Link Loving 07.03.12

• Occupy turns to food justice. Jake Olzen.
• Occupy protesters look to regain momentum. Shannon Bond.
• Government review proposes the scrap of quarterly profit announcements. Heather Stewart.
• Selma Chirouf, an Algerian environmental activist, is my new favourite hero(ine).
• London’s Overthrow – a beautiful photo narrative.
• The truth about leadership. Lolly Daskal.

Campaign Case Study – Amnesty

This Campaigning Common Cause case study is part of a series of stories that will share the experience of organisations that grasp the importance of cultural values in third sector campaigning. We hope that these real-life examples of transformation inspire and empower you to push organisational boundaries and improve how we campaign together.

If you’d like to discuss these stories, or find out more about them, come along to the Campaigning with Common Cause get-together every second Wednesday of the month.

“There are huge amounts of mutual respect and friendship between staff and volunteer trainers . It’s a charmed relationship, really.”

Amnesty International is celebrating its 50^th birthday this year and has a long history of local group activity. Set up as a result of a newspaper article about political prisoners, small groups originally met to write letters about ‘forgotten’ prisoners.

I spoke to Julie Kavanagh and Clare Bracey, who job-share the role of Training Manager, about Amnesty’s successful Active Learning Programme, and their train-the-trainer model of building skills within Amnesty’s local groups. This case study is also an example of how a central head office can work fantastically well with volunteers and is a great example of putting values into practice by building movement capacity.

What is the structure?

There are 260 local Amnesty groups around the country. These groups meet together to write letters, lobby politicians, fundraise and raise awareness of human rights issues in their community. The Activism team at Amnesty HQ supports them, and they receive training and workshops from a network of volunteer trainers. Julie and Clare work with roughly 60 of these volunteer trainers, who each support four to six local groups – building the group’s skills and understanding of the issues that Amnesty works on.

Their Active Learning Programme is organised through a Training Working Group (TWG) made up of the Training Managers and around eight of the most experienced and committed trainers who are members of the group by invitation. This structure is purposefully parallel to Amnesty’s internal governance processes, and so attracts those interested in building capacity more than internal bureaucracy.

To be a trainer, individuals have to be a member of a local group, and this is where they are recruited. They apply to attend the Training of Trainers weekend run every two years. Being a member of a group helps the trainers understand the needs of their grassroots network, and keeps the commitment to the Amnesty community high.

How did this model start out?

When an experienced volunteer approached the staff 20 years ago with the offer of helping with trainings, a new model of grassroots training was born. Starting small, Amnesty volunteers ran a series of workshops for local groups with great success. Because they themselves were activists, local groups really valued their experience and participative approach to learning.

Over time, the new volunteer trainers lobbied for a staff member to support them (the role that Julie and Clare now share), and formed the Training Working Group, which has become the central node of this new approach to working with local groups.

How do staff and volunteers work together?

Generally Julie and Clare write the workshop packs, often based on ideas from the TWG, and trying them out at TWG meetings which take place 3-4 times a year.  A number of practices help to solidify the culture of respect and collaboration during these meetings:

• Rotation of chairing and taking notes at the meeting.
• Ending meetings with a ‘check-out’ to ask how everyone feels about the decisions made and work ahead.
• Running the meeting as a series of interactive sessions led by different members of the group.
• Taking an Amnesty campaign action together.
• Spending social time together before and after formal meetings.

TWG members also do an annual ‘Call and Care’ This involves phoning all the trainers to have a general conversation about their welfare, and how they feel about their work. It’s a great opportunity for issues to arise and be solved together.  Not all groups request training, and low demand can be demoralizing for a trainer – contact from colleagues is essential.

How much resource does this take?

Both Julie and Clare work 2.5 days a week each. The budget they work with is (comparatively) very small – £15,000. Most of that is spent on producing the resources (handbook, workshop guides etc) – and on expenses for the volunteer training (travel and childcare). With this, the organisation quickly distributes best practice and deep knowledge of human rights issues.  The training managers also organize national skill-share events.  They now are also beginning to help build capacity for human rights defender groups in other countries.

What has been surprising?

There’s been a wider benefit from this model on the human rights movement. Some of the trainers take their skills outside of Amnesty, and are now also leading trainings for refugee support groups and local campaign groups, for example.

Because of the high commitment and friendship within the group, and the real enjoyment of running participative workshops, there is a very low turnover of trainers. Approximately every two years, the TWG run a training of trainers weekend for around eight or nine new recruits, and also a trainer conference where trainers can get together, try out new workshops, share ideas and problems. Trainers attending these get to know each other, as well as build up experience and institutional knowledge really well. At TWG meetings when a job needs doing, nearly the whole group step forward to do it – it’s often more a case of turning people down than bugging them to help!

