8 lessons from 6 days in the USA
Earlier this month, the Civic Power Fund organised a learning exchange to New York.
With funding from Unbound Philanthropy, the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and This Day Foundation we brought together 14 community organisers and 5 funders to learn from our friends and colleagues in the US.
We co-organised the trip with Marzena Zukowska, the incredible co-founder of Polish Migrants Organise for Change (POMOC). Marzena is an experienced community organiser with deep roots in the US. They also play a key role with the Radical Communicators Network.
The aim of the trip was to spark ideas around boosting community organising infrastructure in the UK. We hoped organisers and funders would come together to deepen relationships and grow collective ambition around strengthening our own organising field.
We met with organisers of different traditions; US foundations that fund community organising; and intermediary funders dedicated to organising (like the Civic Power Fund).
In this piece, I have tried to capture some of the lessons we learnt and consider how they might shape action in the UK.
1) There are no shortcuts to good organising, but this is a good thing
Organising depends on two core ingredients: relationships and leadership development.
Organisers work to build relationships within and between communities. Through these relationships, they understand what matters and cultivate collective agency: communities working together to solve shared challenges.
We turn up and turn out for the long haul when our own rights and those of the people we love are under threat — and when we’re held to account by a community we trust.
As part of this process, organisers also work to identify and nurture leaders: the people who can build and mobilise a base to take democratic action.
There are no shortcuts to deep relationships and leadership development. But this is a good thing.
The magic of organising is that it transforms the self, community and society.
It boosts individual agency. It strengthens civic bonds. And people power becomes a match for formal power and wins systemic change.
This last bit takes a lot of time, but the first bit starts happening straight away.
We saw this during an inspiring afternoon with the New York chapter of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA).
The NDWA works to:
“… win respect, recognition and labor rights’ for nannies, housecleaners and homecare workers.”
Through their chapters across the US, they support domestic workers to both demand their own rights, whilst running winning, national campaigns.
Since the pandemic the New York chapter has significantly grown their membership — building a base of 600 dues paying members and making contact with almost 10% of all domestic workers in the state. They have also recruited 250 worker leaders.
They have made these gains because they “centre lived-experience leadership in all they do.”
We met with their small organising team and a wide array of their brilliant worker leaders — the women who are recruiting, training and supporting domestic workers alongside their day jobs.
Domestic workers understand what other domestic workers need. This means they are best placed to recruit members and grow collective power. But as important, through day to day organising, domestic workers can liberate themselves from exploitative work by knowing how to demand their rights.
We saw this vividly in New York. Many of the worker leaders had experienced extreme hardship. Thanks to NDWA they reclaimed their personal power and were starting to build collective power. This first part was both just as magical — and a prerequisite for — this latter part.
But we also saw that there are no shortcuts to this work.
One of their brilliant organisers Jacquie told us how she phones potential worker leaders every couple of months. People are afraid and unsure so it can take almost two years before they come on board.
But when they do, it is magic. Over the past few years, NDWA has passed 6 laws in New York to improve conditions for domestic workers.
They showed why the best organising comes directly from within communities.
They also showed why organising must be backed by flexible, long-term funding that allows groups to do the hard, deep work of building power.
2) Understanding of community organising is low, which clouds funding and strategy decisions in the UK
At the end of the trip, our group reflected that many funders speak of wanting social change without understanding what it takes.
The work of organising is the day to day labour of building and sustaining relationships.
It often means convening house meetings. Going door to door to have in depth conversations. Buying someone a cup of coffee. Or picking up the phone every two months to listen without judgement.
We saw this when we spent a day door knocking with a group in the rural Hudson Valley. We had an opportunity to speak to residents across two districts about the potential for better politics. This was a vital step towards building a base of power that would use their democratic voice.
The work on this day was driving around small towns, knocking on homes — many of which were empty — and then engaging in 1–2–1 conversations.
This was hard work, but it was also joyful and rewarding; the kind of work you want to get out of bed each day to do.
