Base Building for Direct Action Organizing Groups
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The document provides information on key concepts related to organizing, including definitions of organizing, youth organizing, base building, and action planning. It discusses how organizing seeks to reform or dismantle unjust systems by challenging power inequalities and transferring power and wealth. Youth organizing is defined as training young people in community organizing and advocacy to create institutional change. Base building involves mobilizing and educating a mass membership on issues. An action plan in organizing involves identifying problems, research, targets, tactics, resources, and timelines. The document also discusses elements that make social movements successful, such as coalition building, direct action, leadership development, and media impact. It provides guidance on finding and developing leadership within the base. [END SUMMARY]
Base Building for Direct Action Organizing Groups
- 2. HOW DID YOU END UP IN THE WORK WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION?
- 3. TAP GAME
- 4. Follow all the rules. If you’re tapped once, repeat all the rules OUT LOUD until the end of the game. If you’re tapped twice, stand up and repeat all the rules OUT LOUD until the end of the game. If you’re tapped three times, do whatever you want.
- 6. Organizing A process to involve people in a visioning and action plan that leads to social change. Organizing either seeks to push the system –with a goal of REFORMING institutions, services and systems; or to rock the system with a goal of DISMANTLING OR REVOLUTIONIZING institutions, services and systems. While social services usually aim to serve people within the current institutional structures, and help them to “accept and survive” within those structures, organizing recognizes the power inequalities that exist in every relationship, and assumes that justice can only be achieved by challenging inequalities, transferring power and wealth, and/or demolishing unjust systems.
- 7. Youth Organizing The Funders’ Collaborative for Youth Organizing defines Youth Organizing as a comprehensive youth development and social justice strategy that trains young people in community organizing and advocacy, and assists them in employing these skills to alter power relations and create meaningful institutional change in their communities. Youth organizing relies on the power and leadership of youth acting on issues defined by and affecting young people and their communities, and involves them in the design, implementation, and evaluation of these efforts. Employing activities such as community research, issue development, reflection, political analysis and direct action, youth organizing increases civic participation and builds the individual and collective leadership capacity of young people.
- 8. Base Building Mobilizing and educating a mass constituency/membership (a.k.a. the base) on the issue, and supporting them to develop as leaders as well as to plan and engage in an organizing campaign activities. Almost any event organizers do – workshops or conferences, street or door-to-door outreach, an action such as a rally or a march, even a cook-out – is usually intended in part to build and educate the base. To build group power over time, organizing campaigns usually strive to recruit, orient and train new people to grow the base.
- 9. Action Plan A march or protest alone, a series of public hearings to pass a new law, releasing a report - any of those things alone IS NOT ORGANIZING. Youth and community organizing involves people in developing an ACTION PLAN to guide an “campaign” and all the activities in the plan are what make up the ORGANIZING. Action plans usually include: IDENTIFYING PROBLEMS/ISSUES, CAMPAIGN GOALS AND OUTCOMES CONDUCTING ISSUE, COMMUNITY AND TARGET RESEARCH IDENTIFYING A TARGET OR TARGETS CONDUCTING A POWER ANALYSIS IDENTIFYING ALLIES DETERMINING TACTICS IN ORDER OF ESCALATION (USUALLY FROM LEAST THREATENING TO MOST CONFRONTATIONAL) LISTING AND RAISING RESOURCE NEEDS/CAMPAIGN BUDGET AND ESTABLISHING A TASK AND TIME-LINE.
- 11. Think of the mass movements you have seen or studied? What made them successful? What elements did they have?
- 12. Movement Building Occasionally, in history, organizing ignites the collective imagination of millions of people, and society is overcome by widespread and sweeping change – major institutional and policy changes – but also shifts in culture, beliefs and values. This is characterized as a mass movement. A movement cannot be built exactly. It happens when the organizing you are engaged in collides with history in a dramatic enough way that it causes the larger community to act in planned and spontaneous ways, in efforts you initiate, and in efforts you never envisioned. The movement lives beyond your control. It is shaped by many forces (youth and community, organizations, activists, artists, coalitions, etc.) that all share the movement’s vision and goals.
