Grassroots and relational organizing has been around for decades, and the basic ideas really haven’t changed much. However, recently many progressive organizations have discovered that without true relational organizing – they’re not really building and sustaining movements.
It’s one thing to get people together for single instances of action, but to truly build a movement of people, and develop power, we need to get to the root of people’s motives and bring them deeply into the causes they care about.
By the end of this free workshop series, you should be able to effectively recruit volunteers to your cause, build up leaders who can do the same, and win important issues related to the causes you care most about. Ideally, as we build up more leaders, the work can be spread among us, helping us all have more free time to rest. And you’ll meet some local activists with similar interests as you!
The workshop is 8 weeks, with one live 2.5-hour class each week, homework each week, and a project we’ll be working on together in the cohort that we will complete at the end. Participants can expect to spend 4-7 hours each week in total. Someday this workshop will be in-person but for now, we’ll do it virtually. I promise it will be more fun than most virtual meetings.
Here’s a preview of the session content:
1: People power, organizing vs. mobilizing, how change scales up to mass movements
2: Identifying motives, values, and self-interest in yourself and others
3: Communicating your vision through storytelling
4: Identifying others who can be organized, helping them understand their motives, and lighting their fire
5: The formula for successful 1-1 conversations, meetings, recruitment, and “hard asks”
6: Organizational management and building leaders
7: Time-management, burnout, and self-care
8: Putting it all together and building our movements