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| The People’s Climate March in NYC on September 21, 2014 AP Photo/Jason DeCrow |
Community organizing can be a complex process. One can only imagine what it took to bring together nearly 400,000 people to march in New York City on September 21 to call attention to climate change. The impact of such actions can be huge. Environmentalist Bill McKibben called this People’s Climate March “the day the climate movement came of age.” Thousands of groups around the country organized their communities to make this demonstration happen. Each group now has to think about where their current strengths are, what they should do next, and how sustainable their organization is.
To assess an organization’s power and sustainability, it’s important to understand its readiness to engage and empower constituents. Individuals and groups at the grassroots level are critical to solving social problems through collective action, including through movements and coalition work, but leaders must ensure they have the resources and infrastructure to support these efforts.
Bolder Advocacy has a way to determine an organization’s ability to engage in organizing—PowerCheck: a tool for assessing community organizing capacity. This brand new, free tool makes it easy for nonprofits, evaluators, and funders to assess capacity to engage in community organizing, plan successfully, and track progress over time.
Does the organization quickly mobilize significant numbers of people for its actions? Does it have a leadership ladder through which constituents can take more and more responsibility for campaigns? Is the group widely known in the community it serves? These are some of the important questions community organizers must ask and PowerCheck asks them. In an hour or less, whether you are a new organizer or an organizing veteran, PowerCheck can show you where and how you can focus resources and what types of partnerships you can seek out to strengthen your work and move forward.
Bolder Advocacy also provides two companion tools that can enhance the effectiveness of PowerCheck:
- Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing (RECO): This tool is a compendium of resources related to evaluating community organizing. RECO connects you to case studies, tools and methodologies, and theoretical approaches to evaluation. This resource provides organizers with the latest examples and research of what is working and what is not in the practice of community organizing.
- Advocacy Capacity Tool (ACT): This tool allows organizations to benchmark their advocacy skills, identify specific gaps and opportunities in their advocacy strategies, and efficiently focus resources to get the best results. Knowing your own capacity to advocate successfully is important in helping empower constituents to do the same.
So, does your community organizing effort have what it takes? Check your power with our new PowerCheck tool!
The post Assessing People Power—PowerCheck: A new tool for community organizing appeared first on Bolder Advocacy.