- 13. OUR OPPOSITION
- 14. US MOST OF THE TIME
- 15. US ON A GOOD DAY
- 16. LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT COALITION & ALLIANCE BUILDING LITIGATION ACTIVIST ARTS POPULAR EDUCATION COMMUNITY SERVICE ELECTORAL AND GOTV MEDIA IMPACT MAINSTREAM MEDIA CREATION ORGANIZATION BUILDING DIRECT ACTION RESEARCH BASE BUILDING PUBLIC POLICY ADVOCACY MOVEMENT
- 19. Where are they? Target your outreach.
- 20. Where are they? Target your outreach.
- 21. MASS BASE How will you reach and bring out larger numbers of people who have a direct connection to the issue? 2nd Outreach Strategy Primary Outreach Strategy Where will you reach the people most impacted by an issue who also have a DESIRE to change things? How will you start the conversation? Where will you find people on a regular basis who are impacted but not active? How will you transform them from people impacted to people who take action? FIND YOUR BASE
- 22. MASS BASE How will you communicate with them and involve them in decision making? How will you mobilize them? How can you move them into greater leadership roles? DEVELOPING LEADERS CORE LEADERS How can you maximize their decision making? How can you prevent tokenizing your leadership? How can you prevent a small elite core that is not accountable? What training and mentoring will you provide? GROW YOUR BASE
- 23. Find the TRUE leaders - Who are the people other people talk to when they are in trouble?
- 24. Practice ONE ON ONES: 1. Listen more than you speak. (Goal to identify motivations and self interest.) 2. Communicate clearly what organization does. Goals - give and try to get contact info. 3. Ask - (to join, to come out, etc.)
- 25. “Check yourself before you wreck yourself.” (ICE CUBE) Erase Inhumane Language
- 26. Empowerment EMPOWERMENT IS NOT TOKENISM. It means having the support, training, and opportunities needed to participate more equally with the people who may have more experience and who have traditionally had more power. Ask questions. Give people space and tools. The realization of personal and group power that people develop through their own action. Although the word is often misused, we can not 兎 mpower other people. Adults can not empower youth, whites can empower people of color, men can empower women. The organizer’s role is as a facilitator, enabling constituency to have the space, training and support needed to find their own voice, build their own vision and act for the liberation of themselves and others. People who want to support the empowerment of others, must agree to work with people instead of for them; listen more than they speak; when talking, talk with people instead of at them; give up their traditional role (as service provider, teacher, board member, tenant leader, etc.) and share these roles, and the power and responsibility that come with them, with other people; and serving as an ally to others, recognizing that there are more rewards in partnership than in hierarchy.
- 27. FROM VICTIM, OFFENDER, PREDATOR, JUVENILE, MINOR, DELINQUENT, WARD, PROBATIONER, ILLEGAL ALIEN/IMMIGRANT, CONVICT, MINORITY, HIGH RISK YOUTH, INMATE, PRISONER…
- 28. TO HUMAN BEING: (PEOPLE/YOUTH IN PRISON, CONVICTED OR UNDOCUMENTED PEOPLE, YOUTH IN CONFLICT WITH THE LAW.)
- 31. FROM YOUTH ARE MONSTERS
- 32. TO THE SYSTEM IS MONSTROUS
- 34. TO TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE - INCLUSING TAKING REPONSIBILITY AND REPAIRING HARM
- 35. FROM “DO ADULT CRIME, DO ADULT TIME.”
- 36. TO NO YOUTH IN ADULT COURTS, JAILS OR PRISONS, AND FAIR AND HUMANE TREATMENT FOR ALL AGES.
- 37. THIS INCLUDES ENDING OUR USE OF DEROGATORY TERMS FOR LAW ENFORCEMENT
Editor's Notes
- #5: Start with a basic set of questions: What happened? How many people were in pain? How did they feel? How many people saw other people in pain? How did they know others were in pain? Who had control, authority? Why? How were they treated by the facilitator? How did it feel repeating rules over and over? Was it a good use of your time? Challenge them on whether or not you in fact had any authority. Why did they “behave” you? If people rebelled at all, ask people who rebelled in small or large ways, why they made those decisions. Why didn’t they take it further? What could have shifted the response of others to be more challenging. What kind of suffering do we walk by every day without doing anything? Closing - organizing is all about challenging authority and having the courage to name suffering and intervene to stop it. We follow rules all the time because there’s a promise for a reward at the end, even though the rules might be unjust, unnecessary and/or hurting people,
- #29: To be seen as a whole being, certain things you deserve as a human being. Preserving dignity and humanity of all people.