning from US academic and trainer Hahrie Han on how we can organise activists. It was a cracking day alongside 50+ other campaigners, full of lots of thought provoking, challenging and inspiring content about how we can work to organise activists to deliver change.
It’s part of a series of events that Hahrie is doing while she’s here in London, this evening Hahrie is giving a lecture in conjunction with the University of Westminster. While the lecture is fully booked you can watch a free web stream of the lecture from 5.30pm today (31st March) here.
Walking away from the day I’m struck by a few lessons that I want to dig into more in my work.
1 – We need to get comfortable talking about transformation and power – Perhaps its our British reserve but because the word transformation seems to be associated with religious fever, while power is seen as a battle between good and evil, we don’t feel comfortable talking about them.
But as Hahrie suggested ‘movements build power not by selling people products they already want but instead by transforming what people think is possible’. We need to help people believe that transformation is possible and that starts by talking about it.
When it comes to power, we spent time considering the work of Steven Lukes and his Three Dimensions of Power. Lukes argues that power is exercised in three ways – visible, hidden and invisible.
Visible power is what we see happening in voting in elections or in Parliament – it’s perhaps the form of power that as campaigners we spend much of our time considering – how can we get MPs to vote for our issue in Parliament for example, but invisible power are the factors/beliefs/assumptions about how the world works that are often imbedded into our institutions.
Campaigners can spend lots of time talking about how we can overcome visible, but organising requires us to consider invisible power that prevents challenging the status quo. We need to spend more time talking about and wrestling with where power really is, and strategising on how we respond.
2 – Agency is about autonomy as well as competence – Agency is the ability to achieve purpose – and in most western countries individuals sense of agency is declining. We’ve often see increasing agency in those we work with as simply providing people with the skills they need – so they have competence to go out and make the change we’re looking for – perhaps because they’ve been trained to use a particular tool or approach.
Hahrie suggested that agency is not simply about make people feel they have the competence to use a tool it’s also providing them with the autonomy to use those tools – the space to act on it free from the control of an organisation.
3 – Good organisers are not always the first to put their hands up – Zack Exley one of Bernie Sanders lead organiser has spoken about ‘the tyranny of the annoying‘ when the worst people with the most time on their hands take over, and when it comes to picking organiser the same could be true.
Good organisers aren’t always those who are the first to volunteer, they can just be those with time to get involved, but instead individuals who have an ability to learn and reflect, are able to hold the juxtaposition between pain (the challenge of injustice) and redemption (hope that it can be overcome) and relational capacity.
4 – What brings you into belonging to a community – Growing up in a church community, I spent lots of my teenage years in debates about if becoming part of the church meant that you have to first believe then behave before you could belong. There is a growing conversation in church circles that actually the focus should be on belonging, and from that behaviour and belief will come. See below for more on this.

For many who come into activism the same is true. We often assume that people’s engagement in our issues comes first from a belief in our message and from that becomes the behaviours (like taking an action) and belonging (forming your support for an issue as part of your identity).
But evidence from pro-life activism in the US suggest it’s the other way around. Half of those who got involved in pro-life activism were indifferent to the issue when they first got involved, instead they did so because they were looking for community or invited by a friend. The belonging came well before the believing, are we creating activism spaces that encourage belonging?
5 – It’s not just about how profitable an organisation is – When it comes to metrics of success, we should take the same approach that financial analysts who don’t just judge the performance of a company in a given year on the profits they’ve made, but also the assets they have which inform their ability to make future profits for an investor.
Should the same be true of our approaches? Focusing on the wins achieved (the profit) but also the capacity going forward (the assets) which will inform the change we can deliver in the future.
There was lots of other insight wrapped up in the day, but I also walked away with some very practical reflections;

We need to be finding our own community of academics and practitioners who are researching this – most of the literature that we covered was drawn from the US (and even then the body of work is fairly small). We need to find academics in the UK who want to dig into what’s working and not working here.
It’s about mixing up and learning from different disciplines – Across the day we drew on insights from a range of approaches as wide as behaviour psychology to those teaching at business schools. Campaigners and organisers would do well to learn from across academic approaches.

