Tag Archives: Relationship-Based Organizing

A grainy white and black photo of a bridge being built over a wide river. Long metal arches are being built between concrete pylons.

Building Organizing Networks through 1-on-1 Conversations

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

For those who get really involved in union activism or political activism, there are different ways that such activists use their time. There are what I call the “floater” activists. Floaters go to all the meetings, go to all the protests and rallies, and spend a lot of time socializing with other activists. I call them floaters because they float around to everything, but this floating happens without being social rooted or having deeper political designs. Floaters will often think they have the most influence on social change because they do everything and go to everything, but I think this detracts from a more grounded approach that is more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast to the floaters, there are the activist “builders.” There are two things that builders do: 1) they build and cohere networks of people who are affected by a problem, and 2) they organize these networks in a particular direction to address that problem.

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A white tern with a black top of its head is pictured flying left-to-right, with its wings stretched out in front and its head tilted slightly down, as if scanning the ground below.

The Question for an Organizer Is What the Wing Is for a Bird

[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

“You can get all your ideas across just by asking questions, and at the same time you help people to grow and not form a dependency on you. To me it’s just a more successful way of getting ideas across.” – Myles Horton in conversation with Paolo Freire in the book We Make the Road by Walking.

Myles Horton co-founded the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee in 1932 and developed a model of popular education that played an important role in stimulating the bottom-up leadership of both the 1930s labor movement and the 1960s civil rights movement. Horton paid close attention to crafting and wielding questions as an essential tool of grassroots organizing.

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Don’t Blame Coworkers and Give Them Space to Say No

[This post is part of my series on 1-on-1 conversations.]

There are two standards that I hold myself to that have become absolutely central to everything I do in my union organizing. First, I never blame my coworkers for not being involved or not caring. Second, whenever I invite a coworker to get involved or to share their opinion, I want them to feel comfortable to decline or disagree.

This might seem counterintuitive. If the point of organizing is for more coworkers to be involved in making things better, isn’t it their fault if they don’t get involved and things remain bad? Similarly, shouldn’t I be finding more ways to get coworkers to say yes and agree rather than say no and disagree?

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The image is of the ruins of an old city, with dark yellow stone walls and pillars on a hillside. All of the buildings have long crumbled away. The image is of Jerash, a city in Jordan that dates back to 7,000 BCE.

Helping Coworkers Overcome Ambivalence Towards Change (Listening Series, Part 3)

[Parts 1 and 2. These posts on listening are part of my larger series of posts on relationship-based organizing.]

In the previous post, I used the example of Connor being ambivalent about standing up to his boss Bill to illustrate how to use the general listening tactics OARS (open-ended questions, affirmations, reflections, summaries) to build trust and strengthen the relationship. While building trust is one essential ingredient, in the counseling approach of Motivational Interviewing (MI) there’s an additional set of practices that are used to help people get past ambivalence and that can be applied to specific such organizing situations. While these are not essential organizing tools that every organizer should know and practice (like AEIOU), I nonetheless have found them helpful in talking with those coworkers who seem stuck.

The goal of these methods is evoking the will to change that people already have inside of them, tapping those enormous reserves of motivational energy that everyone possesses but can be suppressed by ambivalence. The main way to do this is to support people in expressing their values, interests, abilities, and aims out loud. “In particular this process occurs in MI by literally talking oneself into change. People tend to become more committed to what they hear themselves saying.” 

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The image shows the old pillars of the Hera Temple in Greece, built originally in 450BC. The pillars are lined in rows and there's no remaining roof but a blue sky in the background.

Good Listening Skills for Organizing (Listening Series, Part 2)

[This series on listening is part of my larger series of posts on relationship-based organizing.]

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed how listening related to organizing at a more general level. In this post I get into specifics of how to practice good listening. Most of these listening skills apply to social relationships in general, but here I present them in the context of union organizing.

Motivational Interviewing

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a form of counseling that a reader first commented about on my blog, noting how it sounded similar in a lot of ways to how I write about relationship-based organizing. Piquing my interest, I started to look into MI, found a lot that I resonated with, and discovered some new angles for looking at my organizing.

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