The Organizing Mindset

You can learn everything you need to start organizing in the real world in less than 5 minutes.

Why organize?

(Take a deep breath. Remember, this will only take 5 minutes. You got this.)

Mobilizing treats people as participants for a single task, while organizing treats people as leaders who can grow into long-term power.

The progressive movement can mobilize millions for street protests like No Kings, which are a powerful way to show strength, but don’t create lasting change on their own. The energy that brings people out to demonstrations quickly fades, because we don’t have the systems in place to keep people engaged long term.

A more concrete example of mobilizing vs. organizing can be found in community service programs, like food distributions. People show up, volunteer for a day, and leave. Imagine if those service projects become a way to identify leaders, build relationships, and start fixing the root causes that brought people to the food line in the first place — that’s organizing.

Organizing is about turning “regular” people into movement leaders. We must always give people a clear path to deepen their involvement and build their sense of ownership over the movement.

If we want to win, we must start organizing.

What is organizing?

At its core, organizing is about building strong relationships to build power.

Core Concepts

  • You’ve probably had the experience of trying to explain an issue you care deeply about, only to watch the other person’s eyes glaze over. Are they a bad person? Usually, the answer is no. You just haven’t been speaking to their self-interest.

    Self-interest is what makes an issue “click” for someone, because it connects directly to their own life.

    But you can’t find someone’s self interest unless they tell you (or you guess, which is a recipe for disaster). This is where 1 on 1s come in.

  • A 1 on 1 is just a conversation between you and another person, with the purpose of really understanding them; what do they value, what frustrates them, what gives them hope, and where have they taken risks before.

    You ask open-ended questions, and listen more than you talk. What brought them to this campus, this job, this community? When did they feel powerful, and when did they feel powerless? What’s making them angry enough to want change?

    When you uncover those motivations, you’ve found their self-interest — the entry point for organizing. Once you can connect their story to a bigger fight, they’ll be in it for the long haul.

Now what?

Start applying the concepts.

Organizing can’t be learned alone. Join one of our calls and kickstart your organizing journey!

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Every other week, we host a space for you to practice the critical skill of 1 on 1s and take the first step towards organizing in the real world.

If you’ve ever thought “Someone should really do something about this,” this is your invitation: you are that someone. None of us ever feel “fully ready.” Organizers learn by trying, stumbling, and trying again. What matters most is simply taking that first step.

Want to keep learning?

You now understand the organizing mindset, but of course there’s more to it.

Once you build relationships with people, you have to use them to actually do something. That’s the tactical part of organizing.

We’re working on streamlining resources for you to continue building your knowledge. For now, we’ve included a list of resources that we think are a pretty good place to start (ordered from least to most time required).

  1. Fundamentals of Organizing Podcast (the Fundamentals of Community Organizing episode)

  2. Fundamentals of Organizing Toolkit (for a more step by step look at organizing)

  3. Commons Library: Organizing (for any organizing info you could possibly want)