People power: never alone, always together

This month's Dispatch is a love letter to the power of community activism. Emma You Bierman writes on how door knocking and talking to people reinvigorated their love for campaigning.

Ferat Koçak innerhalb der anderen Aktivisten

Emma You Biermann

Hopelessness might be a shared place for many of us now surrounded by heartbreaking, despairing news and systemic violence. It is deeply concerning that many are visibly turning to nationalism and the far right as a solution to their problems. The far right rely on financial and state political capital and the scapegoating of marginalised communities as their currency of oppression. So, what is our currency to counter violence and recreate the worlds of justice and equity we seek?

Our currency is people power – directed at the root causes of problems and not towards division. But how do we build this kind of people power? How do we grow it in sustained ways, where we also achieve concrete wins? Here is a story

Community led organising wins elections

In the depths of a Berlin winter from 2024 to 2025, I was facing potential house eviction, feeling anxious, and grieving the state of the world and how people treat each other. The snap national elections in February were hardly my antidote. I felt despair that the coalition government had become dysfunctional,  frustrated at how elections threw local community campaigns into disarray, and feared the opportunity this was giving to the growing far right. I wasn’t alone in my hollowness. Many of us needed to see changes for ourselves and each other, but had little faith in party politics and, in many cases, didn’t even have the right to vote.

Yet, many of my friends and social movement groups were regularly leaving work early to join the people’s campaign to elect Ferat Koçak, Die Linke (the Left Party) candidate in my constituency. Growing up in the community he was standing for, Ferat had a history of demonstrating in the streets alongside many of us for justice and peace. Now his campaign stood for a nationwide rent cap, the abolition of VAT on groceries, and energy and heating price control – positions shaped by the concerns people shared when his team had knocked on 10,000 doors ahead of the elections. As a Kurdish, working-class man, in favour of cutting arms exports, amid a growing German far-right, Ferat’s election was not a given. Still, the murmur was that with people’s involvement, this seat was actually winnable and would make a difference. Friends kept inviting me to join the daily door-knocking. Despite my own weariness about party politics and my shyness as a non-native German speaker, the hope was contagious, and strategically, it felt important to step into my own discomfort.

One Sunday, when I knew my friend G was going out canvassing, I showed up at the campaign hub, where Ferat’s team was organising an “action week”. People from all over Germany were invited to come and encourage others to vote. Basic trainings were happening every day, and there was a whole programme to support socialising and keep energy up. Locals hosted canvassers at their homes who had come from other parts of the country. Involvement was made as easy and exciting as possible.

People were queuing outside just to get campaign updates and tips for door step one-to-ones. The room was full to the brim. I was moved by the stories shared, and my energy was lifted by the rounding chant, “always together, never alone.”Off I went with G and our affinity group to talk to people.

After all the misery of the past months and my scepticism, it actually became a surprisingly empowering start to 2025. We met people from different parts of life, who told us their problems, debated strategies for change, and even invited us in for tea. Not everyone opened their door, and people who were quick to dismiss our red campaign vests closed doors in our faces, but this only made me more determined. I most appreciated conversations with people I would otherwise never have met, who shared their stories of what they do, what is important to them, and finding common ground. At people’s doorsteps, I experienced the opposite of apathy and felt a deeper connection to the passions and needs of others to be heard and taken seriously.

Through snow and cold, I spent the next three weekends canvassing and inviting others to join me. And it paid off. By the end of it, with over 2,000 volunteers knocking on 139,000 doors, we celebrated. Ferat Koçak (or rather “Team Ferat”) won hands down, and what had been a nose-diving Left Party, on a national level, made an unlikely comeback. From looking like they would not get enough of the national percentage to get seats they gained 64 seats, doubled their party membership from 2023, led in winning voters aged 18-24, and some elected party representatives committed to capping their income – including Ferat.

While I don’t believe that Die Linke or parliamentary politics are the solution to all of our problems, I would much rather call them for help on our gentrification, workers’ rights, and border issues than count on the far-right Alternative for Germany (which came in second in the election). Not only had this collective effort just brought a much-needed win, it had skilled up thousands of us in one-to-one conversations and on how to connect with people outside of our bubbles.

People powered wins

Ferat’s campaign was a success built out of people power, and it is not the only one. In New York City, Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani also won the candidacy to run for mayor. Both talked to thousands of people and connected to issues widely and deeply felt by the communities they sought to represent.

