Who, What and Why?

There are different schools of thought within community organising, but the core principles remain the same. It is a practice that brings people who share a problem or an interest together to apply pressure on their institutions to act. 

It focuses on forging relationships and developing leaders as a route to building a sustainable base of people power that is both accountable to the community and can go toe-to-toe with positional power. 

For the purposes of inclusion in this project we spoke to big charities who:

• are proactively using the term ‘community organising’ to describe their work;
• understand that organising is about building power and have clear constituencies in mind;   
• have learnt from or are learning from the formal community organising sector.

Jason Mogus, co-founder of NetChange Consulting, argues that mobilising is the act of ‘spending power’ - i.e. turning out a constituency in support of a specific issue or around a specific moment. 

It involves a clear demonstration of people power through sheer numbers and capacity to generate a political reaction. [4]

Mobilising relies on an engaged and trusting base - and is at its most successful when grounded in a sound analysis of where power lies and how to influence it. 

Mobilisation thus thrives where there is deep community power-building already being done. However, it is also a vital route to discover latent power - activating people’s pre-existing social capital when it aligns with a campaign goal. Ensuring this energy lasts relies on nurturing supporters and members, and ensuring they have a meaningful stake in your strategy-setting and decision-making. 

Building on the momentum of ‘New Power’ and Networked for Change, Directed Networks Campaigns combine grassroots power-building with a creative, strategic, and disciplined mobilisation of existing constituents. 

This work is woven together around existing priorities and directed towards specific change strategies - surfacing and demonstrating people power at key moments. It is usually shared between different actors and organisations. 

It is different to social movements, insofar as it is ‘directed’, but it adopts many of the same approaches. 

This project is using the term ‘big charities’ to capture the emerging trend of UK headquartered charities that already invest in campaigning and advocacy moving towards more explicit community organising practices. 

We are distinguishing this from the work of small, grassroots charities, many of whom also engage in organising and power-building work (even if they would not label it as such).  

To this end, we include organisations who:

• have an income of over £2 million a year; 
• have a national remit…  
• … but also have local or regional nodes of activity - either through services, shops and other volunteering opportunities, and active supporters and
• seek to influence national policy and decision making. 

We are prioritising these types of organisations so we can better understand the role of organising within existing campaign, advocacy, and mass membership organisations and how these practices can work together for impact. 

Looking across comparable organisations gave us a much better platform from which to assess this, but also helped us build a compelling peer network that can continue to share lessons learnt from relevant and similar starting points. 

As outlined above, community organising is the practice of building the power of a given community. 

This paper thus uses ‘communities’ as shorthand to describe the different groups big charities or their partners may be seeking to engage. Communities interchangeably refers to:

• Communities of place: local people coming together to win change that matters to them
• Communities of experience: communities united by their identity or a shared oppression organising locally or nationally to build their collective power and shift the structures that contribute to this oppression. 

Big charities have different communities in mind when they organise, including their own supporter base; their members; the people that use their services; and the people that they see as vital to achieving their end goals. 

The paper also uses ‘community power’ as shorthand to describe the end goal that community organising seeks to achieve - noting that precisely what this looks like is worth a paper in and of itself. [5]

Community power researcher Pritpal S. Tamber has drawn on the work of Paul Speer [6] and the USC Dornsife Equity Research Institute [7] to define community power as a practice that: requires community members to be in relationship with one another; to invest in each other’s leadership; to understand the root causes of their conditions; and to use this analysis to both identify solutions and successfully influence established power structures to consistently win progress towards these solutions. 

We are referring to this combination of factors when using the term.

This paper embraces social movements as a cornerstone of sustainable change. 

The definition of social movements we use draws heavily on the work of social movement scholars and thinkers Jean Hardisty and Deepak Bhargava [8]; Barbara Masters and Torie Osborne [9]; Richard Healy and Sandra Hinson [10]; and Bill Moyer [11]. Their analysis has three core factors in common. 

Successful social movements….

1. … start from the grassroots and maintain grassroots energy and action throughout. 
2. … unite the grassroots behind a shared and powerful vision of what is wrong with society - and what an alternative might be. 
3. … require a diverse set of actions and approaches united behind a common goal but without a central leader or defined structure.  

Starting with the grassroots is vital, because democratic politics is a struggle for the people’s hearts and minds. Those who hold power know this, and so must changemakers. This is why community organising is essential to social movements. 

