We Forgot How to Organise. We Got Very Good at Delivering.

5-minute read

There is a moment in a lot of the work we do where someone in the room says something like: "We just cannot seem to get people engaged." It comes up in steering groups, in strategy days, in those slightly defeated post-event debriefs where the turnout was low and the energy was off. It comes up when organisations have done everything right on paper: they have sent the emails, posted on social media, put up the flyers, maybe even offered lunch. And still, the room is half empty. Or worse, the room is full of the same twelve people who always show up.

We hear it often enough that we have started to think the problem has been misdiagnosed. Most of us have forgotten what engagement actually is.

Somewhere along the way, engagement stopped meaning "going to where people are, listening to what matters to them, and building something together." It started meaning "getting people to attend your thing." Those are very different activities. One requires relationship, the other requires marketing.

How did we get here?

There are a few forces at play, and they have been building for decades.

The first is the professionalisation of social change. Over the past twenty years, the type of thinking you would find in an MBA programme has quietly made its way into the charity and public sectors. Not in the sense that everyone went out and got a business degree, but in the sense that a particular kind of logic now sits underneath almost everything: outcomes frameworks, theories of change, logic models, key performance indicators, scalability, replicability. These are not bad tools in themselves. But they carry an assumption that the work of improving people's lives can be modelled, measured, and managed in the same way you would manage a supply chain. And when that assumption starts to dominate, it reshapes what gets funded, what gets valued, and what gets done.

What gets done, increasingly, is programmes. Self-contained, time-limited, funded interventions with a start date and an end date, a set of deliverables, and an evaluation. The programmatisation of everything. Health promotion becomes a twelve-week course, community development becomes a three-year project, peer support becomes a service with referral criteria and targets for how many people ‘move through it’.

None of this is inherently wrong. Programmes do good work. But when programmes become the only way we know how to respond to community need, we lose something essential. We lose the slow, unpredictable, deeply relational work of actually organising with people. We lose the willingness to show up without a predetermined outcome, and we lose the capacity to sit in a room and let something emerge that we did not plan for.

The speed of sharing versus the slowness of building

There is a second force, and it’s cultural. We live inside an economic system that rewards speed, efficiency, and the instant movement of information. Everything is built to move faster: goods, money, data, ideas. And we’ve absorbed that logic so deeply that it shapes how we think about social change too.

We’re very good at sharing resources; toolkits, guides, frameworks, webinars, infographics, links to reports. We can circulate a PDF to a thousand people in seconds. We can post a resource on LinkedIn and feel like we have contributed something, and maybe we have. But sharing information doesn’t build power and distributing resources doesn’t organise a community.

Community organising is slow. It happens when someone knocks on a door, or sits in a community centre for three hours waiting for whoever walks in, or makes the same phone call for the fifth time because trust takes time to build. It asks us to be present with people, to follow their lead, to stay when things are uncertain. And it is deeply unfashionable in a world that wants impact metrics and quarterly reports.

We have also, if we are honest, become more individualistic in how we think about change. The internet gave us individual platforms and called it collective action. We share our opinions, curate our personal brands, sign petitions and feel politically active. But collective organising asks something harder of us: putting what the group needs ahead of what we personally want, sitting in a room with people we might not choose to be friends with, compromising, disagreeing, and staying anyway because the thing we are building together is bigger than any one of us. There is no app for that.

What we see in our work

At Habitus, we work across peer support, community health, co-production, and participatory research. Across all of these, we see the same pattern. Organisations genuinely want community involvement but keep defaulting to consultation. They commission peer leadership roles and then build programmes that peers are slotted into with very little room to shape.

The infrastructure of our sector, the funding cycles, the commissioning models, the reporting requirements, has been built around delivery. It supports organisations to do things to and for communities. Building the collective capacity of communities to do things for themselves asks something very different of an organisation, and that’s where most struggle.

We saw this clearly in our recent panel on the difference between community engagement and community-led research. The conversation kept circling back to the same question: who holds the power? In traditional models, organisations define the problem, design the response, and invite communities to participate. In organising, communities define what matters and organisations show up to support that. The difference is structural.

