In our time interviewing past student activists and analyzing activist movements at Davidson, we’ve learned a lot about what’s effective in organizing and what can lead to movements falling apart. You can look below to read what we’ve learned!
Community Building
- The most important group of people in your organization are the newest members, the underclassmen, who’ll be here if and when people go abroad or graduate. Make sure to ABR (Always Be Recruiting), so that the movement will continue beyond one school year, or one semester.
- Reach out to established organizations, so that you can spread information using their tables at the semesterly Activities Fair
- Leverage social media to get the word out about events and meetings
- While recruitment is important, you need to go beyond just having people on an email list. There are a few ways that we’ve heard are good for getting people to invest in the movement beyond simply showing up for events:
- Having rotating facilitators – something that Divest Davidson did particularly well. For each meeting, there would be a different member in charge. They would have the task of checking in with everyone before the meeting to see how different tasks were being taken care of, they would create a schedule for the meeting and hold people accountable for sticking to the scheduled time for speaking, and they would run the actual meeting. This meant that everyone 1) learned how to have a semi-leadership position and 2) knew what was happening throughout the organization.
- Going on retreats – for Divest, it was a retreat in Black Mountain, North Carolina with a Davidson alum and activist. They were there for a weekend learning organizing strategies. However, you don’t have to go to a cabin in the mountains to get away from campus! A retreat can even mean spending an afternoon on lake campus, or at a cafe in Charlotte. It’s just important to 1) have people invest time into intentional meeting and organizing 2) give yourself space off campus and 3) have people brainstorming together – never underestimate what you can do if you’re all meeting in person!
- While you don’t need to be friends with everyone in your group, it’s important to build a community of trust where people know that when hard shit happens, you can turn to each other. Part of building this community is having fun events with each other outside of work-space, like parties or dinners.
- It is impossible to spend all of your time with the same group of people and still be able to separate the personal and work/activism. While you should have trust and community with the people in your organization, you must also build in time with people from outside of the group.
- It may seem like the work that you’re doing now is the most important work you are doing and while it’s true that this work is relevant and necessary, that doesn’t mean that you should give up everything for it. Build healthy boundaries in relation to your work and your fellow organizers. Practice intentional acts of self-care. Don’t forget that there is life after Davidson, that you should also be intentional about what you’re doing to build a future for yourself beyond your current organizing work. Hopeful futurity should ground your work.
- For an effective movement, it’s important to have students and activists who draw from a cross-section of the college. When you have both underclassmen and upperclassmen in an organization, you have to be aware of the power dynamics that can become prevalent if unchecked.
- No one should be above being held accountable for their actions, especially if they’re predatory, problematic, and harmful. Have a process for holding everyone, even leaders of the organization, accountable for their actions.
- Powerful movements need to have wide bases of support: always prioritize coalition building! There are a lot of organizations on your campus who are doing important things, probably some related to what you’re doing, and working in community and coalition with each other is much more powerful than being in competition with each other.
Organizational Structures
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Direct Action
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Navigating Administration
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