A few weeks ago I was a part of a Granville District information night, and I was unable to speak. I wasn’t feeling sick, but I had completely lost my voice. But, because of how the Sydney Alliance build power – it didn’t matter.

Granville sits on the edges of the western suburbs of Sydney. It’s a melting pot of different migrant and ethnic communities – with large numbers of Christian and Muslim migrants from the Middle East, Pacific Islanders, Asian and older Anglo communities. It’s a struggling but vibrant community: it has great local shops that are a pain to get to because there is not enough parking. There is an interchange train station, but it is quite dark and feels dangerous at night.

I was in Granville because I am the founding director of a massive coalition of civil society organisations in Sydney. Since 2007, I have worked with a handful of staff and dozens and dozens of leaders from churches, unions, community organisations, schools and other religious organisations to build a powerful network of citizens, capable of making the city a better place to live. I came into this work because I was frustrated that so many of the problems we face in Sydney were too big for one organisation to solve. And indeed, many of the problems with we face with the state of politics stem from the fact that citizens aren’t engaged, leaving politicians out of touch. The Sydney Alliance seeks to change politics by bringing people back in. We build from the grassroots up – in places like Granville.

In Granville, we have District run by a “core team” of six local community leaders – Alex, Antony, Miguel, Sarah, Paula and Louise. Together we had prepared the agenda, and when I arrived I joined them sitting around a school bench in the playground of Granville Boys High. They laughed when I tried to speak (my voice was an undignified squeak) – then Alex said – “have you lost your voice to provide a leadership development opportunity for us?” We re-allocated the 5 mins I was going to speak at the meeting to another team members, and continued to prepare.

The meeting was successful – over 35 locals squeezed into a classroom to share stories about why they needed to be heard when it came to making their suburb safer. When we debriefed the meeting, there was a buzz in the team – because if they weren’t sure before, they definitely knew now, that this district was their responsibility, and it was working.

When we began the Sydney Alliance, we knew that to stand for the whole of Sydney that we needed to build local suburban scale coalitions as well as a city-wide body. We had to marry the idea of having enough breadth and enough depth. To create breadth, we started with the Sydney metropolitan area – because to be taken seriously by political and corporate decision makers we needed to be based across a large population. However, to create depth, we started building districts – local suburban coalitions of community, union and religious groups in the suburbs.

We made lots of mistakes as we learnt how to build the districts right. Our first mistake was one of scale. Our instinct was to cut Sydney up into a three “big areas” – West, South West and Harbour. Although we held a few quite large meetings – the geography was too broad to foster genuine common interest in local issues. In the West, the Penrith people had a different set of concerns to those in Blacktown/Mt Druitt and Parramatta. Our first districts were a mile wide but only an inch deep.

After some evaluation, we changed directions. Instead we decided that we needed much more local coalitions. We developed a three year plan of establishing 15 districts by 2015, but insisted that we would only build 5 at a time. We decided to do what unions sometimes call “hot shop” organising –we would go to where there were people who were already wanting to organise. So, we began “districts” again, this time in places like Liverpool, Parramatta and Nepean where we had talented individuals who said they were prepared to coordinate local teams.

These districts had a stronger base than the first iteration. However, our evaluations also showed us their weaknesses. We were relying on too few people to make the districts work. In one place, the district almost  fell over because it relied on only one person to do the convening. The lesson was that while you might need a coordinator, what you really needed was a solid “core team” of people if you were to sustain a local district. Ron Burgess, on of our organisers, came up with a formula for what a district needed to work – “you need a core team of 6-8, and then a contact list of 30-50.”

So we tried again. At the beginning of 2012 we began forming “core teams” in a couple of targeted areas of Sydney. We also decided to give the districts a much greater degree of community organiser support to make the team building process easier. David Barrow, one of our Community Organisers, went out and slowly built the Liverpool/Fairfield district through dozens of one to one meetings. He consolidated a team that including parishoners like Faustina, union delegates like Raff and Brad, and community workers like Miguel. Together they ran a Foundations 2 Day training in February with a larger pool of interested people.

