The Next Move: Help People Grow with Stephen Roberson
Season 2, Episode 2
I tell you young organizers, you have not chosen the fastest path to power. You could build power for yourself more quickly if you pursued elected office or became a social media star. You've chosen to do something else, to build the power of many other people and with many other people. It's simply a different thing.
Activism is in vogue these days and we're better for it, but let's not mistake activism for organizing. An activist is active, maybe even leads, in the fight for social change. An organizer is developing the power and the potential of others within that fight; often one-by-one, sometimes many at a time.
Stephen Roberson, is an organizer's organizer who has seen it all. Stephen's path started with United Farm Workers then with East Brooklyn Congregations and United Power in Action for Justice, both projects of the Industrial Areas Foundation; then for SEIU 32BJ and most recently, Community Voices Heard, a member organization of People's Action.
Here are some of my favorite quotes from our conversation:
What Is Organizing?
“Organizing is first seeing a situation, that's not good. And you know, it's not good, it's a bad culture. And you disorganize it, your first thing is you got to, you got to rip it up and dismantle it. A reorganizing of, of existing relationships, and making them different, not destroying relationships, necessarily, but just reorganizing them differently so that people's relationships were different. So they saw each other differently. So they saw their capacity so that they saw their humanity differently.”
The Importance of Understanding Someone’s Interests
“How can you get to know the other if you don't really understand what they're interested in? So I always resented that people on the left, forget about what goofballs on the right said, but people on the left who would say, oh, all those white people voting against their interest. How would you know that? How would you know what your interest is? yet? Why are you so arrogant to say that about another person who you've never spent one second? talking to? I'm not interested in organizing if it doesn't involve interest, people's interest. I can't see that we go anywhere as a society without recognition of the other. Yeah, we're in trouble because of that right now. We're in big, big trouble.”
What Is A One-on-One?
“Simply put, it is the coming together of two people face to face, eyeball eyeball to heads together, trying to get to know each other, trying to figure out if there's anything that they could possibly have in common. If there are any linking interests, is there any hunger and appetite driven by anger driven by vision of what could be. Some people say it takes a minute to learn, but a lifetime to master.”
Leadership Development
“To me, the issue was always that person. It's always the leader. I mean, that's how I was trained. It was never about just the strike. It was about well, who are these people who are putting the ship together? What are they going through? What are they becoming? And am I on a journey with them? Or just kind of watching as a spectator?”
What Would You First Teach New Organizers?
“Understanding that the first change is gonna be in you. And then the second part would be that you gotta love relationships, and you've got to understand one to ones. And that action is to organization like oxygen is to the body.”
The monuments to Stephen's organizing are people, developed in ways that would not have happened if not for his arrival in their life; and those people he helped develop are a tribute to those who invested in him—people like Fred Ross, Cesar Chavez, and Ed Chambers.
In this moment, in which we need the craft of organizing to be at its best, who are you investing in? It's a question we should all ask ourselves: How are you helping people see something in themselves that they did not see until you, the organizer, came into their life?
Stephen Roberson cannot be found on Twitter, but he can be found in the neighborhood if you know where to look. You can learn more about the work that Stephen is doing with Community Voices Heard at peoplesaction.org/nextmove. You can listen to this episode with Stephen in its entirety here or anywhere you listen to podcasts. Or click here for a copy of the full transcript.