The difference between organising for and organising with
Launch library · evergreen read
Organising for a community means acting on its behalf, often based on an outside assessment of what that community needs, while organising with a community means building shared decisions and shared ownership of the effort from the very beginning of the process. That early choice shapes everything that follows.
Organising for can move faster in the short term, since it does not require the same investment in relationship building and shared decision making, but it often produces less durable results, since the community itself has less genuine stake in the eventual outcome reached. Speed, here, is often bought at the expense of durability.
Organising with takes longer to establish but tends to build the kind of local ownership and leadership that survives well beyond any single campaign, which is why most experienced organisers favour it despite the additional time and patience it genuinely requires. That patience is repaid many times over in the end.