Community Organizing

at Clark:

A Mini Handbook

Table of Content

Introduction

How to Strategize

A Personal Organizing Story

Possible Actions

Decision-Making: Consensus

Burnout: What it is and How to Avoid it

A Personal Burnout Story

Final Tips

Resources

So You Want to Organize—How to Get Started

A Little About Clark’s Administration and Structure

Sustaining the Movement: Relationship Building

Introduction

Clark has a reputation for being a politically active school. We talk about it, take pride in it, and use it to make ourselves feel cool, but although Clark students do a lot of volunteering, internships, and projects, we don’t really organize a lot on our campus. We want to change that, or at least contribute to changing it.

What is organizing? Put simply, it’s when a bunch of people come together to change something. It’s the way things change, the way people get rights they didn’t have before and the way individuals and communities can make it better for themselves and others. But there are a lot of ways to organize and it’s not guaranteed that when a bunch of people get together to change something – they will actually succeed. In fact, sometimes it’s really hard to succeed. The idea behind this zine is to use our own experiences of coming together to change things, our mistakes, and the knowledge we gathered to help people who are interested in doing something in Clark or with Clark students; change a policy, protest an unwanted change, hold administration accountable to a problem at Clark, or anything else you might want to do.

A couple years ago there was a big organizing effort on campus, Clark Unite! which is where we started organizing. Clark Unite! was working with Clark’s food services workers who were trying to join a union. That campaign didn’t succeed, and Clark Unite! disappeared sometime in 2010. Since then, Clark hasn’t really had a whole lot of organizing.

Clark Unite! didn’t manage to do all that it tried to do, but it did teach us a ton of useful things about organizing, and that is what this zine is about (as well as about our experience of organizing with other groups). Since very soon there will not be any students left at Clark who were even here when CU! existed, we didn’t want our knowledge to just graduate with us. We didn’t want you to have to reinvent the wheel.

Organizing is often something you learn by doing, and by doing with other people who already have experience. Since soon it might be hard to find people at Clark who have this experience, we hope that this zine can help walk you through some of the basics of organizing and be there for you and your group when experienced organizers aren’t.

We see this, in a way, as our contribution to Clark’s student activism, and hopefully it will help in creating a strong movement at Clark for justice. This is obviously just one little zine with a small fraction of what you will learn from organizing, but hopefully it can at least point you in the right direction. We also want to be there for you, to give advice or support to individuals and groups working on issues of justice at Clark. You can reach out to us at clarkorganizingzine@gmail.com, and hopefully we can help you some more and maybe even give you some of the advice that’s not fit to print in such a public document.

In solidarity, Alina and Yuval

So You Want to Organize – How to Get Started

This zine is meant to help with whatever type of organizing you’re interested in doing at Clark (and hopefully in general), so there could be a whole variety of issues you’re dealing with or thinking about. Whatever it is you want to do or change, hopefully this zine can help you. The first question will probably be: how do you start?

Well, we don’t claim to be experts on this, but we can tell you a few things we know, and the first one is this: you can’t organize alone. You might really want to, you might feel like it’s easier if you just do everything yourself, but let us promise you this: you can’t organize alone. You can be an activist (sort of) alone and protest alone, you can advocate alone, you can educate and outreach alone, but you can’t organize alone. When you want to change something, when you face resistance, your power is in the collective, in the group. So your first step should be finding whoever it is you’re going to be organizing with. These people can be found in all sorts of places, they might be your friends, people in your classes, workers on campus, community members, grad students, or people you’ve never met. Here are some ways to find those people:

First, talk to your friends. Hopefully you hang out with some people who are interested in similar things as you, so they might want to organize around the same thing. They also might not and that’s totally okay, you don’t need your friends to organize, but it’s a good place to start. Reach out to other people you know, acquaintances, classmates, Facebook friends, whoever it is that you’ve ever heard talking about anything close to what you want to organize around. Think about existing groups on campus that might share an interest with you. If you’re organizing against sexual violence at Clark, you might want to reach out to Feminists United and TOPICS. If you’re organizing against racism, you might want to reach out to BSU and ACS. You might also consider reaching out to specific departments (Women’s and Gender Studies, IDCE, Race and Ethnicity Studies…) and local Worcester groups, if relevant.

