OVERVIEW
Enabling people to work together to achieve common goals in the face of urgent need is fundamental to a democratic society. To meet challenges of equity, accountability, and responsiveness, democracy requires an organized citizenry with the power to discern, articulate, and assert its common interests effectively.
By organizing, ordinary people have been able to make extraordinary changes in their economic, social, and political conditions. The practice of organizing can only be learned through experience and engaging the head, the hands, and the heart. From the heart we draw commitment, hope, and the courage to try new things. We must train our hands to do these new things. And we can use our heads to reflect on our experience – learning what works, what doesn’t, and why. By exercising all three we can develop a practice that produces outcomes, creates organizational capacity, and develops the leadership skills of individuals. Understanding why people organize, how organizing works, and what it takes to organize successfully is essential to achieve ongoing change.
Organizing: People, Power and Change is an online program designed to help leaders of civic associations, advocacy groups and social movements learn how to organize communities that can mobilize power to make change. The program represents a unique online learning opportunity for nonprofit and non-governmental organization managers to interact with colleagues from around the world and Professor Marshall Ganz of Harvard Kennedy School.
The Organizing: People, Power and Change program is comprised of nine modules:
- An Overview of Organizing
- Power and Constituency
- Why We Organize
- Building Relationships to Achieve a Common Purpose
- Team Building
- Mobilizing Strategy
- How to Mobilize and Deploy Resources Based on Commitment
- Campaigns and Organization Building
- Organizers, Organizations and the Future
Each topic is covered in a module that combines readings, online discussion, videos, and a workbook exercise – allowing participants to apply the information learned in each module directly to their organization.