Blueprints for Change is an open library of advocacy how-to’s put together by campaign innovators in order to help progressive organizers and groups up their game more quickly.

Systems thinking provides campaigners and organisers with an overall approach and a set of tools to understand the entrenched problems we work on and more strategically engage with the complex systems that we operate in. In this guide we look at systems practice as an overarching approach that can help our campaigns and organising strategies be more effective at driving systems change.

Systems mapping is an important element of any strategy for systemic change (see our guide on Systems Thinking for more on this). Since systems are made up of a complex web of forces and relationships, and underpinned by mental models (values, beliefs and assumptions), then “mapping” these forces, relationships and mental models can be a key step towards developing an understanding of the system you want to change and developing effective strategies to shift it.

Right now Covid-19 is spreading and changing the way we meet, gather and work. Many organizations in multiple issue spaces are scrambling to move their meetings to the virtual space and learn to connect with one-another in an all-remote environment. In person meetings, all-virtual meetings and hybrid virtual/in-person meetings are similar, and yet facilitation and participation in each type of meeting is also different and requires some specific skills and planning. The tips below are offered by the Sierra Club distributed organizing team based on our experience running staff and volunteer organizing meetings. Our remote staff team depends on virtual and hybrid meetings to do our work, build relationships and build people-power. We originally put this document together as a resource for our team. As many of us move to shift our meetings to the virtual space, we know people are asking for support and resources. We received a lot of questions about running virtual meetings, so our Distributed Organizing Associate Director Mary Alice Crim quickly moved to build out the resources list and share it so others can benefit from our knowledge and skills. 

Disinformation (the intentional spread of false and misleading information) and misinformation (the unintentional spread of false information) are not new phenomena. What is new is the ability to rapidly create, disseminate, and consume false and misleading content on a global scale via an interconnected digital media landscape. The hostile actors (e.g., the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency) who create disinformation campaigns rely on provocative, divisive, and/or disturbing content to get our attention in an immensely crowded digital media landscape. The goal is to evoke emotion. Emotions like anger, jealousy, and fear drive content resharing on social media platforms.