In the University of Birmingham’s great hall, 600 community leaders from across the West Midlands gathered to ask the leading candidates for Mayor and Police and Crime Commissioner to commit to addressing their election priorities.
There was music, celebration, and testimony from youth workers, faith leaders, teachers, and school children – nothing that felt obviously student union-y.
This was because a few months before Aston Students’ Union joined Birmingham Citizens.
The group is a diverse local alliance of third sector organisations that come together to build stronger communities and win change. By joining this coalition, the SU feels they can get a seat at the table with powerful regional leaders and secure commitments they can’t win alone. They used community organising methods to bring their students with them on this journey, training a diverse team of student leaders who are helping them to maximise this opportunity.
The SU’s Vice President for Communities Taher Gadiwala took to the stage and began to speak. He spoke about how the 19,000 students he represents struggling to find work, and how when they do find work it’s often insecure work on poverty wages.
He called for the creation of a “community jobs and skills compact” to bring together civil society, employers, and the public sector to tackle barriers to employment and create pathways to well-paid work. He asked the West Midlands Mayoralty to create a website to compile paid work experience opportunities so there as an easily accessible space for those seeking work to look.
Andy Street, the incumbent mayor and Conservative candidate, and Richard Parker, the Labour challenger, were invited to the stage to respond. They supported the proposal – pledging to make it happen and meet with a team of leaders after the election to discuss rollout. The assembly is the biggest and most diverse gathering in the region. Across all three priority areas (housing, work, and safety), the candidates agree to the assembly’s asks.
Community is key
Birmingham Citizens weaves together the priorities of their members into campaigns that avoid the kind of divide-and-rule politics that might otherwise play these groups off against each other. Taher’s ask for a compact focused on work included the priorities of community centres, youth clubs, places of worship, and local charities. Doing this allows for a critical mass of support that can turn out 600 people to a political meeting.
Their community organising methods focus on building these diverse networks of leaders around a common cause. Citizens UK, the national charity behind Birmingham Citizens, have been using this method for over 30 years to develop leads, build stronger communities, and win change.
Voter registration mapping
For Aston SU, their involvement didn’t start with a speech. A few months before they met to discuss how they could capitalise on their involvement in Birmingham Citizens to engage their students in the elections.
They wanted to avoid the kind of voter registration that’s focused just on democracy for the sake of it – with a voter registration stall in the entrance to their building and a few posts online. Tom, a Community Organiser working for Birmingham Citizens, agreed that if Taher could find 20 student leaders who were broadly representative of the student body and weren’t just the ‘usual suspects’ – they could be trained in some basic community organising methods. Taher found 30.
Over a few hours these 30 people grappled with what it means to be community leaders. They talked about power, leadership, and the local elections. They unpacked how these elections are a possibility for communities to win some change.
The team of 30 became their “action team”, resolving to register thousands of extra students to vote by mapping the student community and registering them to vote. They spoke to students and things students were concerned about, and explained that the more students who voted, the more they could secure commitments from candidates.
It worked. They engaged directly with societies and spaces that aren’t normally part of these conversations. Then 40 of the 600 people in the audience of the assembly were students.
Old habits die hard
Sometimes in an SU when a student wants to do something big is to do it for them. This instinct comes from a good place but the risk is that by taking things off students and doing it for them you are taking away their opportunity to learn and expand their influence.
Those 30 students who led Aston’s voter registration work would have probably run out of steam or had a much smaller impact if they had to run through a coordinator with a whole raft of other things to work on.
Letting students collectively truly own the big, political work has a huge number of upsides. They’re now learning those skills of engaged democratic participation, which means they have room to be creative and there’s more capacity and reach than one coordinator could provide alone.
Next moves
As the elections are over, we plan to get back together and deciding how we want to channel this energy. The key upside is we aren’t doing it alone – we know that Birmingham Citizens will be with us to ensure our plans are strategic, worthwhile, and winnable.
Aston SU’s journey with Community Organising and Birmingham Citizens started with the Citizens UK summer residential training – which was attended by officers, coordinators, managers, and senior leaders. There are still places on this year’s cohort. Other attendees have used their training to work with us on civic engagement, transform their democratic processes, and much more.