For those who joined the skill share or the lecture, I’d be interested in learning what you’re thinking.

Why Developing Your Grassroots Matters – My review of 'How Organizations Develop Activist' by Hahrie Han

Since reading it last year, I’ve been telling anyone who’d listen about why they should read Hahrie Han’s book “How Organizations Develop Activist“.
So I was delighted to be asked to contribute to a special Mobilizing Ideas dialogue on the book. A extract from my review is below, but I’d encourage you to head across to the Mobilizing Ideas blog to read the rest of my review and some cracking contributions from other brilliant organisers and academics.
Han has turned her lens on what she describes as national associations, which appear to be organisations with longstanding programs of grassroots work linked with grasstops influencing, neither mentioned by name but one working in health and the other environment, but you get the impression the lessons are widely applicable.
While there are certainly difference between our approach to grassroots campaigning in the UK to the US, for example less of a focus on state/local level activism, we’re generally keen to learn from trends in the US, and while enjoying the book I was reminded of the lessons from Theda Skocpol’s study on why the push to get action on climate change in 2010 failed in part because it focused too much on grasstops lobbying, rather than the slow work of strategically building power, a sobering lesson for any organisation that nurturing your grassroots matters.
Turning the pages, in the book Han hits the sweet spot in the challenges anyone who works with local chapters or groups. The characterisation of groups being categorised into 3 types, Lone Wolves, Activists and Organiser rings true for anyone who’s been involved in working with local groups.
Lone Wolves being those who chose to ‘to build power by leveraging information — through legal briefs, public comments, and other forms of research advocacy’ while ‘mobilisers and organizers, by contrast, choose to build power through people’.
For many its easy to see activism and organising as the same, but as Jim Coe points out in his review of the book that the ‘two strategic models are in fact based on radically different philosophies and approaches’.
This central idea is one that I found most challenging in the work that I do. I often find myself using the words interchangeably, but as Joy Cushman suggests in the book “The organizer thus makes two [strategic] choices: 1) to engage others, and 2) to invest in their development. The mobilizer only makes the first choice. And the lone wolf makes neither”.
The study is full of practical ideas and evidence insight, for me 5 things stand out as challenges and opportunities for those working in ‘traditional’ organisations or associations looking to build grassroots networks;

The need to focus on transformational and transactional outcomes – Han refers to the this paper on Metrics that Matter suggesting in the rush to prove to funders and if were honest often others in our organisations the value of our work we can spend too much time focusing on transactional outcomes (the number of emails sent for example) but we need to focus more on transformational outcomes that reflect the often ‘invisible’ work of building capacity and how people have been altered through collective efforts.

Develop the approach of a coach when working with supporters – groups that had adopted an organising approach were ones that Han understood the need to create a ‘network that grows’, as staff at the heart of an association its easy to revert to an activist approach, but should focus on coaching those involved in groups about how to overcome specific challenges or situations that they are facing.

Question the narrative – Han talks about the way she observed different chapters making meaning of their work through past experiences “Remember when we got 100 people to attend the meeting”, suggesting its more than just the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ perspective but a sense of believing that we develop a ‘taste’ for specific approach. We need to challenge this.

Bring people together for fun – the research finds that the most successful chapters or group were those that combined political and social activities, deepening commitment and a sense of shared values. Perhaps a learning that feels obvious in the cold light of day but too often in my experience overlooked.

Make our approach sticky – making the time to invest in leadership development isn’t easy, but for chapters to succeed the rationale for adopting a particular method of change needs to become ‘sticky’ that is passed on from one generation of leaders to another.

This post first appeared on the Mobilizing Ideas February Essay Dialogues, and can be read in full here.