Yet we exist in a funding landscape that often treats this relational work as ‘overheads’ or minor activities not worthy of resource.
We hear this over and over again in conversation with our grantee partners.
Most recently, Zain went to visit an incredible organisation we support in Stoke. All the Small Things CIC are doing everything I described above — recruiting leaders from within, transforming their lives through individual agency, and building collective power that is winning change.
But they cannot get money for this deep relational work. Instead, funders want to track specific activities related to service provision and then ask for immediate results they understand.
This takes both the impact and the joy out of this work.
These challenges are not unique to the UK.
While in the US, we had a wide-ranging conversation with the Sunrise Movement, a mass movement that won significant progress on US climate action between 2016–2022.
Their ‘big organising’ [1]: mobilising thousands of young people across the US, helped to popularise the Green New Deal; secured the election of climate-forward politicians; and led to the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, which put many of the policies of the Green New Deal into law.
But they are now prioritising deep, local work.
Mass mobilisation is a key campaign tactic, and has been a driving force of many successful social change initiatives.
But without deep organising, it is hard to sustain wins and ensure they deliver for those most affected.
The Sunrise Movement recognises this and are looking to strengthen their local, chapter-based work across the US.
This is — by necessity — less high-profile, but it is the key to building a base of power that can ensure both policy implementation and that politicians are held to account on climate justice over the long term.
But they are finding this less high profile work more difficult to fundraise for.
This is one of the reasons why we argue for a movement ecology approach to social justice funding.
This term was coined by the social justice think tank the Ayni Institute [2] and formed the backbone of our recent report mapping where UK social justice funding goes [3].
To tackle the major issues of our time, we need mass mobilisation but we also need to build deep, lasting civic power that sustains social movements through the ups and the downs.
By not coming together to consider our strategic role in supporting movements, and understand what organising takes, we’re failing at both.
3) Funders and organisers can be in community, if we understand and stick to our specific roles
One striking feature of the US landscape was the comfort around organising and philanthropy sharing space.
Across the funding landscape, positions of power are held by past and present organisers: people with wide organising networks and a deep understanding of what works.
For example, on our final day, we convened a roundtable of foundations and intermediary funders in New York. From the Ford Foundation to the Rural Democracy Initiative, the majority of US funders in the room were represented by organisers.
There is a wider conversation to be had about the pros and cons of this. But it was clear that this leads to a greater clarity around roles.
Many of the funders we met saw themselves as key to movement building, but through the prism of ‘liberating capital’.
Whereas organisers design the strategy and build the base, funders can liberate capital behind these strategies and this base.
It is important to pause at this point and mention that this is due to a lot of hard work from a lot of people, not least the Funders Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the brilliant Decolonizing Wealth Project, both of whom generously gave their time to us this month. Likewise the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, who have been tirelessly making the case for organising as a core pillar of funding strategies for almost two decades.
These organisations have curated extremely successful funder learning journeys and built self reinforcing peer cohorts that are incentivized to move money together. They have shifted billions of dollars into this work.
We don’t see as much of this in the UK.
Often, it is the people in control of the money who set the strategy, tactics and everything in between regardless of their proximity to the issue they are trying to address.
This means organisers are left applying for funding that doesn’t align with their work or strategy. And it also creates a line of accountability to the people who control the purse strings rather than the communities they serve.
However, this is slowly changing. Pioneers like 10 Years Time are helping to change the face of UK philanthropy. And organisations like The Philanthropy Workshop are building global alliances for change.
We saw clearly in the US that this is long-term work, and rests on deep engagement with foundations at decision-making level.
4) We have to change how we fund to boost organising infrastructure
While in the US, we heard a lot of our challenges reflected back at us.
This includes a lack of long-term funding; continually shifting funder priorities and approach; and an over-focus on mobilising power instead of building power (see the Sunrise example above).
Yet in spite of these shared challenges, we saw far more robust and well resourced organising infrastructure.
A refrain we often hear is that grassroots organising is not happening in the UK. We know from both our Community Action Fund and from the 14 incredible organisers who joined us in the US, that this simply isn’t true.
