Training: House Meeting

House meetings can be an effective technique for building volunteer teams from existing social network to help a campaign from 5 to 50 to 500 volunteers.

For a house meeting, a volunteer invites their friends to a meet, shares personal stories about why they want to get involved, connect their interests to the campaign, and plan future actions including more house meetings.  When done well, the house meeting develops the leadership skills of the volunteers, forms a new leadership team, plans an action, and leads to multiple additional house meetings.

House meetings have been used since Cesar Chavez's 1960s United Farm Workers campaign and later formalized by Marshal Ganz as a central tactic to the 2008 Obama for America campaign.

Objective

• Help a volunteer organize a house meeting

Process

See house meetings for how to run the house meeting.

For house meetings, your goal is to help a volunteer the or leader (the “host”) to run a house meeting, NOT teach them how to do it on their own.

As the organizer, you should help the host complete the different tasks such as creating the guest list, calling people, etc. and be prepared to explain the campaign and make the hard asks.

After the house meeting, the host may be able to form a new team (or grow an existing team), and later they can take on the organizing task of running their own house meetings.