Something really unexpected has been how members of the TWG have supported each other. They spend weekends together helping to prepare sessions, and have started to divide tasks internally based on their own interests. Some trainers were uncomfortable reaching out to groups to suggest a workshop, so in one case a trainer in the North West contacted groups for them and then allocated other trainers to each of the active learning sessions

What have they learned?

•  Don’t be afraid to be selective. Not everyone who steps forward to be a trainer is the right fit. It’s explained that an element of mutual selection occurs in the Training of Trainers course, and Clare and Julie always try to find other ways for people to contribute – by co-facilitating, or alternative volunteer roles.

• Give high quality support to trainers – really good materials, responding to requests efficiently, and thanking them for good work done really helps motivate and support volunteer trainers.

• Trust the activists you’re working with. It builds a culture of respect and mutual support. For example, the Training the Trainers weekend is run by TWG members rather than staff.  In fact some Amnesty staff have been trained by these volunteer trainers, and enthused about the high quality of the training.

What does this mean for us as change-makers?

Many NGOs struggle to create and maintain a grassroots network of volunteers and activists, often because the relationship between staff and volunteers is unclear and fraught with tension. This model of ‘helping the network help itself’ puts into practice values of self-direction, trust and empowerment. It enables impact to scale quickly, and embeds skills across the network – not only in professional consultants.

Intrinsic values are central to the participative learning approaches that the TWG uses. People share a commitment to enabling change to occur and to the empowerment of the Amnesty network. As with many of the other case studies – the focus on healthy relationships has been key to the success of this model.

The central reframing that Julie and Clare have achieved is that staff are part of the training network, providing specialist support to enable the volunteer trainers to exercise a degree of autonomy and creativity to do the work themselves.

Contact

Julie Kavanagh and Clare Bracey

training@amnesty.org.uk

Link Loving 06.03.12

• Why caring for my aging father has me wishing he would die. Sandra Tsing Loh.
• Obama, explained: James Fallows.
• Psychology to build a climate movement. Aaron Packard.
• The government has lost it’s ultimate radical. The Economist.
• Natalya Sverjensky identifies some revolving doors in the UK energy system.
• Five things you need to know about the cuts to legal aid. False Economy.

A Story To Remember

Although I had heard of Octavia Hill before, I hadn’t ever thought of reading her work. An old friend, James Lloyd who works at the National Trust, shared these wonderful eight pages of Octavia’s writing that have re-awakened the historian in me.

Her writing is passionate, methodical and entirely convincing. She take a map of London – sticks a pin in it at Charing Cross and makes a circle of a 4-mile radius around it, then divides the circle into four quadrants, and then analyses how much green space there is. This map from 1888 shows London a widely unequal society, where the West has access to many parks and green public spaces, while East London has precious little.

Read it – and next time you go to Parliament Hill and Clissold Park, you’ll know who you have to thank for it!

Injustice: A TED Talk To Remember

This was recorded at TED a couple of days ago and is setting the internet alight.

Bryan Stevenson opens up the conversation about injustice that we’ve been shying away from, and he does it with humour, passion and compassion. Beautiful and powerful – make sure you watch this.

Link Loving 05.03.12

• The great thing about having been poor. Bill Maher.
• Occupy LSX may be gone, but the movement won’t be forgotten. Giles Fraser.
• How to be a racial justice hero. Hatty Lee and Terry Keleher.
• Great blogs from the Fairtrade Foundation sharing stories of how producers are touring the UK.
• Greece in meltdown – how Athens has changed over the last two years. Bleak and hopeful at the same time. Maria Margaronis.
• A history of student intolerance. James Lloyd.
• Nice work from Kate Shayler and Action Aid for International Women’s Day – the 1950’s Facebook Makeover.

From Decline To Rebirth – America The Possible

This is a shameless repost of Gus Speth’s piece for Orion Magazine. It’s a manifesto for systemic change, and the most comprehensible and readable one I’ve seen for a while. This is part 1, part 2 is coming out in May/June.

LIKE YOU AND OTHER AMERICANS, I love my country, its wonderful people, its boundless energy, its creativity in so many fields, its natural beauty, its many gifts to the world, and the freedom it has given us to express ourselves. So we should all be angry, profoundly angry, when we consider what has happened to our country and what that neglect could mean for our children and grandchildren.

How can we gauge what has happened to America in the past few decades and where we stand today? One way is to look at how America now compares with other countries in key areas. The group of twenty advanced democracies—the major countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and others—can be thought of as our peer nations. Here’s what we see when we look at these countries. To our great shame, America now has:

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;
• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;
• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;
• the highest homicide rate;
• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);
• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP; and
• the largest international arms sales.

Our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism. True, the data is piling up to confirm that we’re Number One, but in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at the bottom.

