Effective Organizing
ALL ORGANIZING IS DIG-ORGANIZING AND RE-ORGANIZING
BY Michael Gecan
Metro Industrial Areas Foundation
Your congregation – be it Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim, Buddhist or Bhai- has been around a while. You may have had only one or two clergy leaders, or you may have had many. Like all organizations, you have fallen into certain patterns of operation, some good and some not. Again like all organizations, you have two choices: to continue to do what you always have done (because that’s the way you do things) or to reorganize (and thereby re-energize) the way you do business.
If you want ti reorganize, the tools used for over fifty years by the organizations under the umbrella of the Industrial Areas Foundation can help.
Years ago, we were conducting a training session for a group pf leaders in one of our most effective and successful citizen’s organizations. The training focused on one of the most basic skills of any kind of organizing: how to organizing: how to organize and conduct a productive meeting in one hour or less. Running good meetings has long been the practice within our organizations, but ir became a hallmark of our organizations because we kept teaching and re-reaching people how to di it until it finally became second nature to them.
In the course of the session, one of the leaders asked why the same people who conducted and participated in interesting, useful, and productive meetings in the context of citizens’ organizations that often lasted three or more hours, were not well-planned, and often led to little action or progress.
We began to get request from rabbis, imams, pastors and lay leadership groups in congregations to teach them how to use the same tools that worked in citizens’ organizations within the context of their congregations. So we started to develop training programs that were directly aimed at congregational development. We started with how to run more effective meetings and broadened our work from there. Today, we
BY Michael Gecan
Metro Industrial Areas Foundation
Your congregation – be it Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim, Buddhist or Bhai- has been around a while. You may have had only one or two clergy leaders, or you may have had many. Like all organizations, you have fallen into certain patterns of operation, some good and some not. Again like all organizations, you have two choices: to continue to do what you always have done (because that’s the way you do things) or to reorganize (and thereby re-energize) the way you do business.
If you want ti reorganize, the tools used for over fifty years by the organizations under the umbrella of the Industrial Areas Foundation can help.
Years ago, we were conducting a training session for a group pf leaders in one of our most effective and successful citizen’s organizations. The training focused on one of the most basic skills of any kind of organizing: how to organizing: how to organize and conduct a productive meeting in one hour or less. Running good meetings has long been the practice within our organizations, but ir became a hallmark of our organizations because we kept teaching and re-reaching people how to di it until it finally became second nature to them.
In the course of the session, one of the leaders asked why the same people who conducted and participated in interesting, useful, and productive meetings in the context of citizens’ organizations that often lasted three or more hours, were not well-planned, and often led to little action or progress.
We began to get request from rabbis, imams, pastors and lay leadership groups in congregations to teach them how to use the same tools that worked in citizens’ organizations within the context of their congregations. So we started to develop training programs that were directly aimed at congregational development. We started with how to run more effective meetings and broadened our work from there. Today, we