The new Liverpool/Fairfield “core team” (many of whom undertook our National 6 Day training) lead a local listening campaign where they decided that they would work improve transport access to medical centres. They formed a research-action team and cut the problem into an issue – campaigning for 15 min drop off zones outside 6 medical centres. Two weeks before the Local Government elections, 13 councillors came to an Accountability Assembly with 190 locals at St Xavier Parish in Lurnea. The Assembly was run by the local leaders – and their action resulted in 12 councillors, including the current Mayor, all committing to create the drop off zones. Go to Liverpool now, and you will see them. The signs are up and it is because of how these Sydney Alliance leaders were able to exercise local power for the common good.

“Change our Suburbs, Change our City” was the theme of our City Assembly in October 2012. At the Sydney Town Hall the Alliance showcased the local organising that had developed in places as diverse as Marrickville, Parramatta, Nepean. It also outlined our safe station campaign run by our Transport Team that had worked with all our local districts to audit all of Sydney’s 17 Interchange train stations.

By the beginning of 2013, we knew that while our districts were strong, they still had gaps. Many of our partner organisations didn’t clearly see how the districts could be used to develop the skills, talents and leadership capacity of their parishioners’, union members or community members. So, the Alliance ran meetings inside our partner organisations – 37 meetings in all – where we asked each organisation to consider “what is the vision for your membership in 5 years time?” Then, if there was an alignment between that vision and the work of the districts – we encouraged them to bring the leaders they wanted to develop to a Leaders Assembly in May 2013 called “Local Power for the Common Good.”

326 people came to that Assembly. It was in Glebe, where we showcased how local power had created local jobs for young Aboriginal men who lived in the housing estate, and was working to create more job opportunities. In the second half of the Assembly, each district presented its work – and then – the room split up, with interested leaders finding the districts they wanted to be a part of, and connecting face to face. In the month since, our districts have bloomed – new leaders, new connections, new interests, new ideas.

Why districts?

Power in Coalition argues that multi-scaled organising is a strategy that helps coalitions to be successful. “Multi-scaled” is a fancy way of saying that a coalition must operate at different “geographic levels” at the same time – like operating at a local as well as city, state or national scale.

Multi-scaled coalitions are powerful for two reasons. First, political power is multi-scaled – with local electorates and state and national parliaments. You garner the greatest influence with a Member of Parliament if the people who are advocating live or work in the local electorate. Secondly, the local space is where we live – where we send our kids to school, where we hang out at the park, spend time with our families, eat and shop. Even though we are a “global village” we still “live” in our suburb. Organising locally means that people can find common suburban interests that can overcome apparent religious or community differences – groups that haven’t worked together can find common ground in a campaign to create drop off zones that benefit themselves and each other.

But we need multi-scaled coalitions, not just local coalitions. A coalition exercises power when it can “coordinate” across different local areas as well as have the ability to act in a specific area. Coordination comes from an agreement about certain practices, goals and standards. There is a universal tension here between “coordination” and “autonomy” – too much coordination and you tend towards domination, too much autonomy and you tend towards anarchy. You need to constantly negotiate these poles to hold your suburban and city scaled power in check.

We have learnt this in the Alliance. We did a city wide listening campaign in 2010-11 that led to 261 people “committing” to take action on three problem areas – social inclusion, transport and community support and health. But when we came to look at how to act on these issues, we realised we needed to go deeper into our suburbs to work out how to develop solutions to these problems. So in Liverpool and elsewhere we listened, but rather than asking an open question, we listened to people’s concerns about transport. The listening process was “coordinated” with the city-wide priorities the Alliance had chosen. But, when in Liverpool they identified the issue of medical transport, the Alliance also recognised that districts needed to have the autonomy to cut their own issues based on their energy and experiences.  So drop off zones became their focus.

How to we build districts?

Districts are built from a core team out. If you don’t have a leadership team in place, then you will never have the means to mentor and support new leaders. You need leaders create more leaders.

So when we build a district we don’t focus first on a big launch or activity. We focus on consolidating a team. Short team meetings take on the task of one-to-one outreach in the area to meet with leaders in local organisations.

From the core, we then seek to build a team of committed people and a wider community. This philosophy borrows (and changes a little) the ideas of Rick Warren in Purpose-Driven Church. He talks about cascading circles of leadership – core, committed, congregation, community, crowd. We are exploring how to translate those ideas into our context.

