Finally two more weeks, the first with the Advanced trainee group spending time on messaging and coalition building focussing on how to develop community group activity around local issues and build capacity for unions and, finally, this week with the year 12 trainees looking at the broader context of campaigning both in the workplace and beyond.

Liz Blackshaw is Director of the TUC Organising Academy

Spent a really interesting afternoon talking about digital strategy as part of our campaigning toolkit. With ever increasing social networking and instant communications, unions are getting involved in their own digital revolution and methods to support campaigns are becoming ever more sophisticated and, brilliantly, easier to use and be active in. Online communication to cause actions has been used to great effect in many campaigns, CWUs Keep the Post Public campaign being a case in point.

Cheers to Matthew McGregor from Blue State Digital and Neil Foster Northern TUC Policy and Campaigns officer

Extracts from a very interesting and positive review of the last 3 years work by the TUC’s Organising Team to support and develop UNISON’s huge effort to Meet the Organising Challenge. UNISON’s investment in their organising team is bringing in a visible new layer of organisers who are then trained through the UNISON/ TUC partnership to build union capacity. Remarkably, given that all potential organisers are put through their paces in a serious of simulated campaign activities over a 2 day period, over 90% of all those who have been through it were happy with their experience – even those who were unsuccessful!

Want to find out more about how the TUCs Organising Team can support your union’s orgainsing efforts? Contact either Carl or Liz at organisingacademy@tuc.org.uk or on 0207 467 1361

The telling of the story, the narrative, breaks down into different parts but the most important consideration is that it has to be our story, told as it happens and equally important it has to be relevant and it has to have urgency.  Hence the complexity.  Here’s an attempt at a real example…

I have been (as have some of you I’m sure) watching the unfolding political events of the last few weeks and it felt a little like the end of a Dr Who episode where you hide because you know its going to be scary but you can’t help watching at the same time.  I have also noticed a change in how the PM contenders approached the election and I saw a different campaign, did you?  I saw spreads in Hello! magazine,  interviews on Piers Morgan as well asthose live debates.  Through this I feel I have heard some of their story. The final outcome is still unknown, a bit like those maths formulas: xy2=sum of conservative + liberal democrat. 

One unknown quantity is still guaranteed in all of the papers and news reports.  Our economy (meaning our jobs and income and the tax we pay across all of our workplaces providing all of the services we do for each other) still needs some work.  Now we have two people making our decisions, maybe two heads are better than one but which one gets the final say?  The value of us making sure that we have some say in what happens in every one of our workplaces is critical today because when have you or I ever faced this in our society? 

The time to get our friends and family to join our unions and be active in our workplaces around the country is never more urgent than now. We have to make sure that all decisions affecting us and our jobs and income and taxes and services are influenced by us.  So, I am going to go and make sure my friends and family are all in unions, will you?

This method works better spoken than written, and you will see that there is always room for improvement. The lessons learned from our american friends will be developed into a training course which the TUC Orgainising Academy will be running in the autumn, keep a watch on our website for further details.

Their aims for the year range from improving the image of union’s more broadly by demonstrating the value of union membership; building a strong and active membership; approaching membership increases in a structured way.  They also outlined their own personal aims including learning more about the role of an organiser; improving union knowledge as well as having a hands on role in workplaces. 

Another suggestion was to “inject some life” into the movement and was definitely supported by the lively debate and discussion that took place around the aims of the TUC Organising Academy:

• motivate participants to see the value and practical benefits of an organising approach to the recruitment of new members
• ensure participants understand the need for the development of sustainable union structures
• enable participants to adopt a strategic approach to organising and recruitment activity within the workplace and more widely
• develop and update the skills and knowledge required to organise new and existing union members
• enable participants to build organising activity into other union roles

Sign up for our rss feeds to get more details of the trainees as they post them

Over these 2 days we will be setting out the agenda for 2010 which is going to involve some unusual challenges such as continuing recovery from the recession, a general election and the end of the BB era.

So whilst the nation gets to grips with the CBB intake, we will be finding out more about our Academy Organisers and telling you about them. THey will be posting up info about themselves on their page on the stronger unions blog, available tomorrow.

In the meantime, do any of you Organising Academy veterans out there have any words of wisdom, messages of support or general advice to give to our new intake? If so, post them below.