buildingpower Archives - Organizing to Win

July 3, 2023July 3, 2023

Authentic Engagement Builds Power

A diverse group of Asian, Latina and white young people smiling. They are wearing white t-shirts with the words SF ONE and a map of San Francisco printed in orange. They are in an elementary school classroom.

When you’re an organizing leader, these frustrations come up a lot:

“We can’t get people to come out to a meeting.”

“Why don’t members vote? It’s their own jobs at stake!”

“It’s always the same people who do everything.”

“Why are members so apathetic?”

“Do they just want someone else to do it all?”

And worst of all, “are the current leaders going to burn out?”

The reality is, they’re not apathetic and they don’t want someone else to do it all.

A lot of organizing directors tell me that members or workers are reluctant to engage. But maybe there’s a reason: they don’t see their self-interest represented in the campaigns. Self-interest is more than how much money they make, their position on an issue or who to vote for.

Self-interest is also about values, experiences and relationships.

Self-Interest

Several years ago, I organized with teachers and former teachers who were trying to build momentum for education justice in their communities. They were having trouble engaging community members and parents in a campaign about the district’s school assignment system. (TL;DR – incredibly complicated, record segregation, inequitable distribution of resources.)

To better understand parents’ and students’ experiences, we began a series of canvas weekends. Leaders knocked on doors, prepared with a script that would launch conversations about what came to mind when residents thought about the education system in their city.

What did they learn?

Almost no one mentioned the school assignment system. Parents wanted high quality schools in their neighborhood. It didn’t matter if their kids got into the highest rated school in the city if it was all the way across town.

When leaders started to talk about how to fight for higher quality schools in their neighborhoods, more parents and other teachers engaged.

When leaders create opportunities for members, activists and volunteers to build relationships and take action based on their values and experiences, more leaders surface. More members join. More volunteers engage for longer.

Space to Build Relationships and Power

If we’re deliberate and intentional about creating space to build relationships, grow leadership and surface the issues that are most widely and deeply felt, then we can build power.

June 2, 2023June 2, 2023

Erin vs. Norma: the Organizing Movie Throwdown

Do you ever get this question? “What’s your favorite movie about [your work]?”

When people ask me about my favorite movie about organizing, they’ll often also say “I bet you love that movie Norma Rae!” (Depending on the questioner’s age. Norma Rae came out in 1979.)

Norma Rae

In case you haven’t seen it, the movie “Norma Rae” is about textile organizing in the south in the 1970s. It’s a true story, if a bit Hollywood-ized. In one of the most dramatic scenes, Norma, played by Sally Field, climbs onto a table in the factory and holds up a big sign reading “UNION!” All by herself.

She’s subsequently fired, walked out of the building and shunned by much of the community. That’s not organizing.

Erin Brockovich

Organizing campaigns are more like “Erin Brockovich,” also a true story and also glamorized for the big screen. In the movie and in real life, the residents of Hinkley, CA are poisoned by a toxic substance called chromium 6, which leaks into the water supply from a nearby PG&E installation. (Californians’ motto for PG&E: the utility we love to hate.) Erin, played by Julia Roberts, goes door-to-door to build relationships with people affected by PG&E’s carelessness. She brings them together to share their stories and create trust among themselves.

Only then do they take action. Together. They file a class action lawsuit, but the real movement comes from pressure they put on the company to force a settlement.

Organizing is Bringing People Together to Build Power

No one person could exert enough pressure on PG&E all by themself. It took the collective power of the residents of Hinkley to bring the company to the settlement table.

Just imagine what would be different if everyone at the plant stood on those tables with Norma.

The most effective organizing campaigns are about building relationships and taking action together. We build power by building relationships.

What could your community do with more relational power?

March 9, 2023March 9, 2023

American Capitalism vs. Humanity

image in the style of a Tarot card. Grey top hat with a dollar sign and red band. Roman number III and a lightning bolt at the top with grey clouds framing the corners. Raindrops fall around the hat. Stacks of golden coins and the words The Capitalism along the bottom. — Image credit: @teenvogue

Trigger warning: there is some graphic language about the violence of slavery and the treatment of Indigenous people.

