During the testing of clubs, we identified the need for a community organizing model to recruit and support club leaders regionally.

We realized that this model must provide value to i) established mentors as well as help ii) aspiring educators find their audience and their pedagogical stance.

Understanding our allies

In other words, these are our two personas for clubs:

Activist

• Motivation: Strong on MISSION. Cares about the web, issues like privacy.
• Needs: Help on how to teach. Seeks collaborators and a community. 
• Incentives: Belonging, impact, recognition.
• Concerns: Feeling under appreciated, mixed to low teaching skills

Educator

• Motivation: Strong on STRUCTURE.Wants good content for their learners
• Needs: Curriculum & web tools, professional development, access to skilled educators
• Incentives: Engaged learners, professional develop credentials
• Concerns: Not drawn primarily by cause, narrative or brand.

Volunteer Leadership

To support these two personas, we established that intermediary volunteer leadership roles are needed. Inspired by Obama’s community organizing model, nicknamed “the snowflake”, we would like to pilot the following structure:

1. Club Leader. Runs a local club.
2. Regional Coordinators. Supports several local clubs.
3. Staff Organizer. Supports several regional coordinators.

Starting in April, we’d like to work with a handful of beta-tester regional coordinators to test and grow this organizing model.

The Facilitative Teacher

Furthermore, we realized that community leaders would benefit from professional development and training. In parallel to the curriculum stream we have around web literacy, we will also develop modules around facilitative leadership and teaching.

This includes hands-on activities to teach how to use open practices, connectivism, digital making and general facilitation skills to empower your learners and grow your local community.

I’m quite excited about this area of development and plan to collaborate closely with Aspiration Tech and Mozilla Reps to build this out next quarter.

http://michellethorne.cc/2015/03/clubs-towards-an-organizing-model/