This will be a half day training on the basic principles of community organising. The training will take place in Bristol and is open to all Labour Party members.

We’ll look at the theory and practice of community organising, and how to develop campaigns and build campaign teams. The session will be very practical and is most suitable for people who want to take action in their communities and bring about change.

The session will run from 12pm –  4pm and will be held at:

Cadbury Heath Hall, School Road, Cadbury Heath, BS30 8EN

Tea and coffee will be provided.

You can register for the training here.

A Movement for Change training session will be held in Southampton on Wednesday the 8^th May, 6.30pm to 8.30pm, at the Quaker Meeting House, 1a Ordnance Road.

This aim of the session is to talk about and practice the 1-2-1 meeting technique, which is central to community organising. Feel free to bring anyone along who has an interest in community organising!

You can register for the event here.

Movement for Change activists getting organised in Southampton

Among other places, Movement for Change has recently been doing some organising work in Southampton. We have met with a number of activists who are keen to build two campaigns: one focusing on the provision of elderly care in the community and the other high rates of college drop-out in the city.  A host of one-to-one meetings culminated in a planning meeting last Friday in which the activists from both campaigns built a joint strategy for the next eight weeks.

Movement for Change will continue helping the group by shadowing a number of the activists as they got out into the community for some one-to-one meetings, and by holding a Movement for Change training session in May so that they are ready with some of the practical organising tools.

We are excited to be working with this energetic group in Southampton, some of whom are coming into Labour politics for the first time, and some who have lots of experience and want to try out some new organising techniques.

Would you like to start getting organised in your community? Get in touch with Movement for Change and attend one of our training sessions!

by Madlin Sadler, Director of Movement for Change

I have just attended Movement for Change’s Two Day Intensive Training in Milton Keynes and feel compelled to share the excitement and optimism I have come out of it with.

Training to take action!

I was completely engaged from the outset. From role play where I was surprised to find our Athenian aggressors (we were the Greek island underdogs) staging a unionesque walk out to listening to individuals expressing a personal narrative that they could use as a powerful recruiting tool, I could feel a group of people developing. And they weren’t just developing the tools they needed to make change in their communities or develop themselves as leaders, they were developing relationships.

The quality of the individuals that M4C brought in to a room was exceptional. Engaging, inspiring, diverse, cross regional, international, committed individuals who it was an absolute privilege to spend a couple of days with. With people like this in our communities and in our party I think there is real hope for the future of our country. Let alone the individuals from Denmark, Austria and other countries who wanted to take these ideas back to their own communities and political parties!

The last couple of days have reminded me of two things that we wanted Movement for Change to deliver when we founded it three years ago.

1. A Movement. People working together for change in their communities with the commonality of shared Labour values. That is definitely what we are helping to deliver through this training. We are providing the tool box of skills that show people how to find the power in their communities and use it for positive change. We are showing people a way to inspire hope and action and rediscover the benefits of political engagement.

2. A Network. Giving people the connections and support that foster action and hope. By training together, planning together and acting together people are building networks of power. This is how the Labour Movement was borne and it is fantastic to see people coming together again in this way. I hope that when we launch our new web based tools we will enable people to strengthen and grow the networks that they are making at community level. I still believe strongly that the combined strength of community organising and social media is a powerful cocktail. Once harnessed, the sky is the limit.

We have a fantastic and growing team of Community Organisers who demonstrate passion, professionalism and inspiration. M4C are delivering a high quality training that has the key elements of relevance, content, application and fun. I am grateful to all of them for a great weekend. I learnt a lot.

Interested in attending an Intensive Training Weekend with Movement for Change? Find more information here.

By Liverpool West Derby’s Lana Orr:

I joined Movement for Change back in October 2011. I’d arranged a training session for my CLP, Liverpool West Derby, after hearing about M4C during Labour Party Conference. Being a relatively new member I was thrilled (and slightly daunted) to be asked to co-deliver an M4C session for International Women’s Day. Having previously attended M4C training sessions I’d been inspired by their message of enabling Labour Party members to become involved in their communities, campaigning on the local issues people care about and genuinely making a difference. It also demonstrated to me that M4C was serious about developing its members and showcasing what they have to offer.

Labour Northwest had organised a fantastic programme for International Women’s Day with experienced speakers covering a wide range of issues from fuel poverty, the NHS, the economy and many more. Women from all over the region had come along to meet with fellow party members discuss the issues facing women today and how women can be a positive political force in a time when the Coalition Government’s policies are disproportionately hitting women hard. The Movement for Change session I then delivered was then focused on delivering action.

Ben Maloney, M4C community organiser (and the only man in the building apart from the security guard!) gave an introduction about the organisation and why building capacity in our communities is so important. Then it was my turn. It was up to me to ask each woman why she had joined the Party in the first place. We wanted to avoid abstract answers such as “to fight for social justice” in order to get down to the detail and find out what really pushes someone to become a member of a political party.

The responses that came back were really inspirational; some had joined as a reaction against policies they didn’t agree with, others had joined because family members had instilled in them a sense of wanting to do the right thing, while many had joined because other women had encouraged them that politics was meant for them and they could really bring about change. The last one really struck a chord with me.

Given it was International Women’s Day it was uplifting to hear so many women members supporting one another, and encouraging those in the room to become activists by using community organising techniques. This part of the session was followed by a section teaching about ordinary people who were instrumental in history who had inspired those around them to become politically active and fight for what they believed in.

