What, in your life, is worth fighting for?

A while ago my colleague Edwin took a trip to Norway with his daughter. She is studying history and chose the destination for the Gestapo museum… he found that out when he got there. One museum display posed a question to visitors — What, in your life, is worth fighting for? Edwin posed this question to Grapevine staff in a team meeting recently, and it has mulled over in my mind ever since.

In Community Organising one of our key goals is motivating people to act. We tell stories of a better future, challenge that things shouldn’t be this way, and seek to understand people’s self interest so we can tap into it & make taking action with us worth their while. But we’d be lying to ourselves if we said that we were responsible for creating their motivation. We can surface the motivation, prod it until it wakes up, then give it a good breakfast and start working with it, but it is something within that moves people to act.

We are presented with 4 options:

What, in your life, is worth fighting for?

#1: Your own needs -

In the words of Ru Paul, if you don’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love anybody else?

Only one person out of our staff team of 30ish chose this option, she spoke about needing to look after yourself to be strong enough to support others to thrive. Despite self care being something we talk about a lot within our work, it’s one of those concepts that can get lost in focus as it becomes more necessary. Easy to centre in the conversation but much harder to centre in practice. As a team we are better at collective care — we encourage people to take a walk, have a break if we think that they need it. We encourage the people we are working with to focus their energies and not spread themselves too thinly, and check in regularly to make sure that one team member is not holding all the weight. But self care? Self care is more difficult, not helped by the images it brings up of yoga, pan pipes & suspicious looking teas. My team struggles with unsocial hours — to give everyone an opportunity to be involved, we work many evenings. Balancing out fitting in that 1–1 conversation with a 9 to 5er and getting home for dinner & family time can be difficult. There is still an idea that by working longer and harder, you might be able to tip that change you want to see over the edge. We are reminded that you have to put your own oxygen mask on first, my colleague (mother of two) shares that it took her a very long time to get her head around this.

Putting self care aside, what if you are the only one fighting your fight? It can feel like that sometimes but it’s a myth — if you care about something, then someone out there sure as hell cares about it too — you need to find your people or put aside your ego. One person army’s are common in the world of community work - they often do great things but don’t share the responsibility, either not wanting to trouble others or not wanting to relinquish control. They are well meaning, often powerful, but where’s the sustainability? In Community Organising, we work hard at sharing power, encouraging the people who have experience to team up with those who want to learn — it may take longer but we believe it will last longer too. We also look for self interest — how will getting involved benefit you as a person? Some people back away from answering — it’s not seen as ok to want to gain something from giving, but how can you stay motivated in the work if you are not getting something from it?!

What, in your life, is worth fighting for?

#2: Your friends & family

Again only one person in our organisation went for this. However, if the gestapo were knocking down the door I imagine this would be option number one for many people. There are so many threats to our wellbeing and ability to prosper within our society that looking after our immediate circles is often all we have energy for. It’s why so many people who are fighting for change are directly affected by the issues — if someone in your family has a learning disability, you are a lot more likely to care about changing the system around that than someone with no personal relationship.

This can be frustrating! You can see great potential in people who are aware of the issues but don’t want to get involved. That’s why Community Organising is relational and steeped in storytelling. People relate to stories on a heart level & conversations can change mindsets. They are perhaps the only thing that can. Storytelling is one of the main ways we try to move people from apathy to action. When we share injustice, we bring in the story of us

“This issue affects us all — what if this were your mother or your son — would you do something about it then?!”

Have you ever had a conversation with somebody with very different political views from your own & got on like a house on fire? Gone home to tell your partner, “they are really nice but they vote for x”? It can be hard to get over. When our media or politicians share a narrative that blames minorities for society’s issues, it comes with a threat that if we treat them well, we will be treated less well — a threat to ourselves, our friends & family. Storytelling is powerful, for better or for worse, and sharing our own stories or those we are privileged enough to have had shared with us, can cut through the bull**** of our society’s overarching damaging narrative.

