What is Organizing?
Some people are born with power.
Others, who might not have as much power, need to come together to build collective power in order to make things happen.
This is organizing.
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Power Building
Organizing is the ability to build power to win campaigns.
Power is the ability to make things happen.
Because it can be hard to create collective power, it’s important that we use strategy in our organizing. Having a strategy for long-term, sustainable organizing gives us more chances to challenge power imbalances.
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Types of Power
• Consumer Power : Ability to Conduct a Boycott • Legal / Regulatory Power : Ability to Win in Court • Strike / Demonstration Power : Ability to Disrupt Business as Usual • Political / Legislative Power : Ability to Win Elections or to get Something Passed by Officials
Uses of Power
• You can deprive the other side of something it wants : example - a public official is deprived of votes, or a landlord is deprived of rent through a rent strike. • You can give the other side something it wants : example your members’ testimonies help get a bill passed. • Your organization can elect someone who supports your issues. There are many more examples of types and uses of power.
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Spectrum of Involvement
Uses Existing Power Relationships
Challenges Existing Power Relationships
Direct Service
Self-Help
Education
Advocacy
Direct Action
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Direct Service: A service organization provides direct services such as housing, food, medical care, or case management to clients. Example: prevention education. Self-Help: People who are in need of something organize themselves to get it. Example: People who need medications form a buying cooperative to get lower prices; neighborhood clean-up days. Education: Education, issue research, teaching people about an issue and the steps necessary to change it. Example: A city struggles with homelessness, so an education organization studies what other cities have done, prepares and distributes materials. Also, teaching someone how to find an apartment would be education. Advocacy: Propose and fight for legislative or legal solutions to an issue. May be done by people who aren’t directly affected by the issue. Example: An AIDS organization hires a lobbyist to fight for funding for housing for PWAs. Direct Action: The people directly affected by the problem organize, agree on a solution that meets their needs, and take action.
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Problems vs. Issues
What’s the difference between a problem and an issue?
Problems vs. Issues
A problem is an area of concern.
An issue is a solution to a problem.
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Tactics vs. Strategies
A strategy is an overall plan to win a campaign. Strategies include short and long-term goals, targets, and tactics. Tactics are specific steps in your strategy. It’s often easy to confuse tactics and strategies, or to jump directly to planning a tactic. All tactics must be considered within an overall strategy.
Checklist for Choosing Tactics
Use this checklist to make sure your tactics make sense, given your larger campaign strategy. • Can you really do it? Do you have the needed people, time, and resources? • Is it focused on either the primary or secondary target? • Does it put real power behind a specific demand? • Does it meet your organizational goals as well as your issue goals? • Is it outside the experience of the target?
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Checklist for Choosing Tactics
• Is it within the experience of your own members, and are they comfortable with it? • Do you have leaders experienced enough to do it? • Will people enjoy working on it or participating in it? • Will it play positively with the media? • Does it have options for people who are concerned about disclosing their HIV status?
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Popular Education
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Skills and Qualities
When was the first time you heard about AIDS?
When was the first time you realized that AIDS was something that people fight back against?
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Popular Education
Why do we do this kind of exercise? How can this link people’s personal experiences to a larger struggle?
Popular Education
What is Popular Education? Popular education is generally understood as education for social justice, or education for liberation. Popular education dates back to the 18th century and has been a part of many different movements for social reform.
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Some key elements of popular education include:
- Poses questions and problems rather than imposing answers and solutions - Creates student-teachers and teacher-students who learn from each other - Supports movements for social change and challenge the status quo - Addresses the issues people face in their communities - Draws upon the experience and knowledge present in the group - Facilitates respectful, committed, and honest dialogue - Uses a variety of creative and collective exercises and activities, including non-traditional forms of learning to cater to different learning styles - Encourages critical thinking and moves people to reflective action (praxis); connects learning to action
Using Popular Education
Some elements of popular education can be useful in day-to-day advocacy and community organizing work. The exercise you just participated in – “When did you first hear about AIDS?” – uses popular education to get the group talking about their experiences with and knowledge of the history of AIDS and AIDS activism. It also creates a personal connection between people’s lives – the impact of AIDS on them personally – and the work we are doing. Drawing out this personal connection is often key in connecting people to social justice movements that affect their lives. Using popular education can be a simple as starting a meeting or workshop with a personal question that gives people a chance to reflect on and talk about their own lives and experiences.
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Using Popular Education
The AIDS movement is based on the experience of popular education people’s experiences with HIV and AIDS and what they could do to fight back shaped the movement.
The Denver Principles
We condemn attempts to label us as "victims," a term which implies defeat, and we are only occasionally "patients," a term which implies passivity, helplessness, and dependence upon the care of others. We are "People With AIDS." RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ALL PEOPLE 1. Support us in our struggle against those who would fire us from our jobs, evict us from our homes, refuse to touch us or separate us from our loved ones, our community or our peers, since available evidence does not support the view that AIDS can be spread by casual, social contact. 2. Not scapegoat people with AIDS, blame us for the epidemic or generalize about our lifestyles. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR PEOPLE WITH AIDS 1. Form caucuses to choose their own representatives, to deal with the media, to choose their own agenda and to plan their own strategies. 2. Be involved at every level of decision-making and specifically serve on the boards of directors of provider organizations. 3. Be included in all AIDS forums with equal credibility as other participants, to share their own experiences and knowledge. 4. Substitute low-risk sexual behaviors for those which could endanger themselves or their partners; we feel people with AIDS have an ethical responsibility to inform their potential sexual partners of their health status. RIGHTS OF PEOPLE WITH AIDS 1. To as full and satisfying sexual and emotional lives as anyone else. 2. To quality medical treatment and quality social service provision without discrimination of any form including sexual orientation, gender, diagnosis, economic status or race. 3. To full explanations of all medical procedures and risks, to choose or refuse their treatment modalities, to refuse to participate in research without jeopardizing their treatment and to make informed decisions about their lives. 4. To privacy, to confidentiality of medical records, to human respect and to choose who their significant others are. 5. To die--and to LIVE--in dignity.
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Using Popular Education
How can we use popular education and the history of AIDS activism to help think about the future of a HIV prevention justice movement? This might include: work to ensure that people living with HIV/AIDS are in equal positions of power within our organizations beginning with people’s recent personal experiences when planning and strategizing advocacy work What else?
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Popular Education Resources
Project South www.projectsouth.org UTS Centre for Popular Education www.cpe.uts.edu.au/index.html Highlander Research and Education Center www.highlandercenter.org Center for Popular Education and Participatory Research www.cpepr.net SOUL – School of Unity and Liberation www.youthec.org/soul Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory www.toplab.org Critical Pedagogy on the Web http://mingo.info-science.uiowa.edu/~stevens/critped/index.htm
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Skills and Qualities:
Understanding and Appreciating What You’ve Got
One important step in strategizing for your campaign is knowing what resources you already have, and sometimes the best resources are people and their skills and qualities. Skills are things we learn. Knowing how to cook, how to write a press release, or speaking multiple languages are skills. Qualities are things that are essential or intrinsic to who we are – parts of our personalities or the core of who we are. Being outgoing or a good listener are qualities.
Skills and Qualities:
Understanding and Appreciating What You’ve Got
The Prevention Justice Partnerships are about leadership. What are some characteristics - skills and qualities - of leaders?
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Skills and Qualities:
Understanding and Appreciating What You’ve Got
This exercise is designed to help us understand what skills and qualities we have in our group and in our communities, and know how we can better appreciate and utilize them.
List your skills here:
List your qualities here:
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