Basics At Protests

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What you’ll find with a lot of these early topics that we’re covering, we did talk about direct action. It’s just one of those initial spokes. More than anything, it’s just important that you can talk to others, share your ideas, go in front of people and talk to them about it and join in coordination with other people who feel the same way. This is like the last piece of that puzzle because we’re talking all about tactics at I want you guys to understand mobilization and also understand some of the dynamics that you are likely to face while protesting. When it comes to direct action, you will often be in situations where you need to improvise. Anything that involves so many human beings standing together at once means that the situation can change very quickly and you might have to just completely adapt. In this kind of … Read more

Mobilizing

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We talked earlier about trigger events. I want to go from trigger events to this broader idea of mobilizing. You know, when a trigger event happens, something happens in the news that I can’t predict in a recorded conversation, right? And there’s. There’s just a lot of energy. Mobilizing people and taking advantage of that is a big and important step. When you are making noise and demanding attention, that is powerful.

But however, as powerful as that kind of one off mobilizing can be, it is only the beginning. If we want that to last, we need to move from mobilizing to organizing. And the book no Shortcuts, Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age discusses this in depth. When we talk about mobilizing, we’re talking about energy. We’re marching at City hall, chanting in the streets, rallying around a cause. You’re handing out a petition. This is … Read more

Community Flyers

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Yo, let’s talk about flyers. Physical collateral. If you have something that you can put in someone’s hand, it’s just a great way to command their attention, make them think, make them take action, make them join. Now for us, we have flyers and we put them a lot of places about regular issues. You can literally see we have a pre made flyer that you as a member you can make, you can edit, whatever, but we have like defaults for campaigns so that when you have something like a landing page, there’s something that people can scan and they can go and like actually interact with it right away. And this is something that you may learn to use as you make your own organization one day, right, or you work on your own local issues. So there are lots of places that you can put your flyers … Read more

The Rent Is Too Damn High

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Okay, so this is a map of the city. At Mosaic, we use something called a power map that helps us understand the people and places in our community and how they help us do the mission. And you can think of this as like working on an election that does not end. We look at different locations, and we sort them by how connected they are with us. Do they know who we are? Do they like who we are? Are they a part of our community?

Are they members? Are they serving on some kind of committee? This map helps us figure out where we have influence and where we need to build more connections. Obviously, the city is a large place. I mean, you can look at a map of the city and say, oh, I’m way over here, or I’m not here, or, you know, there’s … Read more

Welcome to the Incubator

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So if you’re here and you’re reading this, I’m just glad this is an incubator for community organizers. We talk about direct action, outreach and publishing as a three part system to build power and drive impact. If you are fired about up about doing that for yourself or your neighborhood, that’s very good. You know, Atlanta has what’s marketed as a long history of pushing for justice. But we also have, I mean a lot of that is marketing. We, we also have a long history of jaw dropping corruption, just like any major city. So being a part of that is important.

The way the world is right now is enough to motivate anybody. And if you’re using that motivation to show up in the lives of the people around you, in your neighborhood, in your city, in your trade, that’s very powerful because not everybody gets that … Read more