Tilling the Soil: Cultivating Organizer Learning and Growth

Community organizing is a challenging and important vocation. But as multiple recent reports and articles have articulated, the organizing field is struggling to build and sustain organizers. Turnover is high, and the past ten years have seen experienced organizers depart the field en masse, leaving a dearth of senior organizers and mentors who can train the next generation. Rebuilding the ranks of organizers requires the field to strengthen, expand, and reimagine how to grow, nourish, and sustain organizers.

In our new report, Tilling the Soil: Cultivating Organizer Learning and Growth we present the findings of the Organizer Learning Project that Grassroots Solutions undertook with support from The California Endowment. In this report, we explore the intensive process that organizers go through to learn about the community and context in which they organize and about who they are in the work. For two years, the project team engaged with over 75 organizers hailing from different geographic areas and organizing traditions, with varied positions and longevity in the organizing field, representing a wide range of identities and communities. The stories organizers shared illuminated not just how and what they learned, but the evolution of their learning and growth throughout their organizing careers and in the relationships and experiences that have shaped them and kept them in the field.

With imagery from plant biology, we depict the progression of an organizer’s development from the seeds of their first encounters with community organizing as a tool for social change, to the vibrantly blooming high points in their careers as practitioners of the craft. We believe the phases of organizer development, the dimensions of learning, and the nutrients for growth that we describe in this report provides a pathway for better supporting organizers, building more durable organizations, and strengthening the broader field. It offers a lens through which we can see opportunities for intervention, support, and action. We envision this report as a grounding resource that is designed to sow conversations with organizers, national organizing networks and trainers, funders, researchers, and evaluators about how we can all improve support for organizer growth and learning.

Click here to read the full report.