The Change Agent Fundamentals

The Fundamentals

This section is a summary of all the previously discussed material. If you ever want to remember the key points of this guide, come back and review this section!

Summary

• “We do with people, not for people” ~ Akili
• Show you care
• Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up 
• Set SMARTIE goals for projects and break them down into pieces
• Instead of getting more work done, get the right work done.

1. Organizing

• Organizing is about people, show you care! – Demonstrate your commitment to others by following-up, appreciating, giving feedback, celebrating, and checking-in on your people. Don’t get so caught up in the work that you only reach out when you need people to show up or take some action.
• Develop leadership in others – Think of organizers as “coaches” who focus on getting their “teams” to practice and improve, but ultimately it’s up to the “players” to carry out the “strategy” and “win the game.” You can only do so much as one person or one group, organizing helps you achieve scale.
• Follow-up, follow-up, follow-up – Relentlessly reach back out to folks, especially texting and calling since emails are easy to miss or ignore. Remind people about what they said they would do or when they would show up. Life is busy, following-up supports people in realizing their contributions matter.
• Make 1-on-1 meetings a core practice – Meeting 1-on-1 with your people should serve as your core recruitment, retention, and leadership development strategy. This allows you to understand how people are feeling and gives you the opportunity to gain specific commitments, while also helping them improve. 
• You must ask – People won’t often voluntarily sign-up to take action or new leadership, so you have to ask them. Everytime you meet with someone, you should have an ask (e.g., attend this event/action, take on this task, become our new coordinator, etc.). This ideally is done in 1-on-1 and you then follow-up.
• Foster peer learning and growth – Give your people opportunities to reflect and share feedback with each other (e.g., doing plusses, deltas, and key learnings after every meeting and/or action). Also give people time to silently reflect and write individual action plans and also get feedback 1-on-1 or in groups.’
• Your goal as a coach is to help others excel – Support, push, listen, and give specific info to be on their leading edge for success. Think of the combination between a sports coach and a counselor. Combine proactive planning with them with reactive listening and helping work through their own challenges.

2. Organizational Success

• Make any team meetings action-oriented and purposeful – Meetings are for making decisions and assigning work to do outside the meeting. Come to meetings with objectives, a prepared agenda, draft or finalized plans and/or proposals, and tasks that need to be accomplished. 
• Set goals for your team members and let them decide how to get it done – It’s imperative you set clear goals and metrics of success for your team members. It can be easy when things are busy to delegate the goal setting, but you need to take responsibility for setting their goals (they can give input but you need to drive it). Then support them in figuring out how to get there. 
• Provide a steady mix of coaching, feedback, and appreciation – You should be constantly giving all three of these in 1-on-1s, when reviewing plans and documents, after actions, etc. People need all three to feel supported and to grow!
• Build distributed leadership structures – Having a snowflake leadership structure gives opportunities for many people to take on leadership roles and responsibilities, instead of funneling leadership through one person or a small group. Ideally everyone on the team has a role and responsibility. 
• Have a leadership ladder and tests – Plan out from new volunteers to experienced team members, how people can get involved with your team or organization. Different rungs of the ladder allow you to test people’s leadership to see where they already do well and where they need more support to improve.
• The best form of recruitment is retention – If you keep people around, you can continue to build instead of just trying to stay at the same level. So before focusing too much on recruitment, make sure you are keeping current folks involved (e.g., getting stuff done, appreciation of members, and learning).
• Remember the OCOCOC cycle – This idea is that if you build the organization, it will be easier to build a strong campaign, then if you build a strong campaign you can build a strong organization, and so on. Focus on building both a strong organization that engages people beyond a single campaign, and also operate issue/electoral campaigns that drive higher levels of engagement..
• Focus on making lots of small organizational improvements – Instead of making episodic big changes, focus every week, and every month on making incremental improvements in the organization.
• Hire/Recruit based on potential rather than their resume – .This means we should hire team members more based on their potential to grow and fit with the organization, rather than a strong resume and specific experience and skills. Remember skills can be taught!
• Publicly track tasks and deadlines – Have a single system where you track tasks on your teams (e.g., a simple TADDS tracker: task, who’s accountable, due date, and status). Update and review each meeting.

3. Justice and Equity

• Those most impacted by the issue should lead – An inclusive organizer focuses on developing the capacity of those most affected to fight for their own solutions. This includes all elements of the effort including: planning, organizing, speaking, and managing.
• Focus on impact, rather than intent – It doesn’t matter whether someone meant to say or do something to contribute to injustice through their words or actions, what matters is addressing what actually happened. 
• Address institutional and systemic injustice, not just individual – Look for the root causes of issues and how you can confront those power dynamics.. This means avoiding just providing direct services for people, but really address why people need those services in the first place. 
• Develop leadership, rather than just identifying leaders – Avoid just selecting people who have certain leadership traits, instead work to develop all people and their leadership (even if they don’t believe in their own leadership at the time). 
• Build political education into your organizational culture and structure – Find ways to consistently engage people in discussions and analysis on how to challenge the status quo. Learning about systems and institutions is more than just a skill/technique. It takes time to develop a whole new way of thinking.
• Understand how different forms of identity and oppression intersect – There are many identities (e.g., race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, religion, etc.) and many forms of oppression.

