Finding Your People – Lessons from Harvard

In organising, it is imperative to know who your people are. Your campaign will not be effective without a clear ‘who’ and the work will have no future. The ‘who’ are the people you are going to work with in a real way. Marshall Ganz calls this your consituency, or for folks who work with Act Build Change, your ‘leadership team’.

This blog series explores the core lessons that emerged from working with students grappling with the basics of knowing who their people are and building power together, all while navigating an authoritarian political climate. These students worked hard and dug deep. I am a better organiser because of learning with them through their commitment. 

The challenges our students faced mirrored many of the struggles I see in organising work across the UK. We get stuck on the same fundamental questions: Why is it so hard to let go of control and bring people into real leadership? What transforms a group of individuals into a team capable of winning? How do we move beyond the issue-based silos that dominate our sector to build the broad movements our democracy desperately needs?

These lessons are for anyone who believes that ordinary people, working together, can shape the world around them. Because ultimately, that's what democracy is – and right now, we need as much practice as we can get.

Values before issue

The most important question in organising isn't 'what is your issue?', it’s 'who are your people?' This is counter-cultural. Our charity sector in the UK is dominated by issues – you're 'the housing person' or 'the environmental person'. But human beings aren't categories. We care about many things simultaneously, rooted in what we value: belonging, love, freedom, safety, dignity. By squeezing complexity into issue-based silos, we struggle to build the broad movements our democracy needs.

What I love about working at Harvard and Stanford is seeing people form teams based on shared values, not issues. At Stanford – led by Toni Kokenis, one of the finest organising educators I have had the privilege to work with – I watched unlikely individuals collaborate. This included a woman mathematician from India, a political environmentalist from the US, and an American football player, working together on environmental justice because valuing nature and place all mattered to them. The specific issue they would work on, would come later. What first looked like potential division became diversity – a loving respect for what makes us different and an appreciation for the strength this brings. This team was able to create bold, creative and surprising campaign strategies because they had diverse opinions and could pool them together to make a stronger whole. 

At Harvard, this process was both rich and playful. Students first listened to each others’ narratives – what has called them into leadership. We crafted the weekend courseshops to ensure as many stories could be heard and that students could have one-to-one conversations afterwards. On the final day students had to decide their teams. Hats, wigs, music and a yak bell all came into the mix to encourage people to build teams of no less than three people and no more than six. Humour, lightness and silly competition is all part of making meaning in the classroom. We want to build serious relationships but we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously. 

Sometimes there is a fear that one student will be struggling solo – that horrible feeling of being the last to be picked in school sports – but when you have spent time sharing stories with each other, the opposite happens. It becomes more challenging to choose which team to join because you have spent time really getting to know everyone and you do not want to leave anyone in the room behind. 

Discovering your people

The job of organisers is to build a constituency committed to one another. This provides resources to build power and a future. These are people you have one-to-one conversations with, who take on responsibilities, communicate and are accountable to each other. 

How do you discover who your people are?

We do this through one-to-ones which start by listening and understanding what drives people and yourself. What brings you pain and hope? What can each person contribute? What do you collectively value?

The student teams at Harvard that didn't invest in one-to-one relationships, had gatekeepers instead of leaders, or relied solely on friendships, saw their campaigns flounder. Those that built authentic relationships – whether they won or not – created leadership structures with future potential. I will dig deeper into the nuts and bolts of measuring power from our class in future posts in this series. 

Those that did win campaigns did so because they took who their people were seriously. A student wrote to us recently, three months on from the course ending. Her team still exists, they are still invested in their housing justice work in Boston and, as importantly, are still committed to each other. It mattered to them, not because this was a course, but because they valued each other's potential and wanted to see real change in the world.

What struck me was that the teams that truly knew their people made real strides compared to those that didn't. It sounds obvious but being obvious doesn’t mean it is easy.

This isn't unique to the course. I see this frequently with groups I work with and presently with the counter demonstration groups working in the UK. Some claim relationships with people they do not know – speaking on behalf of others or hoping that claiming a connection might make it real. I hear consistently that, ‘this community can not do that’ – without asking anyone in the community what they think. Or, ‘we must take direct action’, often on behalf of others without any desire to build belonging and leadership with people from the community who are affected. When probed, groups have often made no real attempt to get to know the people they make such claims about. Capacity is often the reason given but I am not always convinced. If you can rally 150 people to stand outside of a building (which is no easy feat), you can make time for one-to-ones. It’s how you choose to spend your time. These folks are well meaning people and I have also been a part of such action. In moments of not knowing how best to contribute and wanting to show resistance, we mobilise. But often we are not thinking thoughtfully enough to turn that flash of mobilising into sustained power. For some people involved that is not what they want to do, they want to centre their anger and agency above committing time to those genuinely affected.

Another tension that showed up in class was that some weren't satisfied with who they were working with but lacked the legitimacy to work with groups they preferred. So they neither built their base nor grew into new communities. Students would say, ‘our people are high school students’, but had no real relationship with them. The relationship they did have was with teachers, but that did not feel significant or ‘real’ enough perhaps. You might genuinely want to work with young people but if you're actually working with teachers, your constituency is teachers. Your work can benefit young people but they're not your constituency. That doesn't diminish your work – it brings clarity. Without that clarity, you can't organise.