Right now, communities are coming together all across the UK to demand change. But our short-term funding landscape is letting them down.
This came to the fore last week when we reconvened with our amazing Community Action Panel. The conversion was one of hope and deep frustration.
Hope, because through their organising, our Panel is witnessing communities coming together to demand an end to the war in Palestine; justice for people on the move; and urgent action on climate change. This kind of grassroots, intersectoral action is key to unlocking the systems change we need.
But deep frustration, because we do not have the infrastructure that can protect, nurture and hold this energy. Community organisers are still on short-term contracts. Transactional work is still prioritised. And much of this movement based work is still dismissed as ‘too risky’.
Hope, because we have been visiting some of the 18 groups that the Community Action Panel funded earlier this year. The work is phenomenal, with communities working on a shoestring to reclaim their agency.
But deep frustration, because the Civic Power Fund doesn’t have the resources to keep funding many of these groups next year.
In the US, despite our shared challenges, we saw a different picture.
We saw multiple community organising groups that had been working for ten, twenty, forty years plus. We met well-paid organisers, and organisation after organisation for whom organising was core business. We heard funders talking openly about the need to step up and protect movement builders in this time of urgency.
There are many reasons for this, some of which stem back to the founding of the United States and most of which relate to the brilliance of the campaigners and organisers that have built enduring infrastructure.
But there are two features of the US landscape that struck a chord.
First, many US funders are confident in funding organising and know what it takes
We met with countless large foundations that:
- Fund organising as a core strategy
- Provide multiyear (5 years plus) and flexible funding that allows organisations to grow
- Pool resources to make them go further, and invest in specialist funds that provide wrap-around support
- Support backbone organisations to deepen and grow their base, whilst also taking risks on emergent, grassroots groups
We are quite a long way off this, which can make the scale of our challenge feel insurmountable. But we also learnt that it doesn’t have to be rocket science.
During our roundtable on the final day, many of the UK funders voiced their concerns about scale: “how do we scale up this work in the UK when the work required is both deep and urgent?”
One US funder responded that we start by resourcing existing groups well in as many places as possible.
If we get flexible, long-term funding to groups across the UK already doing this work, we can go a long-way to building the roots of legitimate organising infrastructure.
The Civic Power Fund already supports c. 30 groups in different geographies across the UK. Each of them is doing amazing work organising communities of common place or common struggle.
If we could scale up our support for these groups — making it long term and sufficient — we could already go so much further in supporting the infrastructure UK movements need.
Second, there is a greater confidence in organisations’ differing movement roles
In the UK, large institutions that try to do a little bit of everything dominate our social justice landscape.
They provide services, influence on policy, design and run campaigns — and, as it becomes increasingly recognized as a vital route to change — they aim to organise.
This approach won’t build the infrastructure we need, instead, it risks concentrating power in the hands of a few and undermining communities at the forefront of the fight for change.
In the US, we saw organisations that had a specific ‘core business’ within movement ecologies. For example, mass mobilisation; deep local organising; insider influencing; or electoral organising.
We then saw these organisations working in loose networks to achieve change.
This created incentives for the whole network to grow and develop together, rather than competition between groups trying to do everything.
In happy news, we are seeing more of this in the UK.
This includes new network-based organisations like Migration Exchange and the Democracy Network.
But there is no doubt that we need a collective rethink about how we resource organising groups directly and support thriving networks.
5) Funders need to think differently about impact, but we have a toolbox to learn from
One way to address these challenges is for funders to take a very different approach to measuring success [4].
The good news is, this doesn’t mean getting any less forensic about impact. It just means measuring and valuing different things.
Anyone who has spent time with organisers will know they are both ruthless about assessing power and evaluating their successes and failures.
While in the US, we met with the Democracy Power and Innovation (DPI) Fund. Led by Julie Fernandes and Joy Cushman, the DPI Fund has done incredible work alongside organisers to measure power and track impact in organising strategy.
Most recently, they supported an in-depth primer of how to measure whether power is being built and the impact of this power [5].