In the Industrial Areas Foundation, we talk about primary, secondary and tertiary leaders. When building a district we are looking for all of these types of leaders – primary leaders to run the district as a core, secondary leaders to help lead local activity inside their church or school, and tertiary leaders to participate in listening or public action. Of course, we seek to transition people up this ladder of engagement, if they are interested. But unlike in some “activist” groups – there is less urgency to “push” everyone up the “ladder of engagement.” In the Sydney Alliance, we are organising people who are already committed to an organisation that they care about – we work with people to explore their interests and see how they might want to engage in public action, but we recognise that not everyone wants or needs to be a primary leader all the time. And, in developing leaders we don’t seek to take them away from their organisation – but rather make them stronger and more capable leaders inside their organisation. This is how the Alliance seeks to build local power – by building the vitality of our civic organisations and connecting those organisations to each other.

Community organising is the key

The key practice that underpins all this work is community organising. When the Sydney Alliance uses this phrase we mean particular practices and “universal” rules that operate in public life.

We teach these universals to our leaders at our 2 day Foundations Training and our National 6 day Training. And most importantly, we teach and practices community organising in everything we do – from the one-to-one relational meetings we have with people, to the meetings we start on time and end on time, to how we plan our public actions, to how we evaluate everything we do.

In doing so, we stand on the shoulders of the experience of the Industrial Areas Foundation and the thousands of leaders and hundreds of organisers that work in the United Kingdom, the USA, Canada and Germany. The Sydney Alliance is the first time that this kind of community organising has been intentionally practiced in Sydney.

The success of the Alliance, however, is also based on our ability to stand on the shoulders of successful Australian coalition builders and community leaders. Jack Mundey’s Green Bans that saved the urban environment in the 1970s, or the 8 hour day campaigns between the catholic church and unions in the 1880s saw a broad base of community organisations, unions and community organisations come together to make the city a better place to live.

In building the Sydney Alliance we have learnt from all that went before us. Indeed, we seek to cultivate a culture of reflection – learning from the past as well as evaluating our current practice. Combining a culture of reflection, with a culture of relationship building and action has been a key tool for creating an Alliance where highly diverse organisations can work successfully together. We seek to practice our values in everything we do, and what is special about how we make social change is that we involve thousands of people in the process. We say “don’t do for others what they can do for themselves” and accordingly we have worked with hundreds of people to build strong districts across the city.

While we are still building the kinds of issues we work on, over the past 6 years, the kind of local democracy we have built is notable. The team in Granville will go on in 2013 to run a local listening campaign involving thousands of locals. It will identify short term and long term concerns to act on, and over the coming years will make that suburb safer and easier to live in. All the while, the process of involving hundreds of local residents, workers and students in making that change will make our democracy stronger at the same time.

The Alliance has been building for six years, but really it has only just begun. We have big plans to slowly and surely make the city a better place to live.

Glebe Assembly

326 members of community groups, unions and religious organisations met this week to negotiate a better future for young people living in Glebe.

The Assembly, held by the Glebe-Redfern district of the Sydney Alliance, invited Mirvac CEO John Carfi to publicly negotiate new apprenticeship opportunities for young residents.

“This was an opportunity for Mirvac to publicly commit to the local community,” said Amanda Tattersall, Coalition Director of the Sydney Alliance.

“Mirvac has agreed to support two to four extra apprenticeships this year on top of two existing positions. They have also agreed to work with subcontractors to try and fund more apprenticeships.”

“We’ve seen so much progress already in Glebe, with two local Aboriginal apprentices working on site at the Harold Park Estate development.

“This is a chance for Mirvac to step up and continue to be a part of local change.”

The Alliance’s ‘Working Start’ program gives young people the opportunity to access apprenticeships and training programs in the local area.

Lord Mayor of Sydney Clover Moore and Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Youth Victor Dominello were also invited to the Assembly, however neither was able attend.

Alliance members were disappointed that Lord Mayor Moore had pulled out at the last minute. In response, over 300 letters were signed by Alliance members and have been sent to the Lord Mayor asking for her to meet with the Glebe district team.

They will push for City of Sydney Council to offer more apprenticeships to disadvantaged young people in the area.

The Assembly also heard from each of the ten Sydney Alliance local districts and their plans for local change. Those present had the chance to speak with local district leaders and to get involved with the campaigns in their area.

