How to change the world? Do you wonder how to get more people involved and taking action? How can a group organize its work effectively? And how do you build a campaign that not only achieves its goals, but also strengthens the group’s collective capacity to act?
On DSL’s Study Center’s Organize to Change the World – Leadership in Movements course, participants study organizing through Marshall Ganz’s five leadership practices: telling stories, building relationships, structuring teams, strategizing, and acting.
Organizing here means the long-term building of networks of relationships between people, while at the same time increasing the collective power of that community to create social change. Ganz’s thinking represents the tradition of community organizing, in contrast to forms of activism focused mainly on short-term mobilization.
Ganz’s teachings and this course focus on practical organizing work. Completing the course takes approximately eight hours per month, including meetings, assignments, and applying the lessons within one’s own community or organization. Sessions consist of exercises and discussions, and also provide a space for peer support. Because of their practical nature, the tools are useful whether you are active in an NGO, trade union, social movement, political party, or a smaller collective. The course material is the English-language guide Organizing: People, Power, Change (opens in a new tab).
The course consists of nine sessions covering the following topics:
- Organizing and course practices
- Leadership and the course project
- Theories of change, power, and utopias
- Stories move people
- Building relationships – How to conduct a one-on-one conversation
- Structuring teams through the snowflake model
- Strategizing – How to create a path to change
- Action built through strategic goals
- Coaching and conclusion
Application process for the course
- Learn more about the course content by reading: Leadership course lessons in practice – why are leadership and organizing needed?
- Fill in the registration form!
- After submitting the form, we will contact you within two weeks to arrange a 30-minute meeting with you.