Organize a meeting. It’s that simple. You want to get people who are interested in whatever you want to work on in one place and see what happens. You want to invite anyone that might be interested, so be creative and try to get a big number of people. You can flyer, outreach online, invite people in your classes, whatever you can think about.

If you want to book a room at Clark for a meeting, you need to have a club do it for you, unless you book a library

study room, which any student can do in the circulation desk (for meetings of 15 people or

less). You may also be able to have meetings at Stone Soup

Community Center.

The first few meetings should be carefully planned and facilitated. Make sure you know what you’re trying to get out of each meeting, and have an experienced facilitator if possible. People can lose interest quickly so you want to make sure that they know what’s going on and get excited.

Once you have a meeting set up, you want to use it and your next few meetings to do a few things:

Getting to know each other. Finding out what people are interested in doing: you might all share an interest in a certain issue, but you might not all want to do the same thing. Try to be flexible and not too attached to what you “imagined” the group will be doing. Your campaign has to be planned according to the common agreement in the group, not according to what each individual wants. Finding out where people are at in terms of interest and commitment. Some people might be ready to jump in and take on responsibility, while others might have just come to the meeting to learn about the topic. Identify a “core group.” Who are going to be the people who help plan the next meeting? Who is already dedicated? You need these people so it’s not just one or two people doing everything. Start drafting your goals, and then start strategizing around them (read more about that in the next section). Decide on a decision-making system. More about that later. Figure out practical things: how are you going to communicate with each other and with your supporters? How are you going to run meetings? Who will do what?

Don’t forget to set up the next meeting!

Working with a Clark club might make your life easier. They can book

rooms for you, register events, and give you a

little bit of money. Activists United is a club whose mission it is to do

all these things for activists so try to contact

them via LINK. Otherwise, go to relevant clubs or just ones that you have

friends in!

You can find out more about the logistics of planning events and meetings in this guide to event organizing at Clark:

How to Strategize

Strategy is extremely important. A lot of organizing happens without a strategy, people just do what they are familiar with (write a petition, hold a protest) without first going through the process of thinking about each action’s goal and place in the greater organizing strategy. This can work sometimes, but it will most likely use up your energy and time without making progress since you didn’t decide on a direction.

Strategy in organizing is a HUGE topic that has whole books written about it, so just to be clear: this zine won’t provide you with a thorough guide to strategy. What we can offer are some tips to thinking about your strategy.

There are two main questions that you want to ask (the language here is taken from Stephen A. Smith’s “Stoking the Fire of Democracy”):

What do we want? Who can get it for us?

In order to answer the first question, start thinking about your “problem”

in practical terms. Think about the result that would make you happy, what change needs to happen to make you feel like you succeeded?

If you’re working against a new policy, having it canceled might be the goal (and maybe finding a way to guarantee that it stays cancelled); if you’re trying to get a new policy passed then having it implemented (maybe instead of a specific older policy) is probably the goal. But your problem might be more abstract or bigger than that; for example, you might be angry at the direction Clark is going with its investments. In that case, you’ll need to think (with your group) about specific goals that can at least partially solve this problem (for example, implement a policy which guarantees student influence over investments). You might be angry about sexual violence at Clark, so possible goals could be to create new programs around education about sexual violence at Clark, change the policies around sexual violence, or a million other goals. What’s important is that you have tangible goals – things you can demand and communicate easily.

This part is extremely important since it will dictate the direction your campaign is going to go in. Your goals determine your actions, so don’t rush defining your goals! Really think through what you want to get out of this.

The other part, who can get it for us, should be a little easier. You will need to have some knowledge and understanding of Clark’s structure (assuming your campaign has to do with Clark), so we’ll try to provide some info about this in the zine.

You have to think about who has the power to make the change that you’re after. If it’s an admissions policy, who makes those? If it’s about housing, who has the power there? There are some actors that will probably always be a part of your “who can get it for us” group (spoiler: the president of the university and the board of trustees), but try to think about other actors that might have power in relation to your campaign.

