How to Take Effective Political Action
How to Build a Volunteer Team
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
–Margaret Mead
There are a lot of reasons to have a team when advocating, politically, including:
- Leverage skills, talents and experiences of each member
- Develop better strategies due to different perspective and experiences
- Share the work to get more done while avoiding burning out
- Can more easily grow the team with all members’ networks
- Have more fun while advocating!
Once you have decided to form a team, how do you do it?
- If you are working with an organization, it is possible that they might bring together you and others in your geographical area or within your group together who share the same interests in advocacy.
- Another possibility is that you have to be the one to get a team started.
Steps to get a team going:
- Set up a planning meeting
- Invite people within your network who might be interested to the planning meeting
- If you work with an organization(s), ask if they can invite members or supporters who might be interested in attending
At the meeting, determine team’s foundation:
- Purpose of organizing and advocating
- Who are you organizing?
- What are you advocating for?
- Strategy or plan for how your team will win or reach its goal
- Legislative Campaign Toolkit has templates that can be adapted to develop your team’s strategy
- Start with Assessing Your State’s Political Landscape
- Then, use Building a Legislative Campaign
- Determine how much power your group has and how it will build power
- Use Power Mapping to get started
- Actions your team will take to follow your plan
- See Most Common Political Actions for examples
Determine the structure of the team:
- Roles
- Decide on the roles needed to follow your team’s strategy or plan and build your team’s capacity, as needed
- Responsibilities
- What each role needs to be able to do/get done
- What skills are needed to fulfill those responsibilities
- Leadership
- What kind of leadership is needed
- Recommended to have some form of shared or distributed leadership
- Where leadership responsibilities are shared across a team of leaders so that all of the responsibilities and decisions do not solely rest on one person while also being clear of who is ultimately responsible
Norms:
- Meetings
- How often will the team meet
- Who will be responsible for:
- Creating the agenda
- Taking notes
- Facilitating
- Communication
- How often will the team communicate
- How will the team communicate
- Who can initiate communication
- Decision Making
- How will the team make decisions
- Accountability/Taking Responsibility
- How will the team members hold themselves accountable
- How will the team members hold each other accountable