Discipline 7. Community power-builders and collective advocates

This discipline covers two related but distinct kinds of work.

The first is power-building: work that creates the conditions from which collective action becomes possible. Asset-based community development (ABCD) is the clearest example. It starts from the strengths that already exist in a place – skills, associations, relationships, physical assets – based on the insight that a community that sees and feels its own capacity will be more likely and able to act. This work is not technically speaking campaigning or advocacy, but it can enable both.

The second is collective advocacy: standing up for people in a way that increases their self-efficacy, for example by helping a person to challenge unfair treatment and to exercise their rights. This work is most relevant to civic renewal when it is done collectively, and it typically starts not from a place but from a shared experience – for example, a community that has been let down by a mental health system, or a group of tenants who share a neglectful landlord. This work is prominent in disability rights and mental health, where it is often done through advocacy collectives and expert patient groups, or patient leader programmes, and in tenant and resident activism through tenants’ unions and community-led housing campaigns. It also connects to community-led research and inquiry, using evidence as a way for communities to hold organisations to account. Community power is not always adversarial to the state. in some cases it is actively sought out and recognised by institutions as a feedback and accountability function. Rotherham Doncaster and South Humber NHS Foundation Trust, for example, asks to be held to account for meeting its promises, including through its Communities’ Leadership Executive, a shadow decision-making body of fifteen community representatives.

The distinction from community organising is mostly one of tradition and orientation. Organising has a particular lineage, oriented towards building organising power and running campaigns. Collective advocacy more often begins from an identity or a shared experience, while power-building in the asset-based tradition does not tend to be oriented around a campaign. In practice the three overlap and many practitioners move between them.

Assessing the supporting architecture

There is a patchwork of support for this discipline, though some sub-fields are considerably better supported than the discipline as a whole. Each tradition has its own codification: there is a mature literature and framework around asset-based community development, codified by the ABCD Institute at DePaul University and, in the UK and Ireland, by Nurture Development; published methods and member handbooks from tenants’ unions, most fully the ACORN model; a Code of Practice for Advocates, an Advocacy Charter and a formal Advocacy Quality Performance Mark, all held by the National Development Team for Inclusion, in the mental health and disability advocacy field. Each of these sub-disciplines also has its own institutions, gatherings and academic lineage. However, there is no qualifications framework that brings these variants together, no apprenticeship for collective advocacy, and few meetups where an ABCD practitioner and a tenants’ union organiser would find themselves in the same room. The reason, in short, is that these traditions do not see themselves as one field.