Sydney Alliance partner organisations present included the Catholic Church, the NSW Cancer Council, the Construction union (CFMEU), the Uniting Church in Australia, the Baptist Union, Anglican congregations, the NSW Nurses and Midwives Association, Western Sydney Community Forum, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, members of Sydney’s Climate Action Network, United Voice, the Rail Tram and Bus Union, the Arab Council of Australia, the National Tertiary Education Union and many others.

Click here to find out more.

This campaign has brought together local organisations and employers as part of its Working Start program in Glebe – a program which has successfully generated new relationships and new leadership for partner organisations.

Over 200 people are expected to attend this assembly, bringing together diverse individuals from across Sydney Alliance partner organisations, along with a significant force of local individuals and groups from Glebe – such as the Glebe Youth Service Inc., local schools and churches, and Koori Jobs Ready.

Following the Assembly, the Sydney Alliance “New and Core Leader meeting” will bring together individuals involved in the eleven Sydney Alliance districts as well as the core teams and emerging leaders in each of our partner organisations.

The meeting will include a citywide political analysis, an analysis of the local power of districts and time for discussions within organisations about how the partner organisations can see their interests expressed in Sydney Alliance districts.  We will also set course for the March 2014 assembly – an assembly where Sydney Alliance will aim to have the agenda for the common good influence the agenda of the 2015 election.

Who to bring, how to prepare?

• Bring your 6 day alumni, your 2-day alumni which can be obtained from Liliana on admin@sydneyalliance.org.au), your leaders who will be your bridge to particular districts (live, work, or practice their faith in one of the established or building districts)
• Hold a core team meeting in late March/early April to talk about your vision for your organisation – what do you want to be doing, who do you want to be relating to, what is your hope for your membership? Prepare what you will share with others – but be specific about what you want, and therefore identify the most important thing you need to do now to make that happen.
• At your core team: identify your turnout commitments to a March 2014 City Assembly.

Details of May Assembly

When: Monday 20 May, 5:30pm for 6:00pm start to a 9:30pm finish

Where: Saint Scholastica’s College, 2-4 Avenue Rd, Glebe

REGISTER FOR LEADERS ASSEMBLY HERE

I hate not working. It is boring. You can’t even have a social life because you have no money. And you feel like terrible every day.

I am so excited by the idea of work. It would mean that I can support myself. Have a social life. Travel. And when the time is right, have a family.”
In October 2012, the Social Inclusion team participated in the Sydney Alliance’s City Assembly. We asked the Commissioner for Police, Andrew Scipione, to work with on us building a better Sydney. He said yes!  See the video of his commitment here.

Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione with Social Inclusion team leaders at the City Assembly

Where we have come from

In 2011 People across Sydney spoke up about their experiences of racial vilification, religious discrimination and social isolation, inclusion & exclusion.

In 2012, the Social Inclusion team narrowed this issue down to focus on the social inclusion of young people, particularly from multicultural and Aboriginal backgrounds.

Through listening to young people, we realised that the Youth are often locked-out of society.  They can’t hang out in public without getting moved along.  They struggle to engage with education and often have little hope of getting a good job. There are few spaces in civil society for young people and we expect the police to keep them in line.

Strengthening these relationships between young people and the Police Force, and ensuring long-term inclusion through real, strong employment options are at the core of our work.

“When I was 16 I was at high school in Parramatta. 

After school, we students – in uniform – would wait for the bus home from Parramatta near Westfields. 

The police came almost every day and accused us of loitering and moved us on.  We would then sit on the steps.  They moved us on.  We went around the corner – they moved us on. 

As soon as I graduated from high school, I went and sat there.”

From this topic, we have focused on an immediate issue – the interaction between young people and the police and a long term goal – real, meaningful employment for young people.

What we have done in 2012

• Extensive listening and collecting stories of young people’s experiences with employment and the police
• Surveying shops and local businesses in the Marrickville area about their attitudes and experiences with young people.
• Ran an action to provide meaningful employment options for Aboriginal young people in Glebe.
• Worked with NSW Police and the Police Association to start the conversation about the interactions between police and young people in Sydney.

What’s next?