4. Strategy and Action

• Remember power is simply “the ability to achieve purpose” (MLK Jr.) – At its core, organizing is about supporting people to wield their collective power to achieve social change. You need people to get stuff done.
• Build your own power – Instead of just “speaking truth to power” you need to “build power” through a united base of people who are capable of consistently winning on your issues. 
• Break goals into campaign vs. organization and short- vs. long-term – Write up goals for campaign (i.e., mission of what you’re fighting for) vs. organization (i.e., how you’re building the group/team/etc.) and then break those down by timeline. 
• Adapt and strategize your plans over time – Remember your plan should be a living document and shouldn’t stay static (i.e. don’t “create the plan” and leave it on the shelf). 
• Test your assumptions of your strategy – Write up your strategy as an “If-Then” statement (i.e., if we do X strategy, then it will lead to Y goal) and test yourself. If you accomplish X, will it really lead to Y (or do you just hope it will)? Make sure your strategy really has enough power to move your targets.
• Use issues campaigns to drive policy – Just like electoral campaigns, we need to have comprehensive issue campaigns to enact policy (e.g., coalitions, recruiting volunteers, articulating a clear message, etc.). Remember this is about building targeted pressure rather than “raising awareness.” 
• Develop multiple aspects of the social change “ecosystem” – For long-term power choose a few areas to focus on, including: base building, leadership development, cross-issue campaigns, mass mobilization, electoral organizing, public policy, legal, resource activation, media & communications, and economic capacity.
• Use a variety of tactics and ensure they connect to your strategy – There are many tactics out there, use them! Don’t just rely on a finite/predictable set of tactics (e.g., protests and marches). Also any tactics you use, make sure they fit into a broader strategy (i.e., connect and sequence your tactics so they actually build power/pressure to achieve your goals).
• Escalate tactics over time – When working on an issue, start with low-to-moderate pressure tactics (i.e., more general, not putting specific pressure on one target, friendlier language, etc.) and build pressure over time (e.g., specifically focusing on one target, stronger language, etc.).
• Put pressure on specific targets rather than groups – While you may need the whole legislative body to pass a bill, you generally don’t have capacity to put real pressure on all of them. So focus your power and pressure on the targets you can build the capacity to sway and influence.
• Only escalate tactics if you can demonstrate your power – If you cannot back up your words/actions with people power and other real pressure on a target, then avoid escalating tactics until you’re ready. You never want to show your weaknesses.

5. Personal Development

• Set aside time to learn consistently – Make time to learn from those around you (e.g., asking for feedback, writing up your own lessons, etc.) and finding new learning opportunities. Also, avoid putting pressure on yourself to rush to your goals. It’s OK to take months or years to develop your skills.
• Identify your own learning goals – Create a learning plan of skills/knowledge you aim to develop and figure out how to get there (e.g., working with mentors/coaches, practicing skill, reading 30 minutes a day, etc.).
• Personal productivity is key – Organizing and activism can be all-encompassing, so find ways to improve your personal organizing (e.g., inbox zero, reduce the number of unneeded meetings, calendar your tasks, etc.).
• Set goals for projects and break them down into pieces – For long-term projects and initiatives, make sure to set clear goals and then figure out the main actions you need to accomplish them. It can be easy to be intimidated or stressed by big projects, so make it easier on yourself by breaking them down.
• Show you care for others – To demonstrate charismatic leadership, show you truly care about others by demonstrating warmth, listening intently, and make people understand you are focused on them.
• Set a direction for the team, don’t wait – You must help set the direction for your role, team, and/or organization. It would be nice to outsource this work, but we have to identify it for ourselves.

6. Narrative and Communications

• Make people feel – Remember Maya Angelou’s quote “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” One of the best ways to make your audience feel is to tell them a story.
• Use the public narrative – For both your personal and organizational communications, aim to share your Story of Self, Us, and Now. Then break those stories into a challenge, choice moment, and outcome. In particular, focus on the why behind your choice moment.
• Tell a story, not just the facts – People better remember stories than any facts you will share. So focus on identifying stories that fit your effort and lifting them up into your communications (e.g., a volunteer sharing why they got involved, an organizer giving an update on what they’ve learned in the field, etc.).
• Make a message – While you may have your 10-point platform, you need to have a way to communicate those ideas in a way that’s clear and accessible to others. Whether it’s a slogan or concise statement, identify your core message.
• Remember our mental frames decide what information we believe – Frames are ideas of how we view the world so anything that doesn’t “fit our frame,” will be hard to accept. To counteract this make sure to build your new frames over the long term.
• Grow your list – It’s essential to constantly work to grow your email and phone lists. This will help you more easily get your message out. 
• Build a relationship with the press – Remember that you need to have material that helps them in their work so have a story worth sharing!

7. Policy and Government

• Remember many decision-makers treat opinion the same as fact – So that means constituents, stories, and other anecdotes are even more important than having a comprehensive report and fact sheets (though you should still have those).
• Learn about each level of government – From school board, to city/county government, to the state legislature, to the governor. Make sure you understand each one’s unique role and responsibility. Then what forms of pressure make sense for each.
• Get involved in electoral campaigns – Even if you spend most of your energy fighting for issues, it is helpful to know about electoral campaigns. You will learn new organizing skills and also have the chance to influence who’s the next set of elected officials. 
• How you talk about policy is just as important as the policy itself – This is crucial to remember, while you may have the greatest policy in the world, if you don’t talk about it in a way that encourages others to support, then you will have trouble.
• Use multiple forms of pressure on decision-makers – Some forms of pressure include: grassroots advocacy, media, electoral, legal, etc.