Link Loving 04.03.12

• Can we have more of this please? King Hokum (contemporary Australian musician), who sings the old-school blues about unemployment.
• How to overcome perfectionism? Mindtools. h/t Rhizome.
• Seth Godin is writing here about LOLcats and slacklining – but he may as well be describing movement-growth strategy.
• How austerity is destroying Greek society: a report from Athens. Abi Ramanan.
• If you need a boost of hope – have a look what the Transition movement has been up to in February. Rob Hopkins.
• Sudanese activists are finding inspiration in their revolution of 1964. Isma’il Kushkush.
• I wish more people were aware of this – how to ask a good question at a public event.

Progressive Media Commentators – Time To Get Our Shit Together

I am sick of it – sick of progressives being punched and suckered on national broadcast debates.

I know that winning a media-battle is not how we’re going build a sustainable and just society – but to lose the debate so often on air surely undermines all the work we’re doing outside of the radio/TV studio.

Illustrative Story

I’m on the train to Oxford listening to ‘All Things Considered’, a BBC Wales talk-show about religion. This week, it’s a discussion about food banks and poverty – a perfect piece of proof for how serious the cuts and unemployment levels are. The first ten minutes features a sympathetic case study visit to a food bank in Bridgend followed by an interview with someone from the Trussell Trust (funders of community projects tacking poverty). Up next, a conversation between Neil Cooper from Church Action On Poverty and Colin Bloom from the Conservative Christian Fellowship, who gives a masterclass in how to win the debate. Some choice quotes with analysis below –

“We all have to work together (not those with most should help most) to make sure that the most vulnerable….(there are deserving and undeserving poor people – and if you don’t fit my criteria, you don’t get help) are helped (palliative, rather than dealing with root cause).”

“I work in Westminster (personal, open, friendly), I walk up Victoria Street every day (clear image that you can recognise), and for as long as I can remember (this problem has always existed and therefore we can’t do anything about it) we have had rough sleepers sleeping in the city centers. Whether it’s massively increasing or not I don’t know (sew doubt), I certainly know that there are problems there and working very hard to address those (I am perfectly reasonable and want the right thing to happen).

“And actually we’ve now got the opportunity, because of the Localism Bill, because of the work that’s being done in the Coalition (political message of support), that we are now seeing the opportunities are opening up for churches and faith groups to really get involved to do the things that they always were doing – but perhaps did less of in the last few years because government promised more than it could deliver (government fails, churches succeed).”

My favourite moment from the show has to be when he manages to say the following – and nobody challenges him.

“We have allowed compassion to become nationalised.”

SERIOUSLY?! We’re going to let that fly?

Another car-crash example is this debate on Woman’s Hour between a Daily Mail columnist and a spokesperson from Netmums on whether parents are going hungry to feed their children. Same story. Depressing listening.

How We Can Do It Better

Let’s start with some principles that we know and love.

1. People do not connect with issues – people connect with people.
2. People connect with other people by recognising their shared values.
3. People share their values by telling stories that illustrate them (NB – NOT by saying ‘I have value X’, Mr Miliband.)

It is absolutely possible to be a powerful preogressive voice in the media. Some fantastic examples include Frances O’Grady from the TUC, Camila Batmanghelidjh from Kids Company and Shami Chakrabarti from Liberty. So what do they get right?

• Illustrative stories – what is happening?
• Clear analysis – why is this happening?
• Confident communication style – good humour, passion, gravitas, not allowing themselves to be interrupted/thrown off course by others
• Memorable memes and messages – nice turns of phrase, frames that resonate

Most NGO staff receive some sort of media training – but we need to up our game. How many simulated debates do we practice? How often do we use a real studio for this? How do we defend the strong media advocates when they get attached?

Request For Help

I’ve organised and hosted a couple of small attempts to build these skills in the past (media training + economics for activists workshop), but there is a lot more that we can do.

• Do you have access to radio/TV studios which could be used for training?

• Do you have contacts with emerging progressive leaders and spokespeople who will be stronger advocates because of some training?

• Are you, or do you know, someone who can give high-quality media training and simulate real-life situations?

• Do you have time and skills to manage and run something like this?

• Do you have some cash that could help make this all happen?

If the answer to any of those is yes – comment below or email me, caspertk[at]gmail.com.

It’s time to get our shit together.

Link Loving 03.03.12

• Activism for the end times: Mass actions or focused campaigns? George Lakey.
• Judith Wallerstein’s 25-year study of children of divorce – it’s not pretty.
• Rich people are more likely to steal lollies from children, study finds. ABC News.
• Air pollution is second biggest public health risk in Britain after smoking, and is linked to nearly 1 in 5 deaths a year in London. John Vidal.
• How to write winning research funding applications. Duncan Green.
• How leaders lose their luck. Great piece. Anthony K. Tjan.