Grassroots Organizing, Peacemaking, and Faith Perspectives

One of the things that I like about You Don’t Have to Do it Alone is that it invites us to be thoughtful about the things we often decide on auto-pilot.

For example, who we invite to participate in a project?

Often the answer is “whoever we can get.”

You don’t have to however challenges us to:

• include more people
• consider what types of people you need to include
• consider when in the project you need what types of collaboration.

In terms of the considering the types of people to involve, the authors identify six categories of people to include:

• people who care;
• people with authority and responsibility;
• people with information and expertise;
• people who will be personally affected;
• people with diverse points of view;
• people who are considered troublemakers

I have a board member who is an expert at this. She has an excellent grasp on the fact that difficult decisions need to include a variety of people: people with different perspectives, people who know the topic, people who can get it done.

She also knows that you can sometimes prevent a lot of opposition from troublemakes by getting their involvement as the start. That way they aren’t opposing you at the finish.

And as a bonus, you often get a better, more informed decision by including them.

Last month I took a personal mini-retreat and learned came to an important realization.

I don’t know how to ask for help. I tend to insist on doing everything myself.

So, true to form, I’ve started to read about how I can do better on this. Yes, that’s right. I’m not asking for help to learn to ask for help. I’m doing it myself when it comes to getting over my obsession with doing it myself.

And I’ve found the perfect book for me, or at least the perfect book title: You don’t have to do it alone.

The authors talk about how to create effective involvement in projects, and the first step the identify is to ask, “What kind of involvement do you need?”

They identify 4 types:

1. Know-how involvement: Somebody knows how to do something you don’t know how to do, or they know how to do it better, and you need their know-how.
2. Arms and legs involvement: Think of a barn-raising, or a park cleanup. You need help to carry out a task that is just too big for you. Or maybe it’s not the best use of your time to do it all yourself.
3. Care and commitment involvement: The other common phrase here is “buy-in.” This kind of involvement is to ensure that people are on-board and committed to a chosen decision, project, or endeavor.
4. Teaching and learning involvement: this is the king of involvement where people learn and grow and develop in their ability to complete a task or shoulder a responsibility. This kind of involvement is a big reason why I think it’s important for ICPJ to have interns.

Those are the 4 involvement types listed in the book. To them I would add a fifth: Leadership involvement. Sometimes there’s a project that just won’t happen unless someone else takes the reigns and says, “I’ll make sure this moves forward.”

At ICPJ, as a volunteer-based organization, many of our projects depend on volunteer leadership involvement.

I find this taxonomy useful because it helps me thinks more clearly about what kind of involvement do I need in various projects. In fundraising, it’s a bit of all of them. With structure changes and strategic planning, it’s less about arms and legs and more about care and commitment. Knowing that helps me fine-tune how I approach getting involvement in each of my projects.

And yes, so far I still figure that out on my own.

Community builders Valdes Krebs and June Holley write, ‘Without active leaders who take responsibility for building a network, spontaneous connections between groups emerge very slowly, or not at all. We call this active leader a network weaver.’

In Alison Fine’s Social Citizens Discussion Paper, she describes how millenials (the under-30 crowd) see leadership as less top-down and more side-by-side.

How can this be?

Because the emerging model of leadership isn’t based on the power of a hierarchical command-and-control mechanism but more on a dynamic network of connected individuals.

Will it work? I don’t know. It’s a good fit for ICPJ, because we are so volunteer-based that command-and-control doesn’t work anyway.

But here’s the thing. Even without control, there is a place for leaders.

Leaders build connections.

Leaders inspire followers–willing, volunteer followers, that is.

Leaders weave the network of community.

Yes, if we’re all together in a web, we still need spinners (or spiders) to help create it.

The Center for Progressive Leadership Action Network has launched a great tool listing progressive training opportunities.

You can view a map with 2008 training opportunities, or view a calendar of all the opportunities nation-wide.

There are a few bugs to work out, a lot of the opportunities are already out-of-date, for example,  but it’s a great resource nonetheless.

“Overall we’re very satisfied with your work…”

Even when this statement is true, it sounds hollow and vague.

But the critiques that follow it are always specific, and often painful to hear.

I know, I often use variations of this line myself.

But when it’s used on me, I realize how it comes off as an empty platitude.

How should you respond?

One way is to avoid giving criticism or corrective feedback. There are some who advocate this path. They say you’ll get farther with only praise than you ever would with only criticism.

If you look through my blog posts, you’ll see I’m far too opinionated for that approach to work for me.

There is another alternative, though. You can make your praise just as specific as your criticism.

Instead of saying “you did a good job chairing that meeting (followed by the inevitable “but…”),” you can say, “I thought you did an excellent job giving the group time for informal discussion and then gently bringing us back on topic.”

Yes, it takes more thought to pick out specific examples of what to praise, but it’s much more meaningful for the person who hears it.

And if we want their continued support, we owe them this extra work.

And we especially owe it to them if we’re going to offer corrective feedback.

Last year ICPJ organized a bus trip to the SOA Watch vigil at Ft. Benning, GA.

