Changemakers

Back in 2003, I was part of the movement that tried to stop the war in Iraq. In Sydney we built an enormous coalition of over 70 organisations. We met every week on Monday evenings on the third floor of an aging inner-city pub called the Spanish Club.  The coalition had lots of rules. Every organisation was allowed to bring two representatives to meetings, and both could vote. That rule was practical, in a variety of ways. The room struggled…

Read More Read More

This week ChangeMakers is launching the second season of our weekly organising broadcast – ChangeMakers Organising School. We thought this would be as good a time as any to step back and consider – what is this thing called organising? Before 1990 no one in Australia used the term organising. The word first emerged in the union movement in the mid-1990s when the ACTU (Australian Council of Trade Unions) Organising Works program started to talk about organising as a way…

Read More Read More

Every week the news coming out of Hong Kong is a little more alarming. It’s never quite as evocative as ‘tanks running through Tiananmen Square’. But every time, it represents another form of crackdown. On Saturday six Hong Kong democracy campaigners living overseas were issued arrest warrants. One of those was an American citizen called Samuel Chu. Samuel Chu. For some of you that name might be familiar. Last year ChangeMakers made a couple of episodes about Hong Kong produced…

Read More Read More

A few years ago, I decided to do some deep, sustained research that looked at the question of how we involve people in the process of making change. This week my colleague Kurt Iveson and I submitted our first journal article about our findings. Knowing that many of you aren’t likely to get your hands on the somewhat aloof International Journal of Housing Policy I thought I might pass on what we found. The article is on urban social movements….

Read More Read More

For the last 10 days in Portland Oregon, Federal law enforcement have been arresting protesters. After over 50 days of sustained #BlackLivesMatter protest, the Federal Attorney General called in law enforcements over the top of state authorities under the guise of protecting property and restoring order. Federal officials have used less-lethal munitions like tear gas and also conducted arrests, firstly at protest sites and more recently tracking down protesters at their homes and as they walked the streets. The move…

Read More Read More

This week a second CoronaVirus lockdown began in Melbourne, Australia, joining many global cities still in lockdown. It sparked greater focus on the mental health crises that are rising alongside the disease. To date, the standard response to mental health crises is more doctors, more clinicians. That may be needed for helping people in acute need, but is it sufficient for creating healthier minds long term? The greatest tool for living well with a mental illness is insight. Being able…

Read More Read More

Intense pressure can cause radical transformation, like how coal can turn into a diamond. But it can also cause things to crack and break. Welcome to technology in 2020. Last weekend in Tulsa, the twitterer in residence was hoist with his own petard. The campaign that claimed to rule social media found itself pranked by hundreds of thousands of young activists. K-pop fans combined with other Tiktoc users to stage a mass intervention into the ticket sales at the President’s…

Read More Read More