Since the Corbyn loss of the 2019 election, many progressive groups in the UK have begun to (often reluctantly) look beyond electoral politics to build power and re-establish relationships in marginalised and working class communities where they have been lost. Lessons from small pockets of the UK (but mostly from the US) have led many groups and organisations to look to community organising as an alternative way of building a progressive base from which social change can happen. The term ‘community organising’ is turning up in more and more organisational strategies and job descriptions in recent years, but understandings of it are limited, often being framed by the policy influencing, advocacy and campaigning work that these organisations have done for years or decades before.

We see the embrace of community organising as an important and positive development in many social movement spaces, because it reshapes how many are thinking about power and change, grounding it in the communities of those most affected by ‘politics as usual.’ Unfortunately though, there are some significant gaps in understanding and support available for social movement actors to access, as they are shifting their understandings of building collective power away from the structures of the state.

Much of the community organising theory and training that is currently available, has been grounded in trade union and political campaign organising. Many of the lessons from organising in these more structured environments have been incredibly important when adapted for the relative-structurelessness of most working class and multiethnic communities. But even amongst the best trainings, there’s a depth that’s consistently missed when it comes to facing the kinds of complexities that appear when trying to organise in many communities.

These communities are often the spaces where some of the sharpest intersections of oppression are playing out; the stresses left by working under poor labour conditions, experiencing racist policing, exploitative landlords, and the Home Office’s hostile environment, for example. Community organising happens around the places people live and thus often involves facing the impacts and realities of all these things at once.

Additionally, the dynamics of power and conflict that are constantly playing out within and between different sections of a community – sometimes patriarchal, sometimes generational, sometimes interpersonal – cannot be ignored, when so deeply intertwined in the lives of those you are organising with. Organising training tends to give very little space to even acknowledge – let alone work effectively with – this kind of complexity. What does an organiser do when a brilliant organic leader starts to demonstrate strongly patriarchal behaviours? Or when two members with different communities come into active conflict, disrupting the organising work? Or simply when the chaos of daily life regularly impedes the involvement of so many local people? The structures that allow for some semblance of order within a workplace or election campaign are often totally absent in frontline community settings, meaning that a different way of organising is necessary.

This is where Embrace the Mess has come from; experienced organisers who have come up against the limitations of their organising toolkits and want to create space for one another to explore and get comfortable with the kinds of community dynamics no one tells you about, before you’re immersed in them. If community organising is going to become the significant force that many believe it can and should be in the UK, it will need to support community organisers to navigate particularly complex local dynamics, where there are no clear-cut ‘right answers.’ It’s ‘the organising behind the organising,’ that makes the more visible work possible.