After loading up, we got on the bus and on the highway. Our driver handled the bus well and drove safely, both of which are key marks for someone you want behind the wheel.

There was just one problem.

He went the wrong way. He drove west on I-94 instead of east.

I’ve been thinking about this as we prepare for staff evaluations. In all humility, I think I’m pretty good at what I do. And my past evaluations have supported that: I’ve gotten good ratings from our members and volunteers.

But just because I run a good meeting or produce a good newsletter doesn’t mean that we as an organization is moving in the right direction.

Yes, we need to make sure that I’m a good driver, but we also need to make sure that we as a community are going the right way.

I just finished A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically. I picked it up expecting to be entertained, and I was.

What’s not to like about a modern-day germ-phobic secular Jew from New York with obsessive-compulsive disorder trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible for a year? He even stones an adulterer (but since the Bible doesn’t specify, he uses a very small stone).

What I didn’t expect was to relate to his spiritual experience.

At the end, A.J. says:

I’m no a reverent agnostic. Which isn’t an oxymoron, I swear. I now believe that whether or not there’s a God, there is such a thing as sacredness. Life is sacred. The Sabbath can be a sacred day. Prayer can be a sacred ritual. There is something transcendent, beyond the everyday. It’s possible that humans created this sacredness ourselves, but that doesn’t take away from its power or importance.

I fully agree with Jacobs’ experience here. I do not know for sure if there is a God or not, but I do know I have experienced the sacred.

What’s more, I have also found the Quakerism, Christianity, and the Bible to be tools to help me understand Truth and to experience the Sacred.

And that is enough for me

Last post (I think) on Allison Fine’s book Momentum: Ignititing Social Change in the Connected Age. She writes:

To reach the broadest possible audience, organizations should present a continuum of opportunities and ways for people to participate from lot to high intensity.

True.

Except when it isn’t.

Too many opportunities can overwhelm rather than empower.

Consider the Paradox of Choice.

Consider the Big Red Fez.

Consider Discovering the Activation Point.

Consider Don’t Make Me Think.

In a world where people are overwhelmed by choices, sometimes the best way to help a potential supporter take action is to give them a single simple path to action.

Sign this petition.

Donate $25 dollars.

Click to send a letter.

When I volunteer at a food bank, I don’t want to be asked to plan nutrition plans or to analyze the opportunities and dangers of the corporate food system to both cause and alleviate hunger. I want to be told, “put those cans from that pallet onto this shelf.”

Allison Fine is right, you need to have the door open to higher levels of involvement. It also helps to spell out what these higher levels could be.

But it’s also important to save your supporters from the load of always playing “choose your own adventure” when it comes to getting involved.

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Since this is my last post on Momentum, let me also share a few final words of overview. It’s an excellent book that will make you think about how the hyper-connectivity of today’s world affects the social sector.

Allison Fine is a true believer here, and as such she sometimes goes overboard. In particular, she tends to overplay the power of connection technology and underplay the continued relevance of existing tools. For example, when she says “throw out your direct mail handbook,” well, that’s just plain foolishness. For most organizations online giving is a small fraction of direct mail giving, and that will be the case for some time to come.

This over-zealousness may be vital for her to make her point. A less enthusiastic book would be less thought-provoking, not to mention less interesting.

I blogged earlier about how ICPJ needs to look closely at the challenges and trade offs involved in recruiting the next generation of activists.

Allison Fine adds a bit more to question in her book Momentum: Ignititing Social Change in the Connected Age.

It is likely that Net-Gen donors will be episodic in their giving. . . . Net-Genners are unlikely to fill out membership applications–they do not think of themselves as members in the traditional sense.

This observation squares with my experience, though I do see a continued sense of membership is smaller, face-to-face groups even if it wanes in connection to larger, impersonal institutions.

What does this mean for ICPJ?

1. We can’t expect business as usual to provide us with a new stream of members.
2. We need to constantly work to stay relevant for our supporters.
3. We need to make it easy for people to share our work when they are pumped up about our work.
4. We need to invite people to make ongoing pledges of support as a way to help build an ongoing relationship.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes on nonprofit marketing:

“Activists are great at creating broccoli strategies; we are fantastic as pushing out a product or a service that people should need because it’s good for them.”

That’s from Momentum: Ignititing Social Change in the Connected Age by Allison Fine.

I’ll pass on the cafeteria-style, frozen, re-heated, overcooked, bland-with-a-sour-taste mass market broccoli. I don’t care how good it is for me, I won’t eat it.

But if you offer me some fresh, locally-grown broccoli with a balsamic reduction sauce, then you’ll have me coming back for seconds.

It reminds me of a point that Peter Brinkerhoff. It was something like this:

Nonprofit services are all about needs. Marketing is all about wants. As any of you who know someone who has gone through the steps knows, they needed help long before they wanted help.

If we want to build a movement for a better world, we won’t get there by chiding people for not eating their broccoli or for scolding people for not caring about the issues we think they care about.

We’ll get there by understanding what they like and providing them with things they want to learn about and get involved in.