Seven things we’ve learnt about social change in 2021 (and what it means for 2022)

In the middle of last year I tried to capture some of the lessons about effective activism emerging from the first six months of campaigning in a time of coronavirus. Now that we are saying goodbye to a second year of trying to make change amidst a global pandemic, I thought it might be worth revisiting some of those ideas and pulling out seven areas for us to think about in 2022.

• We Need Big Ideas Not Issue Bundling

As I said last year, “in a fight between a rewind and a revolution, revolution’s gonna lose”, but that doesn’t mean people don’t have the appetite for change.

While we should beware of what pollster James Kanagasooriam talks of as “issue bundling”, the habit of progressive campaigners to elide issues which seem clearly connected to them but not the audience, we do know that people respond to overarching big ideas that make sense of a number of initiatives that nestle under them.

Books like James Plunkett’s End State (about how to regulate the digital economy), reports like those produced by the IPPR’s Environmental Justice Commission (on how to create good green jobs) and campaigns like Make My Money Matter (about how to make our pensions align with our values) are all promoting serious structural reforms that are both pragmatic and popular.

As the contours of the next general election become clearer, it is more and more obvious that campaigners are going to need ideas about how to deal with the cost of living and create a fairer future for us all to share. The answer is unlikely to be found in fetishising radicalism for its own sake (just like last year, we need to decide whether we’re in the business of talking big or winning big) or in a smorgasbord of niche and technical propositions. What’s needed instead is one clear idea which makes sense of where we are and where we’re headed. In the next section I make a suggestion about where we should start looking for that.

• Our job is to end the culture wars, not to win them

Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us is my book of 2021 for many reasons, but first and foremost for how she shows that “the old zero-sum paradigm is not just counterproductive; it’s a lie … helping to keep people with much in common from making common cause”.

That was also the theme of a chapter in Counter Culture: How to Resist the Culture Wars and Build 21st Century Solidarity, a pamphlet I co-authored for the Fabian Society earlier this year.

In both cases we try to show how divides end up hurting all of us in the end and we should aim instead for what McGhee calls “the solidarity dividend”, the benefit we all accrue when we organise together. In McGhee’s research she details a number of wins that have helped illuminate the path to future abundance — victories that have delivered material benefits to communities which have only been possible because people have formed multi-racial coalitions to counter the idea that the interests of communities can be split along racial lines. In our own formulation we add a further emphasis in line with the earlier point about pragmatism. We stress that people want a plausible path to future abundance, noting that the burden of proof always lies with those proposing changes that communities could consider disruptive or risky.

While there is an emerging field of organisations committed to doing work that aims to galvanise but not polarise, it is striking that some strategists want to actively court division because of the clarifying effect it can have. The Guardian’s George Monbiot rehearsed that argument in November, with Alex Evans from Larger Us speaking for all of us more interested in building broad and transformational coalitions. The temptations of the polarising strategy are obvious, but as we said in the Times at the launch of Counter Culture, “this sort of resentment, once stirred up, is not easily dampened down … Riling up a base and pointing it at an imagined enemy is much easier than doing the hard yards”.

It may be, therefore, that the way to avoid both the risks of ‘issue bundling’ and of playing into polarisation and the culture wars is to tell one, expansive, broad story about the economy (domestically and globally) and offer people a sense of agency (and control) in bringing that shared future about. That in turn means committing wholeheartedly to the idea that, before we are anything else, we are citizens in a shared country in which we all have an equal stake.

• Defending democracy should be a first order priority

I’m afraid some of the trends undermining our democracy were visible well before the last election (and led to #IfWeDidThis, my favourite campaign of 2019) but this year has seen a big decline in trust combined with a restriction of civic space that should worry us all.

The IPPR’s Trust Issues report in early December found trust in politicians at its lowest level on record, while More In Common found that people in the UK feel they have limited agency in a system populated by people who “look down” on them and don’t listen. These two bits of research took place before the explosion of coverage about Christmas parties at Number Ten and Conservative Headquarters while the rest of us were barred from attending parties or in many cases seeing loved ones.

At the same time, the government has been steadily proposing a number of reforms (on the right to protest, election ID, the Human Rights Act and Judicial Review). The global civil society monitoring organisation Civicus recently added the UK to its “watchlist” due to the speed and scale of these restrictions to civic space.

While different organisations and constellations are doing some fantastic work on both declining trust and narrowing space (shout out to the UK Democracy Fund, the new Democracy Network and Joe Mitchell in particular) I don’t have much sense the activist community as a whole is particularly seized of the need to be “assertive in the defence of plural, liberal democracies”.

There is more evidence that this is exercising our US counterparts, perhaps because the horrifying spectacle of the Capitol riots and the brazenness of the attempts to dismantle American democracy are so stark. The extraordinary discipline shown by activists in the face of Trumpian provocation is beautifully captured in Time magazine’s superb February report on “the secret bipartisan campaign that saved the 2020 election”. If you only read one article about activism this year, make it this one.

• If in doubt, organise

We won’t be able to rejuvenate our democracy without recognising that politics happens in places. Thankfully, local organising seems to be having a bit of a renaissance in the UK.

While the traditional campaigning forces in the unions and the churches might be focused on direct industrial or community work (as laid out by my colleague Tom Baker in his fascinating account of the organising strength of the church), more and more big charities (including Save the Children) are incorporating an organising approach into their plans. Increasingly funders seem interested in supporting “place-based systemic change” and pioneers like the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and Oglesby Charitable Trust are showing how it’s done, while highly local activations like the Great Big Green Week really took off this year.

There is even a new donor intermediary, the Civic Power Fund, which exists explicitly to “get Britain organised”, supporting grassroots organisers to win what matters to their community (for full disclosure I am chairing the CPF and would love to talk to potential donors and potential grantees about it).

