This is what we do.

At DUNN STREET we take your big ideas and make them a reality.

In business, politics and issues-based organisations, we connect people that share your values or common goals, organise them from the ground up and energise them to act and make a big impact.

Campaigns & politics

Bringing more than 20 years of political, union and community campaign experience, DUNN STREET provides data-driven campaign solutions combining the power of grassroots organising and mobilisation with online engagement to build a winning campaign for social democratic parties and trade unions.

Issues & community organisations

We work with NGOs, membership-based organisations and not-for-profits who need to grow their lists, train and develop leadership or mobilise supporters to action by developing an organising strategy that can give your campaign scale and build power for progressive change.  

Businesses that share our values

We develop sophisticated and meaningful engagement with your customer base using grassroots organising strategies that bypass old media and directly engage and persuade people that share your values or common goals.

This is how we do it.

Community Organiser and Dunn Street founder, Stephen Donnelly, brings over 20 years of community organising and campaigning experience to meet your organisations needs.

Stephen was trained by Harvard Kennedy School academic and community organiser Marshall Ganz in the practice of leadership and organising. It is the Ganz organising model that Dunn Street embraces and practices with our partners across the globe to build winning campaigns.

Dunn Street can help your organisation in three specific ways.

Community Engagement Strategies

We work with organisations to develop community engagement strategies that connect people that share values, build a community by developing meaningful relationships, and empowering them to work together to achieve shared goals and win.

We facilitate strategizing workshops that specifically drill down on identifying who your community are, and what unites them? What is at stake for them and what change do they seek? What resources do your people hold and how can you organise them to grow? Together we craft a measurable and motivational strategic goal to work towards, and finally we consider what tactics we deploy to get you to achieve that strategic goal.

Our strategies are built around the leadership of a community. We work with you to develop organising structures that enable growth at scale and execute strategies that organises people to build power from the ground up. Dunn Street makes your big ideas come to fruition.

Leadership Training & Development

Having the best strategy in the world is only useful if you have the people to deliver it. That’s why it’s critically important to invest time in your people to develop their own capacity as leaders and organisers. 

Our approach to the development of your people, embrace the Marshall Ganz model of community organising as adopted by Obama for America in the United States and the Community Action Network in Victorian Labor.

This organising model focused on the work of leadership and organising through five practices: 

• Public narrative: the heart of your campaign - it’s the story of self, us and now that unites people and motivates them to act together towards a common goal

• Relationship building: is the glue that binds your movement together and seeks greater commitment from one another and towards our strategic goals

• Structure: Without structure, we have chaos, so we create structures that develop peoples leadership, finds new leadership,,grows your capacity and gets you closer to the mountain top

• Strategy: We train your people to enable them to strategise with their people and enable them to achieve their shared purpose

• Action: In the end we have to get down to work. We train you on how to design the right action that motivates others to join and create the change you seek

The training pedagogy within the Ganz framework is built on seeing it, practising it, debriefing it, and then doing it in the field. This is our training approach.

Having studied under Marshall Ganz at the Kennedy School of Government and a member of the Leading Change Network, Dunn Street have authorised access to the training materials and resources needed to deliver the same quality of training to your campaign that Dunn Street initially received from Marshall.

Through a structured, centralised or localised training program (face to face or online), we take a group of passionate campaigners and turn them into community organisers. We coach them in specific skills through these five practices that are necessary to deliver specific tactics found in your community engagement strategy.

Power Building

You’ve developed a campaign strategy and you’ve trained your people in the skills needed to lead and organise, now comes the moment to make your campaign come to life. 

Dunn Street brings the day-to-day grinding experience of working on winning and losing campaigns to since 2000.

Successful campaign execution is built on a shared commitment to strong internal and external coordination, clear communication lines at a central and local level, avoidance of silos between other campaign arms, accountabilities, transparency, regular goal setting and reporting, ongoing coaching and skill development, and constant reflection, evaluation and celebrations built into the program.

At Dunn Street we love getting into the weeds of a campaign and ensuring it is executed to perfection. It’s this commitment to detail that can be the difference between winning and losing. If you can’t organise yourself, how can you expect to organise others?