Developing the capacity of community organizers in Germany
Note: This story documents a training course on community organizing run for the German left party (Die Linke) by Steve Hughes of the Working Families Party and Steve Williams of LeftRoots.
For the Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung (RLS), the journey into the idea of transformative community organizing began with a conference in 2012, and has developed through a combination of trainings and small investments in model projects around Germany. From these model projects a body of experience has been developed, as have a core group of increasingly experienced organizers. The Linke Organizing Academy represents the most ambitious effort to date to systematically train and develop these organizers in the practice of transformative community organizing.
Translating organizing
Distilling the art and the science of organizing into a training format can be difficult, but doing so in the context of cultural translation adds to the challenge. “Community organizing” is a term largely associated with the United States, even though the practice has over the last decade and a half increasingly established itself in Europe as well.
Some of the challenge lies simply in the need to translate from English into German. Key concepts in the English-language organizing tradition such as “power” (Macht) and leader (Führer) take on different connotations altogether when literally translated into German! And while these concepts can be challenging even in discussions with beginning organizers in the United States, post-war German history has made the German left particularly skittish of coming to terms with how these concepts should be applied to its base-building work.
There are, of course, proud organizing traditions to draw from in Germany. In fact, Robert Maruschke, one of the key organizers of the Organizing Academy, noted the many ways in which he has been translating community organizing into the German context, starting with the language, but also drawing from the early history of working class organizing in the country.
While history can teach us many things, it is not enough. Organizing by its nature must be finely tuned to the time, place, and conditions we face today. In the first Organizing Academy, held last year, we attempted to provide a set of basic skills that organizers would need to launch a new project in the here and now. By focusing on the tools of one-on-one outreach, “cutting an issue” (i.e. turning big societal problems into understandable issues around which a campaign can be run) and the basics of “being organizational” (i.e. dealing with the challenges of building groups), the skills from the first Academy were a practical, beginner’s take on organizing.
For the second Academy we wanted to push our practice further. The agenda for the event was both designed to focus on next-level skills, but also to “translate” those skills into the real-life environment of our work. We sought to map our organizing onto the terrain of struggle, and to tap our collective strategic intelligence to figure out how the skills of transformative organizing can be used to build power for a greater left political project.
Doing is learning
Organizing, like any craft, is best learned through hands-on practice. However, time in the classroom can also drive the individual and collective practice forward. Our instinct for designing the curriculum of the Academy was to make our classroom time emulate as closely as possible the actual practice of organizing. While we provided certain tools and frameworks “from the front of the room,” a large portion of our time together was spent engaged in simulated organizing situations in a fictious German city called Gross Mimmelage.
The use of organizing simulators is rooted in the Freirian notion of “problem-posing” education. As teachers at the Academy it would have been easy to stand at the front of the room and give lectures on the do’s and don’ts of organizing and to offer strategic advice. However, the learning from this approach is superficial. If, instead, learners are given the opportunity to “write themselves into” the story of the simulation — to assume the role of organizer confronting a real tactical dilemma — they will start to internalize the lessons of organizing more deeply. To solve the problems presented to them in the simulated exercises, the organizers are forced to draw from their own well of knowledge, cultural reference points, and traditions. This is a classroom-imitating-life approach.
On the second day of the Academy we ran a simulated “choose your own adventure” organizing campaign. In small groups, participants were asked to run through the arc of a campaign — from early base-building to negotiating with those in power. Along the way, they were confronted with key “decision points” where an A/B choice between two different paths forward was presented. In their groups, the participants debated the best approach, and after all the collective thinking was on the table, the trainers revealed the outcomes of each choice. On the one hand, a choice may end you up in a tactical dead-end. On the other, it may open up heretofore unknown opportunities to advance the goals of the campaign. The practice of strategic discernment and tactical-level decision-making are skills that all organizers must possess.
At last year’s Academy, we also introduced a tool to participants called the “power map.” However, we did not spend much time using the tool, and some of the feedback we received after the training was that this had been a mistake. Participants were eager to try the tool out. This year we rectified that by interweaving this tool as the “dashboard” to measure our progress toward our campaign goal after each decision point of the simulation exercise.
How did this work? We started by looking at a list of the “power players” in our simulated campaign. There was the mayor of Gross Mimmelage and the City Council. There were formal civil society organizations as well as informal groupings of community members. There were political parties and politicians. Collectively, we placed all of these power players on a map with a dual axis: the horizonal axis represented their alignment with the goals of our campaign, and the vertical axis represented their power relative to the other players on the map. When one maps these forces on this set of axes, we invariably find that the forces aligned with our goals are almost always weaker than those we are opposed to. This is our starting snapshot of the terrain.
Then, as the groups make their tactical level decisions, the power players start to move on the board. The decision to solidify ties with one of our natural allies leads to a closer alignment around the campaign goals (movement on the horizontal axis). A decision to exploit an apparent fissure between members of the opposition coalition weakens their relative power (movement on the vertical axis). As the campaign simulator progresses, we start to see that we have the ability to shape events though our organizing campaign.
