PDF of Power Point Slides for Community Organizing Workshop
Howdy:
I've posted a PDF of the slides I've just created for a workshop on how to use community organizing tools to build the Green Party. Comments and votes will be appreciated.
- Bill Hulet's blog
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Really Good - Catalysts are needed
Thanks for this Bill. This is a good tool that groups can use. We do need Leaders. The Leaders need to inspire and motivate the community to take action. Leaders need to create buy-in - not by acting in obvious self-interest - but by acting in obvious community interest. The benefit of the campaign needs to be tangible, immediate and local. Once organized and motivated, the community can move in many directions - but without Leadership - the community will eventually simply stand still - and either consume or stagnate!
Rob Brooks
Hull-Aylmer
I really liked what you said
I really liked what you said here - especially about the need to create a better forum for on-line communication for all of us. Democracy depends upon active debate to be sure. I like all the info about Obama's campaign - I hadn't known all that. Interesting that the internet played such a huge role.
Any advice for someone who lives in a town where almost no one even thinks there are any needs or problems to solve together?
The first stage: the Social Survey
If you want to start organizing the community, the first stage is to create a community map. You do this by going through a period where you make an effort to really get to know your community as well as you can. This involves months of work. What you do is try to find out all the community leaders you can and talk to them.
The community leaders take all sorts of shape. They include church leaders, social club leaders, local politicians, local reporters, prominent business people, people who run charities, activists, etc. Make a list, do some asking around, internet searches---everything.
Then ask them if you can interview them, one-on-one. You don't tell them anything, you ask them what the issues are in their community, what sort of problems they see, what needs to be done. You also ask them if they know anyone else that you should interview to find out more about the community.
Be really up front about who you are and why you are doing this, but make the focus of the interview what they are about. Most of these people will be very happy to talk to you, because they are usually passionate about what they do.
When you finish the interview, write up the notes from your interview and make a file on the person. Put in info on how to contact them (email, phone number, etc.), what work they do, and a personal evaluation of your impression (hard working, partisan NDP, flake, waste of time, passionate, etc.) That way you are building a database that other people can use when you get volunteers.
After you do this for your community you will have the beginings of a map of the major personalities in your community plus an understanding of what the major issues are in your EDA. This will help you immensely when it comes to building your EDA.
When I did the spade work for the Green Party in Guelph I spent a long, long time meeting with people in their offices and kitchen tables to get a feel for who people were and what issues that they felt were important. People do this informally all the time, but if you are an outsider to the community---which it sounds like you might be---it requires a conscious effort to do it.
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
Wow - thanks for all that
Wow - thanks for all that info Bill. I guess I still am an outsider to the community - I've only been here 3.5 years and it's a town where you have to be here about 50 years before you are considered an "insider" I suppose (even though I grew up in a town just 25 minutes away). But, so many new people are moving here all the time that things are changing.
And I think I would actually enjoy doing the kind of leg work you have outlined here - I do like meeting and talking to people.
Great Presentation - May I Use it?
I'm working on launching the Canadian Municipal Green Party Association. The goal is to have a central place to help folks get involved in the political process and be successful.
Your presentation is exactly the type of information that the Association needs. May I post it to the www.cmgpa.org web site?
Richard Murray
CEO Macleod Federal Green Party Association
www.macleodgreenparty.ca
Feel Free to Use It
Richard and everyone else:
Feel free to use anything I post on my website, only give me credit for creating it. (This isn't to feed my ego so much as to raise my profile, which gives me more freedom to do stuff in a political organization.) Would you like a powerpoint version? Or is PDF OK?
It may take some time for me to come up with the future modules that I promise in it. My age seems to be catching up with me and I often am too tired to undertake these sorts of things. ;-(
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem--neat, plausible, and wrong." H.L. Mencken
"All politics are local"
Now I see why there was so much traffic to my blog from Guelph. You guys 'get it'. I very much like that you have systematised the core elements of local field work for Greens. You are describing the basic elements that must be included in any serious political organising effort. REAL politics is a one-on-one retail effort, and everything else is about setting the stage for the one-on-one encounter. I also advise you to keep it as simple as it is now. Far better that people actually start meeting locals rather than puzzling through complex organizing templates.
It would be very nice if the Hub were actually doing the national 'community of interest' work to support these efforts across the nation. There is a national component to our campaigns, and it does have an important impact. It's not useful to write it off, and say it's dysfunctional, and so can never work. Sure council is too big, and filled with dilettantes, but it has the potential of crafting a viable national campaign plan. Even more important, they do dispose of real resources, and control the 'brand'. If we should ever get council elected that was prepared to push hard to create the right tools, then you could count on picking up local resources from the national effort on an ongoing basis.
A real eye opener, thanks.
Very insightful and intelligent grass-roots strategy. I will make two comments as ‘devil’s advocate’ to try to build on it, not oppose:
I don’t think one can compare the Obama-Democrat’s campaign directly with the GPC. The Democrats already had a huge base which they only needed to energize to ‘get out’ the vote, and sway the few 'undecided'. U.S. elections are won on the slim differences between the two entrenched parties.
In contrast the GPC is largely unknown and at the margins. It receives little media attention other than when global warming is in the news, and is ridiculed as being ‘tree huggers’, ‘kids/students who don’t understand the world’ and even ‘dope smoking hippies’ by much of the uninformed/ignorant. Its constituency is a small intellectual and progressive-minded subset of the public, plus ‘protest’ votes.
I don’t know the percentage now, but a few years ago, only 20% of Canadians completed post-secondary education. (Includes both Colleges and Universities). That was compared to 50% in the U.S.A. A surprising statistic. Maybe it has improved but still the majority of Canadians have no education past high school. Lesson: know your audience. Proposing economic models which are too overly abstract will not resonate with the majority. Perhaps in a University town like Guelph it can.
Next, I’m going to compare ‘selling’ the Green Agenda to the classic business model of 'product launch', i.e. launching a brand new Revolutionary product or service. There are two main avenues:
a) Bottom-up: building local awareness by sampling door-to-door, manning booths in stores and shopping malls, sponsoring local teams. i.e. Net-working and total involvement in the community. (You’ve got this covered in spades, congratulations.)
b) Top-down media blitz: advertising, getting in the news, interviews, announcements, appearing at news events and commenting. Most importantly: Net-working with the key people in the media who actually communicate their ‘bias’ when supposedly reporting events. Who ‘frame’ every story and ‘label/brand’ every participant. (See Noam Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’) Because these people and organizations ‘edit’ the news, they will always impose a negative bias no matter what one does at the community level and discredit you if they are not familiar with it.
Combining both these two strategies in a pincer movement is how a new product/service ‘launch’ has been proven to succeed. It almost never succeeds with only one. Or if it does, it will take a generation. That is why I believe in addition, we need more visible spokespersons to attend and comment at news events, go on talk shows, make public announcements, lunch with the media personalities who have tremendous influence by how they subjectively interpret the news.