Wyrd transitions

I am a capacity building geek, i.e. it genuinely interests me, and maybe even excites me, to investigate and develop new ways of inspiring, equipping, training and mobilising people to campaign on something that’s important to them – albeit broadly within my own preference for a progressive agenda.

So I started this blog to debate whether the organisations I’m involved in were right to move away from old skool offline activism (local structures, public engagement, political lobbying, subvertising, NVDA etc) towards the shiny new frontiers of digital activism. I describe myself as a reactionary simply because instinctively I’d prefer to be chaining myself to something, or driving a RIB full of climbers towards a coal freighter, than clicking on another link.

However I might be wrong, I might be in danger of going extinct and so the essence of this blog was to explore new online capacity building ideas, and to either a) come up with better ideas to justify my reactionary prejudices or b) to learn some new skills (blogging for one) such that I’d find a new role in this new world.

Then the fates intervened in and the organisational wont towards the digital turned into an internal restructuring with a focus on capacity building not to achieve change but to fundraise – while important, excites me less.

For a great many years I’ve argued that such folk exist – with plenty of evidence, folk who want to organise gigs, rattle tins, sort sponsored events and the like, but that they are distinctt from the wider activist base. The argument is that we should do both, enabling people to get involved in a manner of their choosing, giving people the creative space to come up with new campaign and fundraising ideas and that we should resource both paths separately, and well.

To give up on campaigning, or to much reduce it, in favour of fundraising seems counter intuitive, after 15+ years of capacity building to that goal. As the restructuring dragged on, as friends feared for their jobs, as I dabbled with emigrating to the frontline battle against climate change (i.e. the US), things went perverse or just Wyrd.

The plans to fundraise were abandoned, the capacity building team was halved in size, two of us were in essence made redundant, and I seem to have found myself in a digital team exploring the borderlands between online and offline activism. Somewhat poetic really considering the blog I started 9 months before hand.

Now don’t get me wrong, organisational I think we’re being a bit daft, and over time as our ability to deliver offline activism and events diminish, then the simple truth that there is no such thing as a free lunch will become apparent to the powers that be – i.e. what you get out is proportional to what you put in, and in order to have a passionate, inspiring network of volunteers you need to have people on the ground supporting that networ..

However as an individual with a predominately free hand to explore new ideas, to build new capacity building structures online and offline, to facilitate the training of people in skills I don’t yet possess, to try new things – just because, and to support such folk in delivering change – well it’s all quite exciting really, and if one is to believe in fate, destiny, karma in the strength of the wyrd, the clearly the gods are pleased with such paths.