Building Strong, Sustainable Movements: Rhize Foundational Training Curriculum
Movement-Building: Leadership, Strategy & Action
OVERVIEW
Over the last 2 years, Rhize has developed and piloted this innovative toolkit that is the only curriculum focused on sustainable movement-building. It is this methodology that sets Rhize apart.
This provides an overview of Rhize’s basic training, adapted for any group from 3-14 days. Additional trainings or more in-depth trainings are available, based on a group’s needs.
Central Goal: Through our trainings our central goal is to ensure leaders both realize more tangible, short-term successes and create lasting communities that can continue to play a role in what are often decade or generation-long struggles for change.
Supporting Goals:
1. Movement-Framework: Participants come to see their work as part of a greater, connected whole rather than one-off campaigns and to craft their strategy accordingly. Taking from learnings of historic social justice movements of the past and present, participants build a collective, larger vision for change and a DNA for their movement, including a Grand Strategy.
2. Leadership. Participants gain a new understanding of themselves as leaders and community organizers, acquiring the fundamental skills to implement leadership as a practice of enabling other leaders to take ownership over their community and take action around the pressing challenges they face. Participants create a community-building strategy with the ethic of passing the call to leadership to others in their community through action, creating a multiplying effect and improving leadership capacity.
3. Strategic Action. Building a community only works if you have ways to activate a community. Participants will learn how to create short-term campaigns that build active participation in their movement. The product of the workshop is an implementable campaign plan for them to bring back and launch in their communities.
CURRICULUM
Trainees learn critical skills through the development of a comprehensive strategy that includes an implementable action plan. The following is a breakdown of core modules in the Rhize curriculum:
Building Blocks of Social Movements
Value of a Movement-Building Approach
This module explains the history of social justice movements and how they have been the most successful and powerful forces for progress (more so than violent conflict) over the last 100 years and talks about how to use lessons from these movements for any initiative.
Anatomy of a Social Movement
To understand how to build an effective social justice movement, participants must first understand all of its key components and have a clear understanding of what they are working towards. This module introduces community as the foundation of effective social movements and the core components of an activated community that makes movements successful. We also distinguish between change, transformation and transformational change, the latter of which is integrated into the rest of the training.
Building Intersectional Change
Here we explore looking at societal problems through systems thinking, which looks at how to get at root causes of injustice rather than manifestations of it. Participants will learn the core theory behind fundamentally transforming the structural barriers that enable injustice. Intersectionality helps to lay the foundation for participants to think of themselves and their communities as part of larger systems of power in order to further understanding of the contexts in which they live and work to change. We explore the rules that we often inadvertently live by so that we may rewrite the rules we would prefer to follow and come to understand each other more fully in the process. In this process, they work to intentionally build a movement (or organization) that reflects the world they want to build – ingraining cultures of inclusivity (of gender, race, religion) into their work.
Movement Strategy Development
Creating a Vision & Meta-Narrative
Every movement needs an overarching vision that defines success for the movement. It could be equal rights under the law, freedom to self-govern, right to own and cultivate land, access to public spaces, the safety and security to walk down the street at night. A vision is lofty but tangible goal that shapes the movement and gives people a sense of purpose bigger than themselves or any one action that they take, and it ensures people continue to participate in the movement. The meta-narrative is a way to talk publicly about the vision in a way that inspires and activates others.
Creating a Group Identity – Movement DNA
It is important that the culture of any organization is transparent and clearly communicated from the beginning. For a group to be successful, the organizational culture needs to be strong and quickly understood. Having a clear DNA, a form of ground rules and norms, that defines the core values and principles of the group enables more people to take ownership of the problem they are trying to solve in dynamic and diverse ways.
Movement Structure & Purpose
Every group must make key decisions about the way their movement should be structured to ensure maximum impact. Each movement, depending on context, looks slightly different, but they all have answered questions such as (1) Who is a leader and how are they accountable? (2) Who can join and who can’t? (3) What is the purpose of the organization, and what is not? (4) Can people be paid, and how? (5) How does the organization relate to other organizations that might compete with it for attention or resources?
Pillars of Society & Phases
There is rarely a silver bullet or one type of institutional change that will ensure people obtain their rights or freedoms. Many pillars of society (education, culture, government, law, media, etc.) uphold that status quo. Here, we examine the most important pillars working against the movement’s goals and the ones most positioned to change. Through this process, we can also determine more tangible goals of the movement and how to sequence obtaining those goals.
Theory of Change
Shifting from a focus on leadership and community to strategy, knowing how to create an effective theory of change underlies the success of every campaign and action in the movement. Creating clear action-to-impact statements, participants learn how to ensure their strategies of action link to their vision and goals.
