This material from the Neighborhood Anarchist Collective differentiates activism, organizing and leadership. It explains the basics of organizing. For further information on organizing, check out the book Deep Green Resistance.
This guide aims to empower people to become effective organizers in their communities. Organizers bring people together and make it easier for people to take action and succeed. Organizers help people see how they can work together and make an impact. This happens at a group level (convening, facilitating, etc) and by supporting individuals to take on responsibilities and be more comfortable taking action for what they believe in. This guide provides information about some of the basics of organizing: the fundamental principles and the specifics of the most common skills.
The difference between Activists, Organizers, and Leaders
Though the terms “Activists”, “Organizers”, and “Leaders” are often used interchangeably there are important differences between each role. We define them as follows:
Activists are empowered to take action for things they believe in. They mostly do things themselves.
Organizers empower others to take action for things they believe in. They support groups of people to do things together.
Leaders present a vision and invite people to work together to create the vision. (No extra power, just a proposal of where to go.)
A person could act in one or all of these roles at different times.
Community Organizing Principles
An organizer makes it easier for other people to take action and succeed. The ultimate goal of an organizer is to empower other people to be organizers themselves. These are some fundamental principles that point how to do that.
Anyone can be an organizer – No one is born an organizer. It’s a set of skills that anyone can learn.
Organizers create clarity and certainty – Make things as clear and specific as possible. Confusion and uncertainty lead to inaction and disengagement. People don’t want to waste their energy.
Distribute work
Distribute work as evenly as you can – Don’t let a few people do everything (this means you). Empower others to contribute as much as possible!
Roles not tasks – Try to distribute entire roles/realms not just individual tasks. Gives people some autonomy and ability to make decisions. Much more empowering.
Set people up for success – Make things specific, clear, enough instruction/background info, not too many options, etc. Make it easy for people to say ‘Yes!’.
Passion not obligation – Don’t guilt/shame people into tasks. Follow passion and excitement. There are people that would love to do every task/role, we just need to find them.
Follow up – We’re all busy, and we sometimes need a reminder to actually follow through on our best intentions. Following up with people can feel like nagging but is true support.
Sometimes not everything needs to get done right away – Be realistic about capacity. It’s better to do less for longer rather than burn yourself or others out. Social change takes time and we’re in it for the long haul.
Organizing is about relationships
An organizer is always building and maintaining relationships – To organize with people, you need to know them: who they are, what they care about, what they are excited to do, etc. They also need to know you: That you are sincere, competent, and that you care about them.
Meet people where they’re at – Some people are ready to jump in, some want to wait. People have different knowledge and skills. Listen to them and respect where they’re at. Encourage but don’t push.
Check-in often – Digital or in person check-ins are always helpful. Short or long, people appreciate feeling missed and being kept in the loop.
Reach out individually – If you want people to respond to something or attend an event, contact them individually. Inviting a group is impersonal and isn’t building the relationships.
Appreciation goes a long way – People want to be seen and needed. As long as it’s genuine, this almost can’t be done too much.
Engage the heart – Emotion more effectively motivates action than facts and figures.
Trust the people and they will become trustworthy – People respond to trust. Others may do things differently than you and that’s okay. (Credit: adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy)
People want you to succeed – Everyone you’re working with wants you to do well, because that means that they are also doing well. You’re a team. You’re on the same side. It’s not a test or a competition.
Enjoy the work – In a world full of drudgery and fear, we can bring playfulness and joy to social justice work. If we’re miserable doing social justice then why would anyone else join us?
Skill: Conversations with New or Existing Volunteers or Group Members
Conversations with new or existing volunteers or group members are vital to building relationships and distributing work. Some people find either easier than others. However anyone can have these conversations by following these steps:
TREAT
Think – Think through what you want to talk with them about and prepare.
Relationship – Build a relationship. Ask them about their interests. Listen. Share about yourself
Explain – Tell them about the role, organization, task, etc. that they could be involved in. Share the vision of what it would look like. What would they get to do? What impact would it have?
Ask – Ask them if they’d like to get involved with whatever the opportunity is. Don’t leave it vague. Clarify any details or next steps.
Thank – Thank them (regardless of their answer) and acknowledge them for being courageous enough to talk with you. It shows how much they care.
This isn’t a rigid order. Be flexible and jump between steps. Let the conversation flow naturally. Use this just as a helpful reference.
Be sure to follow up afterward to thank them again, see how they’re doing, and ask if they need any information or support.
