Five Principles Of Transformational Activism – Anna Rose

This should be required reading for all organisers, NGO workers, movement-builders, activists and change-makers. Anna Rose is a dear friend and constant inspiration. She founded the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and now works with Make Believe.

Read her blog below – and then join the conversation here.

I started writing this post in the lush green surroundings of Vermont in late spring, and haven’t been able to finish it until now, on a rainy morning six weeks later in the middle of Sydney’s chilly winter. I’m glad I waited, because it’s given me more time to reflect, and to converse with people who’ve helped develop these ideas, especially Lily Spencer (Yay! Congrats on getting married Lily!) and Deepa Gupta, who have been actively thinking about these concepts for a lot longer than I have.

Firstly, a definition: the way I think of transformational activism is activism that (1) looks beyond the short-term and towards the deeper cultural change that’s required for true sustainability and social justice and (2) incorporates wisdom from psychology, health, spirituality and other non-traditional activist areas of life, into our work.

I’ll start with a qualification: we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. I’m not arguing for a complete change in the way all nonprofits, organizers, and activists operate. And I’m also not arguing that transformational activism isn’t already happening. Thousands of individuals and groups are already practicing a different kind of activism that is absolutely transformational. My aim is to learn from them and help spread the lessons that are working, not point a finger at organisations and tell them what to do. I also understand how hard it is “in the trenches” of everyday activism to have the time or headspace to think about more than the day’s overwhelmingly long to do list and I recognise my incredible privilege in having been able to take seven weeks off to travel the world and think about things like this whilst on my Churchill fellowship.

With that in mind, and to kick off a discussion, here are five ways that I think we can translate this enormous concept of ‘transformational activism’ into our work.

1. Think a few steps ahead

I’ve never been naturally drawn to the phrase “strategic planning” because I know that in effective advocacy work, we have to be able to respond flexibly to new circumstances and revise our strategy on the run. But what I do think is important is thinking a few steps ahead about the long-term consequences of our work. Will it polarise the country, or will it help bring people together? Are we fighting a short-term battle that needs to be won, but that will have adverse long-term unexpected consequences like alienating a key ally, or framing an issue in a way sets us up to lose in the long term? A good, practical concept to use when making decisions that I learned when studying Law and Social Change at Cornell is to examine the following: intended positive consequences, intended negative consequences, unintended positive consequences and unintended negative consequences.

2. Build Community

Movements that are based on (or have built from scratch) strong relational ties, social relationships, and a strong sense of community are movements that will last. They’re also movements that are stronger and more resilient, and will therefore be more likely to survive attacks, and take actions that require greater courage. I’m not saying there’s no place for movements based on shallow or weak ties – how else can we widen the circle of those involved? Low barrier actions like online petitions have an important place in a movement’s ladder of engagement. So please don’t misinterpret this – I’m not trying to (unlike Malcolm Gladwell) polarise online and offline organising. That debate is based on a false premise. But what is essential is for organisations that want to practice transformational activism – those who’ve taken on the role of holding the deep movement base, to focus on building strong relationships between members, for example through the ‘small circle’ model practiced by Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, or another way. This is much easier in identity-based movements (like youth, women or people of colour) because of the shared identities and natural inclination to want to spend time with “people like you”. However, there are also groups like the Sydney Alliance, Citizens UK and the Chicago Collaborative (all based on Saul Alinksy’s relational community organising model) who have a model of relational organising between diverse communities and diverse leaders.

There are a few reasons that make relational organising and community building transformational. Firstly, being in relationship with one another changes the life of the individuals involved. We rebuild community and we support each other, which makes your activism much more an integrated part of your life than just a “hobby” you do for a few hours a week. In building strong communities that are also movements we change the notion that doing activism is “work” and we begin to re-shape the notion of what it means to be a modern human. We can start to shift people away from being consumers and back to being citizens, especially where we find ways to mix community service work and advocacy as two parts of the same whole.

3. Diagnose and Ripen Issues Wisely

One of our most important tasks as organizers is to be able to diagnose situations and issues. We need to be able to look deeply at a problem and ask, what are the underlying factors causing this? Once we’ve spent time doing diagnosis work, we can develop hypotheses about what kind of interventions we can make that can change the systems creating the problem. Then we test our hypotheses through action – carrying out our intervention. Then we ask ourselves if our hypothesis was correct, or whether we need to try something else. This process is linked to traditional activist tools such as power mapping, cutting the issue and the campaign strategy chart developed by groups like the Midwest Academy and taught in Australia by The Change Agency. It can be seen as technical work, and often involves research. But there’s another factor: ripeness. We need to be able to judge whether an issue is “ripe” to work on, and if not, how we can make it ripe through an initial intervention. It can be hard for many activists to judge whether their issue is ripe, because it’s so close to their own heart that it’s all they think about – but often they deny the reality that it’s not on anyone else’s radars yet.

