What is Community Organizing?

Community organizing is when a group of people who share a similar problem, come together to align and collaborate on potential solutions together.

How does organizing help the community?

By leaning into community organizing, we can continue to expand our network of resources for the community by relying on partners to help shoulder some of the weight that comes with providing community support.

Organizing support instead of creating new resources, enables TEP to move out of the way, and to allow others to take the lead, where possible. 

It also allows us to avoid doing work in silos and to not waste time recreating resources that already exist, improving capacity and giving us time to focus on deepening our relationships so that we all have the support we need to be successful.

How has TEP utilized Community Organizing?

TEP has launched many organizing initiatives. In fact, TEP was founded through organizing a community clothing swap which attracted over 100 members of the gender expansive community in Knoxville, TN in Dec. of 2016.

Our founder started with a clothing swap specifically because they and other members of the 2TIGE community in the local area, shared a similar problem of not being able to safely access gender affirming clothing.

What Kind of Organizing does TEP utilize in our work?

TEP believes in putting the power of organizing into the hands of the people that need it the most; our organizers ont he ground. We also rely on relational organizing, which is a method of growing relationships with the people that you already know and love, especially to keep our organizers safe, especially while with the rise in hate.