This new recognition that geography shapes identity, power and agency is very welcome but there are a few watch outs for those of us who are investing in this work.

Firstly, there is a real risk of imposing language and strategy that makes sense to us and not to communities: nobody really thinks of themselves as living in a constituency or local authority area, far less in the Red or Blue Wall.

Secondly, attempts to impose “systems and structures” on to local efforts can be, in the words of the Relationship Project’s David Robinson, “like trying to catch a butterfly in a jam jar — there is a likelihood that we will kill or damage that which makes it beautiful”. If David is right and we are about to move on from Mutual Aid 1.0, a form that was “more aid than mutual”, then those supporting the development of Mutual Aid 2.0 need to think carefully about how to help without distorting what works.

Thirdly, we need to think about how to challenge previous power patterns through this work. The Civic Power Fund’s mapping suggests the UK is currently experiencing a “second wave” of organising, combining Alinskyite traditions of building the power of communities to organise with recognising the leadership that already exists in our neighbourhoods and workplaces. That leadership, most often shown by women, is profoundly disruptive to our established power structures, where money and credentials have tended to follow middle class white men around.

Supporting a new generation of women leaders well will have to start with recognising just what an emotional load we’ve carried this year. If you’re not a woman and want to understand how violence against women and girls has sat heavily on our chests, I’d really recommend asking the women in your life what they would do if they weren’t worried about being murdered, inspired by the stunning Caroline O’Donoghue article in the Irish Examiner.

• The people with the best stories win (if they can get them heard)

One of my lessons from last year was that an imperfect message that gets heard is preferable to a perfect one that doesn’t, arguing that we need to get as serious about routes to market as we are in finessing our policy ‘products’.

Since then there has been a spike in interest from partners and funders to look at things like pooling our polling or investing collectively in marketing that makes the case for our causes rather than our organisations, but these initiatives are still largely in the bootstrapped pilot phase. We are still some years (and millions) away from having anything like the narrative infrastructure that might share stories about rights and justice at any sort of sustained scale.

There are, however, things we can learn about how influencers are making the running on our issues.

Whether it is Gareth Southgate’s superlative Dear England letter or the powerful festival of inclusion that was the Strictly Come Dancing final, people in the public eye are helping curate a new kind of conversation about the country we are and are becoming.

While there are undoubtedly limits to what celebrity activism or philanthropy can achieve (and plenty of important critiques), there does seem to be a bit of a rejuvenation of the work of influencers this year. While it might not take place in formats we are used to (think AOC on Twitch or wearing a statement dress to the Met gala), this is recognisably influencer activism, deployed by someone who is self-aware about her level of celebrity as well as her political power. Interesting too is the rise of fandom-as-movement, much in evidence around the BTS Army and how Marcus Rashford’s audience join him in fighting child food poverty, illiteracy and racism.

Then there has been an interesting set of campaigns inside institutions, whether it’s supporters seeing off plans for a European Super League or the “Save the Parish” effort being mounted inside the Church of England.

And all the while opposition to the aid cuts kept on mounting, with sustained coverage generated by unusual allies leading to a 10% bounce in support for aid.

All of which is to say there’s a new set of stories (and storytellers) out there, it’s just not clear whether traditional charities are very well set up to ride the new waves.

• We need to invest in infrastructure

The IPPR / Runnymede report on Making Change is full of insight about what kind of shared infrastructure movements need.

When the Global Strategic Communications Council got their first major bit of coverage the world got to see what climate activists have long known — the extraordinary rise in media salience around climate didn’t happen by accident. Everyone involved in helping climate overtake the economy in the list of voter concerns can be well pleased.

During COP 26 in Glasgow, negotiators and activists alike were supported and informed by a dizzying array of people producing excellent briefings, messaging guides and intelligence reports, all as public goods.

Something similar has happened globally on Covid, via the Pandemic Action Network, and here in the UK development NGOs benefit from intensive insight sharing through the Aid Alliance and Crisis Action. These bits of collective infrastructure show what’s possible and make it all the more strange we don’t have more institutions performing this function. Without the formal infrastructure we might find it difficult to sustain collective action, but perhaps the most useful thing of all would be for everyone who currently runs a traditional or legacy organisation to start leading it like a public good. For that to happen, we need a leadership revolution.

• It’s time for a leadership revolution

I’ve already covered most of my reflections about this in another Medium post but let me just rehearse the main point again here: we need leaders to start acting like trustees of our movement and we need trustees of our organisations to be acting like that too.

A Stanford Social Innovation Review piece from March puts it well, arguing we need a much greater focus on being “respectful and responsible ecosystem players”, with an obsessive focus on the health of the whole.

My worry as we close out the year is that too many boards, funders and leaders still seem committed to quarterly results and individual organisational attribution. We haven’t yet got a system-wide commitment to the idea we are in a system.

We’re still standing

These seven lessons from 2021 won’t tell the whole story. There will be plenty I’ve missed and a lot of reasons to celebrate I’m finding hard to focus on amidst the omicron doom scrolling. As ever, we have a lot to learn and fix in the new year but we should also take a moment to reflect on the fact we’re still standing after a year that was supposed to be much better than the last but has ended up feeling like a grim sequel. We showed up for the causes and communities we love and we stood together when it was easy and when it was anything but. We kept going with and for each other and that through effective activism we could still deliver some change in a time of coronavirus is probably the most important lesson of all.

I work at Save the Children and chair the Civic Power Fund, Larger Us and the Aid Alliance. I’m on the boards of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, IPPR and the Coalition for Global Prosperity. I’m obsessed with building movement infrastructure that delivers social change and tweet and write and talk mostly about power, policy and politics.