Anti-Oppression Toolkit
This month, we want to share tools and inspiration to build anti-oppressive practice into your campaign strategy work.
Our sector does not represent our communities
The mainstream nonprofit sector is largely not representative of the communities that we serve. 70% of executive directors at nonprofits in the USA are white. 77% of nonprofit staff in the UK have witnessed racism in the last 5 years. 70% of nonprofit workers identify as female, yet the larger organisations are still far more likely to be led by men. And hiring practices and ways of working continue to disadvantage and exclude disabled people.
This reality creates environments where the people in the room creating the campaign strategies and making decisions have the privilege of not experiencing racism / sexism / ableism in their day to day lives. Meanwhile, the communities that we serve live with the realities of systemic oppression every day. This is why we have to challenge our own biases and build up our understanding of systems of oppression. Anti-oppression is doing the work to understand systemic oppression and then taking action to dismantle those systems.
Anti-Oppression as a lens to apply to your work
Anti-Oppression is about understanding and challenging the power imbalances that exist in our society and working to create a world where we can all thrive. So take a moment to reflect on your own understanding and experiences of the systems described below.
Think about the ways that society is organised – who has power, where wealth is concentrated, and the narratives and stories that uphold this structure.
You may think about the wealthy white men who have so much power and influence in our society, or about the ways in which migrants and trans people are often scapegoated and framed as the problem with society. Meanwhile, people continue to suffer from high costs of living whilst billionaires continue to hoard more of the wealth.
Anti-oppressive practice is about understanding the ways that systemic oppression impacts our lives differently, whilst also understanding that our struggles are all linked.
Anti-Oppression tools for campaigners
At MobLab, we are always looking at ways to build better, more people powered campaigns. This is why I have been working with my colleagues to build anti-oppression into our Campaign Accelerator programme. This month I am sharing three tools with you all to help you build anti-oppressive practices into your campaigning.
- Reflective Practice – a tool to help you think about how different minoritised communities are impacted by the campaign problem
- Understanding Barriers – a tool to explore the ideas and behaviors in our society that contribute to the campaign problem and create barriers to minoritised communities
- Dreaming Circle – building a space to dream of a better world and collaboratively build a campaign vision rooted in community
Download the full toolkit here
Inspiration and further resources
Anti-oppressive work can feel huge and it can be hard to know where to start. For those in a position of privilege – white people, men, straight people, able bodied people, etc – it can also feel uncomfortable to reckon with your own guilt around upholding and maintaining these power imbalances in your work and in your day to day life. This is why we want to share some of the campaigns and resources that have inspired us in this work.
Understanding systems of oppression
- (divorcing) White Supremacy Culture by Tema Okun is a powerful resource to understand what white supremacy is, how it shows up in our workplace cultures, and the antidotes that can help us dismantle them.
- The Decolonial Centre have been building an online platform and educational content to explore what decolonisation means. Their Decolonial Encyclopedia is a fantastic tool to explore how colonialism shows up in our systems and our society.
- Charity So White have published a great article on the colonial legacies of the aid sector
- Brand by Me’s Dismantle Report explores how racism and white supremacy shows up in our brands
- Betsy Leondar-Wright’s Class Matters book and website is a great resource for middle class activists to build more class conscious approaches to their work.
Changing the narrative
- Migrants Rights Network have been tackling anti-migrant media narratives through their Words Matter campaign.
- Bystanders No More is a vital project aiming to help people understand what is going on in Gaza and Palestine to change the narrative
- Disability Action Research Kollective have created a wonderful zine called “Disabled Radicals” telling the stories of disabled people through history that have been key parts of liberation movements, prompting us to reframe disability.
- The Indigenous Solidarity Network’s wonderful Rethinking Thanksgiving Toolkit will help you shift the narrative on thanksgiving and talk about colonialism with family. (Note, you need to be logged in to a google account to access this public doc.)
Building anti-oppressive practice into your work
- Community Centric Fundraising have a guide to building anti-ableist practices into your organisation
- Guerilla Foundation is a great example of a funder doing the work to build participatory approaches to change making that include the communities most impacted, and their position on managing power is a great prompt for nonprofits to explore their relationships to power.
- The Diversity Welcome can be a powerful way of bringing awareness to the diversity of lived experiences in the room at the beginning of a session, and it is something that our facilitators at MobLab regularly use to open our training sessions.
We hope that these tools and resources inspire you to do the hard work of building up your understanding of racism, sexism, classism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and other systems of oppression. Then do the work of applying that knowledge to your campaign strategies and build movements that work towards the collective liberation of everyone, not just those of us closest to positions of privilege.
