How does ECON support the community
organizing movement?
ECON seeks to engage members in the following three strategic priorities:
Building people power by developing organizing capacity
They don’t teach “community organizing” in school. But as organizers we need opportunities to learn our craft. We need to create space for exchange with others who are developing the practice of community organizing in Europe and to explore the overall strategic framework for our work. We believe that community organizing can not be done effectively without a clear-eyed analysis of power relations and a praxis that reflects the need to build power rooted in marginalized communities.
In our early years operating as an informal network, ECON focussed on promoting the idea of community organizing. We conducted numerous local trainings and consulting visits in over a dozen European countries. We organized over two-dozen site visits allowing community organizing staff and volunteers to share experiences and best practices.
We also focussed on collecting resources. In addition to building a library of numerous existing resources on community organizing, ECON helped in the production and publication of various significant reports such as: Handbook on Citizens Participation – Community Organizing as a Tool for Enhancing Citizens Participation, and Learning Sustainable Citizen Participation: A Toolkit for Democratic Structures and Fundraising Strategies for Grassroots Citizen Organizations in Europe.
Ultimately our goal is that ECON will serve as a hub for the community organizing movement across Europe with a focus on building people power by developing and strengthening the organizing capacity and practice of movements, organisations and communities through training, mentorship, and research. We create a space for organizers from different organizations, movements and countries to develop their strategic practice.
Facilitating solidarity among community organizing initiatives across Europe
ECON’s theory of change is to support the development of bottom-up responses to the interconnected crises in Europe. We facilitate connection, solidarity actions and campaigns across countries, issues, and identities. Connecting and uniting progressive movements in Europe behind shared visions and narrative on the Europe we want. We convene spaces that enable solidarity, alliance, and coalition building.
Member organizations of our network are leading varied organizing projects, from working with marginalized rural and Roma communities in Slovakia while successfully beating the extreme right in regional elections, to creating city-wide networks of local leaders in Bucharest, to building community with elder care providers and women while fostering political activism in Poland, to coordinating national resistance organizing in Hungary. Our core base continues to exist in the Central and Eastern European region, but we are also increasingly in productive dialogue with emerging community organizers, activists, municipalists and others in Western and Southern Europe as well.
Community organizing needs to be supported and allowed to grow deeper roots in Europe. Furthermore, it needs to be allowed to change and adapt to conditions on the ground, so supporting community organizing in Europe does not mean adhering to one particular methodology or “party line,” but rather creating a culture of exchange, evaluation, and adaptation of the work.
Supporting the sustainability of the Organizing sector in Europe
ECON’s theory of change also hinges on our ability to grow the overall amount or resources available to organizing in all parts of our network, at the local, national, and transnational levels. Therefore, we are leading work of facilitating dialogues between donors and organizers, educating donors and funding organizations about community organizing, disseminating and promoting the practice and results of organizing, seeking and sharing funding opportunities for organizing with our member organizations.
Bringing organizers and funders together
In the summer of 2018, ECON convened an international meeting in Hungary of funders and community organizers to discuss the challenges and opportunities that exist to make more and better resources available to the community organizing movement. In the meeting, organizers shared case studies of their work, and then a generative, facilitated discussion surfaced possible areas for further collaboration.
As a concrete result of that meeting, in the spring of 2019, ECON–together with its partner the Ariadne Network of human rights funders–released a study called Making a Way Forward: Community Organizing and the Future of Democracy in Europe. The study interviewed funders already working in the community organizing space, shared case studies of the impact community organizing can have, and made a set of concrete recommendations aimed at supporting a more robust community organizing sector in Europe.