This brings us to our next point: power analysis. This is something your group might want to do as a part of strategizing. There are a lot of ways to do a power analysis, but the main purpose behind all of them is trying to understand different actors in your community, their level of interest in the issue you’re working on, and the amount of influence they have. You can google “stakeholder analysis” or “power analysis matrix” to find some examples, but you can also just take time to think through this without an exercise. What you want to achieve in this is an understanding of how you should treat different stakeholders. For example, you don’t want to put pressure on someone who has no influence or power; you want to direct it at someone who has both influence and interest in your issue. So when you try to engage students, who might have a high interest but not a lot of influence, you should treat them differently than you do the university’s president, who has a lot of power, as well as a high interest. Think about all the relevant stakeholders in this way and strategize accordingly.

So now you have your goals, and some idea about who can get you them. The next step is figuring out how to get those powerful people to do what you want them to do. There are a lot of ways to go about this, and they will depend on the nature of what you’re trying to do. The important thing is to think about it in advance and make an informed decision about which actions to take, and not just do things for the sake of doing.

If you’re dealing with something relatively agreeable that you don’t think will face a lot of resistance, you might just need to inform and try to “convince” powerful stakeholders. For example, if you want to start a new recycling initiative at Clark, that’s something that can probably get support from admin and you will probably just have to present them with a convincing plan to get them on board. It gets more complicated when what you want doesn’t exactly align with the admin’s interests (or goes completely against what they want). If you’re fighting a new policy, trying to change an important existing policy, or trying to influence Clark’s priorities, you will face resistance and will need to strategize accordingly.

In these types of campaigns you need to work on actions that will influence the people in powerful positions, not by changing their minds or convincing them, but by pressuring them. Pressure can be exerted in many ways, some of which I’m sure are familiar to you. These are a few things to think about in this context;

Be gradual. You don’t want to start out with full-blown aggressive and confrontational tactics. You want to be able to escalate if you don’t get what you want in order to exert more pressure and have a “threat” in your pocket.

You need support from the student body if you’re going to do confrontational actions. You want the “severity” of your actions to correlate to the level of support you have, otherwise you’re just going to antagonize people. Something like a petition is a good way to “prove” that you have the student’s support (although it’s pretty useless otherwise!).

That being said, there will always be people who disagree with you. You should hear and consider critiques, but don’t let them paralyze you. If you have a big group of supporters – don’t worry too much about people who criticize everything you do but don’t do anything themselves. Haters gonna hate etc.

Outreach and education is important, but you don’t want to stay just on that level. Outreach should happen as a way of getting people involved on actions or at least gaining their support for actions.

When planning actions – think about what can give you power over admin. There are a lot of different ways to get people to do what you want, but generally admin doesn’t really care what you think when it doesn’t align with their interests. That means that you need to make it in their best interest to give you what you want. Two things that admin will forever be concerned about are money and reputation (which is also basically money), so that might be what you want to focus on. Donors, potential students, and Clark’s image (media) are all relevant to this; they will get very nervous if you show them that they might lose alumni/donor support, or have their socially conscious image damaged. Utilize those concerns, because they might be all you have.

A Little about Clark’s Administration and Structure

This is another one of those things that you’re going to have to educate yourself about outside this zine (okay it seems like that’s true for everything), and we can only offer a brief and incomplete account of what we learned through organizing. There are definitely people around who know more about this, so seek them out and ask (student council people might know a lot, and just those people who are involved in Clark’s innerworkings.)

The first thing you want to learn about is the board of trustees. They’re probably the most important people you’ve never met. Basically, they’re a bunch of very wealthy people who control Clark. All big decisions have to go through them, they appoint the president, and they donate a lot of money to the school. So yeah, they’re important.

The trustees only meet a few times a year, and they also have committees that meet at times (the committee meetings are open to students so find out when they are!). If you’re trying to do something big - that’s where you’re going to be headed. If you’re in a position that you have to meet with the trustees, make sure you’re prepared since they can bring up any issue (e.g. that you have to change something in the wording of your petition), and you’ll have to wait for another 4 months to meet with them again (a very long time the college world).. We would also recommend reading about them and finding out what their roles are (the list of trustees can be found here: clarku.edu/trustees/). Find out which ones can be potential allies and talk to them early on.

