Take me to your leader

In this project, I’ve quite often found myself looking for leaders in the wrong places. You think leaders are easy to identify — they have titles, surely, and offices and email addresses on webpages. Those people are, of course, sometimes very effective leaders and can tell you a lot about their organisations and the people in their community. Many times, however, the people that are actually leading or influencing or changing minds in a community are not out in the front and not speaking down from some high position. They’re grandmothers who are taking grandkids to school every day and having a chat with everyone at the gate. They’re the people making sure that the church roof has been checked after a bad storm. They’re the retired Auntie that you wouldn’t take much notice of because she doesn’t try to get noticed, but knows everyone in the mosque and everything going on.

It’s really hard to fail in community organising, I’ve found so far. You only feel like you fail when you’re trying to do something that the community doesn’t actually want to do, or is your priority, the thing that you think everyone should be doing. This rarely works, but even if you could make it happen, it’s not actually community organising. Community organising requires the people in the community saying what they want and need, and leading to make those changes happen. The organisers stand where they need to stand to make that happen: sometimes it’s at the front of the group, of course, but sometimes it’s at the back. Or the side. Or the middle. Every day I work on this project I’m reminded that what I think people need, or what I think they should be doing, is never right unless it is informed by conversations with people, conversations where I listen to them, and their stories of struggle and success. When I can listen, I can start to see where things are actually going and where I fit in.