The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact
Jacob Harold
336 pages, Wiley, 2022
Doing good is now a profession. Thirteen million people are employed by nonprofits in the United States alone. Millions more work for a better world in government agencies and for-profit companies. Those people (us!) need many approaches to confront the complexity of the world.
That’s why I wrote The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact. In The Toolbox, I explore nine different strategies for making a better world, from mathematical modeling to storytelling to design thinking to complex systems science.
This excerpt is from the chapter on one of my favorite strategies: community organizing. The very phrase “community organizing” reveals a paradox. “Community” is that most ineffable and human of substances: entwined threads of place, language, and history. Yet “organizing” suggests rigid lattices and strict hierarchies; it describes attempts to impose order upon disorder.
At its best, community organizing contains both, despite the paradox. It is the art of finding order in the common interests, angers, and hopes of a group of human beings. That is no small task—especially in a world in which technology is rapidly changing the way we connect with each other. As The Toolbox goes to print, community organizing faces a set of particularly acute puzzles. The excerpt below explores four of those puzzles.
All of our strategic tools need to be sharpened. They can dull with too much use. In a changing world, we need multiple tools at the ready. Our complex world demands it. And our beautiful world deserves it.—Jacob Harold
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Four Puzzles for 21st-Century Community Organizing
Community organizing is ancient. For thousands of years, it has evolved to match the characteristics of its era. Given the unique context of the 21st century, organizing must continue to evolve. Below, we’ll go through four puzzles (or tensions) facing community organizing in an age when collective action is increasingly important.
Technology
Ultimately, organizing is about human connection, and the nature of human contact has changed as the nature of our society has evolved. Technology has made it possible to connect across vast distances and to do so quickly and at very low cost.
We can leverage the broad and shallow connection made possible by technology. And we should recognize that authentic human relationships can happen through a screen. But through a screen we cannot replicate the human richness of being in the same room, of commonality rooted in place, and of blood spilled together. There is no simple solution to this tension. To navigate it, we ought to at least recognize it.
We have seen many examples of the power of social media as a mechanism for organizing. The Arab Spring famously relied upon social media for the bulk of its organizing. But that historic moment is also a cautionary tale.
Many of the dramatic changes spurred on by the Arab Spring turned out to be fleeting. Only one country—Tunisia— emerged from the Arab Spring with a democracy, and that success story is under constant pressure. Autocrats across the globe have come to understand that it is possible to turn off the Internet in a given geographic area. The economic consequences for such an act may be profound, but can strangle a movement reliant on social media. Other regimes have developed techniques to limit the capacity of social media as a mechanism for grassroots political power—from censorship to systematic propaganda.
Technology-driven community organizing campaigns can—if they aren’t careful—damage their own efforts without any interference from autocrats or opponents. For example, generous citizens often find themselves inundated with fundraising emails. Organizer Mario Lugay has called email blasts, “the most narcissistic form of communication.” It is supremely one-directional, from the center out. The short-term incentives are for each message to maximize its financial return.
This short-sightedness leads to multiple negative long-term consequences.
First, it creates an extractive relationship between an organization and its community. If all the emails are fundraising emails, donors feel they are perceived as nothing more than a bank account.
Second, this dynamic has been exacerbated by new techniques that baldly prey on human emotion and cognitive bias. (Think of approaches such as “This one trick may surprise you…”; “Last chance! Your offer expires in 24 hours!”; and “Five things you should know about…”)
Sophisticated analytical and targeting techniques have undoubted short-term benefits for many organizations. But their long-term consequence has been to dissolve the sense of meaningful relationship between the organization and the supporter.
So we have a multi-layered cautionary tale. Donors may feel sucked dry and that their relationship is purely transactional. And these dynamics have the potential to erode a supporter’s sense of agency that is so critical to community organizing.
We run the risk of cultivating cynicism instead of engagement. As we use technology for organizing, we need to think beyond a single interaction toward a lasting relationship.
Decision-Making
The way an organizer structures decision-making can make or break a campaign or an organization. Good decisions yield more impact, and fast decisions can be important in a changing environment. But in community organizing, decision-making is inherently complicated because you are trying to empower others, to model a better society in the way everyone works together to create one.