Other than the trustees, the president, the VP and the provost (the VP and provost are the same person at Clark right now), the people you’re going to have to talk to really depend on the type of issue you’re dealing with. If you’re dealing with a labor related issue, you’re going to have to go through the business manager; if you’re working on something related to students’ well-being you’ll have to talk to the dean of students; if it’s an academic issue then maybe the dean of the college is your person.

The important thing is to keep educating yourself and becoming as familiar as you can with the way things work at Clark. Students aren’t very involved in these processes and things just seem to happen without anyone finding out about them, so just learning and teaching each other about this stuff is a pretty important act in itself.

We knew that the administration would not budge unless we targeted them monetarily which is why we chose an Admitted Students Day to outreach to potential students and their parents. Of course, our actions that day were co-opted by Clark administration and used to further their marketing slogan, “challenge convention, change our world”. After this, the administration basically delayed any further discussion and real change by putting us through a dialogue. This process was not sincere or productive in the slightest. It was a tool the administration used to make it seem as if they were engaging in positive change and a commitment to fair treatment of Sodexo workers by doing nothing about it.

Toward the end of my time in CU!, we all began to lose a bit of steam and started experiencing burnout. I think what really disillusioned me was the declining support from students. Signing a petition is an act of individualism which makes you feel like you are participating in change but petitions do not necessarily affect change, as we saw first hand with the administration. While we were grateful for the signatures we did get, after we participated in direct actions that weren’t exactly through these formal channels, we received a lot of student and administrative criticism. We were being “too confrontational”. It was super frustrating hearing these claims. There’s only so much you can do when official channels fail to achieve real change (which they almost always do...this is how they function). This is why a diversity of tactics and non-bureaucratic channels have their place, but sure it’s easy to criticize confrontational tactics. I’m sure I sound bitter, but that’s because I am. People like to criticize processes they haven’t been through, and being “nice” and formal isn’t exactly going to get you change. You’ll just be sent into a circular process of non productive dialogue. It’s important to really, seriously, discuss within your group when, where, and how to use a diversity of tactics to leverage change most effectively. This by no means is to say do something “confrontational” just to do it. We need to have serious conversations about when and where alternative tactics would be most effective, and when to stick to more formal channels.

So along with lack of students support and external conflict, there was also internal conflict in our group. Burnout affected many of us in the group. Once we realized we had hit a wall with students as well as administration, we lost a lot of steam and, long story short, eventually dissolved.

Despite the unfortunate end of CU!, it was a transformative experience in my life that has completely shaped my politics and thought process; radical politics have literally changed everything for me. I met some amazing and inspirational Sodexo workers, made some of the greatest friends, and learned a lot of important skills from CU!. I find myself looking at the state of Clark politics now and wishing that new students could have seen what once was just a few years ago. Of course, we had issues in the group and those are still valid, and not everything was easy, but I still miss it all the time.

A Personal Organizing Story

From Monika It was during the second semester of my freshman year when I started getting involved with radical politics and organizing through Clark Unite!. Clark Unite! was a group on campus comprised of students, faculty, and staff dedicated to organizing around economic and social justice issues that affected Clark and the community. Specifically, the group addressed Clark’s relationship with the multinational food service corporation Sodexo and its intimidation of Clark’s food services workers seeking to unionize. On February 28th, CU! organized a rally with students, Sodexo workers, community members, and the union SEIU local 615 in Red Square that spread to Crystal Park. It was overwhelming seeing the amount of support this rally gathered. It was my introduction to the transformative capacity of organizing and the bumps and blocks throughout the process.

Although I felt completely welcome at the first meeting I attended, it was no doubt intimidating being introduced to people and terminology that I was not yet familiar with. I think it’s important to recognize that this kind of thing is a learning process that never really ends, and it’s okay not to know everything; it’s impossible to know everything. This is definitely something I wish I realized earlier. I think I would have been less intimidated to ask questions if I hadn’t pretended that I knew more than I did. One thing that helped me throughout this process was the one to ones we facilitated during meetings.

