How might we analyze and leverage power?
Analyzing and leveraging power is a fundamental practice for shifting power to Black and indigenous communities.
“Organizing focuses on power: who has it, who doesn’t, and how to build enough of it to shift the power relationship and bring about change.”
Organizing: People, Power, Change
Sample Agenda for Analyzing and Leveraging Power
As you gather with your team or group, the agenda below can serve as a template that you are encouraged to refine and adapt to your needs.
1. Check-in:
- Review the Sources of Power document. - Write a short poem (haiku is one option - 5/7/5 syllables) about the power you hold - Share poems & reflections in small groups
2. Storytelling: Ask 2-3 people to share a story about how they have leveraged their power to create change.
3. Power mapping: Within teams or small groups of people who work together, use this power map template to map the power in your system and analyze how you might shift it toward the changes you're hoping to enact.
4. Share-out: Groups share with each other about what the power-mapping experience was like
If you have time, it can be valuable to organize folks around racial affinity spaces at this point to reflect on what role their identities play in their organizing efforts, and what they need from, or might offer to, other racial groups.
Resources
More resources for gatekeeping and networking
Networking
We recognize that the growth of a movement for social transformation requires networking – “building a net that works” (Ron Chisom). Networking means building principled relationships based on humane values. (PISAB)
RESOURCES
- Unstill Waters: The Fluid Role of Networks in Social Movements
- Networks & Change: What Are Networks?
- Catalyzing Networks for Social Change
- Network Structures Need Heart
- Creating Culture: Promising Practices of Successful Movement Networks
PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
Organizing is a fundamental approach for networking.
RESOURCES
- Organizing for Racial Justice History Timeline
- Everything worth doing is done with other people
- Revolution & Evolution (esp. from 46:00-50:45)
- From White Racist to White Anti-Racist
- Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
- I’ve got the light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle
- Uses of a Whirlwind
- The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century
- Consciousness-in-Action: Toward an Integral Psychology of Liberation & Transformation
- Anti-Racism in U.S. History
- Black Freedom Movements Then and Now: Organizing Traditions panel
PUTTING IT IN PRACTICE
Cross-Sector Alliance is a strategy for networking.
RESOURCES
Gatekeeping
Persons who work in institutions often function as gatekeepers to ensure that the institution perpetuates itself. The gatekeeper becomes an agent of institutional transformation by operating with anti-racist values and networking with those who share those values and maintain accountability in the community. (PISAB)
RESOURCES