There is no doubt that there is a lot of work for campaigners and change makers to do in 2026. Authoritarian practices and far right narratives have spread widely throughout the world. But in our fight to hold the line and defend the status quo we can sometimes fail to ask ourselves – was the status quo fair and just for everyone in the first place?
This month’s edition of the Dispatch is an invitation to reflect on how our ways of working and organisational structures can uphold the systems of oppression that we see in society. It is also an invitation to dream of an approach to campaigning that embraces the experiences of marginalised communities and gives power to the communities we serve. We will be confronting some hard truths, but we will also be building pathways towards transformation and inclusion.
What does belonging and inclusion really mean?
As campaigners we create change for the communities that we serve. We analyse systemic problems and advocate for change. We build strategies that connect people to the communities we serve. This work is fundamentally about understanding what is going wrong and then working to change systems and practices.
But we do not exist in a vacuum. The systems of oppression that we are fighting against are often replicated in our organisations, so we must think about the role we play as campaigners in upholding those systems.
Looking back to the start of my campaigning career in the UK I distinctly remember the discomfort of walking into spaces dominated by white middle class people that I felt I had little in common with. I often heard colleagues talk about how they were “good people” and talk in patronising ways when referring to the communities we serve. This was a human rights organisation and so we referred to people in our campaigns as “rights holders”. When we were developing a campaign on migration and refugee rights I decided not to share my own lived experience as a refugee with my white colleagues – because the people in the stories we told were so often reduced to just being refugees and I didn’t want that for myself.
I felt that to be seen as a good campaigner I needed to fit the mould and do what was seen as good and competent – which meant delivering the same strategies and tactics that the organisation was comfortable delivering. But liberating myself from that and listening to my lived experiences made me a better campaigner. Bringing different perspectives into the strategy design process meant that we told better stories and had more impact. I was able to build trust with the communities we served because I was able to understand their experiences on a deeper level.
Later on in my career I helped deliver a campaigning workshop to child activists in Colombia. This was a pilot programme to support child campaigners to have more impact in their communities. Part of what we were testing was if the tools we ourselves used as campaigners were too complex for youth activists to take on themselves. But what I saw was kids able to give nuanced and detailed analyses of the problems impacting their communities, and develop campaigning ideas that were more impactful and creative than anything I had seen come from my colleagues working on the same issues.
Similarly, India Thorogood writes why the campaign sector needs more working class people.
Our work as campaigners is to change the world around us so that everyone can thrive. To do this effectively we need to understand the ways that systems of oppression affect the problems our campaigns are trying to solve. This means taking time to understand the ways that those same systems of oppression exist within our organisations.
Lack of diversity amongst campaigners
Let’s take a moment to ask ourselves – what does a campaigner look like and how do they behave?
Think about your colleagues and about management structures. Think about their educational backgrounds. Think about their race, gender, and class. Think about how their bodies and identities impact how they move through the world. Reflect on the privileges they have access to and the barriers that they face in day to day life.
Many of you will be thinking about how so many of our colleagues are often white, middle class, western university educated, cisgendered, heterosexual, and male. This especially applies to organisations in Global North contexts, but many of us working in nonprofits in the Global South will know how our work is shaped by people from these demographics.
Now think about the communities you serve and the people most impacted by the campaign problems you work to change. Ask yourself how similar or different those people are to the people we work with directly?
You may be feeling guilt or shame around the reality that in many organisations our colleagues are so different from the people impacted by the issues we campaign on. Don’t linger on that guilt but use those feelings to work towards transforming your workplace cultures and ways of working.
White supremacy culture in campaigning
Talking about whiteness and white supremacy is scary to many people. When whiteness is the default it can feel scary for white people to reflect on their identities and how these systems of oppression impact their lives. So what is white supremacy and how does it show up in campaigning organisations?
Tema Okun provides a useful framework in (divorcing) White Supremacy Culture. This work is based on her experiences working in academia, but the characteristics she lays out can be applied to many workplaces and structures. These characteristics shape what we see as professional behaviours in the workplace, and in this way campaigners all over the world are often held to these standards.
So what are the characteristics of white supremacy culture?
- Urgency
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- When everything has to be done now and we don’t have time to stop and look at the bigger picture (though we know this is different in crisis response work).
- One right way
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- When we prioritise following organisational processes and doing things the “right way” at the cost of not innovating or trying new things in our campaigns.
- Fear of conflict
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- When we fear that our targets will react negatively to our tactics and not engage with us, and so we prioritise influencing approaches that centre their comfort more than the needs of the communities we serve.