An important skill I was introduced to in CU! was consensus-based organizing

and decision making. This process is based on non-hierarchical and inclusive decision making through mutual interest and understanding. Workers were always welcome to the meetings, but often could not attend because of Sodexo/Clark policies. Because of this, we tried to hold one to ones with cafeteria workers in order to get input and information, although this was something we did not always, at least in my opinion, do the best job with even though it was the most important. Splitting up into committees allowed us to divide and delegate tasks into more focused and specific objectives. For months, these committees facilitated effective outreach. But there’s only so much we could do until we hit a wall with student support and Clark administration which I’ll get to soon.

Visibility and community support were crucial to the campaign. While we received plenty of signatures for our petition for Clark administration to reevaluate their policy and contract with Sodexo from students, faculty, and community members, petitions were nowhere near enough. Although, sure, they reflect widespread support, petitions only get you so far, as they are working within reformative and formal channels for policy change (which the administration basically disregarded). Because of this, we participated in several demonstrations, rallies, protests, and alternative forms of direct action and diversity of tactics.

Action Purpose Pros Cons Be careful of

Rally Show presence and power,

and potentially be

disruptive (aka exert people

power).

Gets people excited and

involved, can be scary for

people with

Power.

Takes more work

from organizing and

uses up a lot of the

base’s

Commitment.

Make sure people aren’t leaving the rally feeling

like they did what they need to do, and now

everything is good. You want it to be a part of a

bigger campaign and serve as a way of putting

pressure, so there needs to be a

Petition Have evidence of student/

alumni/community/staff/

faculty support. Also:

educate the community.

Requires minimal effort from

your base, and relatively easy

for organizers. Also: tangible

and

lasting. Can be used to bolster

the importance/power of

other

Actions.

Doesn’t actually do

anything by itself.

A petition ALWAYS just serves as “proof” that

there is interest in the issue you’re working on and

that you’re representing a group bigger than

yourselves. Clark Unite had a petition signed by

more than half of the student body (which is huge),

and admin still didn’t give a sh*t. It’s a good talking

point (“We have a petition signed by this and this

many students and alumni!”), but in itself it has no

power, it’s just a piece of paper.

Sit-in (hanging

in a powerful

person’s office

for a long time)

Disrupt their routine so they

have more of an interest to

give you what you want,

exert

pressure.

Pretty disruptive and shows a

lot of capacity.

Takes a lot of time,

can put participants

in risk (arrest,

retaliation from

administration).

Doing this if you don’t have enough capacity to

carry it through. You need to make sure you have

enough people who are dedicated to not leave the

office until you get what you want! This needs a lot

of support from many people.

Email/phone/

mail blast (from

students/alumni/

donors…)

Disrupt routine (filling

someone’s voicemail or

email is pretty disruptive),

shows

support.

Relatively easy to organize

and to participate in. Could be

powerful for example if you

have alumni mail in and say

they will not

Similar to a petition. Similar to a petition: make sure it’s a part of a larger

strategy! Or that the emails themselves have a bite.

Possible Actions:

There are a ton of actions that a group could potentially do, and usually you will need to do a few actions to get what

you want, so it’s worth it to consider a bunch of them and then choose the ones that fit your group and goals.

Decision-Making: Consensus

There are a lot of decision-making systems that organizing groups use, and it’s up to your group to decide which one works for you. We personally have the most experience with consensus decision-making, so we wanted to share a little bit about it.

The most basic ideas behind consensus are anti-oppression and participation. You might already know that what’s different about consensus is that everyone has to agree (or at least be okay) with any decision that the group makes. So if we’re used to majority rule, where if 10 people want A and 9 people want B, the group goes with A, in consensus even if 18 people want A and one person absolutely doesn’t agree -, it can’t happen. What this means is that consensus is all about compromise. Everyone has the same power in all decisions, and the aspiration is to be as anti-oppressive as possible.

What this actually looks like is that people make proposals (anyone can make them, and the meeting’s facilitators should try and make proposals based on what people are discussing if no one else does), and then you can “vote” or “test for consensus.” Each person has three options of how to vote: yes, concern/stand

aside, or block. Yes means “sure, let’s go for it,” concern means that you have a problem with the proposal (and then you or someone else can try to amend the proposal to address the concern), stand aside means that you don’t agree with the proposal but you’re willing to let it pass (and if it’s something that you’re going to do as a group, you might choose not to partake), and block means that you are absolutely not willing to let the proposal pass and there’s not chance in hell it’s happening (a block is used pretty rarely, most things can be resolved when people raise their concerns. A block is supposed to be used when the proposal goes against the basic values of the group, and not just when you don’t really like something.)