• Working with the NSW Police and the Police Association to develop practical options to improve relationships between young people and the Police.
• Building on employment options for young people.
• Going deep into our districts.

Want to be involved?

For more information contact Eamon at policy@yapa.org.au or Anna at med67152@bigpond.net.au or Violet at violet.roumeliotis@metromrc.org.au.

see also Community Support & Health, Transport

A System That Works for the People

For too long Sydney’s transport has been a problem.

CBD (Citywide Transport Team)
Taking action on safety at interchange stations, starting at Granville Station on August 9th. Contact Kurt Iveson kurt.iveson@sydney.edu.au & Maryanne Stuart mstuart@rtbu-nsw.asn.au

Fairfield-Liverpool (& Macarthur)
Taking action on pick up and drop off zones outside of medical centres in Liverpool & safety at Campbelltown Station. Contact David Barrow  dbarrow@sydneyalliance.org.au, 0416028001

Nepean Valley
Taking action on safety near St Mary’s Station. Contact Chris Brenton maxbchris@optusnet.com.au & Sr. Louise McKeogh lmckeogh@parra.catholic.org.au

Northern Beaches (& North Shore)
The Northern Beaches district will be seeding this year, starting with a 2 Day Alliance Building Institute on the 15th and 22nd of September. Contact Hans van Schie sydney.alliance@lakesparish.org.au

see also Social Inclusion, Community Support & Health

Our vision is for a Sydney where everyone can participate fully in their community and at work because everybody has care and coordinated services at significant times of their lives, and those providing care are supported and valued.

Early Education, Child Care and Family Services Team

The 2011 Sydney Alliance Listening Campaign told us, the Early Education, Child Care and Family Services team, that too often families have difficulty finding affordable, accessible, quality child care and early education services. Many families also struggle to access the support they need, due to a complex and disjointed family support system.

Our research and conversations with experts in the field have identified many issues the key ones so far are:

• improving paternity/maternity leave conditions
• guaranteeing universal early education spaces for preschool aged children and
• the development of a broad and connected family support system which is accessible at times of need, for all families.

A great deal needs to happen to ensure that all of Sydney’s kids have the same opportunity and access to services and this is what we are going to set about to achieve.

Mental Health Team

The Mental Health team see that as a community, we need to support individuals and families with well co-ordinated services, designed to meet the needs of people with a mental illness and their families, when and as their needs arise. We want to reverse the marginalisation of people with a mental illness so that they are no longer denied full participation as citizens, no longer inappropriately incarcerated and no longer feel the need to resort to self-harm or suicide. Experts in the area are clear – the best results are from early holistic intervention, but it is never too late to make a difference in people’s lives.

Pay Equity Team

The Pay Equity team have taken an over arching approach and looked at the pay equity issues for workers in all areas of the care sector, all of which are low paid and undervalued. Key issues identified include the heavily segmented labour force, a workforce predominately filled by women, an ageing workforce and the predicted workforce shortage in the future.  Solutions suggested so far through discussions with experts in the field include creating a nationally consistent framework for the community sector workers; and strengthening the current industrial framework to ensure workers have bargaining power across their sector. Pay equity is an essential part of the puzzle in ensuring we have the best possible workforce to achieve best practice care & support for the  community.

People in our communities are living longer than previous generations and this is cause for celebration. Yet while negative imagery and attitudes around ageing dominate, older people can face discrimination and disrespect. Social connection, recreation, secure housing and enough income are intrinsic to ageing well. So too, is knowing one’s rights and accessing advocacy. Older people who are carers in their families and communities should have recognition and practical support. Aged care at home, hospital or in residential aged care, should be easy to access, tailored to the person, affordable and provided by skilled and well-resourced staff.

Ageing and Aged Care Team

The Ageing and Aged Care team want to work on improving the breadth and coordination of aged care services; counteract ageism; and build connections within communities and across generations.

Want to be involved?

For more information contact Roisin Smith on 0400 990 112 or Ben Skerman at @raymond.skerman@bigpond.com or Danielle Blanch at dlblanch@bigpond.net.au

see also Social Inclusion, Transport

This result was despite earlier Government assurances to business that there would be trading on Boxing Day in 2012 and the enabling legislation having already passed the Legislative Assembly.

So what changed the dynamic? It was ‘community organising’.

