The digital campaign group GetUp was built for scale: it could move national politics, translate public anger into fast collective action, and show how small acts, when aggregated, can have big effects.
The community organising coalition Sydney Alliance valued something different: it built a democratic engine room through slow, deliberate relationships that changed the people involved as they learned to act with others across deep differences.
But neither could escape the paradox. GetUp could be powerful at scale yet stumble when it did not do relationships well; the Alliance could build deep trust yet struggle to turn that strength into city-wide change. I helped found both, but they never really learned how to value each other’s differences. That too is part of the lesson. Leaning too hard towards big or small can make it harder to work with those who see change differently.
Thinking consciously about big and small means recognising that there is no single silver bullet strategy. The task is not to eliminate the tension, but to stay alert to the strengths and limits of each approach, and to move between them over time.