For example Tommy Williams, who was one of the reasons I joined M4C. I’d never heard of him before he was mentioned during a speech at the M4C conference fringe event.  So who was he? Tommy Williams was an ordinary, working class docker who recruited Clement Attlee to the Labour Party. What a inspirational tale. Ordinary members of the Party recruiting people who have a desire to bring about change can have an enormous effect on our political landscape. Clement Attlee, a leader looked up to by so many, may never have been in a position of power if he hadn’t followed the advice of Tommy Williams.

I think this story resonated with everyone present. Grassroots activism can make a difference. It’s up to us to get to know our members and what they have to offer, and it’s up to us to encourage and support each other. It’s up to us to make links with our local communities and show that the Labour Party wants to be visible and active in every community.

Weeks after I received an email from Ben saying that a lady who had attended  had gone away feeling motivated and enthused, so much so that she wanted to co-deliver a training session in her CLP. This made me smile as I sat at my desk.

All in all I thoroughly enjoyed co-delivering the session and I hope anyone reading this may consider becoming more involved in this aspect of Movement for Change. Delivering training is not that nerve-wracking – I promise!

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

Tom Chivers (@wronglets) of Bath Labour Party discusses the effect of a Movement for Change introductory training session on their nascent plans for community campaigning:

Although I’m a relatively new member of the Labour Party, I joined just in time to be able to help out with campaigning during the local elections in May last year. Hopes were high that with the increasing negativity towards the Government (and in particular the Liberal Democrats who are extremely popular in Bath), this election could be fought on level ground for the first time in decades.

This of course was not the case; the Liberal Democrats increased their number of seats in the council and our all-out mobilisation of candidates and leaflet drops seemed wasted. In subsequent branch meetings our solemn admissions of defeat had one thing in common; whilst our campaigns were fought on a logistical par with the Lib Dems, we lacked the strong community relationships that are vital in creating a strong campaign force. Whatever their opinions were on national issues, voters still turned to the Liberal Democrat candidates as they were seen to be ‘true locals fighting for local issues’. No matter how strong our campaign efforts were, without a strong local presence we Labour campaigners were seen as a foreign force fronting a foreign cause.

Enter Movement4Change. I attended the training because, as a community organiser for one of our target council wards, I felt that although our team was eager to begin campaigning, we lacked a clear direction. We knew all about the local concerns but couldn’t identify how best to fight for them. As part of our plans to create a consistent grass-roots campaign team, the training offered by M4C was invaluable. Not only did the session help our team to better understand one another’s motivations, but it also reminded us of the real importance of community relationships; it’s not about finding policies to fight for, but about creating bonds with the groups which are vital to the community. Not a minute had passed after the end of the session that, armed with a clear strategy, we set about planning our next steps, designating our target groups and starting to build a presence within the local community.

Movement for Change has given our campaign team a much needed push in the right direction. With a straight-forward list of tasks to complete that will begin to shape our operations within the local community, we are energised and focused, ready to bring Labour principles to the heart of Bath.

Tom Chivers is a member of Bath CLP and a ‘community organiser’ for one of their target wards. Follow him on Twitter: @wronglets

During the summer of 2010, Movement for Change trained 1,000 Labour members and supporters in community organising skills. While some used those skills immediately in their CLPs with great effect, others found the challenges they faced were more complex. What happened next? James Austin, a Labour activist from Yorkshire, describes the frustration he felt in a largely inactive rural Party… and the subsequent value of the training in his current political work.

In 1981 Shirley Williams wrote about the death of Old Politics and that it was ‘possible, just possible, that [new politics] will be a politics for people.’ Perhaps she was a wee bit premature in announcing the death of Old Politics but certainly that sentence encapsulates the hope I had for community organising after I completed an introductory training session run by Movement for Change in the summer of 2010. The Movement seemed to epitomise many of the beliefs I had about politics: that it is about communities working together, that it is possible to achieve change from bottom up and that the Labour party should be about solving people’s problems rather than being mainly inward looking.

I then promptly boarded the 20:52 train to Skipton and forgot all about it.

Actually that’s not true.

There were some attempts for those of us from Skipton and Ripon (a safe Tory, largely rural constituency) to meet up with each other. A campaign was proposed to deal with the need for a road barrier in Skipton where two youngsters had been killed last year. But confronted with the big challenges of clashing work schedules, the long distances and the poor public transport which are facts of life in the Dales any ideas we had eventually fizzled out. The culture of inactivity within our local party seemed so ingrained that attempts to organise felt pointless. Faced with those odds, along The culture of inactivity seemed so ingrained within our local Party that attempts to organise felt pointless. Faced with those odds, the initial Movement for Change training session did not lead me to change my local Labour Party fundamentally.

So, what was the point?

While I didn’t change my local Labour party fundamentally, I still found that the training was an important factor in giving me the confidence to become more politically active. Whether it was become an Oxfam organiser, chairing my university Labour Students club, working as a Rugby Coach or become involved in various community projects I found that I could use the skills which the training taught me to great effect. In each of these projects I tried to bring a ethos of inclusion and openness, involving anyone who wanted to involved and using community organising techniques to work with a wide variety of organisations. This month, that work has come full-circle as I’m now working with an MP who is committed to using community organising in the local Party and is working with Movement for Change to achieve that.

Like many of the other first Movement for Change trainees, the fact that I came across challenges within my own local Party has not stopped what I learned helping me to have a political impact. I am both active and more committed than ever to using the skills I learned to strengthen the Labour movement at a local level. If anything, my story shows there is great potential that, as Movement for Change develops and expands, it will be able to build a national network of Labour people working for change across their local communities.

James Austin, Skipton Labour Party activist

Philip Creasy, Secretary of Walthamstow Labour Party, reflects on a recent introductory training session on community organising, with Movement for Change organiser Kathryn Perera.