Why Organizers Need Mobilizers and Mobilizers Need Organizers

(Photo by LewisTsePuiLung)

Social change practitioners often pit “organizing” against “mobilizing,” as competing ways of creating change: While mobilizers believe that the bigger the crowd, the greater the power, organizers tend to focus on developing quality individual leaders and to measure success in terms of those leaders’ skills and commitment to the cause. These strategies can pull organizations in different directions. Choosing organizing means investing time and resources in developing new capacities in smaller groups of individuals, while those who mobilize focus on the tools and techniques that can reach large masses of people, seeking greater engagement from people that already support the goal. Because these approaches also come with cultural differences and operate along different time scales, it can be hard for organizations to mobilize and organize at the same time.

As long-time practitioners and scholars of both organizing and mobilizing, we see a need to reconsider the relationship between these two strategies. We argue that they do not need to be seen in direct conflict or competition, and instead of asking whether organizing or mobilizing is more effective, we want to ask a better question: How and when can these two strategies work effectively together?

The answer is an “ecosystem” approach that looks at how different theories of change can reinforce each other. As Brazilian movement scholar Rodrigo Nunes, argues in his recent book about movements like Occupy and the Arab Spring, there is not one universally correct answer to the question of how we make change. Instead, groups will always pose different strategies, like mobilizing and organizing. Rather than thinking that plurality is a problem to be overcome, Nunes argues that plurality is a good thing, after all, monocultural ecosystems are prone to collapse. The implication is that we need to approach social change not like we are seeking a silver bullet, but rather in search of collaborative principles that allow different people power strategies to coexist and stimulate productive change together. We have identified three such principles: central coordination, parallel play, and agreeing to disagree.

Central Coordination

In 2015 and 2016, GetUp!, coordinated large-scale mobilizations across Australia to protest the government’s asylum-seeker policy. GetUp! has a large membership, numbering over a million, and is adept at rapidly mobilizing progressive Australians to protest. Building on this capacity for “snap rallies,” GetUp! used social media to amplify their message, and in response to the increasingly alarming Syrian refugee crisis in September 2015 mobilized 10,000 people in Sydney and 15,000 people in Melbourne in support of increasing Australia’s refugee quota.

However, GetUp! knew that changing government policy towards asylum-seekers would require more than quick and large protests. Hence in February 2016 they launched the “Let Them Stay” campaign, demanding that the Australian government allow 267 asylum-seekers, including 33 babies, to remain on mainland Australia, where they had come for medical care, rather than be returned to offshore detention centers. Rather than acting alone, GetUp! coordinated with other organizations, working closely with the Human Rights Law Center, large professional NGOs, and civil society organizations whose strengths lay in advocacy, and unions that were known for their powerful organizing. GetUp! also coordinated with organizations offering services to refugees themselves, such as doctors, detention care workers, the Darwin Asylum Seeker Support and Advocacy Network (DASSAN), and hundreds of churches willing to offer sanctuary to refugees. In early 2016, GetUp! hosted regular calls with many of these groups to coordinate and ensure they were aligned on goals, even if groups had different tactics and theories of change.

A highpoint in the campaign was when medical staff at a Brisbane hospital refused to discharge “Baby Asha”, a one-year-old asylum seeker, out of concerns she would be returned to off-shore detention. In solidarity, a community protest formed outside of the hospital supported by the union movement and other allies of GetUp. Meanwhile, the Human Rights Law Center filed an emergency High Court proceeding to prevent Baby Asha from being forcibly returned to detention on Nauru. It was the combination of these different strategies that led to Baby Asha being discharged into community detention, and not sent to Nauru.

The LetThemStay campaign coordinated across not only across organizational differences but differences in strategy, and sought to play to the strengths of each organization. It led to important, but still partial policy changes, with the government reversing its decision and allowing at least 196 of the 267 of the asylum-seekers to stay in mainland Australia (albeit in community detention) rather than return to off-shore detention centers.

Parallel Play

In Barcelona, the 2008 financial crisis caused mass housing evictions that led to the formation of a range of new movements. These platforms and groups found powerful ways to make space for their different mobilizing and organizing strengths rather than detracting from each other. In 2009 in response to hundreds of evictions every day, a small group of long-term city activists came together to form La PAH (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). La PAH used an organizing strategy that helped people to challenge evictions using direct action, policy advocacy, and the creation of emergency housing. Not long after, an explosive social movement called the Indignados began to take shape, and on May 15, 2011 (called 15-M) mobilized 130,000 people across Spain, and 15,000 in Barcelona, going on to occupy the central town square Plaça de Catalunya.

