Author: Rajesh Jain

Self-Us-Now

Central to the persuasion process that is at the heart of organising and relationship building is the concept of the public narrative. Marshall Ganz refers to it as “an exercise of leadership by motivating others to join you in action on behalf of a shared purpose. Although this worksheet focuses on your “story of self”, the goal is to identify sources of your own calling to the purpose in which you will call upon others (story of us) to join you in action (story of now).”

More from Ganz on telling one’s public story:

Stories not only teach us how to act – they inspire us to act. Stories communicate our values through the language of the heart, our emotions. And it is what we feel – our hopes, our cares, our obligations – not simply what we know that can inspire us with the courage to act.

By telling our personal stories of challenges we have faced, choices we have made, and what we learned from the outcomes we can inspire others and share our own wisdom. Because stories allow us to express our values not as abstract principles, but as lived experience, they have the power to move others.

A good story public story is drawn from the series of choice points that have structured the “plot” of your life – the challenges you faced, choices you made, and outcomes you experienced.

• Challenge: Why did you feel it was a challenge? What was so challenging about it? Why was it your challenge?
• Choice: Why did you make the choice you did? Where did you get the courage – or not? Where did you get the hope – or not? How did it feel?
• Outcome: How did the outcome feel? Why did it feel that way? What did it teach you? What do you want to teach us? How do you want us to feel?

A public story includes three elements:

• A story of self: why you were called to what you have been called to.

• A story of us: what your constituency, community, organization has been called to its shared purposes, goals, vision.

• A story of now: the challenge this community now faces, the choices it must make, and the hope to which “we” can aspire.

This graphic from Ganz captures the interlinkages in the story:

These ideas were applied to great success in Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign.

Mobilising vs Organising

Marshall Ganz explains the difference between mobilising and organising: “Leadership in organizing is based on relationships. This is a key difference between mobilizing and organizing. When we mobilize we access and deploy a person’s resources, for example, their time to show up at a rally, their ability to “click” to sign a petition (or their signature), of their money. But when we organize we are actually building new relationships which, in turn, can become a source not only of a particular resource, but of leadership, commitment, imagination, and, of course, more relationships. In mobilizing, the “moment of truth” is when we ask, can I count on you to be there, give me $5.00, and sign the petition. In organizing the “moment of truth” is when two people have learned enough about each other’s interests, resources, and values not only to make an “exchange” but also to commit to working together on behalf of a common purpose. Those commitments, in turn, can generate new teams, new networks, and new organizations that, in turn, can mobilize resources over and over and over again.”

Here is more from Hahrie Han in her book, “How Organizations Develop Activists”:

Mobilizing [is] transactional activism. A transactional approach to activism focuses on the quantifiable indicators of the numbers of people who take action—how many people clicked on a link, looked at a page, attended a meeting, made phone calls, or contacted an elected official?… Because it focuses on achieving transactional goals, mobilizing conceptualizes the relationship between the activist and the civic association as an exchange relationship. Exchange theory says that the relationship between activists and associations is based on exchanging resources that each has to offer the other… In this framework, the job of an association leader is to maximize transactional outcomes by creating volunteer work that is as costless as possible. Because time and effort are the most valuable resources activists have, the goal is to make the work quick and easy so that more people will do it… When associations are focused on making activism as cost-free as possible for the volunteers, they tend to provide only the technical and material needs activists have.

Organizing [is] transformational activism. In contrast to transactional outcomes, transformational outcomes focus on the ways that collective action changes the affects, outlooks, and other orientations of individuals and groups. Examples include the increasing ability of people to see beyond their own self-interest, shifts in beliefs about their own agency, or changes in public opinion. Organizers focus on transformational outcomes because these changes make it more likely that people will become leaders within the association, working not only to achieve associational outcomes, but also to recruit others to do so.  In transformational organizing, the goal is not only to get work out of the activist in   the short term but also to invest in developing the activist’s capacity to act… A key assumption in transformational organizing is that the interpersonal relationships activists have are the locus of leadership development and transformation… Transformational approaches to organizing, in contrast, conceptualize participation as the product of dynamic social interactions and seek to create participatory opportunities that maximize the quantity and quality of those interactions.

Here is a nice comparison from Advocacy Iceberg:

Jason Mogus connects organising and mobilising: “Organizing is building your power. Mobilizing is spending your power.”

In other words, mobilising is about transactions and organising is about relationships. Central to the idea of organising is the idea of self-us-now.