What, in your life, is worth fighting for?

#3: The weak in society

This option was a bit more popular & my personal choice. The mantra..

“Lifting up others to lift up ourselves”

… coined by a community team member when I was starting my organising journey sticks with me. I truly believe that when the weakest in society are powerful, society is powerful. If you think that’s a cute but trite sentiment, then check out ‘The Spirit Level: Why Equality is better for everyone’ by Wilkinson and Pickett. Their cross cultural research backs up that this sentiment is true. Just sayin’

Although a popular choice, the word ‘weak’ brought up a discussion as something that doesn’t sit well. Part of Grapevine’s collective understanding is that people are not born weak but systems and the challenges they face can make them so. Within organising we think a lot about power — who has it, who doesn’t, who should have more of it and how can we make that happen.

Within Grapevine’s Community Organising, we started by breaking the mould and organising with people with little perceived power, no following, and often a whole bunch of life challenges that they have to hurdle over. The first step and sometimes the hardest is getting people to see their own potential for power, their own potential for leadership. In some circles, people’s perceptions of these two concepts are so negative that they shun the titles — they think of power solely as power over another person, and they have experienced the harm that can do — they think of leadership as control and coercion, and have been on the receiving end of this, so why oh why would they want to become the aggressor?! We work hard with these people to explore different types of power, different qualities of leadership, to shift their perception of these concepts so they can move closer into thoughtful leadership and step into their power, distributed within a team that shares with each other and their community.

What, in your life, is worth fighting for?

#4: Justice in the world

The majority of the Grapevine team chose this option. Perhaps not surprising — we are an organisation who talk about system change, people power & justice in pretty much every meeting! Justice in the world would solve everything of course, but how do we start to work towards such a wide vision?

In Community Organising large concepts are often brought to initial house meetings — we need to solve homelessness — we need to make people safer — we need to make things better. Our collective task is to dig into those concepts, work out what people are really talking about when they want things to be better — what things — what would better look like — better for who? We all have different knowledge and experience though as humans we are prone to assuming that others share our understanding of the world. Whether we are considering the role of a meeting Chair or what we mean by ‘making things better’, we need to explore and make things explicit in order to create a shared understanding of what we are talking about. Getting to the stage of defining the goal & agreeing on it is often our first team success! Only then can we break down our goal into something bite size to work towards.

For me this option goes back to energy. When I first started getting excited about changing the world (yes, the whole wide world) I wanted to get involved with every campaign going, I wanted to fight for a multitude of things & I did my best too, yet I was always haunted by the things that I wasn’t getting involved in, concerned about the people that I wasn’t fighting for. After a while I discovered that I was tired — I pulled back from many of the groups and campaigns that I had spread myself across and stopped getting involved in anything at all. It all felt too much. I have seen this keenness in others too — the ones who are involved with everything have great energy when you have them in the room — but are often hard to pin down. They are stretched thinly and so cannot commit as much as you want to the cause. As an organiser, these are the birds in the bush, so close and so attractive, but likely unobtainable. They may flutter in and leave some feathers but they will rarely stay for as long as needed. I’m not quite sure where this metaphor is going so….

Justice in the world. It’s too big a concept to work towards, you have to break it down. Don’t try to fight for everything all at once, you will probably get burnt out. Work out where your big passion lies and go with that, with others who care as much about it as you do. Community Organising is a lot about trust. Trusting in yourself, trusting in others, and trusting in the potential of people coming together to make real change. If small actions make a big difference, then we get closer to justice in the world by creating conditions for people to uncover their passions and leadership potential and trusting that their collective work will make an impact. It’s all about solidarity, baby.

So thanks Edwin, thanks Norway, and thanks to the Gestapo museum for this particular brain tease. I don’t have a definitive answer but I think it’s likely to be…

What, in your life, is worth fighting for?

Secret option #5: All of the above, at different points in time and all at once.