Civic Organizing Strategies

Civic Organizing Strategies are implemented in each stage of civic organizing.

Creating a Climate for Civic Organizing

Leaders make a case for the need to organize civic capacity and a civic infrastructure as a new approach to governance and policy making based upon practice in the places where they have the authority to act.

Restructuring Existing Resources

In the process of making a case for civic organizing, leaders begin to apply specific civic organizing disciplines to restructure existing approaches to policy making and governance within their jurisdiction as they strive to achieve particular goals. They track evidence that civic organizing produces broader ownership in achieving goals, links practice to civic principles, and gives greater meaning to day to day work.

Recruiting, Expanding, and Sustaining a Base of Influence

Institutional leaders integrate the identity and obligation of civic leadership into their role. A civic leader is a civic organizer, educator, and policy maker and is the primary agency for organizing the civic infrastructure necessary for all members of their jurisdiction to function as active citizens while they achieve institutional goals.

Ensuring Sustainability

The outcome of civic organizing is a permanent, inter-generational base of leaders that produce the civic capacity and civic infrastructure within and across institutions in each generation.  Members of the base advance a civic policy agenda framed by civic principles, standards, and disciplines within and across their institution in order to sustain democracy as a just system of governance.