by Calum Barnes, Movement Organiser
Medact’s Organisational Strategy sets out our approach to winning our vision of a better world, including our theory of change that guides our movement in this mission whilst embracing our collective vision and values.
We are currently in the process of developing our next Organisational Strategy. (You can see our previous strategy here). As a member-led organisation, we have and will continue to prioritise time for deep discussion and detailed input to this process from our members, supporters, local and issue groups, individuals involved in our work, the board of Trustees, and the staff team.
The past few years have seen a complex and ever changing environment for our movement, yet we have remained adaptable, powerful and focussed. We believe our approach to organising has played a big role in our successes. By building resilient and connected communities of care across the Medact movement, our members, local groups and supporters alike have found common ground and built collective power to challenge health inequalities and win the changes we need to move towards a world that centres ‘health justice’.
In this blog I will explain why our organising approach is central to the development of our next strategy, and explore some of the feedback we’ve gained through movement workshops around how this approach is and is not being practised currently, reflections on the positive outcomes, and some of the barriers faced by our members in bringing organising into their campaigning and advocacy. It will also share some of the ways in which we’ll be progressing strategy development in the near future.
Organising Centred Campaigning
Our organising approach has evolved over time through studying the ways we have come together and practised as a Medact movement—from our national campaigns and action-oriented research to our local groups and direct actions. We have reflected on how we build power and seek to bring about change. We’ve tried to harness these reflections in setting out our approach, ‘Organised Centred Campaigning’, as part of the new strategy.
Both our strategy and approach to organising and campaigning are founded in the understanding that health is shaped by political and economic structures which create and sustain oppression. Health and wider injustices are not static; power ultimately lies with us, the people. Thus, when we come together we can build ‘social power’ for transformative change.
This framing from Tipping Point in their zine ‘movement power’ is helpful to understand social power:
“A traditional or monolithic view of power teaches us that powerful men make the rules for the world we live in and we lobby them to change things for us. A social view of power (and history) teaches us that mass movements are the most reliable way to create a tipping point for social change. Recognising our own power is the first step.”
Our aim continues to be to build social power by building our movement. On a local level we bring together hundreds of people to take action; on a national level we come together in our thousands. We believe that building people power—and providing skills training, strategic advice and resources for health workers to do this effectively—is how we can win the change we want to see.
Organised Centred Campaigning encompasses this philosophy through embedding the practices of ‘organising’ in our ‘campaigning’ work.
Campaigning: people coming together to take strategic action on an issue, aiming to bring about change.
Organising: building power in communities, locally, at a grassroots level; developing shared politics, skills and capacity for ongoing struggle.
When we hold organising as a central part of our campaigning, we move towards strategies where health workers are not working in isolation to do their advocacy, but instead working in coalition with communities directly affected by the issues we’re campaigning on, and within their own communities. Organising asks us to practise building deep relationships, working in solidarity, and strategically using the health worker voice as part of community-built campaigns. Within our groups, organising prompts us to build skills and develop collective leadership for long-term group health and sustainable capacity.
We might well continue to engage in advocacy (such as lobbying an MP), or mobilisation (such as attending or holding a demonstration), but we see these as the means rather than the end: as part of a longer term strategy to build power in communities.
The basic principles of how we want to go about this work are:
Relationships are key: we focus on building relationships between people in our Medact groups, and in the wider movements we are a part of so that all are strong and meaningful; we put in the time to sustain these as they are understood to be central to building our power.
Developing leaders: we coach and support others to upskill and become effective leaders, while sharing responsibility and power.
Solidarity: we don’t do this alone; we work alongside and are led by those most impacted by health injustices.
Collective care: our spaces are anti-oppressive and we work sustainably in ways that bring joy.
Intersectional lens: the issues we are tackling are all rooted in the same political, economic and social systems that drive ill health; we support others fighting against injustice and oppression.
Movement workshops
While we have had some success in applying the organising approach, we don’t yet know, within a reasonable estimation of the capacity and resources of both the staff team and the movement, if organised centred campaigning is a viable way to achieve systemic change within our movement. In designing our next five-year strategy, we need substantial input from the people who are doing this work with us—our movement.
Over the summer we conducted 3 local group workshops: 2 in-person in Leeds and Sheffield and 1 hybrid in Liverpool. We also ran 2 cross-movement online workshops.
During the workshops we asked participants:
- What do you see as the power/role of the health community in making ‘Organising Centred Campaigning’ happen?
- Do you think this strategy can work?
- Can the health community do ‘Organising Centred Campaigning’?
From analysing responses, 3 main points stood out:
- The participants agreed with adopting Organised Centred Campaigning as a strategy. It made sense and felt like an ideal theory of change.
- Some participants were uncertain about the strategies feasibility and what enacting this would require to happen in reality.
- Some participants felt like they were already embedding some of these practices in their work.
Participants felt that the power/role of the health community in making Organised Centred Campaigning happen was intrinsically related to the position and power of a health worker as a witness of injustice. They liked that it highlighted the importance of:
- Bringing new voices into the movement.
- Practising care whilst organising including cultivating safer spaces with a culture of reflection.
- Challenging the entrenched power structures within healthcare and Medact.
Participants did note some challenges in embodying this strategy, including:
- The changing political landscape.
- Capacity of members.
- Perceived risk and political deterrents surrounding direct action.
- Maintaining an identity as Medact whilst organising.
- Embracing the language of organising.
Participants thought that the staff team at Medact would be vital to ensure that the strategy worked, with a particular focus on offering training, resources and coaching, as well as holding connections/relationships with allied organisations.
Many participants felt there were key opportunities that adopting this strategy could have, including:
- Developing a collective vision for the movement.
- Building capacity and visibility.
- Developing shared learning internally and from work with allied organisations.
- Developing a culture of joy.
- Finding sustainability in our movement.
Some groups reported they had already begun to embed Organised Centred Campaigning in their work through practices such as having 1-1 conversations, running new joiners meetings, and working in solidarity with external groups. They felt this had been a natural progression for them and that they had had positive feedback from their members. Some groups reported that independently, in their group reflections, they had identified that they wanted to share positions of responsibility and power more readily.
These workshops have been an extremely valuable first stage in developing our next Organisational Strategy, and we thank all those who took the time to come to a workshop. It is important to note that there are limitations in gathering input from workshops, including, but not limited to, people’s availability to attend and the potential for power dynamics within groups to limit feedback. It is also important to note that these workshops did not capture dedicated input from our local groups in Glasgow, Brighton, Oxford, Manchester, and Scotland, or from the Migrant Solidarity Group or the Medact Research Network. We hope to speak with some or all of these groups at later stages.
We have learnt a lot about the challenges to Organised Centred Campaigning, issues with the language of organising, and the desire for more training and educational content based on organising and solidarity work. We have more to learn about the risks and/or challenges, as well as about our movement’s hopes for our future work and movement democracy.
Next steps
A strategy is only useful if it is embedded and understood across the movement. This is what brings the strategy to life—ensuring that everyone in the movement knows where we are going, where they fit into it, and that our strategy is used to guide decision-making and development of the organisation moving forward.
Future stages of development will involve consultation with the movement through a survey to capture views from those unable to attend a workshop. We have plans for more movement workshops at later points in the development process, as well as sessions with the staff team and Board. And we look forward to Medact’s new Executive Director leading the strategy to completion once they are in post.
Thank you to everyone involved for your support and input so far. It has been and continues to be a pleasure to work alongside you all as we build a movement toward a world in which everyone can truly achieve and exercise their human right to health.
