Jack Madden, a Labour Party activist in London and Darlington, describes his experience at the first Movement for Change Organiser School:

Since the start of 2012, Movement for Change has been hosting training sessions up and down the country, trying to spread the principles of community organising throughout Labour movement groups across the UK. I recently attended the very first Movement for Change Community Organising Residential School. This was a weekend-long event, with around thirty potential ‘community organisers’, all eager to learn and eager to gain new skills to help in campaigning activities.

The recommended reading set before the weekend was not only impressive, but extremely revealing. This is clearly an organisation that has a deeply philosophical and well-informed approach to the work they do. They are influenced by a broad range of complimentary perspectives rooted in the history of community organising, with a training pack full of writing from a host of different organising traditions. M4C have successfully combined theory and practice into a package that means complete beginners can be well versed in the essentials of community organising in a very short space of time. In short, Movement for Change have done their homework.

The weekend was attended by an impressive range of people. The room represented a cross-section of society in terms of geography, gender and age. These were not the people cynics would commonly associate with politics. What bound these people together was a genuine desire to find a way to help those in their own communities. Everyone present understood that power rests with communities, with the people, with us. What these potential organisers wanted was the ability to channel that power to affect the changes that ordinary people want to see. That is not to say Movement for Change or the people involved in it do not want to see a Labour government returned to Westminster. They realise that the two are not mutually exclusive, no matter how divorced from one another they are perceived to be. These are people with a holistic and pragmatic view of what ‘politics’ is, and just what can be done with it. So with promising content, and promising people, the training sessions began.

The sessions for the weekend essentially consisted of three basic stages of learning: understanding the philosophy of community organising, understanding the concepts of strategy and power necessary for organising, and understanding the tactics that can be used in order to organise. All the lessons were taught through the practice and involvement of everyone in the room, with each person sharing personal experiences, knowledge, and perspectives in order to illustrate the theory being discussed. This teaching style highlighted the basic truth of community organising: that within each individual is power and that by organising this power and by recognising everyone’s abilities in a group, the power can be used to create change. Through sharing individual experiences people began to realise that they were already engaging with the theories behind community organising. The key was to make people realise that they had the knowledge, the understanding, and the ability to organise. Movement for Change aims to inspire them to use it in the most effective way possible to achieve the changes they seek. It was all finished with a role play to bring all of the teaching together. Though the participants had difficulty at times, it was a great way to see how everything we had learnt over the weekend works in practice. And although some of us were frustrated within our roles, it was a brilliant activity to explore the difficulties of putting theory into action.

So what lessons can be drawn from the weekend? The first is that there is a place for this type of politics today. There are people in communities up and down the country who want to take part and who are actively engaging in this kind of politics. There are people who are interested in making a difference to the communities they are part of. The apathy around politics that is so often talked about can and is being broken down and this group represents one way in which that is happening. Second, it shows that Labour as a political party can reconnect with communities if it really wants to. There are people within Labour who want nothing more than to help others and to make politics a part of the lives of everyone, not just an elite few that we read about or see on the six o clock news. Third, the people doing community organising are not ‘radicals’, they do not want ‘a lurch to the left’, they are not ‘hippies’, and they are not extremists or evangelists. They want to help people, and they want to do this by putting communities of ordinary people back into politics and getting people making political decisions for themselves. Fourth, community organising works- and there are examples that prove it. It is not ‘pie in the sky’ thinking or ‘utopianism’, or ‘unrealistic’ to want to engage more people more directly in politics. Movement for Change has a pragmatic vision, tactics, and methods to achieve their goals. It shows that community organising and Labour Party politics are not separate, that they can and will come together again, and when it does, our party, and our society, will be better for it.

Jack Madden

Kate Talbot training with other Labour activists

Kate Talbot (@geordiekate89), a Labour Party activist in Vauxhall (south London), describes her experience at the first Movement for Change Organiser School:

I recently attended Movement for Change’s first residential training weekend.  The invite had promised an “intensive training course in the core skills of community organising”. Well, at least the description was honest: I barely had time to drop my bags in my room and grab a bite to eat before starting the first session!

The thing that struck me initially was the mix of participants. Many political events I’ve attended have been aimed specifically at women, or specifically at young people, and their audiences have obviously reflected that.  Most CLP meetings I’ve been to (although I should point out I exclude Vauxhall from this) have been chaired by older white men and attended by the same. However at the Movement for Change residential, those around me ranged from 17 to 60+ in age, and hailed from all parts of the UK.

At the start of the weekend Blair McDougall, the National Director, challenged us all to share our motivations for attending the course in an honest way. After the predictable silence that falls when a room full of people are asked to speak in front of 40 others they’ve never met, answers began to trickle through. Some attendees were seasoned organisers who had come to hone their existing skills, while others had only just joined the Labour Party. Many were seeking to make their CLPs more inclusive and community based, while a few were attending precisely because they belonged to CLPs which were not making that effort. However, two things seemed to unite everyone: passion and curiosity. Passion for politics to change the world around them, and curiosity to see if Movement for Change and community organising could really help them to do that.

The course was intensive and interactive, with much demanded of participants. In our small group sessions, we explored the important differences between strategy and tactics, and I learned some worthwhile lessons about resisting the urge to rush to action without making an honest assessment of the existing situation and power structure. We also focused on understanding and communicating our own stories (or “political narratives”) and practised using them to motivate others to act.

Yet the course didn’t leave us feeling that it would be easy to take the lessons and skills back into the real world. We were challenged to be honest and self-aware in the difficulties of organising in our own local communities. For example, on the last morning everyone took part in a two hour, 40 person role play, in which a small group of Labour activists aimed to win the Living Wage through a community campaign on a university campus. All of the discussions we’d had, tactics we’d learned, and discoveries we’d made could finally be put to good use…

I don’t think any of the participants would be too offended if I say we failed miserably. We rushed straight in, tried to impose aims and actions on those to whom we were supposed to be listening and allowed the nasty Vice Chancellor (played with relish by Blair) to dictate all the proceedings. Still, as one of the trainers so diplomatically put it, this made for a valuable evaluation.

The training culminated in a few people sharing their political narratives with everyone else. As we learned about why people held the values they held, rather than just what those values were, we began to experience the power of organising and realise how far we’d come in terms of skills and experience over the course of the weekend. My belief in the importance of developing close public relationships with others was reinforced. I really began to understand how power is often given away or assumed rather than being inherent to one group or individual. Perhaps most importantly for me, I realised just how much I identified with Saul Alinksy’s assertion that we need to understand and be realistic about the world as it is, before we can even begin to try to move towards the world as it should be.

I’m taking what I’ve learned into the organising work I am doing already with Movement for Change in Lambeth. I’ll also be relying on the excellent handouts and workbook for extra support as I experience organising challenges in the real world. It is this follow-up which means that the lessons I learned won’t (as they so often can be) be left at the training room door.

Kate Talbot