From Campaigns to Community Power

From campaigns to community power: turning election energy into lasting empowerment.

featuring Hahrie Han and Amanda Tattersall

A Community Independents Network Event

Not just about elections but explores the difference between mobilising people for a moment and organising them for lasting power. The latter is CAPaD’s objective.

Mark Spain has provided a brief summary of the event in case you don’t have 90 minutes to listen to the whole event (which is at the link above).

– mobilising is getting people to do a thing
– organising is getting people to become the kind of people that do what needs to be done
– successful organisations balance both of these
– organising gives depth, mobilising brings breadth
– balancing the two brings resilience rather than fragility and brittleness
– some of the best organisations doing this are evangelising church groups. They use radical hospitatility to ensure you feel like you belong before connecting on beliefs. Then they let you have agency by self organising into small groups with special purpose and needs. You stay with in a large, broad community of belonging and have impact at scale.
– community groups often put believing before belonging
– what are the invitations that bring people to cultivate their own agency? – social connectivity – strategic learning
– the lesson for activist groups: don’t outsource your outrage. Say here’s a problem, what do you want to do about it? Demonstrate a national purpose and local action.
– most people value dignity, belonging and agency. We mainly don’t want to get involved because we want to see people acting with dignity in the public square and we don’t see much of this.
– people invest in the things they value. Make it valuable with social connectivity and strategic learning
– organising is like beating your head against a brick wall until it’s not
– the capabilities are sensing, seizing and transforming
– 15% of people feel that they are producers of public life and 85% feel they are consumers of public life.
– the goal is to make everyone an agent of producing public life
– relational meetings are the foundation tools of this work
– what can build our power together when we open beyond sameness and learn to be curious about difference? This is where the possibility of creativity happens