So it’s all about raising concerns and trying to make better proposals through those

concerns. If in majority rule you would just move on when some people aren’t completely on board, in consensus you will hear them out and hopefully end up with a better proposal because of their input. Another thing that’s unique about consensus is that you talk about each proposal individually and so the discussion isn’t framed around “this or that;” instead you just talk about one proposal at a time which can prevent the group from feeling divided.

A lot of people have negative associations with consensus (often people who never used it), mainly around how long it takes. We don’t claim that consensus doesn’t take time; it will definitely be faster to just make decisions by voting and moving on, and sometimes you can get stuck without a good compromise and you have to figure it out, which takes time. But (!) it also has a lot of benefits that people aren’t always aware of. Although making the

decision itself might take more time - it might save you time later since all (or most) of the concerns were already raised and addressed, potential problems were thought about in advance, and everyone is already on board (and feels ownership over the decision). These

things can save a ton of time and usually make up for the time spent making the decision. They also just make for better decisions in general, which always saves time and pain.

A lot of people have negative associations with consensus (often people who never used it), mainly around how long it takes. We don’t claim that consensus doesn’t take time; it will definitely be faster to just make decisions by voting and moving on, and sometimes you can get stuck without a good compromise and you have to figure it out, which takes time. But (!)

it also has a lot of benefits that people aren’t always aware of. Although making the decision

itself might take more time - it might save you time later since all (or most) of the concerns were already raised and addressed, potential problems were thought about in advance, and everyone is already on board (and feels ownership over the decision). These things can save a ton of time and usually make up for the time spent making the decision.They also just make for better decisions in general, which always saves time.

It’s hard to use consensus without seeing it happen first, so if your group doesn’t have anyone in it who has experience with consensus, you might want to take some time to learn about it together. If you have one or more people who used it before, maybe they can share their experience with everyone else. Either way, reading about it can definitely help, and if you have the time - hosting a workshop about consensus can be really helpful (other students of local activists might be able to facilitate something like that).

Here are a few last tips about using consensus:

The role of the facilitator is very important. Generally they’re there to move the process

along and keep people on task. S/he also makes sure that people respect the process and each other, don’t interrupt or dominate the conversation. Like mentioned before, they should also listen to the conversation and try to form proposals based on what is being said. Usually facilitation rotates and every meeting someone else will does it (or two people can co-facilitate).

Discussion dynamics are really important in consensus. Since it’s all about anti-oppression, it’s important to notice and address any problematic power dynamics in the group. Are men talking more than women? Are some people scared to participate or to voice a different opinion? Are white people dominating the conversation? There are important things to pay attention to at any meeting.

Setting an agenda before the meeting helps a lot. You can do this at the end of the meeting before or over email. Usually the facilitator will email asking for agenda items so that they can be prepared for the meeting.

There are some alterations of consensus (and you can make up your own) for groups that don’t want to use the “regular” system. Soft consensus, 70/30 majority rule, or consensus minus one or two are all ways to make it easier to reach a decision. They have their benefits and drawbacks, and are often used in groups that don’t necessarily have a good common ground to work off of (so a group might start with consensus minus two, which means that they use the regular consensus process, but if one or two people block a proposal can still pass. This will make it possible to keep moving forward even if someone enters the group with the purpose of disrupting, or simply does not share the principles the group is founded on. This probably won’t be an issue but might be an easier way to start in the very beginning.

There are a million things to read about this online.

Google “consensus decision making” and start

exploring. You can also start by checking out some of the resources available

on the Worcester Roots Project website:

worcesterroots.org/community-organizing/

Sustaining the Movement: Relationship Building

It might not seem like a top priority during a

busy campaign, but building strong

relationships is essential to creating a strong

group of students. Have fun together! Have

parties, potlucks or fun times outside of

meetings to get to know each other. This will

help you understand where everyone is

coming from and help you understand each

other better when using consensus. Having

fun events outside of meetings and actions

can also prevent burnout and keep people

energized. It will decrease stress and

strengthen activist networks that keep the

movement going. Strong relationships will also help the group move from one

campaign to another. Once one campaign ends it can be hard to push through

and find another campaign to work on, but if you have strong bonds it will be

easier to sustain the movement in the long-term as you move on to new

projects.

