Practice #6
Connect to a Broader Movement Ecosystem
Build strong organizational connections with other groups, healers, and resources to strengthen our movement ecosystem. Be clear about how these connections grow strategy and support staff and members to widen their knowledge and sense of belonging.
Belonging is a nested system, and needs to exist at multiple levels. Organizations cannot be expected to fulfill every need. Instead, anticipate the needs that the organization cannot meet, and find substantive resources where people can meet those needs. Expand people’s understanding of where they can go for resources, connection, and purpose. Encourage everyone in the organization to ground in a vision of justice that goes beyond any one space.
Risk
When members aren’t connected to resources and work in a wider ecosystem, they can stake all of their needs in one organization. Their involvement in ‘movement work’ can be conflated with their involvement in the organization, heightening the stress of conflict or mismatched expectations. If our work stays in silos, we miss valuable opportunities to strengthen our power and capacity.
Opportunity
When we effectively connect with healers, social hubs, and other groups, members will be better resourced and can carry a wider vision. People who have found belonging in different relationships, spaces, or communities don’t cling to belonging permanence, and can adapt to change over time. Ruptures or separations in our organization won’t mean fatalism, but instead opportunity for exchange and further growth.
Challenge
Social movement organizations are subject to external and internal pressures to focus on our own particular issue area and constituency. Demands from foundations and funders emphasize individual organizational progress and growth. Organization building overtakes resource sharing and collaboration, and purity politics halts potential partnership. Dogmatic politics and reductionist ‘all-or-nothing’ tactics have left people working in isolation if they cannot fit neatly into one space.
Individuals feel and feed this pressure too. With less time outside of paid work and a declining social infrastructure, many people come to spaces wanting multiple needs to be met at once. Untangling overwhelming strain on organizations to be everything will take intention, patience, and clear bridge building. We must actively encourage our members to live full lives outside of our own groups. We must recognize what our organizations cannot do, and find the people who are doing it well, even–and especially when–it isn’t our predisposition.
This work of connection must happen consistently, in recognition of the natural fluidity of people entering and leaving roles and spaces.
Assessment Questions
Do you know of resources, organizations, and people that can help meet the needs of members when those needs are outside of the scope of your work?
Can members of the organization identify other meaningful places of their own belonging?
Are there opportunities to exchange, learn, and build relationships with people from other organizations? Are these opportunities available to people at different levels of involvement?
Implementation
Assess the common needs of the membership–such as housing, mental healthcare, trauma support, job preparedness–and proactively find resources to meet those needs.
Encourage people to reflect on how they get their belonging needs met at different levels, and celebrate their work towards nested belonging. How do they belong to themselves? What relationships or communities do they belong to? What movements, values, or ideas do they belong to? What histories do they belong to?
Build ongoing relationships with other organizations, groups, and healers that can assist the community during acute crises or with ongoing needs. Resource and sustain those relationships often. Make these relationships known throughout the organization.
Provide opportunities to situate the organization within a larger lineage and ecosystem. Ensure people across the organization can study how the work compliments, compares, and flanks other organizations in the past and present.
Create a position or group in the organization that can regularly research additional resources, and act as a connector to the membership.
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