Liam has spent the last 2 decades awkwardly moving between grassroots activist groups, professional NGOs, and frontline community organising spaces. In each of them he found groups struggling to find ways of working together that aligned with their values and allowed a range of people to engage with them across power and privilege lines.
The NGOs had modelled themselves after corporations; the activist groups had usually refused most forms of structure, leaving power in the hands of the most privileged; the community groups had typically found that the models available excluded most of their members from being actively involved.
But there were folks in each of these spaces trying to address the same issues, from different perspectives. Liam found himself becoming an informal repository of some of the early radical organisational policies that fill this site, sharing them back and forth between groups and across sectors, based on personal contacts and connections. Chats with Kiran and Rich helped turn this informal practice into a (hopefully!) far-more-accessible project with wider reach!
If you’ve decided that one highly-paid HR consultant probably shouldn’t be writing all of your radical policies for you, what are some of the options for doing things more collectively?
This is part of an ongoing discussion we’re having about the roles of bigger voluntary organisations and charities using RadHR. It’s something we actually have some differing perspectives on within the team, and wanted to share them so that others could chime in. This is Liam’s view.
