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Year: 2020

What does community organising mean when there’s no community?

Posted on 25 September, 2020 by preorg

I have been interested in community organising for some time, and am currently part of an organisation trying to do it. When you try to do it, you find it is hard, or at least, we find that. But has it always been this hard? I’ve been reading some historical accounts of community organising in…

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On Participatory Action Research as a burden

Posted on 15 September, 202012 July, 2021 by preorg

I’ve just finished my first attempt at Participatory Action Research within a social movement organisation, specifically London Renters Union. I designed the research so that there would be two types of participatory interaction – interviews and workshops – and two different outputs, one for academia and one for the union. I wouldn’t expect anyone in…

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Poor people’s movements and how to win

Posted on 20 June, 2020 by preorg

I have been re-reading a classic of social movement studies ‘Poor people’s movements: Why they succeed and how they fail’ by Piven and Cloward. It has energised me a lot more than most social movement studies texts because it’s authors are very concerned with how to win. Their thesis was provocative in the 1970s and…

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Organising to develop members: who to have 121s with

Posted on 28 May, 202028 May, 2020 by preorg

There isn’t much academic work on deepening the involvement of new members in a social movement organisation. Since I am doing some research around this I wanted to get beyond Hahrie Han’s ‘How organisations develop activists’, which while excellent, is limited by only a couple of case studies in fairly middle-of-the-road organisations. So I was…

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A mental health check-in for activists

Posted on 29 April, 202028 May, 2020 by preorg

The world is messed up and that’s why a lot of people do politics. Saying the world is messed up is also a way of saying we are messed up. Our mental health needs constant attention and activist organisations don’t always pay enough attention to it. In fact when I searched recently for tools to…

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Up the Quaggy: a coronavirus cycle ride

Posted on 5 April, 20205 April, 2020 by preorg

It was the first truly warm day of spring and the fourteenth day since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown. For my government-mandated exercise I had been exploring by bicycle the Quaggy River, after which my housing co-operative is named. There was no particular reason to do this except for the arbitrary name of the…

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Recent Posts

  • What social movements don’t always know they need to learn – and a farewell to LRU
  • Machinery or community? What is a tenants union?
  • London Renters Union reserves? Building a union for those who can’t (or won’t) come to meetings
  • Is there a danger of a radical/reformist tension in LRU?
  • Class partnership: how successful organising works
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