1.1 The membership organisation

Whether we’re organising in the workplace or the community, the principles underlying organising practices are the same. The point of divergence is the constituency your organisation seeks to represent. For a tech start-up, a relatively small constituency of investors might grant you enough resources to run with. But social movement organisations are often seeking to represent constituencies who are relatively low on material resources. So, whereas the tech start-up might have a traditional organisational structure, with managers and a CEO allocating resources, social movement organisations are quite often membership organisations.

Membership organisations tend to be ‘dues paying’ organisations with democratic processes. This means that individuals join the organisation by paying a regular contribution, which grants them a vote in the democratic processes that elect leaders and enact decisions. Of course, these processes and the organisational structures associated with them are varied. But the advantage of the membership organisation to social movement organising is that the pooling of resources, even where your constituency may have very few of them, allows the organisation to function (e.g., if a thousand people can pay £5 a month, that gives your organisation £5000 per month in income to spend on its project).

So, in a workplace your constituency might be Deliveroo couriers, refuse workers, bus drivers. In a community it could be low-income people, people receiving social benefit, refugees, etc. Establishing an organisation with a membership creates a vehicle for your constituency to pool resources with which to represent their interests as a collective.