Leadership, Organizing and Action: Leading Change

During this first module, we get acquainted and discuss our course goals, our strategy for achieving them, and our course requirements.

Organizers start by asking three questions: who are my people, what is their problem, and how can they begin to use their resources to solve the problem? Who are your people? Who is your constituency whose values are at risk? What urgent challenge do they face? How could they turn resources they have into the power they need to solve the problem? How could you design a campaign to achieve an outcome that would help solve this problem within the next 12 weeks? This week, you will think through a “first draft” of your organizing campaign.

Leadership requires enabling your people to respond to challenges that confront their shared values with purposeful action, as opposed to reaction. Public narrative can be a way to access the emotional resources required: mobilizing hope over fear, empathy over alienation, and self-worth over self-doubt. You may communicate an urgent challenge as a “story of now,” shared values as a “story of us,” and why you care enough to accept the responsibility of leadership as a “story of self.” It is not public speaking, messaging, or image making.

Organizers build relationships among members of a constituency to create commitment to a shared purpose. Through relationships, we can come to understand common interests and develop the resources to act on them. This week, we ask you to reflect on whom you want to recruit to your leadership team and to practice conducting one-to-ones.