1. Deliver: If a leader promises to do something, he does it.
2. Have a following (or want to build one): Leaders know other people in the community who share theirs concerns. Leaders identify other people who can be brought into the project.
3. Are accountable: Others in the organization or community care about what a leader is saying or doing on their behalf. Leaders check in with the people they represent.
4. Listen: Leaders have their ear to the ground and take the time to ask people what they need and what they think.
5. Motivate others: Leaders bring out the best in other people.
6. Get respect and give respect: Other people listen to leaders and experience them as trusted colleagues.
7. Rise the occasion: In a crisis, others can count on leaders to respond.
8. Are angry: Leaders are comfortable expressing their dissatisfaction with oppressive people and institutions and are ready to direct their anger at doing something productive.
9. Are hopeful: Leaders believe that change is possible and that they have a role in creating their own future.
10. Understand self-interest: leaders know what’s important to them and what they want to get from building the organization.
11. Want to build collective power: Leaders know that building collective power is the way to create long-term solutions to social problems.
12. Have a sense of humor: Leaders understand that humor sustains communities and individuals and prevents bitterness and burnout.

When it comes to recruiting new constituents for our grassroots campaign, we always acknowledge it requires going out to the battlefield and spend hours and hours of hard work. Ignoring this fact would mean a grave waste of time and money, but there are some other aspects that are not that obvious and that we should as well keep in mind:

Open your organization: The office, the web page, the way you organize the meetings, your clothes, attitudes, microexpressions, etc. It all matters at the time to symbolize the openness of your organization and rethinking all these elements must be our first priority.

Feed your database: Take advantage of every event and ceremony you organize by making attendees fill up a simple form. It takes just a little time and it is going to be very useful to get a direct communications channel with potential members of our organization.

Work on “the other list”: The list of members is the most valuable asset in a grassroots campaign, but we cannot ignore the other list, the list of tasks. If you can’t immediately assign a task to a recent member, you will loose a potential activist because of your disorder. Therefore, the first think to do is to write down all the tasks needed to carry out our campaign and define how many members, time and resources are we going to need for each one. Keeping this “other list” updated and accessible for all recruiters will be the most important task of the recruiters’ coordinator.

Be persistent: If all else fails perseverance prevails and even more when you are not asking for any money but for a commitment.

The mountain won’t come to Muhammad: Go to meet your target wherever it is. Identify good points of entry and organize recruiters properly. Divide all the strategic areas on a map and then organize the teams so that purposes are repeated (alternately if there is more than one goal/problem to focus) but not the persons (the best way would be repeating just one person per area and renewing the rest of the group). Writing down all relevant information will be crucial for the next recruiters to prevent and advance any setback.

Innovate: Try alternative formats to attract people. Simplicity doesn’t mean monotony and being provocative could be the best way to have the attention of alienated individuals.

Set numeric goals: By setting numeric goals, campaigners will be able to evaluate the effectiveness of a daily recruitment.

Compose the message to introduce your organization: Avoid asking “Can I talk to you” and just conduct a personal introduction, appeal to a shared interest and a call to action.

Construct a brand: Everyone on the street has to be able to identify members of your organization and to achieve that it is necessary to adopt a colour, a logo, a slogan and all the promotional products possible to spread the brand out.

Prepare impacting materials: Adapt your promotional products to the goals of your campaign. Sometimes a promotional button is absolutely useless and it worth trying different and innovative products.

Foster members’ loyalty: Gratify your constituents by giving them any kind of bonuses. Thus they will requite with a more effective contribution to the campaign.

More than an organization: Let people know that the experience of becoming a constituent is more than just a fight to fulfil your goals. It is also becoming a member of something huger, something funny, something different, etc.

Follow up: If you wait too long, people are likely to forget about your conversation and the interest they experienced when speaking with you face-to-face. Make follow up calls every 24 or 48 hour to solve this problem.

