The City for All movement based in Budapest has become a global voice on homelessness. City for All is led by homeless Hungarians, direct victims of economic and social injustice, while NGOs and other allies focus on support roles. In the U.S., Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) organizes and mobilizes white people to support racial justice actions led by people of color.
Creating and sustaining a strong relationship between victims of injustice, front-line activists and NGOs is something many campaigns struggle to do well. But if we look, examples of groups learning to become effective allies (and winning) can be found around the globe.
In October 2015, just five months before another fabricated election in Uganda, a handful of youth activists identifying as New Uganda spent three weeks debating which 15 people to train in building a movement. They settled on participants who could activate their own circles: students, social media activists, artists, leaders of civil society.
Maybe this was a fatal error. Inviting people of supposed influence – educated people with expertise – proved mostly ineffective. The few of the New Uganda 15 who are still actively organizing are those who are poor and semi-literate. This led the trainers, who happened to be university graduates, to question their recruitment approach.
Ugandan activists embrace one another outside a police station after a well organized protest. Photo via Waging Nonviolence/Women’s Movement.
One of the trainers visited South Africa a few months later to learn from those who had organized against apartheid. She wondered why mass mobilization seemed impossible in Uganda – why their privileged members seemed unreliable.
“You can’t force a revolution,” explained organizer Jay Naidoo. “We educated people tried raising awareness among the poor, but nothing was getting mobilized. It wasn’t until Afrikaans was introduced as a medium of instruction – something which had a massive impact on their daily lives – that young people flooded the streets of Soweto.”
She decided to test this advice with her trainees. She asked those few active trainees what mistakes the training team had made and how they could adapt.
“We have to get out of these offices,” suggested taxi driver Farouk Minawa. Those in the room nodded their heads in consensus. They had no will to wait for privileged sympathizers and bureaucratic allies like civil society organizations to get on board.
The young movement has since started fundraising among the poor and unemployed. They noticed that campaigns taking off from the grassroots are stronger and can better manage external allies who jump on board. This is a change from traditional ally-initiated (or led) campaigns.
Why females won in Kampala
Activism is often associated with males – or at least with supposedly masculine traits like aggression, competition and rage.