But movements are successful because they go beyond individual community and campaign wins to shift paradigms and build lasting power. They change the wider systems and structures that govern us by shifting attitudes, practices, and policy - and by consistently holding decision makers to account for their promises. 

Equally important is the range of different tactics and approaches required. Bill Moyer’s Movement Action Plan [12] best articulates this through the different roles he carves out for reformers, rebels, citizens and change agents. In 2021, IPPR and The Runnymede Trust mapped the current climate justice movement against these quadrants [13]. This resource uses Moyer’s framework to argue that social movements require a great deal of time and energy. As a result, different approaches are required at different moments to keep up momentum. 

The housing and homelessness charity Shelter has spent several years embedding community organising within their campaign strategies. They now employ a senior leader focused on organising, who in turn has a team of nine community organisers. Most of these organisers are based out of Shelter’s regional Hubs. Shelter put all their community organisers through the Harvard Leadership, Organizing and Action course run by Marshall Ganz. This gives them a common language and frame through which to understand organising. 

Shelter’s primary focus is building the power of people facing the housing emergency. They work with the communities who interact with their regional Hubs and then build wider connections, coalitions, and campaigns. 

Organising has not replaced traditional campaigning. Rather, Shelter recognises that their impact can expand through the deep work of offline organising. Digital campaigning still provides critical breadth, where they can mobilise and engage a much wider audience. This hybrid model is core to their theory of impact. 

The Climate Coalition is comprised of 140 organisations working together for climate and environmental action. Through campaigning and advocacy, they aim to increase political space dedicated to climate issues, secure key legislation, and encourage cross-party political support on climate change.  

Their new ‘Project Ground Game’ initiative aims to deploy community organising techniques to:

1. Enhance public understanding around how net zero and nature-positive policy could benefit people, their families and local communities in key constituencies, growing and showing issue salience and support for policy change.
2. Build networks and power in communities, helping ensure constituents’ concerns and needs are seen and heard by their local policy-makers
3. And power-up key political relationships and strategies in the run up to the next general election and beyond.

The RSPB is the largest nature conservation charity in Europe. They have around 1.1 million members, 12,000 volunteers, and countless affiliated local groups. 

In 2019, the RSPB overhauled their existing strategy. Central to this was acknowledging that this scale gives them both a unique responsibility and opportunity to respond to the nature and climate emergency. 

This prompted a restructure that signalled a shift from traditional ‘old power’ - centralised campaigning and advocacy - to embedding a people power approach through mobilising and organising. The RSPB is now building a small team of ‘Community Connectors’ to support local community leaders and help build community power.  

They have been working with Trust the People, Act Build Change and Community Organisers UK to train and support their wider Community Team, the Community Connectors and local volunteers. Central to their strategy is constant learning: understanding what is and isn’t working for communities and adapting as necessary.

Christian Aid mobilises people across the UK who want to put their faith into action. 

As part of a strategic shift in 2017/2018, they articulated that they were not achieving “the scale of action required for the urgency of our times.” This prompted a campaign review, where organising emerged as an important route to deepen relationships; increase supporter agency; and place more power in the hands of passionate, faith-based communities. 

At present, their approach to organising is to invite Christain Aid supporters and members to join their “Climate Campaign Organisers”. This is a voluntary programme that trains supporters in campaigning and organising. The training is provided by Christain Aid, using in-house expertise and drawing on learning from Citizens UK training, Ella Baker School of Organising and Act Build Change. The full programme is six months, with ongoing support if a volunteer wishes to continue in their role.

Hospice UK is a national charity for hospice and end of life care. Through their Dying Matters campaign, they have a strong network of community volunteers working with local institutions such as hospices, libraries, GP surgeries and NHS bodies. These volunteers are loyal and engaged and very effective at organising community based activities. 

Dying Matters has traditionally been a public health campaign, encouraging people to plan for their end of life care. Hospice UK is shifting this in the following ways:

1. Ensuring communities are more in the lead. Asking volunteers what matters to them and then designing strategies around this. 
2. Influencing politics. Recognising the current health system is not well equipped to provide end of life care, starting a conversation with volunteers about influencing this system to secure long-term change. 
3. Expanding their reach. While Hospice UK deeply values their volunteers and supporters, they also recognise they are not reaching some of the most vulnerable communities. These communities are often the most let down by end of life care. 

Community organising offers a framework within which Hospice UK can start to think about bringing all three priorities together to secure better individual and societal outcomes. However, Hospice UK is grappling with key questions around how to retain the autonomy of their local volunteers whilst building capacity around organising approaches.