Now, let’s look at the way the OWS (Occupy Wall Street) made decisions. OWS was radically democratic in its operations. There was a deliberate effort to not bury the ideas of collective action, common purpose, and community resilience beneath a narrative of single leaders. This decision had strategic consequences, because the public and the media, lacking individual protagonists to follow through their journey, had a harder time wrapping their minds around the OWS story.
At the same time, the movement was a remarkable experiment in a different way of running a society. A “General Assembly” that included all participants made the decisions. OWS showed it was possible to make decisions, maintain a community, and influence the world around them, without resorting to hierarchical structures. But there was a cost to that experiment. One OWS organizer, Jonathan Smucker, has written, “General Assemblies were not functional forums for actual decision making. Because they were so cumbersome and easily derailed, many of the most active OWS organizers, myself included, eventually stopped going to them.”
Occupy Wall Street will, I believe, echo through history as a pivot moment in the quest for a fair economy. But their experiment showed that—under certain circumstances—pure democracy can yield less participation. The decision-making structure succeeded in the short term and failed in the long term. In the end, all leaders—community organizers included—have to balance efficiency and participation.
Movements That Consume Themselves
Social movements have long reserved their bitterest vitriol for themselves. Fine-grained slices of ideology are often the source of the worst in-fighting. Monty Python mocked this phenomenon in their Biblical film spoof, The Life of Brian. The leader of an anti-Roman activist group, the People’s Front of Judea, explains, “Listen. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the fucking Judean People’s Front.”
Some degree of internal debate is, of course, necessary and healthy. But it is a shocking historical fact that those devoted to changing the world seem to channel enormous energy into infighting instead of the work itself.
I see two ways to adjust our mindsets to escape this puzzle.
First, recognize that a variety of different perspectives can make a coalition or organization stronger. This is an instrumental view, not an ethical one; it is simply more strategic to have a range of perspectives allied together.
Second, there will be times when we can’t accommodate every point of view, but we need to acknowledge the humanity of those with whom we disagree.The way we engage with others should reflect the world we want to build.
Loretta J. Ross suggests an approach that is relevant for intra-movement conflict: when someone does something hurtful, “call in” rather than “call out.” Ross argues that it is more effective to start by creating space for private conversations that explain how an action might have caused harm instead of defaulting to public attacks on character. This same idea can be applied when trying to shift the behavior of a strategic target. If you don’t like what someone is doing, try to tell them in private before attacking them in public.
More generally, this narcissism of small differences can consume movements. It distracts attention and causes great pain to those trying to build a better world. We can do better than trashing, cancellation, and struggle sessions. Instead, we can build an ethic of social movement accountability that is rooted in learning, forgiveness, and diversity.
Political Power and Cultural Respect
In this third decade of the 21st century, it is unclear how political power will rise out of the next generation of social movements. Recent movements like Black Lives Matter have transformed discourse but (thus far) made only a modest impact on policy. Transformed discourse is a beginning, not an end.
We simply do not know what changes await. Grassroots uprisings against authoritarianism around the world have seen immense scale and meaningful impact. They have transformed government behavior and, in some cases, toppled dictators. But in others, their victories have been fleeting. We should be under no illusions that entrenched power will easily yield.
And in an era of political polarization, organizing has also become entangled in cultural politics. It is now difficult to distinguish issue organizing from labor organizing from electoral organizing. This blur quickly breeds cynicism, as false stories of “crisis actors” and “paid protestors” deny the authenticity of the challenges we face and the efforts to address them.
So, what to do? Lasting change happens when a collective can demonstrate enough power to knock the old world off its axis. We can gather that power over time. I’ll suggest three ways.
First, organizing at a local level or within specific communities can create a stable political and communal foundation. It enables concrete changes (small as they may be) that changemakers like us can build on. Local work wins victories, builds power, and creates a kind of cultural momentum that can sustain itself over time.
Second, encouraging new narratives can transform conversations and plant the seeds of change. The narrative victories of Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have only begun to play out. We’ve seen a new generation of extraordinary leaders like Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and Malala Yousafzai. Indeed, there are millions of new characters in our shared story. Every day, at street protests and in basement meetings, people discover a new spark of identity and of purpose. And on the pathways ahead, they’ll create new ways to organize the human experience.
Third, we can ensure that our organizing is rooted in the best of humanity. We transform ourselves best when living with hope, sensing the possibility of a better world, demonstrating the highest states of moral character, and manifesting a connection between daily lives and broader systems. Whether for a vast social movement or a small community project, these are the fires that power community organizing.