One to ones are also something you can do in meetings to strengthen the bonds

in the group. They have a long history in community organizing because they

are so effective, and also very pleasant! You can set aside time in a meeting

where each member finds someone they don’t know as well. Each pair talks for

5-15 minutes. You come up with questions like how people got involved, what

inspires them or just have people talk for a while. It might not seem very

important but it can really help solidify the group over time. It can help new

members feel more welcome and valued and old members can share insights. It

also builds those relationships which sustain the movement in the long-term!

Be aware that romantic relationships can be a double-edged sword in activist groups. A couple can tie the group together and strengthen the group or can produce animosity and weaken the group as well.

Falling outs of any kind between friends or couples can be detrimental to the group. Try to find ways to mitigate personal

conflict within the group. You can try having a designated time every once in a while (or when it’s needed) to have “real talk”, a time

when people can bring up any tensions or concerns, be honest about them, and have the group try to resolve them.

One thing we did with a group once was meet on a

Friday night, have a potluck, sit around the fire, and give each person time to tell their story and why they do what they do. It was very important and transformatory to our

group. Being in a different setting can really change

the level of comfort people have with each other so

you might want to consider doing something like that.

Burnout: What it is and How to avoid it

Burnout is basically when you get exhausted from doing too much. It can be too much of an awesome thing, but still too much. It is really common in activism and in organizing and it can be really harmful to any group. With intense organizing or just with doing things we care about, it’s really easy to get sucked in and forget about, well, everything else. This can be really exciting, but it’s not sustainable and we end up wanting to curl up in our room and not talk to anyone. The good news is there are ways to avoid it, when we take into account balance and self-care. Here are some tips about that:

Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s okay to say “no” and not do everything. Don’t be consumed by organizing.

Find ways to unwind, make sure you’re doing things that you enjoy doing, even if you think you don’t have the time. Drink tea, do yoga, watch Netflix, whatever makes you happy.

As a group you can try and make time for more social activities. Watch a movie together, have a party, play a board game, do anything that’s not directly related to your campaign.

Make sure people have time and energy to do their schoolwork. You don’t want anyone failing out of school.

Sleep!

Take time off if you need it, and feel comfortable doing so (and having other people do so). It will be more harmful in the long run if you don’t take time off (for your well being and the group’s).

Communicate your needs to the group and try to support each other. Respect other people’s needs as well.

Keep an eye on people in your group. If you see someone getting too stressed out or exhausted, talk to them about burn out and make sure they are taking care of themselves. Make sure you let them know that it is ok to take a break! You may not notice how burnt out you are getting, but other people might.

Do NOT underestimate the effect that burnout can have! It is insidious and has happened in almost every group or campaign that we have been involved in. Be careful.

You can find a lot of info about this online (google “activist burnout”), here’s one link with some more info and resources:

bluestockingsmag.com/activist-burn-out-is-real/

A Personal Burnout Story:

During my Junior year at Clark I was a major organizer at Clark in many different clubs. I organized on average about one event every week and a half. I was taking some radical classes, learning a lot and working about 10 hours a week as well. I was getting a lot done and doing a lot of radical and cool things. BUT I was also extremely tense, stressed out and each week I got more and more exhausted than the one before. At the end of Junior year I had to get a job off-campus and I felt so sick of organizing and so burnt out that I wasn’t sure I could organize another event for a while. I decided to take the summer off from organizing and work off campus.

When the fall semester came, I still just did not have the strength to organize. I dropped most of my extra-curriculars and only organized one event in the fall semester. I felt like if I organized anything I would get sucked in and I would return to the place of stress and exhaustion that I had been in for my whole junior year (and also most of my sophomore year). My health had been poor over junior year and some of my relationships had deteriorated. I didn’t want to go back to that, I had been so burnt out by the end of that period of heavy organizing.