The strategy and people power marshalled by the Sydney Alliance and the Take the Time coalition was the decisive factor in getting the O’Farrell Government to back off.

Who and what are the Sydney Alliance? We are a broad and diverse coalition of more than 50 of the city’s largest religious organisations, unions, and community groups who started coming together in 2007 and launched in 2011. Our agenda is not driven by political interest. The Sydney Alliance is a non-party political organisation. Rather our agenda is discerned by consultation among partner organisations who acknowledge that our self-interest lies in our shared interest for the common good of Sydney.

The Take the Time Coalition – an initiative of the retailer workers’ union, the SDA, approached us earlier in the year to see if the issue of public holidays was one that was of interest to our members. It most definitely was. Last year when the Sydney Alliance listened to over 6500 of our members, work/family balance came up as a high priority.

Like many civil society organisations members of the Take the Time coalition were concerned that on their own, it would be hard to get a hearing from Government, let alone a positive result about the changes to the Boxing Day public holiday. We in the Alliance knew that many of our religious and community partners would be interested in the issue of public holidays too – and we thought that by working together, we could make a difference.

One key point of influence was the cross benchers in the NSW Legislative Council, particularly the Christian Democrat leader the Rev. Fred Nile. Rev. Nile had previously expressed concern about encroachments on family time. We also knew that Rev. Nile was once a shop assistant himself. Another shift in how we could influence the outcome came when responsibility for the public holiday legislation had passed to the Treasurer (and new Minister for Industrial Relations) Mike Baird. Mr Baird had a strong connection to issues around family time, and was very open to talking with religious organisations – as he had previously trained to be an Anglican Minister.

So, the Sydney Alliance helped the Take the Time coalition to organise a delegation of top religious and community leaders to meet with the Treasurer. It was a very interesting meeting. As community organisers, the Sydney Alliance tells stories and asks lots of questions. At that meeting the Treasurer shared his own stories of working in retail when he was young, and how hard it was for him to negotiate time off. In the meeting he expressed genuine concern for this issue.

Nevertheless, at the Sydney Alliance we know it is power that changes decisions, not just concern or sympathy. So, with one more sitting session of the NSW Parliament to go in 2012, we organised to have a Work/Life Balance Forum on the first day of the last session on Tuesday 13 November.

Our plan was to showcase the broad community support for keeping public holidays as they are, and to show our own power to influence key decision-makers. So we invited Rev. Nile along and asked him to publicly declare not only that he would vote against the Retail Trading Amendment, but also to champion our cause.

That Rev. Nile agreed to attend was powerful enough. We informed the Treasurer of this, and invited him to attend as well.

Having marshalled our forces on the result we wanted, the breakthrough came. At 10:40am, 20 minutes before our Work/Life Balance forum with Rev. Nile was due to start, the Treasurer called the Sydney Alliance and told us that he was going to pull the legislation from the Parliament.

Rev. Nile received a standing ovation when he addressed the 150-plus members of the Work/Life Balance forum. It’s fair to say there were a number of people in that room who would not have expected to find themselves in that situation.

In that room were Catholics, Anglicans, Uniting church members, and I might add a few atheists, Christian youth reps, retail workers, migrant resource centres – just to name a few. We were a motley diverse mob.

But this was no coincidence. We built powerful relationships based on clear thinking about what it would take to stop the passage of this legislation, and we won. Boxing Day was saved as a public holiday for local families.

But it doesn’t end there. Civil society is only flexing its newly-found muscles. At the Work/Balance Forum we saw over 100 people commit to getting more involved in working for family time. I’m sure we will need all those people and more because the strong lobby group – the Retailers Association – has already come out to push for 24 hour trading!

But with wins like this week’s, the lobbyists at the big end of town are now on notice. Civil society is coming back.

Dr Amanda Tattersall is the founding coalition director the Sydney Alliance. She will be speaking on a Sydney Ideas panel on Friday 16 November to launch the Social Justice Network at the University of Sydney.   http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2012/why_social_justice_matters.shtml

Hidden away beneath this week’s headlines of Royal Commissions and ICAC inquiries was a quiet win for the state’s retail workers and their families. It was a victory achieved when the NSW Government gave up its push for new laws that would have seen more Sydneysiders having to work on the Boxing Day public holiday.

