Apr 23 2008

Lessons to Take from Oprah’s Big Give

To be completely honest, GoLeft could not sit through an entire episode of Big Give, it was just too much to ask on a Sunday evening plus it was reminiscent of those shows that take the most wretched on earth and shower them with gifts such as Queen for a Day from the 1950s to today’s Extreme Home Makeover.

But GoLeft caught glimpses of the show from Oprah’s talk show which validated the decision to not give up Sunday evenings to watch this but nevertheless, as people who care about organizing and getting more people involved their were definite lessons to learn from this show.
Lessons for organizers to take:
1) It was a ratings success, showing the appeal of “doing good.” The fatigue that often accompanies people in social justice work is largely due to the small numbers of people involved in our organizations and feeling overwhelmed (and isolated) when faced with the amount of work that needs to be done. We need to remember that the supply of people who want to participate is larger than what we often experience and we have to spend the time in good planning to reach out to them.
2) Break down the tasks and give people easy wins. No one on the show was looking to solve the root causes of the poverty they saw. They had challenges each week that they had to meet where they had to give concrete benefits to a particular group or individual. This does not prevent us from keeping the big picture in mind and linking people’s work to our larger vision of social justice, but we need to plan our organizing with the goal of having volunteers, staff, and people involved walking away with tangible results for the efforts they put into the work they’re doing.
3)Play games and have fun. Though GoLeft thought the Big Give show would work better without having “losers” there is no denying the appeal of the games aspect to the show and organizing in general. The more we can take the work that we do and inject aspects of fun and surprise the more we’ll see positive results in our recruitment efforts.

Comments:

Comment on this story: