Experiments are the engine of social movements.
Our first year has wavered between feeling like a McPizza and a mildly successful Reddit post. In lieu of a traditional annual report, our team has put together a learning report to share what we’ve learned from our pilot campaigns. Tuberculosis patients fighting drug stockouts in India, Nepali youth exposing IMF and World Bank failures after one of their largest natural disasters in history, Kenyan university students holding their government accountable to malaria policies — these are the seeds of a movement, but what do they need to grow?
Organizations like Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Save the Children have evolved over the last few years to match transformations in people-powered campaigning: they have become more nimble, flexible, and lean in both structure and practice. We’ve looked to them and many other groups this past year to better understand what a global movement needs to thrive. 350.org, SumOfUs, Jhatkaa, Hollaback! — these small teams are enabling massive campaigns to put pressure on some of the world’s most powerful actors. They’re using digital to reinvent a distributed approach to campaigning, balancing local leadership and creativity with top-down strategy, training and support.
They’ve helped us through perhaps the most difficult question that all advocacy organizations face: how do you support thousands of campaigners while operating under extreme resource constraints and political conditions? Between May 2013 and May 2014, 41 countries passed or proposed legislation to penalize legitimate forms of speech online, increase government powers to control content, or expand government surveillance capabilities.
We have more opportunities to leverage online spaces where people are already conversing — and understand their motivations, interests, and politics — while these same spaces are increasingly under threat. Our movement for health justice is deeply woven into the movement for civil and political rights. Being creative and nimble is necessary not only for improving our advocacy but also for survival.
Traditional forms of global health and development advocacy are cracking under the lens of global South activists.
Take the recently adopted 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, for example. The process for creating the final goals reflected possibly the largest investment in civil society inclusion in global development to-date: regional consultations, national consultations, global thematic consultations, and a My World global survey. And yet, just two months before the UN summit, negotiations shifted from the bold democratic vision of “World We Want” to closed backrooms where the U.S. and E.U. decided that changes were needed to the sacrosanct goals. Bhumika Muchhala, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Third World Network, noted “What transpired requires a moment to reflect on the reality of vested interests and deeply unequal power between negotiating governments.”
As head of Oxfam USA Paul O’Brien recently said about the future of development advocacy, “if we keep hammering away solely at Northern nails in the hope of remaining relevant to a post-2015 world, we are fooling ourselves and very few others.” It’s not simply a matter of moving from New York to Nairobi. The strategies and tools of development advocacy are out of date — the hammer itself isn’t working. So how do we remain relevant? Or, for global South activists who’ve never felt relevant, how do we become relevant?
Last October 25th was proof that we can: over 165 protests in 65 countries for the first Global Day of Action for the Right to Health. There was a palpable shift: from I to We.
Since then, we’ve experimented with different organizational models to support local organizers across the global South, from a hands-on approach to campaigns that quickly overwhelmed staff capacity to a hands-off approach to campaigns, where local activists faced large political and resource barriers. We’ve received immense demand for training for local groups to start and run campaigns, while also facing our own resource constraints as a nonprofit startup.
If there’s one thing we’ve learned this year, it’s that organizations aren’t movements — they help build and defend movements. We are two staff and a small group of amazing volunteers. Our role can’t be to run every campaign or make every decision on how others should design and run campaigns. It would be a missed opportunity to equip others with the strategies and tools to make those decisions themselves — the core work of movement-building.
That’s what so many of these distributed campaigning groups have been so successful at: creating new open source models for their campaigns that enable leader-full movements, not leaderless. How we make change is changing. A movement’s identity is constantly re-defined by the grassroots. Our team’s role is to provide enough top-down strategy and digital support structure for local teams and allies to take on action-worthy issues, organize mass actions, and win key battles in moments of crisis.
Article 25 can fill a crucial gap in this movement: a platform for health activists to train, launch campaigns, and join a global peer-to-peer community.
Training at scale is our largest challenge and most pressing need. The traditional model of development advocacy has favored mobilizers over organizers. We need a scalable solution to meet the widespread demand from local groups. Currently, trainings in this field are normally offline — short 3 day or 1 week trainings with a high price tag.
We’re trying a different approach — like a Codecademy for campaigning — that could equip thousands of students, nurses, doctors, community health workers, patient advocates, and NGO staff to have a stronger voice in their health systems.
We want to build a new kind of campaign community — one that works for the health worker in rural Kenya or patient in Delhi, whose voices have been drowned out amidst the noise of large civil society initiatives that fail to challenge unequal power structures at the root of the global health crisis.
