Whether we look towards the Earth’s balanced systems, the nature of politics or even some of our shared ideals, the things we have relied on as stable have started to show cracks. It is unsettling. And it can leave us feeling frustratingly impotent.
But it’s also a moment of potential. It stirs in many of us a desire to find different ways to get out of this problem we’ve ended up in. This is the second in a series of articles focused on how we might respond in ways that are rational, fair and empowering.
Ways that look to our shared humanity, rather than top-down authority, for solutions. Ways that we, the ordinaries of the world, might organise ourselves, and reframe our perspectives, to respond to the obvious stresses of the moment.
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In my last post I started to consider the role of movements in creating change, and the vital need to allow time for the scale of change we’d like to see, however desperate we may be for it now.
Movements, it seems, are the framework for how we may create a better now than our current now, from the bottom-up. That’s because the change that comes from a movement is driven by the needs and demands of ordinary people – the yous and mes.
And with their inherent complexity and diversity, movements provide a route towards change without reliance on the authority of some greater power, be that a divine one, a rich one or an authoritarian one (or all three). A complex, diverse, overlapping mess of pressure is a hard thing for an authority like that to control.
Yes, it feels reassuring to know movements could be our way out. But in truth, that doesn’t tell us too much about what next.
I’m in search of what might make a better now than our current now. Tempting as it is to dive into the possibilities for what shape a better world might take, there is still more to consider about how.
Might there be any common ingredients for success in ‘change-making’?
To find some hints at answers, we could do worse that to look at the work of Hahrie Han, Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University in the US. She studies that very topic – change-making – and she’s written several books on it.
Some years back I co-organised a UK speaking tour with Hahrie, after she published her book “How organizations develop activists”. That book asks a simple question:
“Membership-based civic associations constantly seek to engage people in civic and political action. What makes some more effective than others?”
As the quote suggests, it’s not really a book about movement-building. It focuses on what in Britain we tend to call “campaign organisations” - the Greenpeaces and Petas - and how they might harness people power to drive change; how they should run effective campaigns, essentially.
A professional, membership-based campaign organisation is not a movement. But, it turns out, there is a common thread that runs in what they, and movements need if they are to be effective.
Distributing power
Hahrie Han argues how the sorts of significant changes that campaign groups are searching for come, essentially, from a strong grassroots.
Real impacts seem to arrive when organisations apply a model in which power is distributed to community activists and organisers, who themselves hold autonomy and responsibility.
The challenge to these big campaign organisations, in other words, is to let go a little. To focus more on the autonomy, empowerment and capacity building of real people. Alongside a strong vision and good leadership from anyone willing and able to lead, you have some of the key the ingredients for effective change-making.
The organisations that do this, she argues, succeed more than those that don’t, whatever their issue.
Now having read all of this, I and a few others, all working in campaign organisations at the time, were inspired by it. We wondered if we could build some of the learning into Britain’s big campaigning organisations.
So, we gathered the senior folk - CEOs and the like - from a large number of major British environmental and poverty groups together in one room, and presented Hahrie Han to them.
And she set out the facts: The organisations in the room held enormous potential power. Their visions were achievable. But they needed to focus more on building power at the base – networks and communities of powerful, autonomous folk at the grassroots.
Power to the people, you might say if you like a good cliche. Almost everyone in the room got it. And in truth, little changed overnight. But then as I said in my last post, change is sometimes slower than we’d like.
People need people
That though, is not the point of his post. The message I take away from this now, years later, is not about the structure of contemporary campaigning organisations.
It’s that, within the all-important movements I wrote about last time, as well as in these organisations, there is an essential element without which there can be no success: that we can make noise alone, but it is when people gather together, with a sense of collective purpose and a desire to collaborate, that meaningful change is possible.
There is no point in distributing power to individuals, just for them to remain alone. The noise they can make, whilst sometimes impressive, is rarely sufficient. You can play a nice solo on a violin, but you need an orchestra to play a symphony, you might say.
Key to Hahrie Han’s recipe is the buzzy, networked, collective noise of people doing things together. People, organising together.
People need people.
In other words, it seems to boil down to community. Without community, there is no chance of an effective movement and no chance of any change that matters. Now we’re getting somewhere.
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In my first post on “Responding to now” I found movements to be the route to change, and in this one, it seems that community, not individualism, is key.
But we live in the age of the individual. So how do we square that? We’ll look at that next.