Civic leadership and building the base are never ending processes

By Daniel Mackintosh

A mistake I made as a junior borough organiser was assuming that when I had built the team, done the listening and chosen the issue, the team that existed at that point was ‘the’ team. And so I stopped the process of taking action/meeting leaders/driving new participation to keep adding life, vigour, stories and talent. Instead, I would go back to those same leaders again and again. And then, when they lost energy or imagination, that meant that the whole campaign ran out of steam. I would try and motivate them, but the truth is that they had made their contribution. Instead, I should have been focussed on bringing in new leaders with their talent and energy.

Base building is ‘engaging people in a campaign or organisation and developing their ability to collectively address the issues they care about’ (Mondros and Minervi, in Organising for Power and Empowerment, Volume 2, pp 161). And leadership itself is a process of ‘accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty’ – (Ganz).

And our job as organisers is to constantly:

1. Recruit new talented people through 1on1s and house meetings
2. Support people into meaningful interaction as members with the org/campaign.
3. Enable them to make a choice – do they want to become leaders in our collective work by starting to direct some local work within their org, doing training, supporting participation, and then moving up to strategy as they take decisions with other leaders.
4. Finally, enabling them to effectively challenge power.

1 thing I am going to be working with organisers I supervise is to never give up the process of building the base and rebuilding the leadership team as you find talented people through listening, training, actions, 1on1s. New people can always be brought in and supported to find a role.

 Who is a leader in a broad based organisation?

1 practice I am changing as a result of the book, is training around our leadership session. I really like the roles that Mondros and Minervi set out: 1) organisers are paid staff; 2) members are people impacted by issues in member orgs; 3) leaders take a decision to take on responsibilities – decision, strategy, training, leading issue campaigns, developing others in their organisation, negotiating with power, fundraising, recruiting others. Paid staff exercise leadership but our jobs are to promote and encourage the participation of the voluntary leaders and then support them to become more effective public people. See summary below.