The bedrock of the American economy is the belief that everyone can be rich if we just work hard enough. For example, if you’re poor, you must be doing something wrong. Are you too lazy to get a better job? (See also: health care.)

Why? Because. . . slavery.

Not Just the South

As Matthew Desmond writes in the 1619 Project, American capitalism is based on the plantation economy. His essay is titled “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation.” In it, he details the unholy alliance between enslavers, creditors, northern textile factories and the US government. This alliance developed the US cotton market, on the backs of indigenous people whose land and culture were stolen and enslaved Black people who were brutalized, all in the name of profit.

How did these people live with themselves? How did they sleep at night, knowing that they’d exploited millions of people for their own gain? Where was their conscience?

That’s where American capitalism collides head-on with humanity. If we can deny the humanity of people, then we can do whatever we want to them. Kidnap them, ship them across oceans in horrid conditions, sell them like livestock, torture, rape and kill them. We can spread disease and violence across thousands of miles, uproot people from their ancestral homes and rip children from their families.

Aren’t We Done With Slavery Though?

This capitalist denial of humanity is the root of oppression in the United States. It continues today in the form of police murder of people of color, denial of health care, the school-to-prison pipeline, the emotional labor we expect from people of color, dangerous border camps and so much more.

To believe in brutal American capitalism is to deny the humanity of people. For example, if we truly respected the humanity of immigrants, we could never force them into dangerous limbo in tent camps in Mexico. If we truly respected the humanity of Black people, the police wouldn’t shoot first and ask questions later (if they ask questions at all). If we respected the humanity of Indigenous people, thousands of Indigenous women wouldn’t go missing every year. (Talking about women, if we respected the humanity of women, there would be no rape.) Here’s one I bet you didn’t expect: If we believed in the humanity of rural, conservative people, we wouldn’t categorically dismiss them as ignorant and write them off.

Capitalism with Guardrails

Our capitalism needs guardrails precisely because we don’t respect fundamental humanity.

As Representative Katie Porter says, “Capitalism needs guardrails to work.”

(Hint: a federal minimum wage of $7.25/hour and laws that permit employers to fire workers for organizing a union are not guardrails.)

I suspect that if you read this far, you were hoping for some neat resolution. For a happy ending where there’s an intersection between American capitalism and humanity.

But there isn’t. The two are incompatible.

If we believe in the humanity of all people, we couldn’t possibly exploit them enough to maintain our capitalism without guardrails. Guardrails can look like unions, restrictions on the greed of giant corporations, a living wage, universal health care, student loan forgiveness, an end to subsidies for planet-killing industries and more.

I prefer to deny American capitalism (which is a difficult position for a small business owner). I don’t really know what the alternative is, but I know that when workers and working families have power, things get better.

So let’s get busy building guardrails and building power.

January 4, 2023January 4, 2023

Doubling Down on Organizing

The end of the year is often about taking stock, regrouping and refocusing.

While election work this cycle was important, it reminded me that the real work of Organizing to Win is about more than winning elections. It’s about building power. That’s why in 2023, I’m doubling down on outreach to organizations that want to build or strengthen organizing infrastructure.

Organizing requires holding two sometimes contradictory ideas at the same time.

Creating the Vision

On one hand, we keep a vision in mind. I’m working with a staff person from an organization that is in the beginning stages of transforming their organization from direct-service provider to power-builder. To keep us focused on this transition, I often ask her “what does it look like when workers have the power to hold their employer accountable?”

That question conjures up inspiring, visionary answers.

Planning the Work and Working the Plan

On the other hand, even the most meaningful vision won’t become reality by magic. That transition requires a plan, with specific steps, goals and metrics. Planning the work and working the plan isn’t always glamorous or inspiring.

Working that plan is what creates the magic.

The two concepts are sometimes hard to hold at the same time. There’s a risk of getting caught up in our own visionary rhetoric and forgetting the reality of work on the ground. There’s a corresponding risk of getting mired in the details and forgetting why we do this work in the first place.

Visions and Plans in 2023

In 2023, I’m looking forward to working with organizations on creating visions for power and building their organizing infrastructure to achieve them.

