Want Bigger Bases? Let the People Choose the Issues.
There are more paid organizers in the United States than ever before. Why don't we have more members? Here's one fix.
It’s no secret that many organizing groups are in a period of rebuilding, their membership smaller than it’s been in years. There are many reasons for this: the pandemic, the electoralization of organizing, a lack of training in the fundamentals. One solution is to allow organizers to work on the issues that have the most heat in the community.
In the 1990s, when I first learned to organize, there was almost no funding for organizing. What funding we had came from the hard-earned dues of members and contributions from neighborhood congregations and small businesses. We raised funds through ad-books, raffles, or the annual pancake breakfast. A long-standing organization in Chicago, the Northwest Neighborhood Federation, survived for decades hosting a weekly bingo game staffed by organizers.
Raising money was hard. But there was an upside: we always worked on the issues that people in the community chose themselves.
Though there appears to be a worrisome dip right now, funding for the field of community organizing has grown by leaps and bounds over the last 15 years. Foundations and donors should be commended for stepping up, and I hope they'll step up again in 2024.
Still, the nature of some of the funding has come with costs. Today, organizations are rarely funded to work on issues that bubble up from the community. Instead, we often receive grants to work on issues that philanthropy has chosen. In this model, executive directors of community organizations play the role of match-maker, trying to match priorities of their community and those of philanthropy. Even many general operating grants are often indirectly linked with issue areas. If an organization were to stop working on the issue the donor cares about most, those general operating funds might just dry up.
The result is that many organizations end up doing what you might call “advocacy with testimony.” Organizers are tasked with finding people who are impacted by an issue the organization receives a grant for. Organizers train those people to be public voices on the issue—telling their story at a press conference or the State Capitol. This is not a bad thing, but there’s a world of difference between this and building a mass base with the power to force decision-makers to the table and advance an agenda.
Today, I’m part of a team of organizers that's committed to listening for—and working on—the issues that are most widely and deeply felt. As a result, like other organizations that still prioritize listening, these organizers have been able to quickly build bases of new working class people.
An organizer I work with started from scratch this spring with only a couple of contacts. In a three months span, he completed thirty face to face one-on-one meetings in rural areas, listening for issues that were widely and deeply felt. Without question, the lack of elder care was the top issue.
Then, using social media, the organizer tested the issue of care with more people, and found hundreds of more folks who were passionate about the issue and interested in connecting with an organizer. He soon uncovered a pattern of conservative county-electeds organizing to close beloved county-owned nursing homes. In just one of these rural counties, they now have an active base that meets and has some kind of action nearly every week, and can put a 100-plus in a room with short notice.
Without help from the organizers, they have gathered a thousand signatures by going to churches, bars, and diners. They have already generated a dozen media hits, including a good mix of local and statewide. Word has gotten out, and people throughout the region are asking the organizer to come work in their county - more potential members than we are able to follow-up with. All of this in six months, simply by working on the issue that was the most pressing for people. We entered this work with no intention of working on long-term care.
When issues are chosen by the community, we end up working on the issues with the most heat and also ones that more closely match an organization's ability to win. Working class people want transformative change as much as anyone, but they're also smart. Early on, they often direct organizers toward fights that are in line with an organization's power, testing if we can deliver. If we do, they are all in on stepping it up a notch or two.
Being in right-sized fights is good for the development of organizers too. They give budding organizers a chance to learn the fundamentals of campaigning: finding widely and deeply felt issues, cutting an issue with members, doing a power analysis, designing a campaign, and actually winning. All of which leave organizers more prepared for the more complicated campaigns to follow.
Skipping these steps is skipping an essential phase in the formation of an organizer. As a result we have too many organizers who are struggling, running campaigns well beyond their experience level, wondering if something is wrong with them, when in fact it's built into the model.
To be clear, the spirit behind the funding to community organizations to work on specific issues comes from a spirit of generosity and a belief in the power of organized people. The issue priorities of philanthropy would improve conditions in working class communities, and some have real resonance in the community. But here’s the rub—choosing the issues for communities short circuits the small-d democratic practice that makes community organizing so powerful.
When an organization listens, then wins on an issue that people chose themselves, the new members feel more ownership over that win, and start to see they have power inside the organization. They start to believe in democracy. That genuine sense of agency is something that we've lost in the matchmaking model between funder and community interests so present in the field today.
I believe the “advocacy with testimony” model of organizing is among the more broken parts of our field. If we really want to build larger bases of working class people so we can win what we see as the most pressing fights of the day, we should start by letting the people we organize tell us what is most pressing for them.
To my friends in philanthropy, that means making multi-year grants to organizations that enable them to listen to what community members most care about and fight to win on those issues. It means going where the heat is. If you do this, I think you’ll like what you see. In time your grantees will have more and tougher members, more strategic, capable, and confident organizers, and be in a better position to take on and win the larger and more structural fights, including your priorities. They will do this, not with testimony from a small groups of members, but with powerful bases of true believers who've learned how to fight, get to the table, and win.
I recently did an interview with organizer Ellen Cassedy, discussing her organizing book, “Working 9 to 5: A women’s movement, a labor union, and the iconic movie.” Check it out.