How to engage with communities — learning from community organising principles with University of Warwick students.
This morning, three coffee-fuelled Grapevine community organisers made their way to Warwick campus to lead an “Introduction To Community Organising” session. The module: Theory and Practice of Community Engagement, makes masters students think practically about engaging with communities and we were asked to bring our expertise and energy as grassroots community organisers in the local area. We wanted to show them how we embed community organising practices into our work to ensure that we don’t just engage with communities but we get communities to engage (and organise) with each other. Shifting power together.
We brought in our organising methods: a rounds question to open up the space, a group agreement and principles to lay the foundations for the group discussion, and a period of reflection. We asked them to be present, to speak from the “i” and to park their assumptions.
We began our session with a case study. At home, the students had read a brief case study of one of our projects (abbreviated for the sake of this blog):
“You are a community organiser working on a place-based organising project… In 2020 your team began engaging with the community and the response was positive. However, the pandemic hit and online engagement was not as fruitful as before. People stopped showing up to meetings and the energy dwindled.
After a period of deep listening within the community you found several important themes. The area lacked self-sustainability — service providers would come into the area without consulting those that needed those services. It was top-down through and through…
Your role is to get the community voice heard in decision making spaces with the aim of collaboration and cohesion to create a stronger and more powerful community.”
- What would be your three next steps to re-engage with the community?
- Who would you reach out to? Who are the stakeholders that you would prioritise?
- What methods/tactics would you use to build relationships in the area?
- What would success look like to you?
In groups, we asked them to feedback ideas and thoughts, some notes from which are shown below.
We wanted to know what experience these masters students had of on-the-ground community engagement, what challenges they thought might arise, and how they would work to push through barriers.
We then explained that community organising is a methodology. It centres the power and leadership of ordinary people to turn the resources they have into what they need to win change. As organisers, we build relational power by growing leaders. We identify, recruit and train future leaders in a relational, distributed way; growing community around those leaders to achieve goals.
Our work is based off of five key principles:
- Creating shared story.
- Creating shared relational commitment.
- Creating shared structure.
- Creating shared strategy.
- Creating shared measurable action.
We told them the story of Coventry Urban Eden, a group of people committed to increasing community led green spaces in Coventry City Centre and asked them to analyse how the five principles of organising have shaped this piece of work. From 1:1 relationship building, core team skill analyse, and passing out seeds to gain attention and raise awareness of their work, the students picked out the tactics and we discussed. We talked through the successes and the failures and we dove into their questions.
Our discussions had breadth and depth, and it was exciting to engage with students on a challenging and intentional level. The students not only listened and learned, but they brought their own passions and ideas to the table. Together they came up with ideas that were refreshing and thoughtful.
Some interesting questions from the session included: How can we change the power dynamic and get the community to take ownership and control of a meeting? How do we engage with councillors? How do we engage with communities that aren’t english-speaking? Who do you look to for leaders in communities? How do you build leaders in communities? With what institutions would you build relationships? Is informal the same as fun — does it matter? Where do we find joy in our work? (we have plenty of blogs on some of these topics as a team — check out Grapevine’s Medium Page if you’re interested).
Our last exercise called back to our first case study — what would they do differently now that they understand the five key principles of organising? Below are their ideas (I know, so many of them!)
Our aim was to give these students an insight into the mind of a community organiser, and to have them leave with ideas on how they can engage with communities on the ground. We left with ideas such as : 1-to-1 conversations, identifying key stakeholders, power-mapping, embedding reflection into community work, and supporting communities to identify their own skills. Safe to say, the Grapevine team felt happy as we left the room this morning!
As always, we ended our session with reflection. We asked them to think about what went well, the even better ifs, and how they were feeling. Their emotions are captured below in a word cloud.
I want to say a big thank you to the University of Warwick staff that made this session happen, the Grapevine team that brought it together, and a special thank you to the students — thank you for bringing your energy and passion. I am incredibly excited to see how you shape the world for the better.