4. Work with Spaciousness & Neutrality

Once an issue is “ripe” to work on, we need to be able to hold it with a bit of distance at times. In Sydney Leadership we called this “getting off the dance floor and on the balcony”, which gives a nice image of getting our heads above the day-to-day chaos and asking, ‘what’s really going on here?’ In order to be able to do this, though, we need to be able to work with two important concepts: spaciousness, and neutrality. I struggle with both of these! They’re really hard! Spaciousness is being able to hold an issue lightly. We may care passionately about something, and this is both extremely useful at times, and not useful at other times because it can blind us to reality, or to what’s really going on. When we can’t hold an issue with lightness, we get depressed and dull. We lose our sense of humour about our campaigns and start thinking rigidly. The enemy is demonized, our own righteousness unquestionable, and our theory of change set in stone. We stop seeing new possibilities that we may have once seen with fresh eyes. Holding an issue lightly means taking weekends and holidays! We need to renew our sense of joy and wonder and take the weight we feel about all the problems of the world resting on our little shoulders off for a while.

Neutrality is being able to see the issue from many sides. I’m not saying you are wrong to look at it from your perspective – but that being able to hold it spaciously and look at from a “neutral” hat will help you see new possibilities and understand what’s at stake for the other players involved. In all hard issues, like climate change, some parts of the system are facing a loss. Neutrality means being able to acknowledge and understand that loss. It means we can approach the people who fear change with compassion rather than judgment. As Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird, “never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes”.

5. Bring your whole self to activism and allowing your supporters to do the same

The New Organizing Institute teaches what they call “engagement organising”, which is basically asking and allowing our supporters to bring their whole selves to their work. We shouldn’t just see them as a wallet, or a potential petition signatory, or a number on a database – they are whole people and they have a variety of skills, experiences and most importantly, networks, that they can bring to a campaign that they feel deeply passionate about, and welcomed in to. This is much easier to do with small, community-based campaigns where a lot of the work is done face-to-face, but the principle of engagement organising can also be applied to larger, even primarily online, campaigns through using a ladder of engagement, which I mentioned earlier. Read Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church, or Make Believe’s summary document “Purpose Driven Campaigning” if you haven’t already done so. In every campaign there should be opportunities for people to go more deeply if they want to. There should be leadership development and leadership opportunities, even if it’s as simple as organising a local event in your own community for a national campaign. Design campaign tactics with this in mind. Let people bring everything they have into a campaign, and encourage them to do so.

This principle – bringing whole selves to activism – applies just as much to how you, the organiser, do your work. Do you feel you have to be a different person with your activist friends as compared to how you are with the people you work with at your day job, and a different person again with your family? If so, you’re not bringing your whole self anywhere. This can be hard for the many, many activists who are forced to, out of financial need, to split their income earning activities from their activism and social change work. My heart goes out to you –and I’d love to hear in the comments field how you manage to do this and stay sane.

For me, activism has been at the core of my life since I was 14, and everything else – housing, where I live, high school studies, University, income earning, friends – mostly had to fit around that. And luckily, that worked out – with a bit of hard work and serendipity. But it was always relatively balanced in the sense that I felt like what I was doing was the most important thing I should be doing. I never felt that I “had” to do activism because it was a job. Rather, solving climate change and advocating for social and environmental justice was my passion. I never had any expectation when I got involved in my first campaign in high school that it would lead to a “career” or “income”. But I couldn’t not do it – even if it meant I’d be working at a café to support myself. It was too important to me. Conversely, though, my activism has always been very linked to the social part of my life. The people I wanted to be friends with were mostly also doing social change work. I met my fiancé through co-founding the AYCC with him and other people who have become my closest friends. I’m probably not doing the best job of describing this, but what I’m trying to get at is that most of the time, my life has felt very integrated. I’m the same person at work as I am at home. I don’t feel like I have to separate and split up aspects of myself for different audiences. This is the kind of activism that leads to deep change, both in ourselves and in the world. Powerful leaders and deep system-changing movements throughout history (like the civil rights movement, suffragettes movement and Indian independence movement) and today (like the DREAM Act campaign in the USA and the activism of front-line communities experiencing climate change) has always been about whole-of-self activism.

If you’re interested in thinking more deeply about your activism, I would highly recommend any of the courses run by Social Leadership Australia. I did the 9- month long Sydney Leadership program last year. There are several 4-day introductory courses coming up, and you can find out more here.

And now, over to you! I wrote this blog because there are upcoming discussions in our movement about the concept of transformational activism, and I want to make sure the wisdom of this blog community can feed into that. Comment away…

Link Loving 17.07.11

• IBM makes legislation easier to understand. Tess Croner.
• What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends? Wesley Yang. (Powerful stuff.)
• Turns out there’s a lot to learn from Louis Armstrong. James Altucher.
• Poland’s European infusion. Krzysztof Bobinski.
• Moving investors towards socially responsible investment – lessons learned. Ben Metz.
• In a globalised world we need globalised regulation. Jonathan Glennie.
• Google’s big idea needs to learn the maxim of political violence: “no justice, no peace”. Jonathan Githens-Mazer.
• Better justice in Baltimore: a community’s approach to crime. Lauren Abramson.