The odds are quite stacked against us — Big Pharma is the largest lobbying industry. They spend nearly double the amount that all the oil and gas corporations spend combined on lobbying. Not to mention Big Tobacco’s growing influence in the global South. Despite the wave of support for strong public health systems after the Ebola crisis, health systems are still under attack globally, from budget cuts, corruption, illicit lobbying, and more. 400 million people do not have access to the essential health services they need and over 5 billion people lack the essential medicines they need. If we want strong health systems, we’ll have to win them.
We may not ever match the resources of Big Pharma or other special interests, but we can leverage people-power to defend health systems where they are threatened and transform the narrative on healthcare as a human right. We’re called to protect more than health rights — this is a movement to strengthen democracies by investing in people to organize, fight, and win.
To our inspiring network of activists, allies, and supporters: Thank you. Stay ambitious. Dream with us. Be a founding donor. Together, we have a chance at building a better, healthier future.
Onwards,
Amee & Ankur
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Article 25 is an early stage nonprofit building a people-powered movement to fight the global health crisis.
“stories are contained (they have a beginning, middle and end) and about someone else, while narratives are open-ended and unresolved; their resolution depends upon our own choices and actions. They are about us and the role we can play.”
from Making Detroit a Movement
Stories return us to the narrative of inequality and justice in all our work. They are the dueling characters in our narrative: inequality being the seemingly inevitably course of history; justice living in the margins, showing its face in the everyday human interactions that confront hegemony.
What greater power is there than to change the narrative of what is, was, and could be? Thereby changing what is, was, and could be possible. Take for example 350.org’s divestment campaign. Their campaign goal isn’t to bankrupt the fossil fuel industry, says Bill McKibben, “We can’t do that with divestment alone…But we can help politically bankrupt them. We can impair their ability to dominate our political life.” Narratives shift political power.
In many ways, understanding the impact of narratives also helps us better understand the value of data during campaigns. Having a good system for collecting data isn’t about being “big brother”. It lets us tell the right story to the right person. Data-driven narratives are simply more accurate narratives.
“Part of the resistance against making decisions comes from our fear of giving up options. The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.”
from Do you suffer from decision fatigue?
Open-source campaigning from #Not1More is a fantastic framework on an organization-level for creating decision-making structures that balance of top-down strategy and bottom-up leadership: ”almost every organizer has a story about when more time is spent structuring the structure and processing the process than on advancing concrete work.”
Playing on the idea of open-source technology, #Not1More experimented with tiered decision-making to enable more meaningful entry points for participation among grassroots activists and allies. The results? Creative and unexpected tactics, a powerful campaign woven together by local leadership and a central narrative.
When we experimented with a Global Vote to decide which issues to campaign on, there was only little over 1% difference between the top issues after 10,000 votes. This raises the question: How can we use strategies like open-source campaigning to create entry points for groups to drive these different campaigns themselves, while still providing enough top-down framing and support? Open-source campaigning cultivates a structure for “new power” values to translate into action.
“this is what happens when a story fades from the headlines, the heat is dialed down and the eyes avert: In the silence, amid the stillness, there is movement.”
from Beyond Black Lives Matter
In 2015, the death of Cecil the lion has been one of the top news stories in the world, while over 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria (#BringBackOurGirls) are still missing and yet have faded from the headlines. The possibilities of movement-building seem matched by their impossibility.
Here are some thought-provoking reflections we encountered this year on how movements are built, sustained, and fractured. Some of these are linked to throughout this article. Most of these come from U.S.-based activists and staff, but we’re on the search for more global movement analyses.
Molly Ball: How Gay Marriage Become a Constitutional Right
Micah White: Protest is Broken
Tom Liacas: The 350.org and Hollaback! approach to distributed campaigning
Jessica Mckenzie: The Unfinished Business of the People’s Climate March
Ashionye OGene: Abandonment of ‘Bring Back Our Girls’
Bree Newsome: When Oppression is the Status Quo, Disruption is a Moral Duty
Anand Giridharadas: The Thriving World, The Wilting World, and You
DeRay McKesson: Ferguson and beyond: how a new civil rights movement began — and won’t end
Paul O’Brien: What future for Development Advocacy? Three Paradoxes and Seven Directions
Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms: Understanding “New Power”
Marisa Franco, B Loewe, Tania Unzueta: How We Make Change is Changing, Parts I & II
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Special thanks to Greenpeace’s MobLab and PowerLabs for their guidance and inspiration.