Pathways to Power explores possible metrics to tell us whether progress is happening under six key tenets of social change:
- Base Building
- Leadership Development
- Advancing Issue Campaigns
- Building Electoral influence
- Long-term Narrative Change
- Organizational Resilience
But in all of this, it argues that:
“Organizations must be the central strategists and decision-makers when identifying the right metrics to track…”
We learnt a lot from DPI in the creation of our own Learning Framework [6].
Crucially, in both cases, organisers led this work.
Rather than imposing their own metrics downwards, funders have to start from a place of understanding the craft of organising — how do we know whether power is being built? And measuring success against what communities want and need — what does success look like to this group?
We have a big job to do to boost collective understanding of organising and what it takes.
But don’t let anyone tell you that a reason not to fund it is because it ‘too hard to track impact’. As we saw in the US and see every day in our work, this simply is not true.
6) Shifting dependency on philanthropy is important
It is no secret that Civic Power Fund thinks shifting philanthropic resources into organising is key.
UK foundations spend billions of pounds each year (and are sitting on billions more…). Right now, just 5.7% is going towards social justice and just 0.3% to community organising [7]. If we could shift even a fraction of this resource, our capacity to build a better society and economy would transform.
But one of the reasons that infrastructure is so strong in the US was that many of the organisations we met had managed to combine successful grant based fundraising with membership models that connected them to their base and generated independent and sustainable income.
Groups like the services union 32BJ, the Working Families Party, and the National Domestic Workers Alliance were all financially sound and accountable to their members because they had a dues-based relationship.
In most organising traditions, payment of membership dues is a key part of the strategy.
Citizens UK, the UK’s largest organising group has a longstanding dues-based model. Here, organisations pay a membership fee to join a Citizens UK Alliance. This is partly to sustain the Alliance and partly to ensure it is rooted in the genuine concerns of its members.
But beyond Citizens UK, we don’t have the same history of community-based membership institutions that you see in the US and in other contexts.
This is something Charlotte Fischer from Love and Power and Stephanie Wong from Act Build Change have looked at in detail in their new report Collecting our Dues [8].
They argue that:
“… the gap of organisations that are built from ordinary people’s money, with some exceptions, such as trade unions and the religious congregations, is a fundamental block on the development of movement infrastructure in the UK.”
Collecting our Dues makes a strong case that philanthropy can play a vital role in resourcing groups to raise their own money — backing them for the long-term to build a membership base that can transform initial philanthropic investment into sustainable, self-generated income.
This model is gathering pace in the US through organisations like the Progressive Multiplier. The Progressive Multiplier has the express purpose of supporting social justice groups to build a membership based model. They combine long-term money and access to specialist resources to enable this.
Writing in The Forge earlier this year, their former Executive Director Phil Radford argued that:
“There is a role for philanthropy to play, not only to fund more organizing but to provide catalytic funding to achieve the 50/50 rule: to help organizing groups achieve fifty percent of their funding from philanthropy and fifty percent from their base and businesses. To get there, philanthropy should invest five-to-ten percent of its funding in the independent revenue generation programs of mission-aligned organizations and flip its funding priorities from policy formation to power building.”
This is another solid example of how funders can situate their role in movement ecologies.
Funders can be vital members of our movements, by liberating the capital and supporting the income growth movement actors need.
7) When we get this right, it means hope, optimism and progress even in the toughest of times
When conducting our end of Exchange check-out, one of the participants reflected on the optimism they saw during the week.
The world feels pretty scary right now, and talking to movement activists in the UK there is a palpable sense of anger, fear and sadness.
This is of course also true in the US — with many looking ahead to the 2024 election with dread.
But it was amazing to see how buoyed up the activists and organisers we met were. And this is because they were winning.
As organising powerhouse Deepak Bhargava reminded us in his newsletter this week:
“ …from striking auto workers’ use of prolonged disruption to win record 25% raises to pro-choice coalitions’ use of narrative reframing to win seven statewide abortion-ballot measures in red states like Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, and most recently, Ohio.”