I ended up taking most of senior year off, which was very important for my personal health and sanity. I was also sad that I hadn’t taken better care of myself over those previous years so I could have organized in the long-term in a more sustainable way. I could have organized at a slower pace and organized over all my college years rather than organized so heavily for just a few years. Now I am getting back into organizing, but I am making sure that I take care of myself first. I am finding ways to balance organizing and my own health and wellbeing. I urge others to take on what they can but not to fall in so deep that their organizing will be unsustainable. In the end we are trying to create a better world, and that world depends on and should include happiness and healthiness for us and our fellow organizers.

Final Tips

Don’t become a boss. When one person or a small group of people start something, they can unintentionally create a hierarchy when the group grows. You don’t want to be anyone’s boss; organizing is about working together. Some people will naturally pick up more responsibilities and that’s fine, but you have to be careful and intentional so you don’t end up doing all the work or making all the decisions. Even if you’re using consensus (or even if you’re not), pay attention to the power dynamics. Are people looking at you (or someone else specific) when it’s time to make a decision? Do people listen to some voices more than others? Do some opinions count more? These are all potential problems and you want to work against them. Even though it might be tempting to just do everything yourself, remember that that’s not sustainable and not a way to yield collective power (which is what organizing is all about).

Think about capacity-building. You will focus most of your time and energy on whatever campaign you’re working on, but try to have some long-term plans if possible. In addition to what you read earlier about building the relationships in the group, there is also the issue of building up the skills of

individuals in the group. Your group will inevitably have disparities in organizing experience and skills. It’s easy to just let whoever is experienced do everything/almost everything, but it might be good to use this opportunity to let people gain experience and improve their organizing skills. Especially in a college setting it’s extremely important to involve different people from different ages; you need younger people to be involved if you want your groups to survive more than a year or two. Let people try out new things, and use the experienced people to guide the less experienced people; have an experienced person co-facilitate a meeting with a newer person, ask inexperienced members to do things like write emails or represent the group in meetings when possible. Small things like this will strengthen the whole group and make it more likely to last.

Be smart with your base. There might be a lot of people who are interested in hearing about what you do and even show up for bigger actions (like rallies), but people have very little patience and you can lose them pretty quickly. Don’t bombard them with emails, be strategic about the times you really want to communicate with them. Not too rarely (so they remember your group) but not too often (so they don’t get sick of you). Have two email lists, one for your base and one for general

organizing.

Be careful of “dialogues.” These can sound nice and are a very “Clarkie” thing, but in the context of organizing they are often just a way to neutralize the situation and waste your time and energy. It might sounds harsh but it’s the truth. If you’re working on a campaign that admins are not into, they will try to deter you from doing it, and creating a dialogue space where interested students can “feel like they’re being heard” could be a way of channeling the energy and interest to a non-threatening place, and then hoping people will be satisfied with that and stop organizing. Don’t let them trick you! You can go to their dialogues, but make sure they understand (and you understand) that you won’t be appeased so easily and that talking only goes so far.

Be careful of other common tricks. There are a lot of ways to distract you, keep you running in circles, and tiring you out, so be attentive. A common one is telling you that you have to talk to someone else about this (often someone who is not very available and maybe only comes to Clark a few times a year).. They might say you have to talk to this and that committee, to the board of trustees, to their superior, tell you they don’t have the power to do what you want them to do etc. It’s hard to avoid this kind of thing and often you just have to do what they say, just know that it’s often a way of wasting your time. Admin making a new committee for whatever issue you’re working on is also risky, since it’s often a way of taking it out of your hands and into theirs, and it can be a great way to slow down or even completely stop organizing around an issue.

Resources

Stone Soup (a local community center): stonesoupworcester.org

Activists United (Clark club): clarku.collegiatelink.net/organization/Activistsunited

The Worcester Roots Project: Community Organizing Resources: worcesterroots.org/community-organizing/

Dynamics of Organizing: tenant.net/Organize/orgdyn.html Organizing for Power, Organizing for Change (a lot of resources about different topics in organizing): organizingforpower.org/organizing-resources/

Clark Activists (a blog about activism at Clark, a place to post and find resources about organizing on campus): clarkactivists.wordpress.com/

Email us: clarkorganizingzine@gmail.com