In the heat of a real campaign setting, these decisions are often times made quickly by a small group of staff and leaders. However, in this classroom setting, we have the opportunity to “democratize knowledge” in the sense that we are making the vagaries of the decision-making process transparent and accessible to all.
“I am starting to see the reason for having a party.”
Besides being a useful tool for campaign planning and teaching decision-making skills, the power map is a visual representation of power relations. It puts into clear relief the ways in which each piece of the puzzle interacts with the other. The mayor is moved by the balance of forces on the city council. The city council is affected by the set of forces we are able to set into motion via the tactical decisions we make in our campaign as well as the groups we are able to bring into alignment with our objective. We can see the need to consolidate power at our base and build the unity of our aligned organizations. We are also able to visualize — and therefore exploit — the contradictions embedded in the forces of our opposition. The terrain upon which we are working becomes a thing we can see, touch, and imagine changing.
It also makes the case for having a political instrument — a party — to achieve our goals in the realm of elections and governing. Without that instrument (and without that member of our party on the city council in the pretend scenario) we do not have the wedge we need to force cleavages in our opposition on the city council. Our organizing initiatives and civil society organizations are operating without a key tool to achieve our goals.
The Academy was a blend of Linke Party members as well as friendly — but unaffiliated — activists working in a variety of spaces, from housing rights to social services. One of the members of our group, herself not a member of the party, expressed after the power mapping exercise, “I am starting to see the reason for having a party.”
This is one of those “light-bulb moments” that you live for as an educator, and it is also one of those epiphanies that is very hard to imagine coming about if all we did was lecture on the need for a party as a complement to grassroots organizing and base building!
Leadership development
The third day of the Academy focused on the challenge of leadership development. Rejecting the false notion of “leaderless movements,” transformative organizing specifically embraces the concept of leadership. The role of the organizer is to look for and develop the leadership of people who otherwise may feel they have no such entitlement to play a leading role in society, let alone their local community. Indeed, transformative organizing locates its practice in marginalized communities, and views the “transformative” as both a societal and profoundly personal mandate. If leaders on our campaigns are not developing a sense of agency and a feeling of their own centrality to the historic process of social change, then we are doing it wrong.
We also used a simulator exercise to explore this theme. Leadership development never happens in laboratory conditions — it is done in the hustle bustle of a campaign or the demands of running an organization. For this reason, we overlaid the leadership development challenges of this exercise onto the decision points of the campaign simulator from the day before. For example, while our decision to organize a mass meeting in the community was a successful campaign tactic, it opened up a leadership development challenge when some of the most active people started fighting amongst themselves over the goal of the campaign, a process which surfaced not-so-hidden racial attitudes between members of the campaign committee.
Organizers have any number of tools at their disposal to deal with these kinds of challenges, but the simple fact remains that human beings are complex. It is not always easy to know what intervention an organizer can make that will actually push a leader to grow. Will a one-on-one meeting with a leader who is expressing subtly racist ideas help? Will a training? Will the leader be open to change? Will they walk away? These are the multi-dimensional challenges that come with the territory for an organizer who takes leadership development seriously.
From a pedagogical standpoint, this day of the Academy was more challenging. Whereas the simulator from the day before offered simple A/B binary choices, this simulator presented learners with a menu of options. As a point of self-critique, it may have been better to more clearly “isolate the variables” for this simulator. In other words, it may have helped learners find a better point of entry into the skill set of leadership development if we had not given as many options at once, but rather designed a simulation comparing individual interventions against one another. But again, humans are complex, and so is leadership development. Even experienced organizers struggle with this work, so the challenge that the organizers in training experienced in this section is hardly surprising.
Story time
Finally, a word about stories. Organizers learn — and teach — with stories. Stories are what move people to action, and they are the basic building block of narratives about the world-as-it-should-be that we seek to build in our transformative organizing projects.
Woven throughout the several days of the Academy, the trainers made regular use of stories to illustrate key lessons. Sometimes they were stories of people who inspired us. Sometimes they were stories of an embarrassing mistake we made as baby-organizers. The point is, organizing is not a technocratic exercise. It is a craft that combines our heads, our hands, and our hearts.
A particularly moving moment in the Academy came when we introduced the session on leadership development by sharing stories of leaders who had grown in profound ways in the course of their organizing work. In turn, these leaders pushed us to grow, and they provided the ballast we need to keep upright through the demanding work of being an organizer dedicated to the cause of large-scale social transformation.
At the end of the training one of the participants came up to us and thanked us for our stories. She said that the stories we told, and the vulnerability we showed as trainers, “made it okay to for us to bring our hearts into organizing.” As a trainer — as an organizer — there is no better compliment you can receive.