For this episode of the Green Flame we celebrate the United States launch of the Women’s Human Rights Campaign with WHRC U.S. co-contact Thistle Pettersen and U.S. WHRC media moderator Austin DeVille.
Our skill-share highlights the WHRC effort to offer mutual support in the face of inevitable backlash:
It is of the utmost importance strategically when you are engaged in radical political movements to anticipate and prepare for push-back and to stand in unity against it. On that note, the Women’s Human Rights Campaign USA has a special committee dedicated to lending solidarity to anyone who has received backlash for signing the declaration. This committee will promptly send a letter to the opposing party in defense of the signatory’s right to resist threats to her safety and dignity. To contact the Solidarity Committee, send an email to solidarity@womensdeclaration-usa.com
We thank Thistle for permission to include her performance Michigan aka Gender Hurts in our program.
The title of the film “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” comes from an Irish ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce (1836–1883), a Limerick-born poet and professor of English literature. The song is written from the perspective of a doomed young Wexford rebel who is about to sacrifice his relationship with his loved one and plunge into the cauldron of violence associated with the 1798 rebellion in Ireland. The references to barley in the song derive from the fact that the rebels often carried barley or oats in their pockets as provisions for when on the march. This gave rise to the post-rebellion phenomenon of barley growing and marking the “croppy-holes,” mass unmarked graves into which slain rebels were thrown, symbolizing the regenerative nature of Irish resistance to British rule. As the barley will grow every year in the spring this is said to symbolize Irish resistance to British oppression and that Ireland will never yield and will always oppose British rule on the island.
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
I sat within a valley green, I sat there with my true love, My sad heart strove the two between, The old love and the new love, – The old for her, the new that made Me think of Ireland dearly, While soft the wind blew down the glade And shook the golden barley
‘Twas hard the woeful words to frame To break the ties that bound us ‘Twas harder still to bear the shame Of foreign chains around us And so I said, “The mountain glen I’ll seek next morning early And join the brave United Men!” While soft winds shook the barley
While sad I kissed away her tears, My fond arms ’round her flinging, The foeman’s shot burst on our ears, From out the wildwood ringing, – A bullet pierced my true love’s side, In life’s young spring so early, And on my breast in blood she died While soft winds shook the barley!
I bore her to the wildwood screen, And many a summer blossom I placed with branches thick and green Above her gore-stain’d bosom:- I wept and kissed her pale, pale cheek, Then rushed o’er vale and far lea, My vengeance on the foe to wreak, While soft winds shook the barley!
But blood for blood without remorse, I’ve ta’en at Oulart Hollow And placed my true love’s clay-cold corpse Where I full soon will follow; And ’round her grave I wander drear, Noon, night, and morning early, With breaking heart whene’er I hear The wind that shakes the barley!
Music in this video
Song: The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Bonus Track) Artist: Tommy Makem Album: Songs of Tommy Makem Licensed to YouTube by: The Orchard Music (on behalf of Tradition Records); BMI – Broadcast Music Inc., The Royalty Network (Publishing), and 6 Music Rights Societies
The Green Flame is a Deep Green Resistance podcast offering revolutionary analysis, skill sharing, and inspiration for the movement to save the planet by any means necessary. Our hosts are Max Wilbert and Jennifer Murnan.
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This short introduction to the concept of “mutual aid” was originally published by Keith O’Connell in Oh Shit! What Now? Mutual aid is placed in opposition to social Darwinism which promotes competition, and the power of the ruling class under capitalism. While Deep Green Resistance is not an anarchist organization, we draw heavily on the mutual aid tradition.
Capitalism can inspire people to do many amazing things, as long as there is a profit to be made. But in the absence of a profit motive, there are many important tasks that it will not and cannot ever accomplish, from eradicating global poverty and preventable diseases, to removing toxic plastics from the oceans. In order to carry out these monumental tasks, we require a change in the ethos that connects us to one another, and to the world that sustains us. A shift away from capitalism … towards mutual aid.
Anarchists work toward two general goals. First they want to dismantle oppressive, hierarchical institutions. Second, they want to replace those institutions with organic, horizontal, and cooperative versions based on autonomy, solidarity, voluntary association, mutual aid and direct action. Through mutual aid, anarchism takes shape as a practice in care, exchanging resources and solidarity, information, support, even comfort, care, and understanding. People give what they can and get what they need. When a group comes together to push for a change; when social outsiders come together to share or explore ideas and new ways of living, these are all forms of mutual aid.
Of course, mutual aid is obviously not a new idea, nor is it exclusive to anarchists. However, to understand this specific embrace of mutual aid, we need to go back over 100 years, to the writings of the famous Russian anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, who just so happened to also be an accomplished zoologist and evolutionary biologist.
