Empowering Trusted Messengers and Communities through Relational Organizing

Session description: Why do you believe the things you believe? Research shows that the most impactful messengers are our friends and family. That’s where Empower Project comes in. We help community groups engage in Relational Organizing, which leverages the power of community leaders and volunteers to communicate with family and friends to enact change. Our partnerships in the health space include efforts to increase vaccine uptake, and coaching organizers working to change policies that impact health in our communities. Empower Project has engaged in 9 different independent studies demonstrating that Relational Organizing is one of the most impactful tactics organizations can employ. We have been relationally organizing for over 12 years, have trained 82,000 people from over 1,000 organizations on the techniques, and in 2022 tested several new promising strategies to best leverage the power of personal relationships to enact change.

In this session we talk about relational organizing at scale with specific examples from our work in health and civic change, share our innovative research program which aimed to answer test theories on scaling Relational Organizing quickly, and discuss how to capture the moment online to achieve action and communication offline. We also share mistakes we made along the way, lessons learned and best practices, and how we can work together to empower trusted messengers and build up progressive organizing capacity for the long term.