Organizing for Power and Empowerment: The Fight for Democracy 9780231548335

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ORGANIZING FOR POWER AND EMPOWERMENT

Organizing for Power and Empowerment THE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY 2ND EDITION

Jacqueline B. Mondros and Joan Minieri

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023, 1994 Jacqueline B. Mondros and Joan Minieri All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mondros, Jacqueline B., author. Title: Organizing for power and empowerment : the fight for democracy / Jacqueline B. Mondros and Joan Minieri. Description: 2nd edition. | New York, NY : Columbia University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022015569 | ISBN 9780231189446 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231189453 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780231548335 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Community organization—United States. | Social action—United States. | Social service—United States. Classification: LCC HN65 .M58 2022 | DDC 361.20973— dc23/eng/20220629 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022015569

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee Cover photos (from top): courtesy of New York Communities for Change; courtesy of New York Communities for Change; courtesy of SEIU Local 26; courtesy of Oakland Education Association; courtesy of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

CONTENTS

P R E FAC E

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Chapter One The Evolution of Social Action Organizing 1 Chapter Two Organizing Against Corporate Power 39 Chapter Three Intersectional Injustice

73

Chapter Four Women and Gender Frames 102 Chapter Five The Organization as a Political Home and a Vehicle for Change 129 Chapter Six Righteous Anger: Building the Base and Developing Leadership for Power 160

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Chapter Seven Issues: The Rubik’s Cube of Organizing 199 Chapter Eight Campaign Strategy: Fundamentals and Innovation 237 Chapter Nine Using Information and Communication Technologies 285 Chapter Ten Conclusions: The Next Evolution of Organizing 315 Postscript Reckoning and Resolve 349 357

A P P E N D I X : ST U DY M E T HO D S

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

A D D I T IO NA L R E S O U R C E S

B I B L IO G R A P H Y

INDEX

387

373

363 365

PREFACE

This book is about how ordinary and often marginalized people build power. It is the story of how they challenge corporate and elected elites to pursue racial, political, economic, environmental, and social justice. Their goals are not only to change their own lives for the better but to transform the systems of power that reward monied interests to the detriment of the common good. The stakes have never been higher for poor and working-class people and the organizations that support them. Corporate control, supported by neoliberal policies, an increasingly racist narrative, and a far right agenda, threatens the economy, our elections, and our physical, social, and economic environment. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in 2020, it laid bare long-standing societal disparities. In its early days, we experienced a government unwilling and incompetent to meet health, economic, and human needs. The pandemic exposed a dangerous lack of trust in science and government and a frayed social contract. Continued police violence and incarceration of Black people and others of color is a national emergency. Climate change is a global one. The baseless claims of an invalid presidential election, followed by the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol building struck at the very core of our democratic system. The United States is at a crossroads. Political extremism on both ends of the political spectrum divides families and communities on issues

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as global as immigration policy and as local as grade school curriculum. Americans all along the political spectrum experience and act from a deep sense of isolation, disconnection, and personal powerlessness. We heard much about these issues in our research for this book. If democracy is to survive, we must promote a path that serves the common good; recognizes, appreciates, and responds to our diversity; and plans for the future. Perhaps America’s best hope for the future are the social action organizations we describe in this book. This second edition builds on work published 25 years ago in Organizing for Power and Empowerment. The first edition was based on an exploratory study of 42 progressive organizations that we called “social action organizations.” In 1994, we defined social action organizations as self-generated associations of people organized to wrest power from established individuals and institutions to create progressive change. The purpose of these organizations, we wrote, was for members to experience a growing sense of power, pursue activities to accrue power, and ultimately for their organizations to be powerful in making change (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). When we began our conversations in 2016, writing a new edition was an easy decision. The election of that year and its aftermath were marked by the politics of division, and an explicit narrative by the United States president and actions of federal government departments targeting vulnerable populations. Simultaneously, major social justice movements for immigrant, worker, and LGBTQ+ rights and for racial and gender justice were emerging on the political landscape. By 2016, it was clear that progressive activism was growing (Meyer & Tarrow, 2018). Community-based social action organizing, issue coalitions, and statebased strategies existed more than 25 years ago, but this work remained, for the most part, under the radar. We began to see indications of a renewal of progressive social activism and greater media attention to it as early as 2011 when protest erupted against inequality in Zuccotti Park, adjacent to Wall Street. Known as Occupy Wall Street, civil disobedience in the form of a tent city established in the park lasted for two months and spread to other cities throughout the country. Occupy’s rallying cry was, “We are the 99 percent.’’ This catapulted into public awareness that the top 1 percent of Americans controlled nearly all of the country’s wealth. In 2013, enraged by the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black man, and the subsequent

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acquittal of his killer, activists using the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter began using social media to organize protests. In 2014, following the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, a group of activists led by Black women organized a decentralized Black Lives Matter organization with more than 30  independent chapters globally. This network today conducts direct action campaigns against violence toward Black people and works to eradicate white supremacy, particularly in the criminal justice system. Social activism escalated with the 2016 election and continued through four years of social policy, rhetoric, economic policy, and government activism targeted at vulnerable communities. In some cases organic and unplanned protest evolved into new organizations that politicized, activated, and trained a new generation of organizers. This new, prolific, and innovative progressive organizing made a powerful and convincing argument for a second edition, but even now much progressive organizing remains invisible to the general public. Protest, what Han (2014) calls “viral engagement,” generates media attention. Sometimes the outcomes of an organizing effort are publicized (for example, a teachers’ contract is signed, the agreement to move an Amazon hub to New York City is prevented). But the organizations behind the change, the people involved in making decisions, the slow, long, careful strategic process that results in a new outcome remains largely invisible in the media and to the general public. It’s worth noting that this can be true on both the right and on the left, where the slow deliberate work of organizations is often overlooked in favor of publicizing high-profile events. We do not address in this book the organizing growing on the right of the political spectrum; we leave that analysis to others. We focus on capturing a detailed picture of the emergence of exciting new organizing and organizations as the next generation of progressive organizing. Second, we were eager to describe a broad array of organizations. New technology enabled us to extend our reach across the country and deliver a richer and more representative story. Our sample reflects a greater geographic spread of organizations, including organizations in the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. We also wanted to show that activism occurs not just in the more familiar urban areas but also in rural and suburban communities. In this edition, we reflect on issues that arise in less populated areas and report on how organizations engage and work with members and leaders who are not in close proximity to one another. Given this

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greater reach, we describe how organizing occurs in different contexts on a range of issues and with diverse memberships. Third, as organizers and researchers, we are interested in exploring the “state of organizing,” that is, what factors have remained constant and important to organizers, what has strengthened and deepened, as well as what has changed. We offer a portrait of the evolution of organizing over 25 years. We very much want to understand how the fundamental concepts of organizing are envisioned and operating today in a changed societal, global, and economic context. We anticipated that some perspectives and practices had been widely confirmed and that other areas were being rethought and redeveloped. We knew, for example, that social action organizations remain committed both to power and to empowerment, but thinking about how to accomplish these goals has evolved in exciting and innovative ways. Finally, we approached this new edition with a firm conviction that our original decision to let the organizers speak for themselves and to tell their stories on a variety of subjects was a valid and important one. The vibrancy of their words, examples, and experiences gave the first edition its staying power. This second edition follows the original model. Through the organizers, you will learn about many emergent organizations, new communities that are being organized, new issues and new ideas about long-standing issues, and a more complex and nuanced approach to action strategy. We have included organizations that are still going strong after more than 50 years of activity. We have been inspired by the organizers we interviewed and have consistently struggled with decisions about condensing or omitting their passionate and elegant discourse. The organizers are quoted frequently, and their words are instructive and only lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Although the decisions we made 25 years ago focused and informed our current inquiry, they also offered challenges for a second edition. When the original study was published, we believed our work would add to the developing scholarship on the long and robust history of “active citizenship” in the United States. There was exciting contemporary writing on social activism, its virtues and challenges, but most of it was based on the personal experiences and activism of the writers or case studies of a particular protest movement. There appeared to be little comparative research at that time about organizations and organizers. Our study was designed to use a wide angle lens to describe and categorize a broad swath of progressive

