The main criterion for being a movement building ally is that Tearfund is in an active ongoing relationship of accompaniment, collaboration, journeying together, and mutual learning and support with the ally.
This relationship can be indicated by, for example:
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Tearfund has a Movement Building Ally agreement with the ally.
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Tearfund and the ally regularly use the Tearfund Movement Building Assessment Tool together in a collaborative way, as a coaching and planning tool.
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The ally plays a leading role in the movement and acts as a focal point for Tearfund, for example, if the ally acts as a national expression of the global Renew Our World campaign.
A movement building ally can be an organisation, group of individuals, church denomination, network, theological training organisation, or church.
We would not normally count every individual we engage with separately. Instead, we would count the organisation or group they are part of. However, in some rare cases, an influential individual who plays a key role in the movement in their own right, rather than as part of an organisation or group, can be counted (an example would be Less Waste Laura or Vanessa Nakate).
How we count groups of individuals will depend on how they are organised and how we engage with them. If the group is organised at the national level, and this is where our engagement sits, then this would count as one ally. If the individuals are organised in local groups, then each local group that we are actively engaging with would count as one ally.
When we work directly with an individual church in an ongoing relationship of accompaniment, then that church can be counted as an ally. However, if we are simply in touch with the church as an active member of the movement, then we would not count them as a movement building ally. In particular, where our main engagement is at the denominational or network level, we would count the denomination or network of churches as one single movement building ally, even if there is also some contact with individual churches in the denomination or network.
The reason for counting the number of allies, rather than the number of movements, is that it can be difficult to decide where a particular movement begins and ends, and also how far Tearfund’s support can be said to extend. For example, do we count Renew Our World as one global movement, or does each national expression count as a separate movement? To get around this, we decided to count the number of movement building allies we directly support / work with. Also, if we count the ‘number of movements’, this does not capture the breadth and nature of Tearfund’s engagement in the way that counting ‘allies we are actively engaging with’ does.
A note on language:
The word ‘movement’ can be problematic in certain restricted contexts, as it can be seen as too political. In those contexts, we use other words to describe the movement, such as ‘network’ or ‘platform’.
Likewise, the word ‘ally’ can be problematic, as it sometimes carries military connotations. However, it is still the most commonly used term for the relationship that exists between different members of a social movement, and for this reason we have chosen to continue using it. An alternative could be ‘friend’ but this is less well understood.