These two movements did not directly coordinate nor did they attempt to reconcile their strategies, but their combined existence helped each other. Organizations like La PAH contributed to the supply of distributed digital mobilizers and town square occupation coordinators that made the Indignados protests so large. While speedy and digital, the Indignados were not spontaneous; they built on the capacities of existing community organizations and activists. In turn, La PAH’s organizers recognized that the Indignados mobilizations provided them with significant opportunities: La PAH organizers went to the Plaça every day of the occupation asking people to sign a petition about housing, and in those conversations identified people affected by evictions and invited them to La PAH assemblies. The mobilization had brought together a mass of potential leaders that organizers could then talk to; rather than seeing the mass protest as separate from its organizing, La PAH saw it as an opportunity for outreach. This alignment was not coordinated between movements but enacted on the ground. It was an example of both of the groups recognizing that their broad ecosystem provided an opportunity for parallel play where they could harness their different strengths to build people power.

Agreeing to Disagree

The unprecedented size of the Hong Kong protests in 2019 came from something you could easily miss: Demonstrators pioneered a code that allowed people to productively work together, despite profoundly different approaches to making change.

The Hong Kong protests erupted in response to an Extradition Bill that threatened Hong Kong’s rule of law. In June, at its peak, two out of Hong Kong’s seven million inhabitants took to the streets, in waves of protests that continued for months. The movement had two coexisting groups: the “peacefuls” favored non-violent protest to maximize public participation, while the “braves” saw protest as a tool for direct action that could physically stop the Legislative Council from passing the Extradition Bill.

The groups involved with the 2019 Extradition protests created a series of principles that set out how the peacefuls and the braves would work together. During the 2014 Umbrella Movement, disagreements over strategy had led to very unproductive divisions that had weakened the protest overall, and so there was general agreement on the need for shared strategic ground. The principles were captured as maxims: “respect the role of the different groups,” “we all lead,” “no one is left behind,” and “be water.”

The principles created a methodology for shared leadership. A movement with lots of leaders needed to respect the many different ways in which groups could lead, and create space for those wanting to be more militant to do so without fear or rebuke. In the face of existential crisis, everyone was encouraged to do what they thought was needed, which in turn nurtured a uniquely productive culture of protest that emphasized the importance of investing energy in your own strategy and not judging the actions of others.

In June, the two wings prosecuted different people power strategies together. While the “peacefuls” organized two mass rallies, the first with one million and the second with two million, forty thousand “braves”, wearing helmets and gas masks, used direct action to stall the passage of the Extradition Bill in the Legislative Council by preventing them from meeting. It was the combination of these strategies that proved decisive. The first enormous protest created pressure, but it was only after it was combined with direct action that Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam committed to suspending the Bill. Even so, the fact that a second even larger mass protest was scheduled for a few days after the direct action indicates the kind of virtuous cycle that was possible in Hong Kong’s political ecology. In that environment, it is unhelpful to try and decipher which action was the most significant, instead, the more obvious conclusion is that together these different types of action shifted the outcome. This sense of shared success emboldened protesters' commitment to the principles, and in the months of protests that followed it was unusual for the wings to criticize or attack each other in public. Instead, a culture developed that when parts of the movement disagreed, they would offer and pursue alternative strategies as a response.

As the world of social change continues to struggle for resources and people, organizers and mobilizers must explore how they can help each other. Indeed, as strategies organizing and mobilizing have their limits. Organizing can struggle to scale and mobilizing can struggle to develop leaders, and those limitations are unlikely to be redressed by simply doubling down on those strategies alone. Instead, the way forward is in the creative combination of these different strategic capacities. Turning “either/or” into “both/and” means turning scarcity and competition into abundance. Finding strategic alignment or connection is structurally difficult, of course, given the cultural and structural differences that these strategies bring to questions of time and decision-making in social change. But as these case studies attest, central coordination, parallel play, and/or agreeing to disagree all offer ways for an ecosystem of change to thrive.

Read more stories by Amanda Tattersall & Nina Hall.