Central to Tamarack’s thinking and research on movements for change is the question of whether movements can form and grow through the deliberate actions of engaged citizens and organizations. This page explores resources that discuss the processes associated with building successful social movements.

Every social issue, initiative, and collaboration is unique. There is a “one-size-fits-all” method that organizations and individuals can use to spark and sustain a vibrant social movement.

The resources in this section effectively describe some of the ways in which movements for change are structured and function.

The resources also consider how an organization can think like a movement when addressing complex community issues.

Building a Movement for Change

A Guide to Community Organizing - Charles Dobson describes the Industrial Areas Foundation’s (IAF) organizing as “the best grassroots organizing in the US”. Currently, the IAF has a network of 56 church-based, interfaith and interracial organizations in the US, Canada, UK, and Germany. The foundation’s goal is to create a large network of "Peoples' Organizations" that would provide tens-of-thousands of ordinary working and modest-income Americans with a measure of power to shape decisions that affect their lives and communities. In this article, Dobson summarizes the “highly successful IAF methods” that have distinguished it from other community organizing initiatives.

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Social Movements and Grassroots Organizing - This document is the Executive Summary of a report that was commissioned by Ms. Foundation for Women to gather information on the successes and failures of social movements in America. The study was conducted in 2001 and is no longer in print, but the executive summary is worthy of reading because it explores how the Civil Rights, Contemporary Right, and Environmental Justice movements were structured to leverage political opportunity, create effective issue frames, and mobilize resources. The summary’s introduction also lists eight successful movement strategies.

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Greenpeace’s Campaign Strategies - As a Canadian-born organization that now represents over 2.8 million members, there is much to learn from Greenpeace’s campaign strategies. In this article Gilles-Philippe Pagé, a Québécois environmentalist, explains how Greenpeace’s direct actions, political lobbying, public awareness, and controlled message have made it so successful at capturing the attention of the public, governments, and private enterprises around the world.

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Strategy Planning: Tobacco Control Movement Building - This strategy guide, the second of two Tobacco Control Strategy Planning Guides published by the International Union Against Cancer and the American Cancer Society, is a comprehensive resource for tobacco control advocates around the world. This is one of the most detailed attempts to deliberately create guidelines for building a movement that we came across in our research. We found the discussion of formal coalition building (page 47), leadership roles (page 51), and leadership lessons (page 55) particularly useful.

We also suggest you take a look at the strategy guide’s two appendices. Appendix A The Canadian Tobacco Control Coalition is written by Ken Kyle of the Canadian Cancer Society and describes the creation of one of the most effective tobacco control coalitions in the world. The 10 commandments he lists could be applied to any movement for change. In “Ten Ways to Kill a Citizen Movement” (Appendix B) Byron Kennard outlines common pitfalls of movement mobilization efforts. His ten rules highlight important features of social movements that differentiate them from other types of organizing.

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Advocacy.org - Advocacy.org, run by the Advocacy Institute, was created to “make social justice leadership strategic, effective and sustainable”. This site contains a wealth of resources, toolkits, and ideas that are directly applicable to developing strategies to build a movement for change. The site identifies fundamental components of movement building and provides strategies to help us work towards the goals outlined in each of the five sections:

The sections include a summary of key ideas and goals, informative lessons and multiple resources designed to help organizations think about the way they approach social change initiatives. Each section is also connected to an inspirational story from the Leadership for A Changing World project that the Advocacy Institute founded in collaboration with the Ford Foundation.

Read more about Leadership for a Changing World.

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Do We Need Another Hero? - Stephen Huddart, a Program Director with the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, offers a comprehensive look at the role “star power” plays in the development of social movements. A summary and conclusions of the report can be found on page 55. Of particular interest is the author’s “typology, critique, and comparative analysis” (p.40) of celebrity engagement. Through illustrative examples, this section provides movement builders with a useful tool for assessing how, when, and with what precautions, they should approach celebrities to support a given social “cause”.

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Asset Building for Social Change - This report was published by the Asset Building and Community Development Program of the Ford Foundation and is aimed at exploring ways to “accelerate the diffusion and adoption of effective policies and practices so that large-scale, enduring change is achieved.” Through case studies and strategies from the Ford Foundation’s own work, the report explores five “pathways to scale”: Developing Public Policies, Fostering Communities of Practice, Influencing Market Forces, Changing Power Relationships, and Promoting Social Learning. At Tamarack, we believe that effective movement building strategies follow many, if not all, of these pathways in order to achieve lasting change. Check out the following three sections for concrete lessons and strategies for building social movements:

• Following the Pathways: Linkages and Combinations (p. 28)
• Lessons Learned about Scaling Up” (p. 30)
• Inherent Difficulties (p. 31)

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Thinking Like a Movement

Building Movement Project - The Building Movement Project, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, was established in 1999 and, in 2001, ran a series of meetings across America to “explore the intersection between building movement towards social change and building social change organizations.” Out of this consultation process grew the project’s Features of Movement Capacity Building for Nonprofits “toolkit” which outlines nine “tell-tale” signs that an organization is working in ways that will allow movements to form and flourish.

The Building Movement Project published a full summary of the regional meetings they held, called Building Movement vs. Building Organization: Summary of Regional Discussions.

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Social Movements - Charles Dobson, an Associate Professor at Emily Carr Institute, notes in the introduction to Social Movements: A Summary of What Works, that there is a significant body of academic literature on social movements, which has remained within academic circles. This article provides an accessible summary of Resource Mobilization, one of the predominant theories of social movements that grew out of North America in the second half of the 20th century. His summary highlights theories about favourable pre-conditions, volunteer recruitment and mobilization, and maintenance of movements for change.

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Changing Concepts of Change - As a “movement activist” for over sixty years, Grace Lee Boggs has seen social movements emerge and develop throughout the latter-half of the 20th century. In this discussion forum at Reuther Library, Boggs suggests that in order to build movements for radical change in America we will have to shift our thinking to encompass the complexity of social change. With an illustrative quote by Margaret Wheatley, Boggs helps us understand how, in an interconnected social system, the size and scale of actions do not necessarily correspond their ability to achieve lasting impact in the larger social system. She urges movement builders to focus on “the construction of power from below.”

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Movement as Network - Movement as Network caught our eye because it presents both a diagnosis of, and theoretical approach to addressing problems that the authors suggest have hindered the environmental movement. This website was created by ONE/Northwest, which is a Seattle-based non-profit that delivers technology support to environmental organizations. Also be sure to check out Movement as Network: Connecting People and Organizations in the Environmental Movement which proposes that the environmental movement will function most effectively if the parts that comprise it focus on their areas of expertise: people, solutions, or resources. For a summary of this report click here or to download the entire report click here.

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Movements for Change Bibliography - In the process of researching social movements, we came across a wide range of resources relating to social movement theory. Check out the bibliography we have compiled for a categorized list of the most useful resources we came across. Where possible, we have included links so that you can access these resources online. We believe this resource is particularly useful as a reference to help guide further research on social movements or if you are interested in exploring a particular movement dynamic, such as participant mobilization, or the diffusion of movement ideas.

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