Lev radin/Shutterstock
Is there a difference between advocacy and organizing? While researching our new brief on Midwest Academy, sources told us that the answer is “yes.”
“[A] lot of people think that organizing is more advocacy work, but they don’t know how to really show power in order to get their demands met, and what that means and what that looks like,” said Arista Burwell-Chen, organizing director of the Seattle-area group FEEST. “I think a lot of people think that they’re organizing, but they’re actually great activists and advocates. And when they don’t win their demands, it’s because they haven’t learned how to mobilize the base, how to build power, and actually escalate pressure on decision-makers so that we can have systemic change for the things that we need.”
Burwell-Chen wasn’t the only source who told us that one of the benefits of working with Midwest Academy is that the academy, which trains activists, stresses the difference between advocacy and organizing. With their words in mind, we had to wonder: If even some of the people working on progressive issues are confused about these tactics—to the extent that they’re using the wrong one and even losing battles—what do small and mid-sized donors need to know about them, particularly when deciding how best to target their giving? Here’s what we found.
From the bottom up
Organizing is the process of building power from the bottom up, according to Dr. Michael Fabricant. Organizing focuses on marshaling the latent power within communities most directly affected by a law, policy, or economic crisis. according to Dr. Michael Fabricant.
Fabricant has deep roots in this work: He is a professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work, an activist, advocate and organizer focused on issues of housing and homelessness who has previously served as a board member and principal officer of the National Coalition for the Homeless.
“Ultimately,” Fabricant said, organizing is about “the folks who are affected by the problem leading and being at the center of campaign[s] for change around problems that they define as priorities.”
The power being built, Fabricant told Blue Tent, isn’t based on money or professional expertise. Rather, “It’s power really based on the people living (or working) in or near the communities most affected by the issues that are being raised.”
Advocacy, on the other hand, is usually the purview of professionals—policy experts, lobbyists, lawyers who work within an existing power structure, whether Congress, the White House, regulatory agencies, or in courts—to change existing laws.
The limits of advocacy
Advocacy is a critical tool, but it doesn’t build the kind of lasting power or shift power dynamics in the ways organizing is intended to achieve. Real power is only leveraged when an entire community of affected people and their allies are the ones whose voices are front and center—and the ones who continue the fight, from meetings to protests to the ballot box, until they win the changes they’re seeking. And when a law or policy is changed, organizers stay involved to hold officials accountable for following through on that change.
As a general rule, advocacy done well can generate headlines and potentially win single battles, as when attorneys successfully battled for full legal recognition of equal marriage rights for same-sex couples before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2015. Effective organizing, on the other hand, has been the key to winning battles on everything from statewide campaigns to raise the minimum wage to the 2020 Georgia U.S. Senate victories.
This isn’t to say that advocacy is akin to the red-headed stepchild of social change. In fact, advocacy and organizing are often used together. In New Jersey, for example, Fabricant worked alongside attorneys fighting for emergency assistance and sheltering rights. While the attorneys fought in court, Fabricant and others organized both homeless individuals and stably housed people at risk for housing insecurity so that they could push for lasting change on the issues affecting all of them. After the attorneys moved on to other cases, the newly organized community groups kept up the fight.
A checklist for donors
There is no simple checklist donors can use to determine whether an organization prioritizes organizing, Fabricant said. Key indicators, though, include whether or not individuals directly affected by the issues hold leadership positions, choose the organization’s priorities and strategies, decide what research is pursued and how that research is conducted, and are the people who call for, conduct, and lead meetings. Further, donors should evaluate whether or not the organization is actively engaged in leadership development work to find, recruit, train and develop as many affected people as possible to take on leadership roles.
“I’m not going to romanticize [organizing],” Fabricant said, “it is very hard, difficult work.” But that work, when done well, not only wins victories—it sets the stage for winning even greater victories down the road.