We are pleased to share two videos of Tony Massengale, co-author of the Civic Organizing Framework.
Tony Massengale demonstrates his distinctive presence, voice, strength of conviction in this 2014 video on collaboration. As co-author of the Civic Organizing Framework, we agreed there was a need for a new approach to political organizing. The outcome would not only produce more sustainable collaboration but would result in a new approach to governance for the common good as the method for doing so. We agreed that the solution strategy was organizing a base of sustainable institutional partnerships whose members would work with us on developing a way to drive civic organizing deep into institutional operations. We chose different ways to make our case.
Tony built upon his established reputation as a consultant/organizer/ educator/lecturer working to conceptualize civic organizing within his leadership in 40+ collaborative networks. I chose to start with organizing MACI, a standalone cross-sector base of demonstrations and institutional members with a shared civic organizing agenda.
We found similar challenges summarized in Tony’s words: “partners presumed my approach/methodology was an extra thing to do rather than the thing to do. Or, that my unwillingness to focus solely on their ‘hot-button’ issue/problem was at best a missed opportunity to attract activists and activist dollars.” At the same time, there was an increased awareness of crisis in both institutional, national and global governance but this problem was not linked to the systemic inability to make progress in addressing problems.
In 2015, having no reason to question our initial analysis and facing our last stage of leadership for civic organizing, we agreed to focus our organizing on who would move forward to make a case for civic organizing within a cross-sector base of institutional partnerships.
Tony died in December 2016, while in the process of restructuring his model, winding up his tenure in county government, having enough time, knowledge, and financial autonomy to focus solely on this civic organizing agenda. In many ways, Tony’s death was tragic, but it re-enforced my resolve to see our experiment through. We moved forward to focus on the role of MACI Lead Organizer, determined by supporting only those who would test the Civic Organizing-MACI Model developed in stage 1-3 and to govern our progress in advancing the MACI purpose. In 2020 we will post institutional case study updates to track progress and lessons learned in the process.
