Taking Openings with Saket Soni

In organizing, when you see an insurmountable challenge, you have to let the river help you cross it. You have to dive in, and let the logic provide its own momentum.

I first met Saket Soni when we were both organizing in Chicago. He was trying to mix theater and organizing. This didn’t make a ton of sense to me at the time. Today, I would be much more open to, and excited by it. Through the years, I’ve witnessed Saket as someone who practices the fundamentals, but is anything but orthodox in how he applies them. He now runs the Resilience Force, which organizes workers, families and local governments to rewrite the rules of recovery. 

I interviewed Saket for the Fundamentals of Organizing podcast, and we talked about the work of “taking openings” created by disasters.

You can listen to the conversation here, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Here are a few nuggets from the conversation.

You refer to “taking openings.” What do you mean by that?

I don't think disasters are opportunities. They're just tragic. They're awful. You know, they don't help anybody. But what they are is openings. Inside a disaster situation, you have these tiny glimmers of where you can come in. And if you do the work, you can open up people's relationships to each other, people's relationships to the idea of government, people's relationship to the ideas of outsiders and immigrants. And so, the work I lead now with resilience force, tries to come in, take the opening, pry it wider, and work inside it.

We seem to live in a period of constant crises. How do you approach organizing within a crisis?

I feel like in organizing, when you see an insurmountable challenge, you actually have to let the river help you cross it - you have to dive in. And let the logic, the center of gravity of that challenge provide its own momentum.

We can tend to think of openings as opportunities to move policy, but I hear you saying something beyond that.

To take the opening is to have faith that people are movable, people can change and grow. It's also to realize you might have been wrong about them, you might have been wrong about what they thought. They may not have been as rigid as how you viewed them from far away.

Do you think climate change may be the ultimate opening?

Disasters of any kind are…climate change, the pandemic, the disaster of a shooting, or gun violence. All of these traumatic experiences tend to carry within them the ingredients of their own healing. And grief clarifies people's purpose, pulls people together. And for a moment, we tend to stop and say what's important to us. What’s important right now. I am sitting in my house, two of my four walls are gone. And there's mold on my floor, and I've lost all my possessions. But thank God, I'm still here, my kids are safe. And how important is it right now in my life, to hold on to my idea that the immigrant worker, who is my only shot at fixing my roof before the next rainfall should be deported? I think that's the kind of opening that you're presented with in any kind of disaster. But climate change is the organizer of so many of our national energies. We should be thinking about how to take the openings that it prepares and provides.

This piece in the New Yorker details the work of Resilience Force and the role immigrant workers are playing in the aftermath of climate disasters. 

You can listen to the whole conversation with Saket here or wherever you listen to podcasts.