نعتذر! هذه الوحدة غير متوفرة كلياً باللغة العربية في الوقت الحالي. إن صندوق العدة أداة حية تتطور باستمرار. يمكنكم التواصل معنا لمساعدتنا في ترجمة هذه الوحدة.
باختصار
Organizers can help people shift their understanding of the difficulties they are experiencing from isolated hardships to shared grievances, then carry out successful campaigns to address those grievances.
A tile that falls off a roof may injure us more seriously, but it will not wound us so deeply as a stone thrown deliberately by a malevolent hand.
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker
الأصول
The Path of Most Resistance, 2018, articulating a truth of organizing that is as old as ideas of justice and injustice.
Social movements grow by converting hardships into grievances. Organizers can use the hardship-to-grievance methodology to help people shift their understanding of the difficulties they are experiencing from individual problems to collective demands, and then carry out successful campaigns to win those demands.
To use this methodology, we have to understand the difference between hardships and grievances.
A grievance is a shared experience of suffering that has an external cause and a common solution.
A hardship is any condition that is difficult to endure and that may not be associated with an external responsible party or solution —my house was destroyed by the earthquake, for instance, or I can’t afford the medication my child needs, or I have no safe way to get to school and back. Seeing a difficult situation as a hardship can sometimes lead to feelings of isolation, helplessness, or self-blame.
A grievance is a shared experience of suffering that has an external cause and a common solution. For example, building standards for construction are not good enough to withstand earthquakes, or essential medication is too expensive, or city planners don’t take women’s safety seriously. By sharing grievances, groups of people can assign responsibility for their suffering, seek accountability, demand action, build solidarity, hold on for a resolution, and, ultimately, win.
Well-defined grievances mobilize people around a common target and offer them a path for action. Gandhi's Salt March, for example, succeeded by shifting a hardship (“Salt is so expensive, I can’t afford to buy it”) into a grievance “The British have no right to tax us on salt that we all need to live!” (see: STORY: The Salt March).
Not all grievances are created equal, however. In order to move people to action, an effective grievance must include an identified culprit and a potential solution, giving people hope that working on the issue will result in improvements.
كيفية الاستخدام
What follows is a brief exercise that you can use in social movement trainings to introduce the hardship-to-grievance concept and show movement participants or organizers how to use it.
Introduce the concepts of hardship and grievance.
Prompt participants with a few examples of negative events that could be understood as either a hardship or a grievance: a childhood asthma diagnosis, a cancer diagnosis, a bicycle collision with a vehicle, a home lost to a flood or wildfire, a workplace injury…. Ask participants to volunteer one or two other negative life events that could be understood as either a hardship or a grievance.
Have participants break out into groups, and ask each group to list some hardships that they or their communities face.
Ask each group to choose one hardship from the list that they can see as a shared grievance, and that they could imagine building a campaign around. Ensure they can identify an individual, group, or entity that has some responsibility for the issue or the power to address it. Ask the group to produce a grievance statement based on this discussion.
Back in the big group, review the grievance statements that have been developed in the breakouts. Choose one or two that are particularly well-suited to a campaign, and work with the big group to ensure each grievance statement has an identified responsible party that is vulnerable to direct or indirect pressure, that each grievance statement is framed as an injustice or a situation that can be changed, and that each points to actions that can be taken or demanded.
Close by inviting questions or comments about grievance statements and how to use them to identify campaigns that a grassroots organization could take up.