And it’s the structural piece that most organisations struggle with, because it means giving up control. It means accepting that the timeline won’t be neat and tidy, the outcomes might not match what you wrote in the funding bid, and the process will be messier and more uncertain than a programme with a clear delivery plan. It’s also where the real change happens: in the relationships that form when people come together around shared frustration and shared hope.

Tracking change that people can feel

Here’s where we need to be careful, because the answer to programmatisation isn’t to stop tracking impact. We’re an evaluation and research organisation, we believe deeply in understanding what works. The question is what you track, and when.

The standard approach layers evaluation on top of delivery: you run the programme, then you measure it. This creates a strange doubling, where staff deliver a session, then fill in a monitoring form about the session they just delivered. The evaluation lives in a parallel universe to the actual work, and everyone knows it. The forms get filled in because they have to be, the data goes into a report, the report goes to the funder, and very little of it feeds back into what happens next with the community.

What we’ve learned, through years of doing this work, is that the most useful evaluation is built into the activity itself. The community conversation is the data collection. The peer-led focus group is both the engagement and the evidence. The act of bringing people together to reflect on what matters to them produces the insights that shape the next phase of work. When evaluation is designed this way, it stops being an administrative burden and starts being a tool that communities can actually use.

This also changes what you measure. Instead of counting how many people attended a session, you start paying attention to whether the same people came back and brought someone new. Instead of tracking how many referrals were made, you look at whether people are forming connections with each other outside of your programme. Instead of asking "did you find this service helpful" on a feedback form, you ask what’s changed in how someone sees themselves, their community, or their power to act. Hope, self-advocacy, a sense of belonging, the confidence to challenge a decision: these are harder to capture in a spreadsheet, but they are the real indicators that something is shifting.

That doesn’t mean stop measuring, it’s to measure the things that tell you whether community power is growing.

What you can do differently

If any of this resonates, here are some concrete places to start.

In how you design projects: Before you write a programme plan, spend time in the community you’re trying to work with. Go to the places people already gather, ask what matters to them. Let their answers reshape your plan, even if it means going back to your funder and saying "we have learned something and we need to adjust." Build in enough flexibility that the project can change shape as relationships develop.

In how you structure roles: Create at least one role in your team whose main job is building relationships. Their work is to be present, to listen, to connect people to each other and to opportunities. This role shouldn’t carry a caseload or deliver a curriculum. It should be protected time for the slow work of building trust and growing what the community can do together. If that feels like a luxury, consider how much time and money your organisation currently spends trying to engage people who don’t trust you yet.

In how you run meetings: Stop running meetings where the agenda is set entirely by staff. Try opening with "what’s on your mind?" and giving the room twenty minutes before you get to your items. Use rounds instead of raised hands so quieter voices have space. Close by asking what the group wants to do about what has come up, and then support them to do it.

In how you evaluate: Design your evaluation activities to double as engagement activities. If you need to understand how people experience your service, don’t send a survey. Hold a reflective conversation, facilitated by someone with shared experience, and use what emerges to shape both your evaluation report and your next round of delivery. Track relational indicators alongside your standard KPIs: are people forming connections, are they coming back, are they taking on roles, are they bringing others in? These tell you whether you are building community or just delivering a service.

In how you bid for funding: When you write your next funding application, describe your engagement approach in terms of relationships and community capacity, not just recruitment targets. Name the time it takes to build trust. Budget for it.

Coming back to what we already know

The principles of community organising have been around for a long time: go to where people are, listen before you act, build collective power, and never do for people what they can do for themselves. These have been the foundation of every effective social movement in history. They’ve been crowded out by a managerial culture that is more comfortable with programmes than movements, and more fluent in delivery plans than relationships. But they have not disappeared.

Every organisation we work with has people in it who already know how to do this. They’re the ones who stay late because someone needed to talk. They’re the ones who know every family on the estate by name. They’re the ones who organised the community response during the pandemic without a project plan or a theory of change. The work is to find those people, value what they do, and build from there.

The sector does not need another engagement toolkit. It needs to trust what communities already know about themselves, resource the relationships that make collective action possible, and measure the things that actually tell us whether power is shifting. That is harder than running a programme. It is also where lasting change comes from.

Habitus Collective is a lived experience-led consultancy specialising in peer support, co-production, participatory research and community engagement. We work with organisations who want to do things differently. If you want to talk about how to build organising into your evaluation, your engagement, or your next project, get in touch.

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