- Quantity over quality
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- When success in our campaigns is measured in how many engagements we have had rather than the quality of those engagements or how much they actually helped us achieve the change we want to see.
- Worship of the written word
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- When you pay more attention to what you write in strategies and reports than focusing on what you actually do.
- Either/or thinking
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- When we reduce our strategies to choices between a fixed set of tactics we are comfortable with, rather than create strategies that embrace the complexity and nuance of the world or the issues we are working on.
This is by no means an expansive list, but it is an invitation to reflect on how these behaviours show up within your own campaigns team and organisation.
Systemic oppression affects us all
White supremacy is just one way to look at the problem of inequity and injustice within the campaigning and organising space. Think about how the characteristics of patriarchy, ableism, classism, and other systems of oppression show up within your working cultures.
Think about how often meetings are dominated by the voices of the same types of people. Whether it is because of the power and authority they hold, feeling more able to speak their thoughts out loud rather than needing to digest things further, or just feeling that they will be listened to and respected in the meeting.
Think about who is excluded in our ways of working. The activists and communities we serve who often have no say on our campaign strategies. The neurodivergent staff that may need more time to process their thoughts and ideas. The colleague with a disability that may not be able to physically access the office but is often forgotten about when dialling in or joining on zoom. The female or younger colleagues who get spoken over or not listened to.
But it could all be so different, and we can build more equitable and radical ways of working that empower everyone to build the best strategies to create change. From the women organisers frustrated at how male voices were dominating decision making in Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners that they split off to create their own group called Lesbians Against Pit Closures. Or when two young women of colour sent an open letter telling Friends of the Earth CEO that to get environmentalism out of its “white middle class ghetto” change needed to start within the organisation itself. Or look to the many grassroots activist movements organising around non-hierarchical structures. We don’t have to replicate the patriarchal business world in our ways of working.
What can campaigners do to combat systemic oppression?
The goal of this Dispatch has been to prompt you into reflecting on the ways that we as individuals and as teams replicate and uphold the very systems of oppression we campaign against. So what can campaigners do to start to dismantle these systems within our workplaces?
- Resist urgency culture – slow down your approaches and develop more measured responses.
- Resist competitive behaviours – prioritise building bridges and collaboration within the wider social justice ecosystem – including movements and grassroots groups and communities directly affected by the issues we are addressing. Find a way to get what is needed to fulfil the mission rather than what is best for yourself or for your organisation.
- Resist ableist culture – create processes that allow people to engage and contribute in multiple ways, avoid situations where the same few voices dominate discussions.
- Resist unequal power dynamics – create campaign strategy design processes that flatten hierarchies and share power across everyone, where everyone has an equal voice and we embrace everyone’s experiences.
- Centre experiences of communities you serve – don’t just seek sign off from communities you serve, include them at the very start of your strategy processes and make them a key part of the campaign throughout.
- Create space for radical imagination – the future does not exist yet and we can come together to shape it. There is something powerful in that, and creating spaces where we can come together and dream is a form of resistance.
Doing the work of challenging our own biases and changing ways of working is difficult, but the reward is that we build approaches to campaigning where everyone can belong and that make us better able to build a brighter future for the communities we serve.
Jon and the team at MobLab
Resources for campaigners willing to do the work
We have previously created a toolkit to help campaigners understand how systems of oppression play out within their campaign problems. You can download the anti-oppression toolkit here to change your strategising practices.
We also love the Feminist Dream Space toolkit from Feminist Futures for its in-depth look at feminist facilitation practices and exploring futures and foresight in a feminist way.
Finally, we love this illustration from Wenjia Tang and UC Berkeley on what belonging looks like within co-creation work.
Opportunities for campaigners
It is always a good time to sharpen your campaigning skills. So take a look at these training opportunities below for opportunities to build up your skills!
Campaign Accelerator Training, MobLab
A one week in depth training programme where you will learn how to build more people centred campaigns. We will be looking at how to adapt our strategies to the increasingly authoritarian contexts we are operating in.
London: 9-13 March 2026
Brussels: 6-10 July 2026
Campaigning Forum 2026, Fair Say
For UK based campaigners the Campaigning Forum is a great place to get inspired, find community, and build collective power.
When: 14-16 April 2026
Where: Oxford, UK
Storytelling to Inspire & Activate, Social Movement Technologies
A series of workshops from SMT looking at the key elements of narrative, storytelling, and visuals to build powerful campaigns.
Five 2h sessions: Wednesdays, Feb 25 – March 4 – March 11 – March 18 – April 1. All sessions start at Noon | NYC, Bogotá | 6 p.m, Kinshasa, Brussels | 7 p.m. Gaza, Nairobi.
Where: Online
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