Students often confuse their people with gatekeepers – those who control access to your real constituency. They'd claim professors as part of their leadership team when actually they'd only borrowed a lecture theatre or received advice. A professor becomes part of your constituency only when they make real commitments to drive your shared goal forward. Otherwise, they remain a gatekeeper, or a useful ally to influence, but not your organising base.

In the UK, I see this pattern repeatedly. People claim relationships but refer to subscription lists or event attendees without follow-up, or are a solo influencing operation. There's often a desire for certain folks to be ‘their people’. For example, children of an estate when they're actually working with parents. Or we call it a team but it’s more of a random network of people that is yet to be fully functioning. This feels insufficient or too vulnerable to admit, so they claim a constituency that is more fantasy than reality, kidding themselves and undermining their real potential.

Why are we scared of commitment?

The engine of our power is organised people. Individually, we may move fast but we cannot take on big things or even know what the big thing could be. Together, we get more done and therefore – I need you and you need me. We have to become committed to each other. Sometimes we don’t ask people to take on real responsibility because we fear we will lose control. That if we share power, it will have too much risk. The students who called on others to act were able to have actions that had real potential. Sure there were nerves – what if people didn’t show up? But their trust in others meant their actions were bigger than what four or five people could have brought together alone. 

Inviting people to learn and act with dignity in democracy requires making asks. When I asked one student team why their constituency wasn't growing, a student responded, ‘I don't want to impose my will on someone else.’ Another didn't want to burden already-stressed students. This sounds caring but is often patronising. It also doesn’t help us build anything. 

There are two fundamentals of organising: believe people can make their own decisions and don't do for others what they can do for themselves. This does not mean we pretend oppressive power dynamics do not exist – that racism, ableism, misogyny does not exist. They are significant forces. What it does mean, however, is that we centre people's agency. Reinforcing people’s victimhood and taking away their choices is not caring – I find it the opposite.

Everyone has to make those choices and none of that – I stress none of that – is easy. But we have to be so careful of speaking on behalf of what people can commit to. 

Most of us understand this theoretically, but in practice we often stumble. In organising, our role is supporting people to act collectively on what matters to them. Without commitment formed, you don't have a strategy to organise from. Strategy flows from the level of commitment we have to each other and our goals. Discovering what each person can bring (time, skills, people) forms the foundations of what can become effective teams and movements. 

People can be scared to invite others into commitment to a shared goal because that means they'll have to take action themselves. And what if it goes nowhere? Or gets hard? Or worse – people might say no, or that your strategy doesn’t make sense. For those of us who personalise the work, this feels like personal rejection or irritation because we think we have the answers.

Relationships involve risk, including rejection and tension. But making an ask shouldn't be about pressuring someone. The work isn't about controlling outcomes, it's about creating conditions where people can step into their own power and make choices aligned with their deepest values.

It also means becoming a leader of high integrity. You will do what you say you will do. That doesn't mean showing up when you're sick, but it does mean being accountable. So much work in our sector is treated as if showing up is a burden, or that we should be grateful because someone is doing you a great service by being there. But this is about shaping our world, which is something we should both be invested in. This is what solidarity means to me.

The practice of making an ask

Your ask must be specific and it must matter. Some student teams had so many demands, it felt more like a shopping list than a well thought out strategy. Others had asks they felt almost embarrassed to share with classmates, because even they were not motivated by them. Others who formulated their asks around what was meaningful and specific were energised. This isn't unique to students. Frequently, people ask others to do lots of small insignificant things instead of the three things that might get us somewhere. We forget people commit to democratic action because it's meaningful, not because it's easy.

Sometimes students had great asks, but did not know the right person to ask it to or were too frightened to make the ask in the first place. 

Questions that often come up when organising campaigns are: how do you craft asks that are both worthwhile and winnable? That are urgent and time-bound? How will you know whether they've been carried out, and how will you celebrate? Finally, our asks must be rooted in our strategy and require us to make judgements and to test and iterate. Some students would say, ‘we are going to ask 100 people to sign this petition.’ Cool, but why? How will this get you to your goal? How will this develop leadership? What is the petition building?

This craft takes practise and in lectures, we would role play. Students would coach each other to make their asks more specific and to not give up on the first ‘no’. This work may seem straightforward, but rehearsing our embodied reactions in these situations enables us to find better footing and more confidence when making our asks for real. Asking each other: Why does this matter? Or, if this person says yes, what do we predict will happen? How does this build our own leadership and that of our constituency? These are all important reflections to make before deciding what your ask will be. The students who made their asks clear, meaningful, and specific to their strategic goal, whilst building respectful and accountable relationships with their decision maker, made significant progress.

Some of the teams went all in – and some won what they were asking for – progressing on issues around healthcare for international students, pushing for housing reform in the Boston area, building a movement of students dedicated to sanctuary and protection of international students, support for parents and their children’s nutrition in Boston and diversifying the environmental curriculum at Harvard to include case studies from global majority nations. If they never made the ask, it may never have happened. This was achieved in 4 months alongside numerous competing priorities and a political climate that is terrifying for many people. It truly was impressive and motivating work.

Practising democracy

Democracy asks people to do hard, meaningful work – forging our world together across our differences. Like learning an instrument or mastering any craft, this takes practice and commitment. You're not asking for favours. The question is: is this meaningful to them? Organising is about enabling people to speak for themselves (including you, the organiser). It's not a charity project. It's a justice project.