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Last weekend, I met the present and future of education justice in Utah. 

Parents, students, organizers and activists came together to find consensus on the most important issues in their communities and build their organizing muscle to win. 

My privilege was to facilitate sessions about understanding power and building an organizing framework. The curriculum was a mix of organizing theory and practical applications. Woven throughout the workshops were discussions of how white supremacy culture shows up, dealing with out-of-touch (but powerful) community leaders, and the difference between organizing and mobilizing. While I have led sessions on all the topics we covered, this weekend became more about mentoring junior facilitators than teaching. It was 🔥🔥!

In Spanish and English, these emerging and established leaders role-played, asked questions (and then answered them), connected dots and laid a foundation for progressive power in Utah. 

After a bootcamp day and a half of workshops and a mega house meeting, they came to consensus on the first issues to take on: 

• A new high school in the historically excluded neighborhood of Glendale (Salt Lake City)
• Belonging and Representation in Schools
• School-based Safety, including trauma and mental health care

Over the next few months, they will continue to fine-tune their organizing skills, reach out to neighbors, conduct research meetings and identify specific levers they can pull to make a difference for students and families.

They will build power.

A few months ago, I met with the co-executive director of a statewide organization that has been instrumental in transforming his state. It hadn’t voted for a Democrat for president since 1964, then voted blue in every cycle since 2008. They’ve also legalized marijuana, restored voting rights to thousands of returning citizens and passed a voter’s bill of rights.

His organization is thinking through some local action strategies to complement their state political work. In the course of our conversation, he mentioned several campaigns they’re brainstorming.

💡organizing with parents to establish safer routes to school for students who faced gun violence at a bus stop

💡challenging the terrible working conditions of gig workers

💡regaining control of a city council from the rigid grip of developers

Build Power In Addition to Winning

Each time he mentioned a policy idea, I thought about the wider impact they could have if the focus was on building power in addition to winning.

✊🏻The opportunity of bringing parents together could build power for systemic change in the school system.

✊🏻Bringing gig workers together could create momentum for structural changes in the exploding economy in the region.

✊🏻Bringing residents together to challenge the grip of developers could bring much-needed transparency to city government – and all the improvements that come with sunshine.

This organization has been part of dramatic wins in this state for decades.

Powerful Questions: What Does It Look Like When. . .

Just think of the impact they will have when they add bigger questions to their planning:

❓What does it look like when parents have the power to create schools that provide an equitable education?

❓What does it look like when workers have the power to negotiate with their employer as equals?

❓What does it look like when low-income residents have the power to hold their elected leaders accountable?

True equity and justice depend on power. We can win every campaign we launch, but if we’re not building power, we’re always going to scramble.

That’s why I organize with the objective of bringing people together to build power, using the opportunity of the campaign to do it.

To be strategic, every campaign, training, coaching session or disrupting white supremacy culture program should have two purposes: winning in the moment and building power for the long-term.

What would you transform in your community if you could build power in addition to win?

Please meet Zekiah Wright! Z – as they’re known – is running for the city council to protect the unique culture of West Hollywood. Their vision for the city includes more affordable housing, stronger renter protections and more accountable law enforcement. Their experience as an employment and housing attorney means they are ready to take on the toughest issues that California cities face, especially housing.

Did you catch that? “They?” That’s right. Z would also make history as the city’s first nonbinary and first Black city council member. Even in famously progressive West Hollywood, there is work to do.

I’m particularly proud to work with Z because of their outlook on campaigns. When we first met, we connected over our shared belief that campaigns should be about more than winning. They should be opportunities to bring people together to build power. We are totally in sync about the power of a good field campaign!

Want to invest in this emerging leader? Here’s their donation page.

Have you ever had a drop the mic moment? I’ve had one and the recognition came from an unexpected place.

It was during a prep session for an organizing training. We anticipated that the folks who came to this session would have a hard time internalizing what we meant by “organizing.” It was a group who were taught to rely on data to solve all their problems, yet love the romantic notion of organizing.

To be fair, it is a difficult concept to grasp unless you’ve done it. Sometimes we put the label “organizing” on a rally, the field program in a political campaign or a Twitterstorm. Those actions are really mobilizing. We organize before we can mobilize.

During this conversation, I was trying to link together the words that I associate with organizing: together, power, people.

So I came up with “organizing is bringing people together to build power.”

That’s when my boss dropped the mic.

He and I didn’t always see eye-to-eye and he’s usually better at finding a meaningful turn of phrase than I am. So, when he recognized the moment, I knew I had something.

That’s how “Organizing is bringing people together to build power” became Organizing Rule to Live By #10. (See the full list here or on social media below.)

