How to be a Community Energizer: A Strategy Toolkit for Mobilization
It’s very easy to feel discouraged in the midst of the elevated destruction of democracy and reproductive justice over the last four years. Following the overturning of Roe and the abortion bans it set into motion, along with attacks on voting rights and institutionally backed instances of sexual violence as November midterms arrive.
However, this bleak feeling will pass.
Community is vital and important, and can be compared to how a public pool operates. Community organizers are lifeguards, keeping the people afloat and moving, much like the current political arena of inaction. However, lifeguards cannot watch all of the pool just as the community and organizers cannot fight all battles in face of losing important rights; thus, a role opens up. When a person starts drowning, the people closest to them alert the entire pool or end up being the first line of support. In communities, it’s very easy for community members and unincorporated people to get disengaged or disillusioned from the current political inaction. When the operations of pool and community converge; the role gap is what I term Community Energizer: someone who engages, connects, and protects the community through individual connections where they are at.
The future of reproductive justice requires community energizers to sustain the movement and prepare for the next frontier of reproductive justice onto the midterms ballot.
Community Energizers
A community energizer is someone who focuses on the engagement, retention, and support of active participating members and decision-makers involved in organizing. An energizer differs from an organizer by scope. For instance, an energizer emphasizes individual or smaller group interactions, while an organizer is looking to scale up important advocacy for a wide range of community members and advocates. The impact of energizing people creates community synergy, necessary to mobilize the next generation of reproductive justice.
Energizing can fit inside the work of organizing, but it is distinct. Organizing is scaling a community into mobilization. Organizing, when overloaded with necessary, vital work, will struggle to meet the needs for the community due to capacity constraints. Good organizing means having teams of energizers who directly interact with smaller networks and close relationships so that mobilization ripples to more of where the people are at. Organizers move a community, while energizers move smaller groups of people. When these two roles are put into action, organizing can scale up and build change that will outlast oppressive institutions through unity and expanding the community labor capacity.
Community energy is community synergy.
Energizing people synergizes communities using common interests, goals, and shared concern for others’ wellbeing. Most organizers have used tried and true strategies: text banks, canvassing, and social media campaigns. But community energizers expand this work further by figuring out the needs of a local community to mobilize together. They fill the gaps of interfacing with the community that organizers can miss from taking on the high workload of administrative tasks and endless planning meetings. The gaps community energizers fill mirror the organizing structure that disability activists center, demonstrating an energizing intersectional focus. As an example, the focus of disability justice with rest and recharge shares axioms with reproductive justice and community labor, which become valuable lessons that energizers spread around.
What does energizing look like?
Energizing is about doing the little things that matter – sending check-in texts, learning about someone beyond an icebreaker, and participating in community spaces. Showing commitment and authenticity to people brings good energy that’s needed in community spaces, even if it isn’t immediate. Friends who become community members often echo that they felt too shy or discouraged from being involved because they lacked an inviting opportunity to participate. The little things in building community requires bridging that gap so people are empowered to stand with reproductive justice.
Importantly, energizing is not limited to friends or close relationships. Neighbors, coworkers, mentors and mentees, and people in third spaces are all great choices. Navigating each of these groups to energize them requires tact, trust, and the belief that the people will do what is just and necessary. While each relationship is different, discernment is important to determine good-faith members, and can bring important conversations to people that haven’t had the opportunity to connect with the movement.
Energy surges through all of us!
The upcoming midterms will be an ultimate test of mobilization in this nation. Hundreds of movements nationwide are working tirelessly to mobilize communities in new ways via empowering their vote. In this vein of work, energizing is vital because energy built up can surge to other sectors of organizing, and continue past a single issue. Taking care of each other individually and communally, developing new organizing strategies, in union, and assisting collaborators of similar and parallel movements are vital to maintaining an ecosystem filled with momentous energy.
Ammu is a visionary. She is a part of the URGE “Our Folks” cohort, and specializes in teaching people the foundations of advocacy with organizing …
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