Introduction to Community Organising

This course is brought to you by One Future Collective. One Future Collective is a feminist social purpose organisation with a vision of a world built on social justice, led by communities of care. We fight for each person’s right to live a life of safety, dignity, and belongingness by catalysing people’s power and building just institutions.

Have you ever heard the phrase ‘community organising’? When communities organise, they can achieve great things! But what does it mean for communities to organise effectively? What are they organising for? What is their locus? Who leads them? What are their values? How do they know they’ve succeeded? In this course, we will try and unpack what community organising is, and situate it within the practice of feminist leadership, and as a means to achieve social justice.

This course is designed to define community organising and offer key frameworks of practicising it. We will root it as a feminist practice related to building power and also distinguish it from mobilising. Finally, this course hopes to bring a few key learnings from the field for you to take a closer look at community organising in various social contexts.

Through this course, participants will:

• Learn about community organising as a practical tool of social justice.
• Understand models of community organising.
• Identify the key features that distinguish community organising from mobilising and how to incorporate feminist leadership into organising practice.
• Engage with the practice of building power through organising.
• Learn the practical tool of the five organising questions.

We hope you enjoy the course!