Every Organizing to Win campaign or training starts with opportunities to build relationships, find common values and develop leadership.

If we’re going to bring lasting change to our communities, we have to do more than win. We have to build power.

Originally published in January 2022

Recently, I was part of a facilitation and coaching team for a multi-month training program for new organizers in the education space. As a training team, together we have over 150 years of organizing experience. What I learned from that team . . . Wow. Can’t be found in any book.

Over six months of the training, I heard us share many traditional and not so traditional organizing truisms.

I call them “Organizing Rules to Live By.”

With appreciation and thanks to the Community Organizer Training Program facilitation team, here are the top 10, with attribution where appropriate.

1. Iron rule: Never do for someone what they can do for themself. (Industrial Areas Foundation)
2. “The mark of a good organizer is the attention she pays to the smallest details.” (Fred Ross, Sr.)*
3. People are experts in their own lives.
4. We can’t be afraid to talk about power.
5. Solutions should be led by those closest to the problem.
6. “Organizing is transformational.” (Cathy Sarri, my first organizing supervisor)
7. People do things when we ask them.
8. Never thank people for doing something that benefits them.
9. “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” (Frederick Douglass)
10. Organizing is bringing people together to build power.

You will also see these rules on social media (@organizingtowin).

Post your own organizing rules to live by in the comments!

*Yes. Fred Ross said “she.”

Originally published in December 2021

Remember all those memes from the end of 2020? When we thought “Whew. 2020 is done. Come on 2021!” And we thought it would be all over, like a bad dream.

As it turns out, 2021 was a little rocky.

Good news: Joe Biden won! Bad news: So did almost every other Republican challenger.

Good news: kids went back to school! Bad news: Delta and Omicron.

Good news: guilty verdicts for Derek Chauvin and Kim Potter. Bad news: police still killed Black people at a rate that is twice their representation in the population.

Good news: 204 million people in the US are vaccinated against Covid-19. Bad news: Don’t visit Idaho, Wyoming, Louisiana, Mississippi or Alabama.

Good news: unemployment is down to 4.2% Bad news: inflation

Good news: workers at Kellogg, John Deere and Nabisco and members of IATSE won strikes! Bad news: employers still act like employers.

Both good news and bad news can inspire us to greater action. In 2022, I look forward to working with education, climate change and democracy protection leaders and activists to build power for justice.

We have the opportunity to build relationships and power in communities that are historically excluded. We have the opportunity to protect ourselves against oligarchy and build our democracy. We have the opportunity to organize to win.

Thank you for your endless support in 2021. I am grateful for the conversations, introductions to new people, generosity with your insights and good will. I hope to return those favors next year and every year after.

May your 2022 be filled with health, justice and victories.

Originally published in November 2021

Earlier this year, I started to think about what I had done in past in campaigns and projects that perpetuated, rather than disrupted, white supremacy, even if I didn’t know it at the time. Most of us do it because we’re conditioned to think that certain practices are normal or “the way things are,” when they are really legacies of white supremacy.

An example? Sure.

In the early ‘90’s, I organized college speaking events for the officers of a national feminist organization, as part of the organizing plan for a reproductive rights March in Washington DC. In Pennsylvania, the president did a week-long organizing tour. I don’t remember all the schools where I arranged a speech, but the list looked something like this: Bryn Mawr, Bucknell, Carnegie Mellon, Franklin and Marshall Colleges, Gettysburg College, Haverford and Swarthmore.

Notice anything? Yep. They’re all private. And then we wondered why the campus delegations to the March were so overwhelmingly white and middle-class.

While I was proud that students represented about a third of the 750,000 people who came to the March, I’m not proud of my role in perpetuating such exclusion. The urgency of building a crowd can’t replace our anti-racist values of inclusion and equity.

Then I started to wonder where else I’d contributed to traditions of oppression and where I disrupted them.

That interest was the genesis for a workshop that I developed with Cat Shieh called “Disrupting Traditions of Oppression in Organizations.” If I was trying to re-examine my usual practices, maybe others are too. Cat had created innovative curriculum for ethnic studies classes and piloted anti-racism, anti-bias curriculum for students, making her the perfect partner for this work.

In the session, we lead a discussion of the characteristics of white supremacy in organizations. Then, we offer several (real-life) scenarios for an exercise we like to call “What’s wrong with this picture?” Participants identify the places where white supremacy rears its ugly head and brainstorm equitable solutions.

The workshop was very well-received at last year’s Organizing 2.0 conference and we look forward to facilitating it again for the Nonprofit Technology Conference in March 2022. (Read more and register here.)

To talk more about disrupting white supremacy in your organization, get in touch!