Top tips from community organizing guru Hahrie Han

Cycled across a freezing London recently to hear community organizing guru Hahrie Han launch her new book Undivided (review to follow) at an event organized by Act Build Change. It was well worth the cold ears and frozen feet.

Han is US-based, the daughter of Korean immigrants and granddaughter of refugees from North Korea. She teaches at Johns Hopkins and is a prolific author. Her field of research is the world of community organizing, a very particular subset of campaigning that focusses on ‘building power’ among marginalized communities. Act Build Change, Citizens UK and the Advocacy Academy are some of the well-known practitioners in the UK, but there are many more in the US, where it seems that both theory and practice are more developed.

According to one site devoted to the topic:

‘Organising is different from mobilising. Mobilisers focus on getting as many people as they can active in a particular action or campaign. In contrast to organisers, they are less concerned with developing people’s capacities as leaders or connecting people relationally across the movement. Organisers nurture leaders, creating the conditions for cooperation. Or, in organising parlance: organisers organise organisers (OOO). They seek out and enable local, often untapped, talent to build power with others to transform injustice.

Organising is also different from advocating for individual or even systems-based advocacy which, more often than not, is based on doing things for people. Advocacy depends on the skills, knowledge and resources of the advocate, rather than working with people and enabling them to make change themselves. ‘Lone wolves’ tend to focus on information and choose social change tactics that require fewer people.’

As a ‘pracademic’ accompanying community organizing groups, Han’s aim is to ‘unpack the mechanics of organizing, and the role played by intentionality.’ While I get round to reading the book, here are a few of her memorable soundbites from the session:

Change happens where ‘authority and motivation are in alignment’, when there is a misalignment, eg those with authority are not motivated to change, you usually have ‘a problem of power.’ The aim of organizing is to bring authority and power into alignment by shifting authority’s motivations.

People are often outraged by an event, but they then ‘outsource their outrage’ to any one of a number of organizations – NGOs, campaigns etc, who see citizens as ‘ATMs for ballots, bucks and bodies. Others just register their outrage on social media and move on.’ The job of community organizing is rather to ‘get people to become the kind of person that does what needs to be done.’

Undivided is a case study of a particularly successful bit of community organizing by an evangelical church in Cincinnati, Ohio called Crossroads. Han noticed an odd dichotomy: in the 2016 elections, Ohio voted for Donald Trump, but Cincinnati also voted in a local ballot to increase taxes to support universal pre-school education. When she dug into the reasons, she found an Anti-Racist Programme called Undivided which then moved people into wanting to take organised action for racial solidarity. It was run by Crossroads, a mainly white evangelical mega-Church. The book is based on in-depth interviews with four activists from that Church.

She identified 3 ‘design choices’ in the Undivided Programme and how Crossroads worked as an institution:

1. ‘Belonging comes before belief’: Crossroads and Undivided believed people can transform along the way – make them people feel welcome, and don’t insist on 100% purity/alignment when it comes to their views
2. Don’t script the solutions – small groups of 8-12 people come up with how you will behave and act in the world. As people become active, their groups provide feedback and help them learn.
3. Combine that small scale with the big scale that a Church can provide – a honeycomb structure that can ‘bend without breaking’ over the inevitable stress, strains and disagreements.

One interesting question from panelist Shingai Mushayabasa, Senior Organiser from Act Build Change, ‘how do non-faith based organizations and activists ‘bend without breaking’ when there is no secular equivalent of an ethic of forgiveness and love?’ As someone who regularly laments the secular bias in aid and development, it was refreshing to hear that kind of question, which I think is a really good one.

Han sees her role as ‘working at the intersection between instinct and rigour’, which is a lovely description of the kind of stuff I’ve been trying to do – introducing ideas from How Change Happens to activists without turning everything into a checklist/advocacy sausage machine that kills creativity and judgement. I’ll definitely steal it, but we also agreed to do a podcast next time she’s in London. Do check out her website and publications.

In one small sign of the increased prominence of community organizing, our activism students suggested a separate lecture on the topic next year. Let’s hope Hahrie will be passing through to give it!