Organizing for New York - Incite at Columbia University

In September 2015, Incite Institute launched Organizing for New York—the first comprehensive study of organizers across social justice struggles in New York City.

Using a respondent-driven sampling design, the goal of the project was to understand the sets of understandings and practices that make organizers most effective at social change work, and to see how these understandings and practices differ across different sub-networks of organizers.

As a part of this project, researchers asked social change leaders to identify those leaders whose work they most respect. They then asked the same question, iteratively, to those to whom they were referred. Over the course of several iterations, they have been able to “map” the field of social change leaders in the city.

Subsequent projects related to organizing for New York included identifying and interviewing intersectional organizers to understand how their position impacts their ability to make social change.