Goal: Just like USP is a basis for marketing campaigns, when it comes to mobilize grassroots we must take into consideration the concept UGP or Unique Goal Proposition. People will not join our campaign unless they understand clearly its purpose so we will have to describe this unique goal as simple, short and sweet as possible.

Vision: Strategy is always the spine of any campaign and to build this strategy we will need a visionary person able to keep the focus on our goal and advance potential difficulties.

Recruitment: A main part of grassroots campaigns is confined to recruit new supporters and that is why is so important to count on a down-to-earth group of people whose idea of a working day is not just some entertainment hours, but literally a day of hard, tough and comforting work.

Facilitation: Hundreds of supporters always mean hundreds of different opinions and to get along with all these points of view it is usually needed the contribution of a well organized and responsible person who lay down the decision process and move members to discuss and overcome their differences.

Coordination/Agitation: To understand the importance of coordination and agitation in grassroots campaigns, you should firstly take a peek at the video of this post. On the battlefield it is more important to have 300 soldiers than 3000 uncoordinated people.

Involvement: Even this is going to sound obvious, the key factor to make people get involved is to ask them for it. Today archers are being replaced with phone callers whose function is to inform people about a cause and open the door to jump in. This is involvement.

Representation: A group must have a representative and exercise this representation. This means representatives of the group are obliged to attend all the meetings and conferences related to the organization’s goal and thus make the organization visible.

Relationship-building: An unconnected group is as useful for grassroots campaigning as a bra to wrap up. Information doesn’t flow between unconnected nodes, therefore relationship-building must be taken into consideration in the group and between other organizations that share the same goal.

1) Organizations engage in electoral organizing to build political power by doing partisan work and electing candidates for office.

3) Labor organizing describes the strategy to bring together unorganized workers to achieve better working conditions.

4) When many organizations also see themselves as part of a broader social movement that seeks change beyond the direct self-interest of any group, then we call it movement-building.

5) Mass mobilizing refers to the events where large numbers of people move into action, usually to oppose something. Although there is some organizational structure behind the action, most of the people who come out into the streets are no connected to any specific organization; rather, the problem or issue moves them to action.

According to this and keeping in mind we live in a world where political disaffection prevails, labor groups are falling and movement-building is in crisis, what  kind of mobilizations can we expect from anger citizens?

We already know the answer, but what we ignore is that by being always on the side of mass mobilizing and looking down on the other forms to exercise power, what we will likely get is the growth of the NIMBY Syndrome. Sometimes it worth distinguishing between use and abuse, and insinuating that mass mobilizing is the only way possible to reach power is not just an abuse, but also a dangerous strategy. If we want a productive, positive and condstructive society mass mobilizing must be a way, but not the only one. Now ask yourself: what do you do to stress other bottom-up ways to exercise power?

In Democracy in Action: Community Organizing and Social Change, published in 2004, Kristina Smock describes five types of community-organizing approaches:

1. Power-Based Model: Organizers and leaders create a large, formal people’s organization and use conflict and confrontation to demonstrate their power and pressure powerholders to concede to their demands.
2. Community-Building Model: Organizers and leaders create collaborative partnerships among stakeholders, including businesses, nonprofits, and government entities, in order to be publicly recognized as a legitimate representative of the community as a whole.
3. Civic Model: Organizers and leaders create opportunities for neighbors to meet and problem solve in order to get the city services system to respond to neighborhood problems.
4. Women-Centered Model: Organizers and leaders create small support teams and provide safe, nurturing spaces for community members to gather and build shared leadership. From this base of support they can interact one-on-one with staff and administrators of public institutions and get them to be more responsive to community concerns.
5. Transformative Model: Organizers and leaders develop an ideological foundation within the community so that a broad-based movement for social change can emerge and change the terms o public debate.

Obviously, an organization can incorporate elements from more than one of these models, but understanding how different organizations work is very helpful to start your own campaign or organization.

