If you don't respect yourself, ain't nobody
gonna give a good cahoot, na na na na
Respect yourself...
- Respect Yourself
lyrics by Luther Thomas Ingram and Mack Rice
The most recent posts in this series have focused on Chapter 3 of From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D). You can find those posts here, here, and here. A key point of Chapter 3 was that the kind of economic and political noncooperation that destroys a dictator's regime works best when it is applied on a mass basis as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society. Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration. Sharp made the point that if the independent institutions of the oppressed society have largely been destroyed or taken over by the dictatorship, the democratic resisters against the dictatorship will need to rebuild these independent groups so that these groups can contribute to the liberation struggle by their mass withdrawal of cooperation from the dictator's regime. The building, rebuilding, and redirecting of organized groups of people requires people who are willing to take on the role of community organizers, as we showed in the last post in this series. Therefore, today we will consider some supplemental material that describes what tools organizers use in order to successfully create organizations that can wield power. And we will be looking at some further material from a veteran community organizer and social movement scholar named Marshall Ganz.
Dr. Ganz has created an entire curriculum designed to teach the craft of organizing. I had the opportunity a while back to take one of his online classes in organizing, titled, Leadership, Organizing and Action. I will not attempt to reproduce the entire class here, but rather to summarize some of its key points. To quote Ganz, "Organizing is a form of leadership. Organizers identify, recruit, and develop the leadership of others; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community. Organizers do not provide services to clients or market products to customers. They organize a community to become a constituency - people able to stand together on behalf of common concerns. Organizers ask three questions: Who are my people? What is their urgent problem? How can they turn their resources into the power to solve their problem?" (Emphasis mine.)
From this description we see that the organizer's job is not an easy one! This is especially true in the United States, where many oppressed peoples and communities have become so passive that they look for "saviors" or "programs" from the dominant culture instead of building their own power in order to become independent of that culture. Because the "saviors" never quite seem to adequately "save", and the "programs" never seem to effectively eliminate the problems they are supposed to solve, these communities continue to passively suffer the effects of institutionalized oppression. The organizer's job is to bring the members of these communities to say, "Hey - no one is coming to save us. What therefore are WE going to do to turn our resources into the power we need to save ourselves?" How can organizers effectively call their people out of passivity? The organizing framework of Dr. Ganz is a way of answering that question, and it has five elements:
As I have said above, the organizer must ask "Who are my people?" But the people whom the organizer seeks to organize will want to know, "Why are you trying to organize us? Why do you care about our problem?" So the organizer needs to have a clear story of why he is trying to organize. And this story must not just be a story of factoids and statistics, but of the moments which called the organizer to be an organizer. These are the moments when the organizer faced not the mere statistics of the challenges facing his people, but the physical incarnation - the embodiment - of those challenges. For one particular organizer whose story I heard on a podcast, a particular series of such moments consisted of her childhood experiences of crossing a bridge from Jordan to Palestine to visit her relatives. As part of that bridge crossing, she had to endure being forced with her mother and sisters to strip naked in front of the Israeli army soldiers at the bridge checkpoint in order to be searched. For me, one such moment came during an afternoon in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade, when three racist bullies from my school came to my house to steal water from our water hose and I had to fight them.
Moments like these are activizing moments - and they form the basis of the organizer's story of self. The organizer must also have a story of us - a story of his response as a member of his people to the collective challenge faced by his people, and a story of now - the response he is asking for from his people. But the story of us and the story of now are not just the creation of the organizer. They are developed and enlarged as the organizer forms relationships with the members of his people and as he hears their stories of self. This is a key to the development of shared strategy later in the organizing process. This is why Mohandas Gandhi spent many months traveling through India listening to the stories of his people before he began his campaign of Indian liberation. This is also why the Reverend James Lawson spent several months listening to the stories of hardships suffered by African-American mothers who had to shop in segregated stores in the Jim Crow South before he began organizing his campaigns of civil disobedience. This listening and collaboration is key. Without it, you may have an organizer who is activized well enough, yet who in his rage tries to shove solutions down the throats of his people. (I've been guilty of this, I'm afraid!)
SHARED COMMITMENT
From the sharing of stories of self between the organizer and other members of his people there arises a set of shared relationships. These relationships become relationships of commitment to a common cause. These relationships, moreover, are based on shared values. As Marshall Ganz says, "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...Relationship building is thus the key to organizing because it is the association of people with each other, not simply the aggregation of individual resources, that can create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." That is why my previous post in this series began with a quote from a romantic song - because relationship-building requires skill! And maintaining relationships requires ongoing work.
SHARED STRUCTURE
From a network of relationships of common purpose, the various people involved in those relationships build a shared structure for action. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, that structure must be explicit and mutually agreed upon by all its members. Remember - successful social movements are always planned and never purely spontaneous. And the organizations that produce successful social movements always have an explicit structure, including an explicit, mutually agreed method of making decisions. The kind of structure that is adopted by a group has a great impact on the effectiveness of the group. A group where one person does all the thinking for everyone can be easily defeated (or worse yet, decapitated). On the other hand, a group which doesn't do anything unless all its members come to a consensus on what needs to be done never gets around to doing anything. The "snowflake" model of leadership development proposed by Ganz is a way to strike a happy balance between the two extremes and to create leadership that is maximally effective.
SHARED STRATEGY
Shared strategy is the outcome of shared story, shared commitment, and shared structure. Strategy is the answer of your group to the question of how to "turn the resources you all have into the power you all need to make the change you all want." Just as leadership is not as effective when it is done by only one person in the group, strategy is most effective when it is developed as a team effort. Effective strategy is important for groups of oppressed people who are struggling to liberate themselves from their oppressors, because this strategy is the way such groups make up for a lack of resources by becoming more resourceful in using what they do have. Effective strategy also is how such groups overcome the advantage of the much greater resources of their oppressors. Ganz uses the term "strategic capacity" to describe the characteristics of teams that are most likely to develop effective strategy. (See this also.)
SHARED ACTION
The final outcome of shared story, shared commitment, shared structure, and shared strategy is shared action - a unified campaign by the oppressed to shift the balance of power between the oppressed and the oppressors. Organizations work through campaigns that have strategic goals or milestones. This setting of milestones provides the necessary discipline for organizers to achieve concrete goals. One campaign I know of organized poor villagers in the Middle East to teach themselves to read. This campaign achieved certain milestones of success that had been developed during the strategy and planning phase of the campaign. The phase of shared action is the time when your organizing skill and effort is put to the proof.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
The person of the organizer and the work of organizing is so important to successful social movements that it deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give to it in a limited space on a Sunday afternoon. However, if you want to know more about how the powerless can build their own power for their own liberation, Dr. Ganz will have another online class through the Harvard Kennedy School next winter and spring. You can find out more about it here. The class is definitely not free - but maybe if you're part of a group, a number of your friends can chip in and you all can pay for one member of your group to attend. (If you're an African-American leader in a Black Lives Matter group, you should definitely attend!) There are also the following free online resources:
- Leadership, Organizing and Action (training guide from a 2016 workshop in Morocco)
- "Learn About Organizing from Marshall Ganz" (a series of videos is included on this page)