What It Is

Britannica on community organising: “In community organizing, members of communities are organized to act collectively on their shared interests. Saul Alinsky is commonly recognized as the founder of community organizing. Alinsky emerged as a community organizer in the second half of the 1930s. His thinking about organizing was strongly influenced by the militant labour movement in the United States emerging at the time. Alinsky’s approach emphasized democratic decision making, the development of indigenous leadership, the support of traditional community leaders, addressing people’s self-interest, use of conflict strategies, and fighting for specific and concrete results.”

Dave Beckwith and Cristina Lopez write: “Community organizing is the process of building power through involving a constituency in identifying problems they share and the solutions to those problems that they desire; identifying the people and structures that can make those solutions possible; enlisting those targets in the effort through negotiation and using confrontation and pressure when needed; and building an institution that is democratically controlled by that constituency that can develop the capacity to take on further problems and that embodies the will and the power of that constituency. Heather Booth, founder of the Midwest Academy and legendary community organizer, expressed the fundamentals in this formula: OOO = Organizers Organize Organizations.”

Hahrie Han: “I’ve always thought about the challenge of pulling people off the sidelines into public life in a way that makes them real agents of change, realizing their own interests – as opposed to consumers of something else. And that can happen through elections, or through traditional community organizing, or through unions, or elsewhere.” More: “Democracy is a muscle. Just as babies have to strengthen their leg muscles to walk, we all have to develop the skills we need to act collectively to achieve our common interests. We must invest in the organizations and movements that can equip people in that way. Only then will people become the source of resilience we need to protect democracy.”

Michelle Oyakawa: “[Organising] begins with people building relationships with each other and learning to transform those relationships into power to make the change that they want…People are not only struggling with powerful institutions and social forces, they are also wrestling with themselves to find the courage to take action. Organizations can help leaders navigate this and provide them with support and a vehicle to make their voice heard…When people come together, build connections with one another, take action repeatedly and reflect on it together afterwards, they can create a better world for themselves, their families, and their communities.”

A final quote from Marshall Ganz: “Leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty. Organizing is leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want.”

The Need

I have written earlier about United Voters of India (UVI), as the mechanism to mobilise the NANVs (non- aligned and non-voters) to build a bottom-up movement to create a Lok Sabha of Independents in the next elections as the first step to transform India into a free and prosperous nation: The Logic of Collective Action and Constructing the Collective. In this series, I want to discuss how we can mobilise a few lakh people in every Lok Sabha constituency to create the collective that can defeat candidates from the mainstream political parties. The big idea: community organising.

I first came across the term “community organising” when I was studying Obama’s 2008 campaign for new ideas in ground mobilisation in the run-up to the 2014 elections. Obama himself was a community organiser. He built a huge volunteer network across the US that transformed political campaigning. In India, we had seen mass mobilisation in the past few decades – Ram Janmabhoomi movement in the 1990s and India Against Corruption (2011) come to mind. Political parties mobilise huge numbers for their campaigns in every election. The operative word is “mobilise” as opposed to “organise” – and there is a big difference, as we shall see.

For UVI to succeed, it will need to be driven at the grassroots level – neighbourhood by neighbourhood. This will require an organising model very different from the top-down approaches that we normally associate with movements. Without a single tall leader issuing diktats from the top, it will require a self-organising approach with a network of local leaders who focus on persuading people in smaller groups.

I had spent quite some time thinking about community organising during 2015-18 when I was working on Nayi Disha. But we never got it right and the project eventually failed. Maybe the ideas of freedom and prosperity did not resonate, maybe I did not do enough to spread them to a large audience, maybe our outreach was flawed. Post-pandemic India will be different – many speak now in hushed tones (WhatsApp and Signal calls!) about the need for an alternative to the current political dispensation – “anyone but them”. But as I wrote recently, the alternative we seek should not be another political party (or a coalition of the also-corrupt-and-incompetent). What we need is a movement that frees India from the clutches of all politicians and their political parties.

This is where UVI as the organising idea comes in. UVI will need an organising model to harness the power of people at the local level – this is where community organising (or just ‘organising’) comes in. It is an idea which is relatively new in India, but there have been variants in the shakha-based approach used by Shiva Sena and RSS. (I had discussed covered this in my series on Circles earlier.) Done right, it goes beyond membership and money; it can be the lever to transform grassroot politics and activism, and deliver the Nayi Disha Indians need.