This result was despite earlier Government assurances to business that there would be trading on Boxing Day in 2012 and the enabling legislation having already passed the Legislative Assembly.

So what changed the dynamic? It was ‘community organising’.

The strategy and people power marshalled by the Sydney Alliance and the Take the Time coalition was the decisive factor in getting the O’Farrell Government to back off.

Who and what are the Sydney Alliance? We are a broad and diverse coalition of more than 50 of the city’s largest religious organisations, unions, and community groups who started coming together in 2007 and launched in 2011. Our agenda is not driven by political interest. The Sydney Alliance is a non-party political organisation. Rather our agenda is discerned by consultation among partner organisations who acknowledge that our self-interest lies in our shared interest for the common good of Sydney.

The Take the Time Coalition – an initiative of the retailer workers’ union, the SDA, approached us earlier in the year to see if the issue of public holidays was one that was of interest to our members. It most definitely was. Last year when the Sydney Alliance listened to over 6500 of our members, work/family balance came up as a high priority.

Like many civil society organisations members of the Take the Time coalition were concerned that on their own, it would be hard to get a hearing from Government, let alone a positive result about the changes to the Boxing Day public holiday. We in the Alliance knew that many of our religious and community partners would be interested in the issue of public holidays too – and we thought that by working together, we could make a difference.

One key point of influence was the cross benchers in the NSW Legislative Council, particularly the Christian Democrat leader the Rev. Fred Nile. Rev. Nile had previously expressed concern about encroachments on family time. We also knew that Rev. Nile was once a shop assistant himself. Another shift in how we could influence the outcome came when responsibility for the public holiday legislation had passed to the Treasurer (and new Minister for Industrial Relations) Mike Baird. Mr Baird had a strong connection to issues around family time, and was very open to talking with religious organisations – as he had previously trained to be an Anglican Minister.

So, the Sydney Alliance helped the Take the Time coalition to organise a delegation of top religious and community leaders to meet with the Treasurer. It was a very interesting meeting. As community organisers, the Sydney Alliance tells stories and asks lots of questions. At that meeting the Treasurer shared his own stories of working in retail when he was young, and how hard it was for him to negotiate time off. In the meeting he expressed genuine concern for this issue.

Nevertheless, at the Sydney Alliance we know it is power that changes decisions, not just concern or sympathy. So, with one more sitting session of the NSW Parliament to go in 2012, we organised to have a Work/Life Balance Forum on the first day of the last session on Tuesday 13 November.

Our plan was to showcase the broad community support for keeping public holidays as they are, and to show our own power to influence key decision-makers. So we invited Rev. Nile along and asked him to publicly declare not only that he would vote against the Retail Trading Amendment, but also to champion our cause.

That Rev. Nile agreed to attend was powerful enough. We informed the Treasurer of this, and invited him to attend as well.

Having marshalled our forces on the result we wanted, the breakthrough came. At 10:40am, 20 minutes before our Work/Life Balance forum with Rev. Nile was due to start, the Treasurer called the Sydney Alliance and told us that he was going to pull the legislation from the Parliament.

Rev. Nile received a standing ovation when he addressed the 150-plus members of the Work/Life Balance forum. It’s fair to say there were a number of people in that room who would not have expected to find themselves in that situation.

In that room were Catholics, Anglicans, Uniting church members, and I might add a few atheists, Christian youth reps, retail workers, migrant resource centres – just to name a few. We were a motley diverse mob.

But this was no coincidence. We built powerful relationships based on clear thinking about what it would take to stop the passage of this legislation, and we won. Boxing Day was saved as a public holiday for local families.

But it doesn’t end there. Civil society is only flexing its newly-found muscles. At the Work/Balance Forum we saw over 100 people commit to getting more involved in working for family time. I’m sure we will need all those people and more because the strong lobby group – the Retailers Association – has already come out to push for 24 hour trading!

But with wins like this week’s, the lobbyists at the big end of town are now on notice. Civil society is coming back.

Dr Amanda Tattersall is the founding coalition director the Sydney Alliance. She will be speaking on a Sydney Ideas panel on Friday 16 November to launch the Social Justice Network at the University of Sydney.   http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2012/why_social_justice_matters.shtml