What is Transformative Community Organising?

Transformative community organising combines two key practices: community organising, which builds the power to win change, and collective care, which sustains the people and relationships that make change possible.

We’ve learned from years of practice that this combination is what makes change last. Organising without care burns people out and fractures teams. Care without organising doesn’t shift power. Together, they build communities that can win – and keep winning.

Read Our Work to find out how we support people to organise.

Community organising

Community organising is a power-building methodology that develops leaders, builds collective power, and wins real change. It involves collective teamwork to identify shared resources and take strategic action, targeting those with power, to solve issues.

Organising starts with people with lived experience of an issue, building relationships and identifying leaders. Leaders bring people together who care about an issue, and the community decides how to turn the resources they have into what they need to win. Unlike campaigning, lobbying, or mobilising – which keep power with professionals or rally those who already agree – organising builds the power of the community itself: growing collective leadership across difference, so the work continues long into the future.

Because powerlessness is the source of so many of the problems people face, organising enables people to solve those problems and, by working together, become more powerful. Any single campaign victory is a comma in that journey, not a full stop.

Organising builds power in three ways:

• Developing leadership – people gain the skills, relationships and courage to work in uncertainty and make change happen. Power is being built when leadership is growing in a community.
• Building teams and strengthening organisation – individuals alone cannot sustain change. Change needs powerful, moral collectives that build solidarity and wield collective leadership.
• Winning material change – feeling more powerful is not the same as being more powerful. Organising wins real change, whether that is saving a local library or winning national rights for kinship carers.

Collective care

Collective care is the practice of sustaining people and relationships through the long work of change: navigating conflict, repairing relationships, fostering accountability and courage, and confronting the ways systemic oppression shows up inside groups as well as outside them.

Organising is done by people – people who get tired, disagree, carry trauma, and make mistakes. Without care, teams fracture, burn out, or quietly lose the people they most need. Collective care is what makes it possible for teams to stay together, work through difference, and keep organising for the long term.

Our collective care practice is built on four principles:

• Accessibility – working in ways that mean anyone, regardless of their needs and background, can organise.
• Anti-oppression – addressing systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, and ableism, and who gets to lead and hold power.
• Trauma-awareness – putting the belonging, safety, and dignity of the most marginalised at the centre of our work.
• Joy – ensuring care is not just about survival but about thriving together.

This matters because those with lived experience should be able to lead on the issues affecting them – and that requires care. It matters because communities are increasingly polarised, and working through differences to find common values and shared purpose takes method and courage. Collective care supports leaders and organisations to navigate tensions without fracturing – becoming more effective and sustainable as a result.

Learn transformative community organising

The best way to understand organising is to start practising it. We recommend every organiser starts with our introduction training. You can take our trainings as online courses on our Courses page, or as live workshops which you can find on our Events page.

If your group would like bespoke support, visit Work With Us.