Coca Cola ‘Does’ Egyptian Revolution

François La Rochefoucauld famously said that ‘hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue’. Nowhere is that truer than this monstrosity:

The Arabic refrain translates roughly to “Make tomorrow better, the sun is rising”.

Oh – and if you think Pepsi is any better?

h/t Tom Sutcliffe and Connected In Cairo

The World As I See It – An Essay By Albert Einstein

A wonderful short essay by Albert Einstein. Thanks to Martin Kirk for sharing.

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people — first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving… “I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves — this critical basis I call the ideal of a pigsty. The ideals that have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth. Without the sense of kinship with men of like mind, without the occupation with the objective world, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific endeavors, life would have seemed empty to me. The trite objects of human efforts — possessions, outward success, luxury — have always seemed to me contemptible. “My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude…”

“My political ideal is democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and reverence from my fellow-beings, through no fault, and no merit, of my own. The cause of this may well be the desire, unattainable for many, to understand the few ideas to which I have with my feeble powers attained through ceaseless struggle. I am quite aware that for any organization to reach its goals, one man must do the thinking and directing and generally bear the responsibility. But the led must not be coerced, they must be able to choose their leader. In my opinion, an autocratic system of coercion soon degenerates; force attracts men of low morality… The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. “This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor… This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism — how passionately I hate them! “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Link Loving 16.07.11

• The time is now for well-being policy. Laura Stoll.
• Tom Baker reviews Christian Aid’s public review of the Countdown to Copenhagen campaign. Good reflection.
• Making borscht cool again. Erik Assadourian.
• Political apes, science communication, and building a cooperative society. Eric Michael Johnson. (h/t Christine Ottery)
• Why high-carbon investment could be the next sub-prime crisis. James Caldecott.
• Murdoch, New Labour, Credit Crunch, Expenses: collapses of concentrated power. Adam Ramsay.
• The role of women in modern-day political dynasties. Duncan Green.
• Jobs in sustainability work have quadrupled in two years. Stephen Lacey.

Cesar Chavez Reconsidered

It’s never nice to realise that our heroes aren’t all we want them to be. This piece in The Atlantic by Caitlin Flanagan reveals what happened to California farm worker organiser Cesar Chavez after the great victory of the grape-pickers in the sixties. Particularly of interest is the binding of social justice organising with a fervent religiosity.

To understand Chavez, you have to understand that he was grafting together two life philosophies that were, at best, an idiosyncratic pairing. One was grounded in union-organizing techniques that go back to the Wobblies; the other emanated directly from the mystical Roman Catholicism that flourishes in Mexico and Central America and that Chavez ardently followed. He didn’t conduct “hunger strikes”; he fasted penitentially. He didn’t lead “protest marches”; he organized peregrinations in which his followers—some crawling on their knees—arrayed themselves behind the crucifix and effigies of the Virgin of Guadalupe. His desire was not to lift workers into the middle class, but to bind them to one another in the decency of sacrificial poverty. He envisioned the little patch of dirt in Delano—the “Forty Acres” that the UFW had acquired in 1966 and that is now a National Historic Landmark—as a place where workers could build shrines, pray, and rest in the shade of the saplings they had tended together while singing. Like most ’60s radicals—of whatever stripe—he vastly overestimated the appeal of hard times and simple living; he was not the only Californian of the time to promote the idea of a Poor People’s Union, but as everyone from the Symbionese Liberation Army to the Black Panthers would discover, nobody actually wants to be poor.

Saturday Morning Music

Link Loving 15.07.11

• The life and letters of Rosa Luxemburg. Jacqueline Rose. (£)
• Nexii – a South African social stock market. Turns out Mark Campanale is starting one in the UK too.
• We Do What We See. Noel Hatch’s lovely website.
• How can we criticise the current system in a way that prefigures and helps enable a more just society? Justin Kenrick.
• Want to understand complexity theory? Try organizing a children’s party. Dave Snowdon.
• Google+ Sustainability: How Google can connect billions of people to sustainable lifestyles. Patrick Connelly.
• Josie Long talks intelligently and warmly about her politics.
• Want to learn about Game Theory? (h/t Gavin Thomson)
• A hippocratic oath for journalists. George Monbiot.

“Life Would Be Better Without Oxfam”

Oxfam sponsored the student prize for the D&AD Awards in design and advertising, with the judges choosing this entry as the winner.

I love the idea of making the work more transparent (in the sense that casual observers can easily see what is happening), and the personal relationship built to the work Oxfam does. But would it work as an official advert?

h/t Duncan Green.

America Gets Radical

Climate Camp – USA style?