In this blog, we offer 3 tips for when you start organising in your community.
Summary: When you are community organising, we suggest you create roles based on individual skills; have a clear understanding of who to recruit, connect with, and target; and make sure to meet one-on-one with them.
So, you’re a grassroots activist trying to organise your community against rising xenophobia, and you want to start assembling a diverse activist base near you. Or maybe you’re a professional Community Organiser at a large charity trying to create local branches to fight against pollution, and you want to make sure your coalition is strong. Regardless of the issue, organising a community for a common goal can help build a powerful movement for almost any cause. So, it’s important to know what you need to do to get there.
Most of you will know this already, but there’s a big difference between community mobilising and community organising.
Community mobilising means getting large swaths of the community to complete an action, like signing a petition or attending a protest.
Community organising means building sustainable movements by growing, recruiting, and training new leaders.
If you’re looking to build that grassroots movement, you’ll need to know:
- how to recruit those who are most likely to engage.
- how to assign roles suited to each person’s talents and resources.
- how to have one-to-one conversations that build trust and networks.
And good news: that’s where SMK can help! Here are our 3 tips for when you start community organising, provided by our expert Associates:
1) Figure out who to connect with. There are so many options for people to reach out to when you start organising your community. You’ll have 3 key groups:
- Your core base: those who are affected by the issue and those who support your mission.
- Your connections: those who maybe have less drive to support you, but are well-connected locally.
- our targets: those who actually have the decision-making power.
Start by figuring out who those people are. (You could even sign up for SMK’s Community Organising workshop to figure out how to divide up your energy between those groups!)
2) Use your community’s talent to divide roles and tasks. A mistake some campaigners make is assuming that there are a finite number of ways to contribute to a movement . Whilst protesting and sharing petitions are good tactics there are many other valuable ways to do so. When community organising, understand where talents lie in your team, groups, those in the community as people will be bringing all sorts of skills and expertise to the table. For example:
- Academics or students could research the causes and effects of the issue.
- Coding experts could build resource directory websites or show people how to mass-send emails.
- Photographers and journalists could educate the community on what’s going on.
There are an endless number of roles in a local campaign, as there is an endless amount of talent your community has. (To brainstorm these with your peers, sign up for SMK’s Community Organising workshop!)
3) Have impactful one-to-one conversations with others.Figure out who you need to meet with and what they can do for your campaign. As some examples, if you need to…
- figure out how to help people, then meet with your core base to ask about their experiences.
- reach more people, then meet with well-connected players in the area to have them make introductions.
- sway local laws, then meet with local decision makers to persuade them into acting.
We hope you’ve got a starting point for organising your community!
If you’re interested in learning more about how to do these community organising actions, sign up here for SMK’s Community Organising workshop to get to work on building power in your local community. Dates for this workshop are:
- Tues 24th Feb 2026, 10am-1pm
- Tues 19th May 2026, 10am-1pm
- Tues 27th Oct 2026, 2-5pm
- Thurs 25th Feb 2027, 10am-1pm