Movement Building Requires Tolerance

For the global justice movement to continue growing it needs to evolve ways of involving larger numbers of people in useful but non-core activities that allow them to build their confidence and organisational skills.

Movement Building Requires Tolerance
Danyl Strype

Working in nonprofit consensus groups, as well as the obvious benefits to the wider community, can be a rich personal growth opportunity for the volunteers involved. Compared to fulltime campaigners, new volunteers will always seem to lack personal organisation skills and sometimes even experienced activists can be tagged with a reputation for unreliability.

I believe this is a reflection of the negative stigma attached to inability to work in our society and a resulting nervousness about returning to an activity (whether paid or voluntary) after a breakdown. This especially affects mentally-ill people whose self-esteem is already suffering. I know many mentally ill people that make immeasurable contributions to voluntary organisations. I am one of them. The reason we prefer voluntary work is that we can be casual helpers and if we freak out or burn out we can reduce our commitment, then return and take on new tasks when we have recovered.

The problem, in my experience, is that voluntary groups usually coalesce around a core group, usually composed of fulltime activists who can tend to under-appreciate other people's commitments (study, work, family etc) and the general chaos of life that can prevent even the most sincerely-committed of people from finishing a task on time. Thus core people often get frustrated with us casual helpers and our unreliability. This can result in an attitude that says it is less effort to exclude casual helpers and have the core group do everything. While this is understandable, it results in a stagnant in-group that quickly loses touch with its support base in the wider community and expends far more energy trying to re-establish that connection than would be lost being more tolerant of people's foibles in the first place.

Many activists bemoan the core group/ casual helper division, believing that anyone involved in a group should have equal authority and responsibility. While this view arises out of laudable egalitarianism sentiments it creates an all-or-nothing approach to group involvement and an expectation that volunteers will either commit their full energy to the group or none at all. Further to the problems mentioned above, this attitude also results in an vicious cycle of exclusion as the workload for each group member and thus the expected level of involvement gets continually higher.

The solution as I see it is to accept the reality that any group with a well-defined project has a number of tasks that MUST be completed regularly and reliably. These tasks must be defined and assigned to a core group who know they have the time and energy to commit to them. Then there are tasks that can be carried out simultaneously by a number of people not necessarily in close contact with the core group. Tasks that if left unfinished can be picked up or restarted by other helpers without significant disruption to the group project.

To use Aotearoa Indymedia as an example we can see a number of levels. Tasks associated with hosting and maintenance of the website need to be done and fairly promptly. Other jobs like newswire clerking and feature writing are also fairly crucial to the usefulness of the site and because they require admin passwords need to be limited to trusted volunteers. However they can be carried out in a more scattered or distributed way than core maintenance. At the other extreme is writing articles, taking photos etc and posting this media to the newswire. This can be done by anyone at any time without the volunteers involved being known to the core group.

Through this organisational process we flatten the pyramid power-structure endemic to corporations, nation-states, traditional political parties etc. In the pyramid model the decision-making power concentrates at the top and the responsibility for actually carrying out the work of the organisation sinks to the bottom. In our