In the face of terrifying times, organisers are deploying smart strategies to win.
And the same is true in the UK!
On the trip, we had Act Build Change, who recently worked with the care charity Kinship to win a major victory in recognising the rights and needs of kinship carers.
We had the Nanny Solidarity Network, who organised on a shoestring to end the Family Worker minimum wage exemption.
We had Centre for Progressive Change, who have built a cross-party campaign on sick pay, which has opened doors with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and seen the Labour Party adopt their policy asks wholesale.
We had Citizens UK, who seeded the Living Wage campaign that is still ensuring hundreds of thousands of workers in the UK are earning a fair wage.
And this is to name but a few!
But as we explored above, we don’t yet have the organising infrastructure that can sustain wins and take them to scale.
We need wholesale recognition that organising is a winning strategy, and that funding it well means shifting power, resource and decision-making to communities and organisers on the frontline.
8) Global trends are getting pretty scary; we need to dig locally to challenge them
However, while I am a firm believer in the constant presence of hope, we have to acknowledge that the stakes are very high.
Just a cursory glance at the news shows that many of the issues we face are global. The far right is on the rise and our democracies are under threat.
Those seeking to undermine democracy and promote authoritarianism are effectively coordinating across borders to activate new demographics and build their own base.
We have to be alive to these threats and collaborate in turn.
We heard this over and over in the US, with funders and movement actors deeply concerned about what the next election will look like.
To tackle this, we need a local response grounded in building the power of disenfranchised communities. But we also have to work together to share strategies and pool resources.
Those who wish to dismantle democracy are already doing this — and have been for some time [9].
When speaking about these challenges with US organiser and scholar Marshall Ganz last year, he pointed me to Pope Francis’s ‘Fratelli Tutti’; his missive on global cooperation during the pandemic.
In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis captured the inescapable relationship between the local and the global — and warned that we primary one over the other at our peril.
“We need to sink our roots deeper into the fertile soil and history of our native place… We can work on a small scale, in our own neighbourhood, but with a larger perspective… The global need not stifle, nor the particular prove barren.”
Organising is hard, takes time, and is contested. Yet it is non-negotiable to ensure both personal transformation and winning movements.
Organising delivers sustainable, people-led change. It is also forensic about who holds power and how we win power. This approach to strategy is capable of propelling us forward on the justice issues of our time, whilst strengthening the fabric of our communities and our democracy.
If we get behind organising, and reform our approach to funding accordingly, we can transform our landscape of fear and sadness into one of hope and action.
Endnotes
[1] ‘Big Organising’ was codified in ‘Rules for Revolutionaries’, written by Becky Bond and Zack Exley in 2016. They argued that digital technology and issue-based campaigns can go hand-in hand to mobilise engaged citizens at scale.
[2] You can dig into the Ayni Institute frameworks here.
[3] In Funding Justice 2, published in October 2023, we mapped UK foundation giving across 2021/2022. We found that just 5.7% of UK foundation giving was going towards social justice funding. When we looked in detail at this 5.7% we found that the vast majority was going towards service delivery or elite influencing, with the deep structured organising and mass mobilisation so central to change often overlooked. By applying a movement ecology approach to funding social justice, we would by default see much more resource reaching organising — a vital route to repair our democracy and win big for social change.
[4] This is something we talked about in detail in our report Power Up, published in 2022, which explored the relationship between organising and large NGOs.
[5] If you’re interested in measuring power, we strongly encourage you to dig into the recently released ‘Pathways to Power’.
[6] Working with Liz Griffin at Hidden Depths and a council of organisers, we developed a draft learning framework to help map out how we know whether power is being built.
[7] Taken from Funding Justice 2.
[8] A link isn’t currently available but if you’d like to read the report, we can happily put you in touch with the brilliant authors.
[9] This 2018 blog from Vu Le aka ‘Non Profit AF’ is absolutely brilliant on the grantmaking practices already deployed by many anti-progressive moments, which those in favour of social justice continue to eschew.