Understanding a Grand Strategy
A Grand Strategy makes sure that everyone has the same basic theory of change, the same basic objective and the same basic method to achieve it. A mutual understanding of the Grand Strategy provides activists with a common basis to evaluate the past and set the course for the future.
Leadership
Leadership 101: Building & Using Power
Leadership is defined by Marshall Ganz as “Taking responsibility to enable others to achieve purpose in the face of uncertainty.” In this module participants learn how empowering leadership serves as the foundation of all effective movements and begin to see themselves as organizers—people who lead from behind and enable others to join them.
Motivation & Public Narrative: Story of Self, Us, Now
The ability to tell stories serve as a key skill to motivate others and move them to action. In this half-day module, participants learn the art of public narrative as a means to tell their own stories of leadership as a means to motivate others to join them. This also serves as a key team-building exercise so participants can get to know one another.
Recruitment 101: Building Commitment, Forging Relationships
As a first step in building an effective team, participants learn to make asks of people in their community to join them in their activism. Participants practice making difficult asks of people and inviting new people into their work. This also serves as a key team-building exercise.
Building Effective Team Structures
Movements are driven by effective leadership within the context of effective teams. Teams can look and be structured a number of different ways, but they all must have clear roles, decision-making processes, norms, and diversity in perspective and skills. In this module, participants talk with each other about the way they would like to work together and help develop teams throughout their movement. Participants begin to map their core leadership teams as well as their second layer of leadership. They discuss the value of centralized versus decentralized teams and how to structure teams throughout their movement.
Facilitation
Participants will practice fundamental facilitation skills to run meetings, engage communities and run trainings.
Building Power: Organizing for Action
Community Asset Mapping & Coalition-Building
Participants break up into teams and work to map their respective communities for otherwise invisible resources in places like physical infrastructure, organizations, government, and formal and informal leaders. Through this process, they begin to identify their allies or potential allies and get a broader sense of all of the resources – tangible and intangible – that they have at their disposal to build their movement.
Understanding Models of Power
Making the distinction between monolithic leadership and pluralistic leadership structures, participants learn the mechanics of building people-powered movements where people, rather than formal leaders are the driving force for change. Here, participants map the key pillars of power that currently uphold the power structures that support the injustices they are fighting against.
Active Popular Support
Diving deeper into the concept of pluralistic power, we look at how to take their issue from a marginalized issue to one widely adopted throughout their targeted communities and society. Participants will map where support currently exists for their movement and where they must target to gain ground.
Using Power: Creating Campaign Strategies for Tangible Results
Mapping Campaigns to Grand Strategy
Key to every movement is a grand strategy that maps different levels of theory of change from a grand strategic objective to campaigns and tactics. Participants begin to bring elements of the training together to map this strategy into clear short and medium-term goals and objectives. (Ideally, much of this work is done by a core group of leaders ahead of the training.)
Campaigning 101: Defining campaigns vs actions
Here we begin to make the broader strategy more tangible through a clear understanding of clear distinctions between movements, campaigns, and actions. Here we also introduce the concept of the commitment curve—how to build different levels of actions into strategies in order to create pathways for more people to join your work.
Crisitunity: Crisis + Opportunity
Every campaign first starts with a crisis that organizers are able to turn into opportunities for action and change. Here we practice coming up with different, immediate crises facing communities within the context of the broader issue and brainstorming opportunities for change.
Campaign Theory of Change
Developing a clear theory of change for campaigns can be a technical but artful exercise. Through this half-day module participants begin to craft campaign strategies that map directly back to the grand strategy.
Campaign Action Plan Development
Participants use their theories of change to come up with a comprehensive campaign strategy for a launch campaign that bring the core elements of the training together: community-building, grand strategy, and campaigning
Communicating Your Strategy
Message Development: From meta-narrative to tactical messaging
Effective messaging is key to being able to recruit new leaders and articulate the goal of the movement and campaign. Participants come up with their core messaging points and then create more tactical messaging, based on their strategies while taking into consideration channels, targets, goals, audience and tactics.
Introduction to Digital Engagement
Digital engagement has become increasingly important in mobilizing large numbers of people and building activated communities. Participants learn key strategies for building digital communities, based on the technology available to their target audiences. This is a foundation for more in-depth trainings for digital coordinators.
Mass Training Strategy
Mass training is the most effective ways of scaling your work both quickly and with quality. We begin to address the fundamentals of building mass trainings into the engagement curve of the broader, grand strategy and define clear next steps to for participants to engage broader audiences.
Next Steps & Follow Through
Participants will agree on key next steps and make commitments to each other and to their communities. With this, we tie together the grand strategy, understand the role of different campaigns and set goals together as a group.
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