The Next Move: Asking Why with Caroline Murray
Season 2, Episode 4
On The Next Move Podcast, I talk with organizers about the craft of organizing. Caroline Murray, the Principal and Owner of Innovative Organizing, and former Executive Director of Alliance to Develop Power, spoke with me about the joy and responsibility of helping people imagine a new world through organizing.
The other day, I picked up my 10-year-old daughter from school and we took a walk. She shared some stuff that she really didn't like in her relationship with a couple of her friends. My response was kind of a “buck up, it's all attitude!” speech. Later, I realized that I'd missed the opportunity to understand what she needed from the conversation, and why she had raised the subject. What she really needed was someone she trusted to process her feelings with, not advice.
Once I got it, I was able to be of help to her simply by listening. This dynamic plays out in our relationships every day. And organizing is about relationships. We have to get really good at relationships. One part of that is understanding what's underneath people's feelings and actions, asking why it feels this way, why you see things the way you do, why you think we should go in this direction helps us do that, not as some rote practice, but out of genuine curiosity. Good things happen when we ask “why”.
Caroline Murray has been organizing for 30 years. She is principal of Innovative Organizing, where she brings strategies to movement organizations, leaders, and campaigns seeking to build power and scale their impact through organizing. As executive director of the Alliance to Develop Power, a multiracial, low income people's organization, Caroline was at the vanguard of the new economy movement, organizing to win a community controlled economy of thousands of units of housing and over $80 million.
During this episode, she tells us more about bringing communities together to create sustainable structures of ownership, economic development, and thriving. She also speaks about the role of the organizer:
Organizing the Unorganized
“When we say organizing the unorganized we mean people who don't necessarily agree with us yet, or people who don't know that they agree with us. You can't just stick with the people that are already with you. And even though you're busy, and you got to turn people out, you still have to find the time, I think, to go talk to the others to find them and bring them in and welcome them.”
Organizing As A Countercultural Act
“Organizing itself is sort of countercultural, right? It's against what we're taught to do in the world: to be in relationship with each other and to develop social trust. It's not, of course, what our society tells us to do. That's right. We're supposed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and be hyper individuals.”
Organizing As A Practice
“I have been around so many people who have reinforced that, for me, that real commitment to developing those relationships, and to lifting up the leadership of folks on the front lines of people who are immediately impacted. Otherwise, you know, you're not an organizer, you might be an advocate, you might be a campaigner, you might be a social worker, all of which are important. But that's not what community organizers do.”
Preparing Leaders
“I've seen a lot of organizers kind of write speeches for people. And you know, that just - it doesn't work. That is robbing someone of their dignity. I think, you know, people have their own stories and their own agency and their own way of speaking. And you can only really unearth that by having a real conversation by really listening, and helping them sort of craft their story.”
Favorite Organizer Axiom
“Why Robert McAfee Brown's quote, ‘What you see depends on where you stand. What you hear depends on who you listen to, who you are, depends on what you do.’ is a favorite. “
The Role of The Organizer
"It's almost like we're a doula or midwife, helping people birth into a new sense of self, to imagine a new world. And we're constantly helping people see themselves anew. And that you have to really listen to people. It depends where you are, who you're listening to, who you're talking to, where you're getting your feedback from, and then what you choose to do with that. If you remind yourself to always go back to the base, I think that you'll always be in the right place."
What To Teach New Organizers
“I'm gonna teach them how to do a one-on-one. How to meet people where they're actually at and not preach at them, and actually listen, and how to to engage with loving agitation, how to go deeper. That's, that's a whole set of things, but I'm going to count that as one.
The second thing I'm going to teach them is that if you're just building relationships, but not doing anything with them, that's also not organizing that you've got to be identifying what the problems are, and then having a strategy to win, to craft the solution.
And then the third thing I'm gonna teach them is to then love on each other. It's a whole cycle, right? It's like you meet, you build the relationships, you go into action, and then you celebrate and you love each other. And then you do it again.”
An organizer recently said to me that the wins that are on the table today are not commensurate with the scale of the problem. Sadly, that's often going to be the case. But statements like this don't really change things for people. Putting forth a theory on how to change the conditions—or win the best thing possible in the current ones—can. Under less than ideal conditions, the Alliance to Develop Power won buyouts of thousands of units of housing and moved those into collective control of tenants. That’s winning the-world-as-it-should-be within the-world-as-it-is.
Caroline and the Alliance to Develop Power identified a strategic opening that made winning ownership of these properties a possibility. As organizers, we need to listen, build relationships, and develop people and we need to be strategists, looking for levers that make bigger change possible. We are always doing strategy.
Developing leaders: Caroline said that one of the things we always say to members is, "We're going to be there with you. We're not going to throw you into something that you are not prepared for. Yes, we'll throw you into new things, and we'll all agree to do that, and we'll all do that together." This is a thing organizers get to do all the time. Prepare people for new experiences. This is where the magic happens.
You can learn more about Caroline and her work at peoplesaction.org/thenextmove.
Join the conversation and listen to this episode with Caroline Murray in its entirety here, or click here for a copy of the full transcript!