Roadmap for Building a Community-Led Campaign
Background
Our mission is to build power together to create the change we need for everyone in our communities to make ends meet, live with dignity, and have a voice in shaping the decisions that impact us.
With so many challenges facing people, we believe things can change when people from different walks of life get together to discover what they have in common. So often, the people closest to the problems are also closest to the solutions, yet those are the same people who don’t have a seat at the table. Through organizing local community-led campaigns, we plan to change that.
We are a homegrown power-building organization that serves as a vehicle for people’s collective action. We are not a service, education, nor an advocacy organization. Our work is a reflection of the needs in our communities. We believe deep relationship building combined with leadership development and strategic action focused on concrete problems in people’s everyday lives is how we build power to create lasting change.
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Talk to an organizer about a new potential campaign
Process
To be responsive to the needs of our communities, we have developed a clear process for community members to follow for tackling a problem with an organizing campaign. Because we have limited resources, we are only able to invest in a limited number of campaigns. Therefore, we use a process with criteria and benchmarks to determine which campaigns we can realistically support.
To determine whether a campaign supports our mission and is aligned with an organizing theory of change, we ask the following questions when evaluating a potential campaign. We answer these questions by embarking on the campaign exploration process (outlined below).
Steps
We have defined a series of steps that will enable a leadership team to build the power they need to win on an issue in their community:
Begin creating clarity around the problem we hope to address, people experiencing the problem, potential solutions, and who has the power to implement a solution. Continue to create clarity every step along the way as more people with unique knowledge and experience are engaged.
Engage with people in our community who we think stand to benefit from your campaign to learn about people’s values, experiences, self-interest and, importantly, whether they are motivated to join a leadership team.
Identify those with leadership potential who are motivated to work on this problem. Explain the commitment, connect it to their self-interest, and invite them to join the leadership team.
Collaboratively develop a working structure for your leadership team by articulating a team name, shared purpose, decision making process, norms, roles, responsibilities, and regular meeting times.
Drawing upon the wisdom of the leadership team, create clarity around goals, power, constituency, tactics, and timeline. Where more information is needed, leadership team members conduct in-person research visits with experts and decision makers.
Make a public move that captures attention, generates motivation, attracts new people, demonstrates power, and builds momentum towards the next move.
Resources
For community-led campaigns we support, we are able to offer some of the following resources:
