Pre-Order Today: Fundamentals of Community Organizing Booklet
Thirty years ago an organizer handed me a pamphlet on how to organize. It laid out steps on how to do the thing. What was once mysterious, soon made sense. Here's my effort to pay it forward.
I had two jobs. One as a cook at a soup kitchen. The other as a live-in staff at a group home for people who were struggling with mental illness and homeless. I needed the work and was proud of it. But, the soup kitchen line kept growing, and so did the number of people without housing.
We started to organize, or at least try. Then, we met an organizer named Mike Evans. He was the first to share there was a methodology to organizing. We also got a hold of copies of Shel Trapp’s Basics of Organizing, a pamphlet that spelled out how to get started: Knock on doors and listen for issues, keep an eye out for people with certain leadership qualities, turn problems into specific demands, identify a target who could, if properly motivated, say yes to your demand, and so on.
What once seemed mysterious, now made sense. We were off and running. That was 1994.
For some newbies from Southern Indiana, Basics of Organizing and pamphlets like it were a lifeline to the craft. I’ve long wanted to pay that forward, so wrote Fundamentals of Community Organizing. In it I spell out a few dozen fundamentals that have been a bedrock for me and many others. I hope it can be helpful to today’s organizers like Basics of Organizing was to me thirty years ago. This booklet (it’s 50 pages) comes out next week, but we are opening pre-orders today .
I’ll let the opening words say the rest…
“I was raised by lions and trained by wolves. Larger than life, they were legends of the craft. Their organizing was worthy of make believe, and yet somehow, all of it was true.
Organizers as raw as rough-sawn wood, as honest as dirt. An imperfect lot, they were out of place in their prime, they would be unrecognizable today. They had blind spots, yes, just as we all have blind spots today. And yet, they were among the very best at organizing — the craft of getting lots of people to come together to do things they had never imagined, and winning.
These were people who lacked not for directness. They had reverence for little. The rules were meant to be broken, and break them they did. If they had reverence for anything, it was the fundamentals of the craft. Ones that go back to before organizing became a job.
Coming up, the fundamentals were the air we breathed. Some had slogans, others were more elusive. Though not dead yet, they are worthy of a revival. I, for one, believe the times demand it.
I am part of a generation who sought to evolve our craft. The organizing handed down to us was designed to win the best thing possible within the existing landscape. We wanted to remake that landscape altogether. We set out to win the battle of ideas, build electoral might, and rewrite the rules of power.
These shifts were overdue, and I am proud to have played a part in them. But, along the way, something got lost: the very elements that made our craft so powerful and life-giving in the first place. What were once bright markers along the trail now resemble bread crumbs scattered here and there.
In the push to evolve we became heavy on theory and light on craft. Here’s to reviving the fundamentals, before the bread crumbs turn to dust.
What I share here are not the fundamentals, but the ones that I know, shared with me by organizers young and old. Honed and reworked as the time, place, and conditions have changed. Applied well, they have the power to change lives, including your own.
Here are the fundamentals, as I have come to know them.”
I hope you’ll get a copy and join the conversation.
Many thanks to the following people for reviewing earlier drafts of this little book. Afua Atta-Mensah, Ai-jen Poo, Brigid Flaherty, Jacob Swenson-Lengyel, Jenn Carrillo, Mike McMahon, Nikki Marron, Stephen Roberson, and Tomás Garduno. That you made the time to do so means a lot. Thank you!
Thank you to Gretchen Kalwinski for careful and thoughtful copy editing.
A special shout-out to Jenn Carrillo, my partner in creating so much good trouble. Thank you for all the conversations, hard questions, AND for the design of this booklet. It is exactly as I had hoped it would be.