The following are the eight essential qualities of a community organizer:

1. Anger: Organizers are anger to move people to action and believe in their job.
2. Flexibility: Organizers are able to refocus and adapt to changing situations.
3. Sense of humor: To reduce conflict, relieve tense situations and do not annoy the team, an organizer must know how to be funny.
4. Fearlessness: Grassroots organizing means leading the army ground forces of an organization to take real risks and must be unafraid of the consequences.
5. Ability to hear: Good organizers are able to hear what people say and reflect on it.
6. Awareness of their own-interest: Organizers understand what they want to get out of a situation.
7. Ability to be self-critical: Organizers are not simply brainless hooligans trying to pick a quarrel, but people able to consider what could potentially happen if they take a course of action.
8. Willingness to share power: Organizers have to be willing to give up power, let members make decision, and ultimately be willing to win or to lose if that’s wgere’s members’ decisions lead.

Forecast: Plan, analyze and network.

Immediacy: Respond, apologize and move on.


Presence: Proximity starts at the crime scene.


Truth: Never ever lie.


Teamwork: Build coalitions, mobilize grassroots lobbyists, engage your employees and give discipline.


Empathy: Be a person before being a professional

1. Build a base of members: more people means more power.

• Get people involved
• Move powerholders with numbers
• Get members to make decisions

2. Get members to understand what organixing is: action fosters commitment.

• Guide members to see the roots of problems
• Move members to action

3. Develop members to be leaders: Leaders learn by doing

• Let leaders do the work
• Conduct political education

4. Implement strategic campaigns: campaigns deliver wins.

• Run winnable campaigns
• Analyze power

5. Engage members in the social justice movement: neutrality is not an option.

• Build the movement

State an ideology

Extract from the book: Tools for radical democracy (by Joan Minieri and Paul Gestos)

Is Europe becoming a conservative continent? Belgium, Denmark, France, Holland, Italy, Sweden and much of eastern countries have already succumbed to the wave of expansion of the right in a traditionally leftist Europe. Today they are only a minority of states that maintain the social democratic leadership and everything indicates that the UK will be the next to turn in 2010. A real sociological change is occurring in front of our eyes and it seems the culmination of the process is inevitable. Is it the crisis? Is the rise of extreme right? Is it  the lack of leadership? Or is it simply the need to toggle? The answer is now the great riddle. An enigma that, as usual in political matters, the United States has long passed.

The American response came five years ago, when British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge published a book describing a phenomenon easily applicable in Europe today. Under the title ‘The right nation’, the authors narrated, from the perspective of outside observers, how the United States had the most pronounced turn right in history without  generating any social alarm. As if it were Toqueville and Beaumont, Micklethwait and Wooldridge rode throughout to draw conclusions from that fact. This time, however, the response was not the proactive spirit of the Americans who discovered the French, but their deep conviction that their peculiar and prevailing conservatism was the natural evolution of the American sentiment. Northamericans had completely renounced the behavior of class to give priority to the values of family, freedom and security. They had established a climate of opinion that effected all parts of the political system and caused and unprecedented shift of the social paradigm. Certainly many think this dynamic today has been broken with Obama , but the fact is that the current president would not had won the elections without the triangulation.

Are we (Europeans) experiencing the same process? Maybe we do or maybe not, but surely we can admit that many factors discovered by British journalists are taking place in our continent. Four factors in total of which include a low turnout, internal discipline, activism and professionalism. The European conservatism, parallelly to the U.S., is now the most disciplined, organized and coordinated the political movement. In this sense, it is remarkable how right-wing parties broadcast perfectly a single message through their highly mobilized members. Just like the 300 Spartans, they are spreading out their elaborated message with a unanimous battle cry that lead all of us  to the resignation of all our feelings of class and the assumption that we are… Ahu, ahu, Ahu! Will Europe be a conservative continent?

GLbonafont
Do not communicate, involve!