Back in Kropotkin’s day, the field of evolutionary biology was heavily dominated by the ideas of Social Darwinists such as Thomas H. Huxley. By ruthlessly applying Charles Darwin’s famous dictum “survival of the fittest” to human societies, Huxley and his peers had concluded that existing social hierarchies were the result of natural selection, or competition between free sovereign individuals, and were thus an important and inevitable factor in human evolution.
Not too surprisingly, these ideas were particularly popular among rich and politically powerful white men, as it offered them a pseudo-scientific justification for their privileged positions in
society, in addition to providing a racist rationalization of the European colonization of Asia, Africa and the Americas. Kropotkin attacked this conventional wisdom, when in 1902 he published a book called “Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution,” in which he proved that there was something beyond blind, individual competition at work in evolution.
It is a concept that is familiar to many anarchists, but often not fully understood. Mutual aid doesn’t mean automatic solidarity with whoever asks for it, nor does it mean that anarchists have an obligation to enter into relationships with other oppositional forces. It is not a bartering system; it rejects the “tit-for-tat” psychology of modern capitalism while challenging the notion of communist distribution. It means to be able to give freely and take freely: from each according to her/his ability, to each according to her/his need. Mutual aid is only possible between and among equals (which means among friends and trusted long-term allies). Solidarity, on the other hand (since it is offered to and asked for by ad hoc allies), needs to include the reality of reciprocation.
Do you ever spend time thinking about where the food you eat, or the clothes you wear come from? What about the labor and materials that went into building your house, or your car? Left to fend for ourselves without the comforts of civilization, few among us would survive a week, let alone be able to produce a fraction of the myriad commodities we consume every day.
From the great pyramids commissioned by the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, to today’s globe-spanning production and supply chains, the primary function of the ruling class has always been to organize human activity. And everywhere that they have done so, they have relied on coercion. Under capitalism, this activity is organized through either direct violence, or the internalized threat of starvation created by a system based on private ownership of wealth and property.
In an era of a dwindling welfare state with social safety net provisions crumbling, the importance of mutual aid and support networks could not be more important. The examples of such models are many. Clients at a syringe exchange share a place to stay. Such mutual aid networks helped keep many alive and off the streets, where they inevitably would have been swept up by police and sent to the de facto poor person’s housing provider: city jail.
In San Francisco, when people lose lovers to the AIDS crisis, neighborhood members formed a group called the Mary Widowers. This mutual aid group helps widowers cope with their losses, find new spaces for care, work, love, art, and fun. Mutual aid helps people survive.
Syringe exchange activist Donald Grove helped organize an underground syringe exchange program called Moving Equipment. “It was about creating a basis of mutual self support from which we could do this other stuff. And much of that support was born of an ethos of care among social outsiders. User organizing, people want it to be about political campaigns and stuff like that but what I see is that users are already organized in a hostile environment about just providing basic survival needs. To say that is not enough is to demand that everything and all political models act and look like the dominant political model. Sometimes self care is enough.”
Imagine a world in which human activity was not organized on the basis of ceaseless competition over artificially scarce resources, but the pursuit of the satisfaction of human needs … and you will understand a vision of the world that anarchists seek to create.
In this video clip Derrick Jensen talks about how to support direct action, both through loyalty and physical, material support. Derrick lists many ways people can support others on the front line, using examples such as supporting indigenous people opposing oil pipelines and the importance of using your skill set from accounting and writing to others who can cook and sew.
Derrick Jensen challenges those of us listening to offer an hour a week for another person’s activism.
When one cannot go to support an action directly, how can one still support that action?
Napolean, or maybe it was Frederick the Great, famously commented that an army marches on it’s stomach. What is meant by that is that the quartermasters are just as important as the soldiers. Another way to say this is that in battle, in World War II, for example, only about 10 per cent of the soldiers ever fired their gun in battle. The vast majority of soldiers were clerks, or truck drivers, or people who delivered ammunition, or medics, or cooks, or something else. That is a pretty common figure—about, 10 per cent, or often less. I think it was only 3 percent of the IRA that picked up any weapon.
Let’s think about a professional basketball team, or a professional baseball team. You not only have the players. You’ve got all the minor leagers. You’ve got the trainers. You’ve got the dieticians. You’ve got the people who sell the tickets. You’ve got the groundskeepers. You’ve got all these others.
Or in a movie. A movie does not just consist of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. There are gaffers and stunt people, and editors, and caterers. So the point is that there are very few accomplishments that people actually do solo. Most of us require support in whatever we are doing. That support work is just as important as the more glorious aspects.
My friend Lierre Keith often says that what an activist movement needs is two things. It needs loyalty and material support. For example, right now, there are people, primarily indigenous people, some non-indigenous people, who are opposing pipeline that is going across their land. Of course, every pipeline goes across indigenous land, but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. For people whom, for any number of reasons, cannot go there to be there physically, there are a near infinite number of things they could do.
They can write letters to the editors locally. They can advocate in one way or another for them. They can send them supplies. The people actually in the frontline still need to eat. They are going to have shoes that fall apart. Or, they’re going to tear a hole in their jeans. Or, they’re going to get sick.
When we were attempting to stop timber sales, we would sometimes have to work very hard to meet the deadline. We’re having to have till midnight to finish our appeal. There was a post office that stayed open till midnight, for whatever reason. We would oftentimes be working as hard as we can. We were working for hours and hours. We’ve only got two hours left to go. We’d actually get very hungry. Somebody has to go get some food. That’s just as important as the person who drives it to the airport, where the post office was. That’s just as important as the person who writes it up.
Physical material support is very important. There’s also the notion that a guerrilla army swims in the ocean of the people. You need to develop support among the people in order to have a guerrilla army. That’s not just true for the guerrilla army. That’s also true of activism. We need to raise public support for our positions.
I’ve thought often of an experiment called something like “The Second Person Experiment.” They had a bunch of people sitting in a room, like a doctor’s office. They’d have a couple of people come in who were part of the experiment. One person would say, for example, something very racist. The others would not believe it. They would just say it was the part of the experiment.
What they found was that the response of everybody in the room was heavily influenced by the response of the second person in on the experiment. Let’s say that the first person says something racist. If the second person says, “That’s pretty funny, that’s great.” Everybody in the room is much more likely to respond positively than if the person said, “Hey! That’s not very cool.”
I think about that a lot. In fact, it came across a very very small way in the past few weeks. I’m on an email list in my neighborhood. It’s a neighborhood watchlist, where they will announce when somebody gets their house burgled. They’d say, “Everybody watch out. There’s somebody burgling a house. They were seen leaving in a whatever.” So, that’s pretty handy.
But another thing that the people running the list would do, that kind of annoys me is they will complain every time anyone in the neighborhood sees a mountain lion or a bear. And, they’ll say, “We need to call fishing game and get rid of the animals, cause a mountain lion was seen carrying a great kitty.” Nothing personal to the great kitty sitting in the house.
They’ve been doing this a lot. I’ve been keeping silent. Finally, I just couldn’t keep silent anymore. I wrote a very nice note saying, “We need to remember that we’re in their homes. If you have a cat and you leave your cat outside, that’s the risk you’re taking. The mountain lion or the bear should not be harmed for the risk that you took or your cat took.” Nevermind that cats kill birds, but let’s leave that aside.
It was a very nice note, but it had to be said, because I wanted to break the hegemony of it. It’s the same on the larger scale. There’s a line I’m going to mangle, I believe it was from Gandhi. “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they oppose you, then you win,” or something like that. I think that’s awfully simplified. But, it’s really true that somebody has to go and say something. And then somebody else has to repeat it. And, somebody else has to repeat if, till it gains cultural currency.
Let’s think about this in terms of the attempts to support the indigenous people opposing the pipelines. If they had 50,000 people show up, that’d be great. But, if that 50,000 people show up, but they have no body show up with a port-a-putty, and they had nobody show up with food, that 50,000 people thing would last about six hours and leave a mess. You need to have support in order to have a long-term campaign. That’s absolutely crucial. It’s just as crucial as anything else. What can people do, who are not on the frontline?
I have a friend who is an accountant. Part of her activist work is she does accounting for various organizations that need accounting. That’s something you have to to do too, especially if you have a non-profit. You have to have a 501C3, means that you have to go through all of that stuff. It’s nice to have someone to navigate that territory.
I don’t care what your skills are. If you’re a good writer, they need good writers. If you’re a good cook, they need good cooks. If you are a good accountant, they need good accountants. It is so true. I get tired of being called the “violence guy,” because I talk about resistance. Truth is, we need everything. We need school teachers. We need accountants. We need cooks. We need sowers. We need everything.
I want to challenge everybody who’s listening to this. I’d like you to take at least one hour every week and do some form of activism, or support for somebody else’s activism.
