What is Community Organising and how is it powerful?

RRAC was founded to nurture Community Organising (CO) for Reproductive Justice in England and Wales. In this article, we will explore what exactly Community Organising is.

CO aims to harness the resources of a community - be they particular skills, knowledge, cultural traditions, or just strength in numbers – to leverage the change that the community desires. This distinguishes it from policy advocacy, which typically assumes that power rests with quite a small group of people like politicians or policy-makers. Community Organising relies upon good old-fashioned people power to resist or influence those in formal positions of power.  

CO naturally recognises and addresses the intersectionality of injustices in a way the law often cannot. The problems, and their solutions, are defined by those navigating them.

Every CO campaign has three goals. The first goal is a strategic goal - for example, to destigmatize abortion in St George’s Hospital. But the second goal is to strengthen the organisation/campaign, and the third is to strengthen the individual leadership skills of its members. 

In other words, CO goes further than just pursuing the goal directly related to the issue being focused on. This is part of a recognition that community organising is cumulative and non-linear – your campaign might need to go again, and you want it stronger for when it does.

So you want to start a community organising campaign. What do you do next?

1. You start with recruiting an organising team. This uses the skill of holding 1:1s and communicating your motivation for activism. At RRAC we use a framework called ‘Story of Self’ for this. We always stress that your story of how you came to care about Reproductive Justice does not need to involve trauma, or anything you are uncomfortable sharing. Joy is valid and is a powerful motivator!

2. You then go on to exploring the particular issue area in the community, understanding how people relate to it and what other intersecting issues you might be aware of. You do this via something called a ‘listening campaign’. This might lead you to expand or alter the focus of your community organising campaign, depending on what you hear.

3. Together with your team, you decide a shared objective for your campaign. Now that you know what you’re aiming for, you can start to map the power holders in your community and use that knowledge to plan a campaign approach.

4. You develop a ‘Story of Us’, which is about consolidating your team’s purpose and narrative. This is something you’ll use through your campaign, as you hopefully gather momentum and advance your goal.

As you may notice, a lot of work happens before the campaign actually “starts” – and that’s because the foundations of relationships and understanding your community require considerable time and attention.

Interested in how CO can look in the context of Reproductive Justice? Stay tuned for our next blog post and follow our social media for updates.