You want to achieve change. But where do you start? We recommend you find likeminded people and start organising yourselves together. This article explains the basics of how to start a movement.
This article is a work in progress. Feel free to suggest improvements!
¶ Community Building
How to activate and engage activist members.
How do you build rapport and friendship among your project volunteers? There are always questions about how to get to know the volunteers more. You ask yourself, “Is there something I should do to fill in the time between deadlines?” How can the project facilitator construct efforts to be fun and not like a job?
Read more: Community Building
¶ Build a movement
We have organised this article as following:
- Act together: Together, you can achieve more.
- Find likeminded people: Talk to some friends. Organise a brainstorm.
- Define your strategy: Decide what you want to achieve and how.
- Organise yourself: Divide roles and set up working groups.
- Act and grow: Organise your first action and spread your message.
¶ Act together
¶ Inspiring example: Greta Thunberg
Take the example of Greta Thunberg: one day, she realised that something had to be done about the climate crisis. So she decided to sit in front of her local town hall with a protest sign every Friday. Nowadays, she is well known for her activism. Young people from all over the world join protests under the name ‘Fridays for Future’, and she even got to speak at a UN climate conference.
But she did not get there on her own. For decades, people across the globe have raised their voices for climate justice. Her story is inspiring: not just because she was brave enough to start this protest on her own, but because she is part of a movement.
At Activist Handbook we believe every individual has the power to spark change. Greta is one of the many heroes of the climate movement, and you can become one too.
¶ Working together works
To-do: improve this section on why it is better to act together.
- Refer to some research on if movements work
- Benefits: motivating to work together, more creative ideas, louder voice
- Refer to Getting started
¶ Find likeminded people
Here are some practical tips on how to get a movement started:
- Reach out to some friends: Send a message in some group chats and Facebook groups, to see if people in your own network also care about your cause. Get them together and talk about your next steps.
- Invite people to a brainstorm: A brainstorm is a great way to define more precisely what exactly it is you want to change and how. Make sure to prepare the brainstorm beforehand and decide who is going to facilitate the event. Decide on a location and time at least two weeks before, so that you have some time to promote it.
- Extend your network: Share the brainstorm with as many people as possible. Create a Facebook event, share it on your other social media, and talk about it with everyone you meet. And make sure to ask everyone who is joining to invite others along!
- Collect and exchange contact info: People who are interested in your initiative may not be able to join the brainstorm. Create a chat group or ask participants of the brainstorm to fill out a form with their email address and phone number. This way you can reach out to them later if you want to organise another meeting.
To-do: Create a page that explains how to organise an effective brainstorm.
¶ Define your strategy
To-do:
- The section below seems a bit too in-depth for this article (which explains the basics of how to start a movement). Perhaps we should create another article about setting up the formal structures of an organisation.
- Link to Strategy
Any organisation should have a core set of widely agreed-upon rules and basic principles. Usually, these rules and basic principles are written down.
For example, together you could write down the demands of your organisation. This way, it is clear to both your members and the outside world what your organisation stands for.
The following aspects are often included in the constitutions of activist organisations: principles, manifesto, rules, demands, organisational structure.
¶ Aims
Define your aims (or goals/objectives). This will help guide everything the organisation does, including the structure, messaging and tactics. There is extensive accessible literature on goal-setting frameworks to use. For one example which is directly applicable to politics, and written by a former political communications strategist, see chapter 1 of Winners: and how they succeed[1] by Alastair Campbell. Campbell sets out a framework he calls "OST" (objective, strategy, tactics), which has its merits in political organising regardless of Campbell's political leanings.
¶ Conditions
An organisation’s conditions can be thought of as its consistent and unwavering strategy. While these may be altered at some point, they are not to be changed regularly. Therefore, they are not to be confused with tactics, which are chosen under the guidance of conditions and are highly changeable. In this respect, the conditions help guide the choice of tactics. Once more, see chapter 1 of Winners: And How They Succeed by Alastair Campbell for a full discussion on how strategy relates to tactics, as well as goals. For an example of an activist organisation's conditions see the Core Principles and Values in Extinction Rebellion's "How to" Actions, Art, Logistics: towards the decentralisation of XR.
¶ Organise yourself
To-do: Section on how to organise yourself in an effective way using roles and working groups.
- Benefits of defining roles
- Importance of delegating
- Suggestions for working groups: communication, action & logistics, finance & fundraising, arts, tech (for example Extinction Rebellion circles)
- Link to: Decisions, Facilitation, and Power
¶ Act and grow
To-do: Section on how to organise yourself in an effective way using roles and working groups.
- Link to Communication