I am going to tell a story, which is how I got started as an activist. When I was about 24 or 25 or 26, I realized I wasn’t paying enough for gas. I wasn’t covering up the social and economic costs. Every time, I would buy gas, for every dollar I spent on gas, I would donate a dollar to a local environmental organization, cause they need it. But I didn’t have any money. I was completely unemployed. I had very very little money. So, what I’d do instead is I’d give myself a choice. Either pay a dollar for every dollar of gas. Or, I could pay myself $5 for every hour of activism. If I spent $10 on gas, I could either give $10 to a local organization or do two hours of work of activism.
I want to challenge everyone to do that. Take some amount, and either give a “tithe” to some local organization, or do two hours of work for a local organization. Or, one hour of work. Everybody can take 1 hour away from their lives. I don’t care how busy you are. You can take 1 hour. You can write a letter. You could go to a protest. You could help start assembling a package. You can do just that much to start. It’s a wonderful start.
Max Wilbert is a third-generation organizer who grew up in Seattle’s post-WTO anti-globalization and undoing racism movement. He is a co-founder of the group Deep Green Resistance and longtime board member of Fertile Ground, a small, grassroots environmental non-profit with no employees and no corporate funding. His first book, a collection of pro-feminist and environmental essays, was recently released. It’s called We Choose to Speak, and Other Essays.
He is also the co-author of the forthcoming book “Bright Green Lies” (with Derrick Jensen and Lierre Keith) which looks at the problems with mainstream so-called “solutions” such as solar panels, electric cars, recycling, and green cities. The book makes the case that these approaches fail to protect the planet and aim at protecting empire from the effects of peak oil and ecological collapse.
I’m not a Leninist, but I think it’s worth reading Lenin and all those famous revolutionaries throughout history, I think it’s very worth studying and reading their work even if you disagree with large portions of it, even all of it depending on who you are, but Lenin talked about revolution as not being something that people make happen. Ultimately, revolution comes about more or less organically because of those interactions between people, and society, and environment, and that whole socio-political, ecological context gives rise to these revolutionary conditions, and whether or not there is a revolution that depends on people’s ability to harness and change the situation in some way. This whole conversation I’m always thinking of this quote of James Connolly who was an Irish Republican around the early 1900s, active around the 1900s in the independence movement in Ireland, and James Conolly said “revolution is never practical until the hour the revolution strikes, then it alone is practical and all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers become the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings, and the whole idea of revolution to me is fascinating because in this context that we find ourselves in today, so many people have trouble imagining, you talked about this in your work Derrick, so many people have trouble imagining another way of life. People can imagine the end of the world, the collapse of the biosphere, the end of all human life and perhaps, most non-human life as well before they can actually imagine living a different way of life or living without the conveniences, and the consumption, and the high energy lifestyle of modern civilization. So, I think part of revolution, part of building towards revolution is how do we envision a future world that is better than the one we live now, and then how do we concretely begin to work for that world in here and now, and be prepared for those revolutionary moments that we know are coming, because that’s the truth as we know these revolutionary fractures in society are coming, and if you were in Paradise California when that fire came through, as the James Connolly quote talked about, all the efforts of the conservatives and compromisers were the most futile, unvisionary of human imaginings in that moment when the inferno is sweeping through your town and the climate apocalypse is upon you, and that is just a small taste of what’s coming. This collapse has been an on-going process for a long time, but it’s getting so intense as the ecology of this planet really has taken such a hammering over the last hundreds and thousands of years, but specially in the last hundred years and the last decades as this culture’s hyper powered on so much fossil fuels, and so much energy that is destroying and extracting the last of all the resources of the planet, blowing up as many mountains as it can and exploiting everything, right? In that context we need to begin to build the seeds of the future and I think it has to combine that imagination, that ability to imagine a different future with like a very hard-headed, a very practical organizing mindset.
Browse all of my Resistance Radio interviews here.
PLAYLIST
0:11 – Introduction 1:22 – The Need for Change in Large-Scale Social and Environmental Movement Approaches 6:59 – Reform Can Be Very Helpful but Doesn’t Address the Fundamental Problem 12:26 – Revolution as a Consequence of Ecological Collapse 18:26 – Deep Green Resistance: Luck is Where Preparation Meets Opportunity 24:34 – We Can’t Out-muscle the Empire, We Have to Be Able to Out-think It 29:19 – Strategy and Organization is How We Build Power 35:06 – Where Does the Power to Exploit Comes From? 41:01 – Dismantling is Scary and Difficult Yet We’re Not Alone 44:05 – Pre-revolutionary Phases and How to Reach Out
