Mark Parker, a community organiser in Southwark, on organising people for power.

1. Reshaping Grassroots Politics
Mark Parker

2.  Formerly worked at bassac for over 10 years
 A network of community centres now part of
Locality
 Awarded an MA in Community Organising at
Queen Mary, Mile End in Nov 2011
 As part of the MA, took up placement with
London Citizens in LB Southwark
 Working as a trainee community organiser
with Locality in LB Southwark since Oct 2011

3.  Introduction to community organising
 Outline of main features of organising
 Q&A
 Origins in USA
 Locality’s training programme

4.  Many people involved in developing
organising in USA eg Si Kahn, Harry Boyte
 Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) seen as the
principal originator
 Taken forward by Ed Chambers and the
Industrial Areas Foundation
 Transposed to UK by Neil Jameson and
Citizens UK
 Locality takes a different tack but more on
that later

5.  Citizens UK has delivered significant
organising successes over twenty years
 Living Wage Campaign
◦ Calling employers to pay their staff enough to avoid
poverty
 Strangers into Citizens
◦ Calling for undocumented residents to be granted
permanent status after decades in limbo
 City Safe
◦ Creating safe havens for young people under threat
of street violence

6.  Summary always butchers the truth but...
 Organising has four main pillars in my book
◦ Relationships
◦ Independent Agenda
◦ Power
◦ Organising People

7.  Central plank to organising is building trust
and respect between citizens
 Face-to-face exchange between two people
focused on creating a meaningful relationship
 Sharing values and motivations, visions and
concerns
 Hearing the person’s willingness to act with
others for shared goals
 Face into difference, keep it personal and
human, create trust and empathy

8.  Organising seeks to find those issues that
most energise community members
 Open questions, supportive enquiry and
looking for root causes
 People will come together around the
common good, the felt priorities
 Anger moves people to action; organising
keep them together and focused
 Autonomous debate leads to shared goals
and agreement on strategy

9.  Power = the capacity to get things done
 Acknowledge that power is central to all
human affairs
 Develop power analyses of community life
 Focus on the way power is used for and
against citizens – issues
 Target those who can make the decision and
change life for many people
 Call to account power-holders through taking
action

10.  Two forms of power – money and people
 Bring out lots of organised people at strategic
moments -> acknowledgement -> respect
 Numbers matter as does discipline and
leadership
 People find confidence and new abilities as
they grow powerful
 One voice for the people calling power-
holders to account -> new democracy

11.  Here’s an opportunity to ask any questions
about things so far
 I will go on to talk about the origins of
organising and about Locality’s training
programme in a minute
 Later we’ll have some debate, so at the
moment ...
 Do you have any questions about what you’ve
heard?

12.  First emerged in Chicago 1940s in ‘The Back
of the Yards’ – industrial slum
 Came to prominence in Chicago’s black
ghetto of Woodlawns and New York’s
Rochester vs Kodak in 1960s
 Moved into rural organising especially in
California and the South in 1970-2000
 Many traditions today, many church-based,
some working with individuals
 E.g. PICO,Gamaliel, DART

13.  Draws on some key sources of inspiration
◦ Aristotle – humanity as political
◦ Machiavelli – working with power
◦ Chicago School of Urban Sociology - ethnography
◦ Catholic social teaching – solidarity, corporatism
and subsidiarity
◦ Paulo Freire – Brazilian educator in 1970-90s
 Clearly also influenced by civil rights
movement and the Vietnam War opposition
 Also roots in the Highlander Institute and
other training for ex-slaves

14.  Founding chapter was The East London
Community Organisation (TELCO) in 1996
 Take institutions into membership such as
churches, unions, universities and schools
 Now have over 250 member organisations
 London Citizens held public Assembly with all
mayoral candidates in 2008
 Citizens UK had 2,000 people attend a
meeting with three Party leaders in May 2010
 Showed the power of organising

15.  In 2007, Sen Barack Obama became a
candidate for the Democratic nomination
 His campaign was spectacularly successful in
engaging ‘ordinary’ Americans
 Used many organising techniques to mobilise
volunteers, donors and staff
 Republican sniping led to greater visibility
than before for community organising
 In 2009, he became the 1st black US President
 UK Parties wanted some of his magic too

16.  Maurice Glasman launched ‘Blue Labour’ in
April 2009 cf. Philip Blond’s ‘Red Tory’
 Positive experience with Citizens UK
 Influential on Ed and David Miliband’s 2010
campaigns for the Labour Party leadership
 Recruited 1,000 organisers within the Labour
movement
 Aims to renew the unions and local branches
through community organising
 See ‘Tangled up in Blue’ by Rowenna Davis

17.  Conservative manifesto 2010: 5K organisers
trained to work in areas of ‘low social capital’
 OCS tender proposed training 500 senior
organisers over 4 years each with £20K
attached (1 yr)
 4,500 volunteer organisers also trained
 Inspired by Red Tories and Cons tradition of
community action (e.g. Tocqueville)
 Promoting culture change in local
government?

18.  New organisation – bassac and DTA – since
April 2011 – won the OCS contract
 Focused on organising using UK model
developed by RE:generate Trust
 Listening to community and stimulating
action for change through projects
 Seeking to identify leaders to form a
Community Holding Team
 Identifying community assets and enterprise
solutions

19.  Organisers are hosted by existing community
organisations for a training year
 Recruited locally to common JD; many
employed nationally by Locality
 Find own operating resources after training
 Accountable to local community
 Senior organisers train and support volunteer
organisers
 Independent professional association to
establish and manage standards from 2016

20.  Each cohort numbers about 40 individuals in
teams of 2-5 – about three cohorts a year
 Residential – 3½ days – mixture of
experiential learning and inputs
 Online tutor supervision – 3 hours each
month in four groups
 Seven OCN modules –> Certificate in the
Foundations of Community Organising
 Choice of ‘Go Deeper’ courses for final six
months

21.  Root Solution Listening Matters (RSLM) has
been developed over 20 years by RE:generate
 Provides a framework for animating the
community and creating autonomous action
 Organisers are listening to citizens at the
door, in cafes, on the street and wherever
 Recording their responses and provoking
action
 Encouraging residents to invite their
neighbours to listen to each other

22.  Bringing citizens together around their
passion for change creates project groups
 Organisers support and encourage projects
but ‘never do for others what they can do for
themselves’
 Linking citizens up through listening to each
other creates new networks
 Friends and neighbours become customers
for projects, volunteers, leaders and voters

23.  Organising is essentially the development of
independent citizen action and power
 People’s organisations act autonomously and
engage with other agencies in their time
 Local agencies do seek partnership and to
share intelligence and plans
 People’s organisations often find it best to
remain without formal allies
 Consequently, they can become an authentic
and distinct voice for their community

24.  In the context of savage cuts, is this strategy
credible or feasible?
 Are Locality organisers making any difference
to grassroots democracy?
 Does the organising have some of the
answers to our uninspiring local politics?
 How might organising give voice to those
most excluded?
 What part can you play in this developing
picture?

25.  Neighbor Power by Jim Diers
◦ Bringing together organising and civic structures
 Going Public by Michael Gecan
◦ Modern practical intro to IAF organising
 Blessed are the Organized by Jeffrey Stout
◦ New story / theory account of organising
 Roots for Radicals by Ed Chambers
◦ Values and vision of today’s organising
 Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky
◦ Original challenge from Alinsky himself

26.  www.southwarkorganising.wordpress.com
 mark.parker1@virgin.net
 07956 370 676
 @kmarkparker
 Hope to hear from you! Comments and
feedback welcome.