While social media and digital platforms were part of successful strategies to spread political messages and calls to action across broad audiences, these wins required people-powered movements that extended beyond screens. Street conversations, door-to-door canvassing, community cafés, and gatherings are tactics used to identify common problems, understand their roots, and build or offer a collective plan winnable with our combined efforts. They are key places of political education.

The power of transformative organising

Sometimes referred to as “transformative organising”, these tactics are both strategic and not always a linear process. They are methodologies to transform power. Asian-American political scientist Hahrie Han, who focuses on civic engagement, social movements, community organising, and democracy, says that, “[W]e have to figure out how to develop peoples’ sense of their own agency in being agents of change as opposed to feeling like they’re just recipients or pawns in the game that someone else is controlling” (Undivided: The Quest for Racial Solidarity in an American Church, 2024). In transformative organising, the goal is not only to change our conditions but also ourselves and each other in the process. We can discover how to grow our agency and make change as a result of growing power with one another, as well as from within ourselves.

Having active conversations are part of building trust and growing commitment to one another over time—to put a message out there together, take risks together, and not leave people to face their problems alone. We build enough trust that people don’t just dream of different lives but try to make them happen together. The late leading organiser Jane McAlevey would say this process has “no short-cuts.”

Transformative organising is not reserved for party politics. It has been employed by well-organised groups and initiatives for decades to achieve housing and land wins, transform workplace conditions, and fight for democracy, as well as resist the rise of the far right. For over 40 years, the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil has been using one-to-one conversations to base-build thousands of peasant families and communities to occupy and reclaim land, fight for agrarian reform, and raise people’s aspirations for a good living. The resistance committees of Sudan focused on mutual aid and many one-to-one conversations to grow trust, leading to the growth of their vital social pro-democracy forcethat eventually ousted Omar al-Bashir, the country’s long-reigning dictator. Both the MST and the resistance committees continue their vital mutual aid work today under the most critical conditions.

Behind the mobilisations, actions, and press coverage, much of transformative organizing is the marginalized work of relationship and leadership building that fosters lasting change. It’s the work of hosting many, many conversations that lead to results like:

  • support for connection to what people deeply care about,
  • creation of space for reflection,
  • support for risk-taking,
  • learning by doing,
  • centring strengths over weaknesses,
  • overcoming self-limiting beliefs,
  • gaining feedback,
  • curating a shared plan,
  • building communities that not only withstand difference but are all the more powerful for it.

When the extreme right is a real threat, these tactics can be a source of hope and a way for individuals to grow their agency, as groups both impatiently and patiently commit to the steady politicisation of their communities. But they cannot do it alone. Along with needing more people, we also need resourcing. This is also a call for funders to become acquainted with the world of organising and to support our movements at every step, as if they also wanted us to win.

Change becomes possible when we do it with others and find more people to join us. It’s a process that needs investment because the potential and opportunity to change something together is the antidote to isolation and hopelessness. It means, as organisers for change, we have to be out there present and meeting people on the streets, at their doorsteps, in community spaces, and inviting people to take their situation into their own hands. As the long-standing political organiser and teacher Marshall Ganz put it, “Organizing is a practice of leadership whereby we define leadership as enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty”. Without us and each other, change is unlikely to happen.

In solidarity,

Emma You Biermann & the MobLab Team

Resources on Transformative Organising

Training and Funding Opportunities

 

Survey: Understanding the learning ecosystem for change makers

This month’s Dispatch we are highlighting how vital community leadership is to campaigning victories. Organisers on the ground leading efforts to mobilise communities around a shared goal is vital to the fight to transform the places that we call home and build a society where we can all thrive. But building up people power requires us to invest time and resources into the campaigners and organisers doing the work – and so we want to understand the current state of leadership and talent development for changemakers across civil society.

The data from this benchmarking survey will help us to:

  • Map existing investment levels and approaches across NGOs, funders and government institutions.
  • Understand the skills and strategies being prioritised.
  • Capture outcomes, challenges, and opportunities.
  • Build a shared evidence base that can inform stronger, more strategic long-term commitments.

We can’t do this without you! Completing the survey (it takes about 15–20 minutes) will help build a sector-wide benchmark report that we can all use to guide our strategies, approach and investment that will strengthen civil society leadership to turn this trajectory around.

The survey is completely confidential: all data will be analysed in aggregate, and individual organisations will not be identified unless you choose otherwise.

This article is the September edition of our monthly newsletter, The Dispatch. To receive the next issue in your inbox sign up to our mailing list here: https://mobilisationlab.org/newsletters/

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Dispatchstrategytech, tools and tactics

Emma You Biermann

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