There's More Than One Way to Do the Fundamentals
A new organization in Southeast New Mexico runs deep in the fundamentals, but is anything but fundamentalist in their approach.
For this piece, I teamed up with Casey Thomas who I work with at Addition, an organization that seeds and launches new working-class organizing projects.
Nikki Marín Baena of Siembra NC once said that organizing is a conspiracy to convince people that they can be powerful together. The new organization, With Many Hands, leans into this in a big way.
Tomás Garduño, a New Mexico Native, started With Many Hands in a part of the State that is so much more conservative than the rest that it’s called Little Texas. Donald Trump won 71 percent of the vote here. In the four largely rural counties that make up this part of Southeast New Mexico – Otero, Chaves, Lea, and Eddy – 40 percent of the population lives on under $50,000 a year.
Tomás started by posting snarky memes about the cost of living, and engaging people who liked or shared those memes. A direct message turned into a phone call, a phone call into a one-on-one, and hundreds of one-on-ones into a real on-the-ground membership with hundreds of working-class people who are willing to act together to make their communities better.
For those of us who come out of a strict door-knocking or one on one model, think of the meme as the door knock, the direct message as the initial conversation on the doors, and the phone call as the actual one on one. It’s all organizing, but with different tools.
Two local leaders, Courtney McCary-Squyres and Jeneva Martinez, in Alamogordo and Roswell, took on big bodies of work, were coached by Tomás and have become organizers.
With Many Hands runs deep in the fundamentals. They meet people where they’re at– working on issues identified by the members themselves, never selling an issue chosen by staff or philanthropy. The issues that the members chose were food, land, and housing and the organizing has been more effective because these were the most widely and deeply felt issues.
They don’t insist that people agree with them on all things before contributing their leadership, or move people through ideologically focused workshops, but instead the political development happens through the fights they are in. They learn who’s on their side when their demands are met, or aren’t.
Doing one on ones runs deep in their culture, and they consistently ask the question and act on the answer of “how are we bringing in new people?” Because Tomás is a fervent believer in never doing for a leader or organizer what they could do for themselves, their leadership is accustomed to carrying a lot of work and recruiting new potential members themselves.
The result is that With Many Hands has hundreds of volunteers and people who attend their events. The majority of the people involved aren’t necessarily interested in politics, nor have they historically looked to the government to solve their problems.
While With Many Hands practices the fundamentals, they are not fundamentalist. Much of their outreach is online first, but quickly moves offline. They unabashedly use mutual aid to help meet people’s immediate needs. In Roswell they helped start the Gonzales Hope Warming Center so people who had limited options could go there, get warm and eat in the winter.
With Many Hands Volunteers found that much of the dilapidated housing in their neighborhoods was owned by working class property owners who didn’t have enough money to repair them. The housing stock being out of circulation also meant that fewer units were available to rent, driving up the price of housing.
They won a $500,000 grant from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority to create a program to address this need, but did it in an unusual way. They put up some of their own funding to show that this could work, rehabbing two properties themselves, and then took that evidence to the state, and won this half million dollar grant.
With Many Hands members in Alamogordo organized to get elected officials to allow publicly-owned land to be used for community gardens. They have turned 4 empty lots into community gardens to grow food in food-insecure areas. These gardens provide healthy, free food to people in the area. One garden is next to a community center with a commercial kitchen. With Many Hands is organizing classes, which use food from the garden to teach people how to can, prepare food and start micro-businesses that can supplement their incomes.
These mutual aid efforts and campaigns on the exact issues that people were most energized by resulted in a bunch of people now believing that when they organize they can create and win the things they need. They’ve also run into the barriers that can only be addressed by engaging in elections. Now, a group of people from With Many Hands is getting involved in elections that could have big consequences in New Mexico and beyond.
New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District is rated by Cook Political Report as one of the two dozen US House races that will determine which party controls the US Congress. The newly organized people in the district will have something to say about the outcome.
On September 7th, they hosted a food and housing summit, with over 200 people on hand. Most of the people who showed up do not traditionally engage in organizing or politics, but because the issues were chosen by them, they are getting engaged.
They invited both Congressional candidates and sitting Congressman Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat, came and connected with the crowd. His Republican challenger, Yvette Herrell, did not attend. Also on hand were candidates for statehouse races.
Out of this event, they began their get out the vote campaign in earnest. Courtney and Jeneva have brought on a group of their most dedicated leaders as organizing fellows. They are receiving organizing training and will run voter mobilization campaigns, starting with their own circles of people who tend to sit out elections, and building out from there.
Along the way, they’ll play a role in determining who represents them in Congress, and maybe who controls Congress. And it all started with applying the fundamentals, but not being rigid in their application.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of Fundamentals of Organizing we still have some. You can get one here.