Giving Compass' Take:

· Tom Liacas expresses his admiration for the progress made by people-powered advocacy movements and explains the importance of measuring their impact to secure sufficient funding. 

· How effective are people-powered movements? How can organizations support and work with people-powered approaches to scale progress? 

· Check out this article about making local advocacy stronger.


With a close eye on the world’s mounting (and interconnected) wicked problems, as well as our closing window of opportunity to act decisively on them, it’s clear to me that emerging people-powered movements — like the student-led climate strikes — are the only forces out there moving with the proper speed and scale to offer us hope of turning things around in time.

If I had heaps of philanthropic money, that is squarely where I would be placing most of my bets — not on more research, on top-down persuasion campaigns or in lobbying centrist governments for incremental change. But that’s just me.

Does progressive people-powered mobilization actually get enough love from funders and decision makers in social change circles these days? The answer, sadly, is not by a long shot.

Having been a fly on the wall during many discussions where advocacy campaign strategy and funding were being pondered and decided on by those with resources and power, I have a good idea of what’s preventing the greater support of people-powered organizing and mobilizing, which I’ll be happy to unpack over time. For now, I want to focus on the measurement and evaluation piece of the puzzle.

Read the full article about measuring the impact of people-powered advocacy by Tom Liacas at Medium.