If you or a colleague is thinking about how to expand your organization’s vision, let’s make 2023 the year we work some magic to make our visions of justice into reality. Comment below or get in touch to find a time to talk.

May your 2023 be filled with visions and reality of equity, justice and happiness.

March 30, 2022

Parent Power in Education

Blue easel sign that reads Vote Here in white in English and 8 other languages

Originally published in March 2022

Recently, a friend and I were debating the rhetoric around parents’ control over their children’s education. He felt strongly that to give parents a say in curriculum, lesson plans or strategies would be untenable nonsense.

“Do you really want some [blowhard] dictating what teachers teach?” he asked.

“Of course not, but I do want parents to have a voice in their child’s education,” I countered. Aside from the kids themselves, parents know their kids best.

That’s why I’m so excited to help education activists in Oakland to prepare for their next campaign. They’ll be supporting a local ballot measure to enfranchise non-citizen parents of public school students to vote in school board elections.

We don’t want the loudest parents in the room to make decisions for the whole district and we can’t let those obstructionists shut out the voices of the majority. Most parents simply want policies that improve the quality of the education their kids receive at school.

They want a voice in the policies that govern their kids’ education. In America, we call that voting. It’s one way parents can build power.

For this project, we’ll build power by bringing people together using the opportunity of the ballot measure to do it.

Stay tuned for (more) great things out of Oakland.

January 11, 2021

Organizing to Win

After the 2018 mid-term elections, I was talking with a consultant who had helped a Democrat win a traditionally Republican US House seat. In our exuberance about the Democratic wins that year, we both shared stories of volunteers who had knocked on doors for the very first time. “They want to keep going, but we just don’t have anything for them to do!” she said.

Oh, but you do, I thought.

So, then I got to thinking. . . these red-to-blue House seats are not ours forever. Some of those voters went blue for the first time ever. They are never going to agree with the Democrats on the issues, so there has to be some other way to authentically connect with them if we want to keep winning.

Also, there are potential progressive voters who believe that politics just isn’t about them so they don’t bother. We can show them memes of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King all day, but without a relationship, they still feel in their hearts that their votes don’t matter.

Then I started thinking like an organizer. I bet we have experiences and values in common. If Democrats wanted to win again in 2020, they must start building relationships with voters. (Spoiler alert: they didn’t.)

As it turns out, I was right. Democrats lost 11 seats that they’d flipped in 2018.

Seeing those results, a plan started to take shape in my mind: engage energized and inspired volunteers to bring people together to build relationships with Democratic leaders and potential candidates.

Step One

Train volunteers on deep canvassing techniques. This tactic involves engaging a voter in a conversation. Really. Standing on the front step talking for about 15 minutes. By itself, this conversation can open a space for people to change their opinion. When national organizing network People’s Action opened their deep canvassing results to an evaluation by data scientists, the scientists found that 3.1% of voters moved to Biden support. The conversation moved 8.5% of Independent women voters. (Read the whole 14-page report.)

Step Two

Invite those deep-canvassed voters to a community meeting. Taking the building-relationships theme up a notch, these meetings are small group conversations, not town halls. In each small group, a facilitator asks discussion questions that provide opportunities for participants to tell a story. The facilitator guides the discussion so everyone has a chance to speak and the conversation doesn’t go off the rails.

After the small groups have finished and the groups have come back together, a speaker asks for reports back from each group. In that way, that leader has an opportunity to connect with everyone in the room by telling their own story to relate to each group.

Would this plan lead to a tidal wave of support for climate change measures or abortion rights? Probably not. But that’s not the point. The point is to build relationships.

One of the most important lessons from the Georgia runoff this year is about off-year organizing. We can’t parachute into neighborhoods four months before an election and expect to keep winning. Building real strength requires investment.

If all we do is scramble to win elections every two years, that’s all we’re ever going to do. If we invest in building relationships with voters, we will not only win, but we might also win on the issues that brought us in to politics in the first place. Let’s invest in building sustainable, lasting power.

A plan for a pilot project is coming together. To get involved in building this experiment, email mira@organizingtowin.net. Or fill out the contact form.