Threads Module 2: Community Organizing

Thank you for cooking with us at the March 5 Southern Beyond Survival workshop about Community Organizing. The recipes y’all were sharing for community building, investigate and educate, and collective action are contributing to our collective cookbook of knowledge around our organizing and movement building work.

Thanks to the time we spent together in our shared kitchen, we are all a little more equipped, a little more knowledgeable, our recipe books are fuller, and we’ve all got some interesting recipes and experiments to try out in our communities!

We encourage you to keep sharing these morsels with your folks and keep trying out and putting into practice these tools and approaches.

If you were there, we would really appreciate your taking three minutes to complete the evaluation survey, so we can really serve up some useful and delicious.

Resources from the workshop on Community Organizing:

• English Slides (activity slides have been added in to this presentation)

• Spanish slides

• English Recording (use this link if you need AI-generated captions)

• Spanish Recording

Go Deeper on Community Organizing:

• Jemez Principles of Democratic Organizing 

  • People of Color Environmental Justice Principles from 1991 Summit (these preceded the Jemez Principles)

• Southern Echo, who taught us the four principles of community organizing, among many other things

• Highlander Methodologies One-pagers English & Spanish – includes Cultural Organizing

• Cultural Organizing Triad

• People’s Movement Assembly Handbook, Planning Worksheet, and Agenda Template

• Principled Struggle Agreements

• Problem Tree root cause and issue analysis exercise

• Community Mapping Worksheet, part of Highlander’s Economics and Governance curriculum

• SCOPE Power Analysis Grid

• Campaign Planning Exercise

• We Are All Leaders,” BeautifulTrouble.org 

• Building Powerful Community Organizations book and especially chapter 11

• Narrative Strategy from National Domestic Workers Alliance

• Midwest Academy Strategy Chart

• Tactic Star tool for planning and evaluating campaign tactics

• Action Plan Template to divvy up responsibilities

• Join the Southern Movement Assembly at southtosouth.org

Let us know if there is a resource you want but don’t see listed here, or if you have a resource to add to this library.

Workshops Comin’ Up:

We request the pleasure of your comp’ny at all of the Threads Workshops. The Threads workshops constitute a baseline, and we will be asking folks to attend or watch the recordings before applying to join us in program offerings that provide deeper accompaniment. Visit the Threads Workshop webpage for all the updated registration links, dates, as well as recordings and resources from workshops celebrating Highlander’s 90th year.

• March 31, 7pm to 9:30pm ET:  Southern Beyond Survival: From Racial Capitalism to Solidarity Economy – Register

• April 20, 7pm to 9:30pm ET: Community Governance 

• May – Thriving Groups 

• Also, Southern Movement Assembly’s Hot D.A.M. study group on Mutual Aid – registration opens in April.

Yours in the people’s kitchen,

Ayana, David, April and Denzel