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activism in an attempt to better understand the organizations and to introduce their attributes and work to a wider audience. The decisions we made reflected the work in the field, the tools, and the scholarly advice available to researchers at the time, but that history posed a challenge when producing a new edition. First among those decisions was the book’s title. Although power as a primary goal and a concept in social action organizing has persisted, we had to ask ourselves whether the term “empowerment” is still relevant? Based on the literature of the time, we defined empowerment as “a psychological state—a sense of competence, control, and entitlement—that allows one to pursue concrete activities aimed at becoming powerful” (Mondros & Wilson, 1994, p. 5). Today the term empowerment has been nuanced, studied, and contested. To developmental psychologists, empowerment is understood as individual agency (Wilke & Speer, 2011), whereas community psychologists mean efficacy at the organizational or group level (Brodsky & Cattaneo, 2013). The sociological literature views empowerment as arising from resources or connections to resources, from social status, education, wealth, which connotes positional power, perhaps status power, that can then be activated to take power. Still others look to measure it or describe it. Meyers (2016), for example, focuses on how structurally disadvantaged constituencies gain influence and the important role “owning the narrative of success” has in legitimizing past efforts and spurring new action. He writes that the narratives of victory “can maintain the enthusiasm of the faithful, mobilize new activists by providing a script for contemporary actions, and make sense of current political challenges . . . providing a sense that the proactive efforts of individuals in the service of a moral cause against great odds was worthwhile” (p. 72). These “fortifying myths” help to sustain collective efficacy. Han (2014) describes the process of “cultivating the skills and motivations of activists and developing civic leaders” as the defining work of transformational organizing (p. 105). In her view, the process of relational organizing is transformative for participants and is related to other positive organizational outcomes: “Transformational outcomes focus on the ways that collective action changes the affects, outlooks, and other orientations of individuals and groups. Examples include the increasing ability of people to see beyond their own self-interest, shifts in beliefs about their own agency, or changes in public opinion. Organizers focus on transformational outcomes because these changes make it more likely that people

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will become leaders within the association, working not only to achieve associational outcomes, but also to recruit others to do so” (p. 96). Ohmer (2010) replaces empowerment with self and collective efficacy and lists several aspects of each. Self-efficacy includes self-judgments about one’s ability to organize and execute actions necessary to achieve goals; the belief that one’s actions will be efficacious in some control over problems and will lead to increased expectations regarding the ability to address problems and add improvements. Collective efficacy includes, among other things, shared expectations for intervening to effect control by the community and a shared belief about a group’s power to produce results. At the same time, many on the progressive left and feminists writing in the popular media condemn the term empowerment as rooted in individualism (Riger, 1993) or having been so watered down that it has become “ubiquitous vacuousness” (Whippman, 2016). For others, it signals a lack of corporate and governmental accountability for continued inequality, and connotes blaming the victims for their own powerlessness. As Morley and Floridi (2019) write, “the empowerment narrative. . . . can feel like an elaborate mechanism for victim-blaming [that] denies the fact that much. . . . is controlled by macro forces over which the ‘user’ has only very marginal or no control” (pp. 1166–1167). We found debates and disputes in the literature and the media about empowerment. However, it was clear early on in our recent work that the education and political transformation of members and leaders is, if not the foremost purpose of organizing, certainly a primary and significant goal. Organizers broadly agree that they are about helping “lift up the power of people,’’ how they work to assist members to “become agents of change” and become “leaders who change the world.” They movingly describe how economic forces are contrived to promote inequality, and how the people they meet (immigrants, farmworkers, drag queens, formerly incarcerated people) are overwhelmed, afraid, and rendered self-blaming and self-doubting by the powerful forces and narratives that target them. Their work with members and leaders is to undo this traumatic process—to build confidence, to generate righteous anger, to find means of increasing voice and participation. That is, their work is designed to result in efficacy, agency, empowerment, and transformation. In fact, the concept of transformation currently describes not only the evolution of members and leaders but of the goals and purpose and the

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organizations themselves. Organizing as transformation goes beyond specific campaigns and policy wins to an intention to transform the social, political, and economic systems that are the pillars of massive injustice. As Alicia Garza (2020), co-founder of the Black Lives Matter global movement, writes in The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart, there is a critical connection between power and empowerment: empowerment is important, but it is not enough. “Power is the ability to impact and affect the conditions of your own life and the lives of others. Empowerment, on the other hand, is feeling good about yourself, akin to having high self-esteem. Empowerment is what happens when people come together and don’t feel alone anymore and don’t feel like they’re the only ones who experience what they do. Unless empowerment is transformed into power, not much will change about our environments” (p. 57). In the end, we agreed that the title Organizing for Power and Empowerment would remain despite its difficulties, and we would use the words of the organizers to give the title its currency. We have added a subtitle to this second edition: The Fight for Democracy. Our decision to add these words came about as we continued to analyze our findings, wrote and rewrote each chapter, watched as the political context became more contentious and frightening, and most important, as we listened again and again to the voices of the organizers we interviewed. Their words, more than anything else, convinced us that the organizations we write about here are fighting for democracy’s future. It is certainly true that from its very beginnings the United States has been an imperfect democracy. Our history has been a series of fierce battles, advances, and backslides in its attempt to become “a more perfect union.” Our national discourse continues to evolve around civil, individual, and human rights. Whether it be abolitionists, suffragettes, or the LGBTQ+ and disabilities rights communities, the idealistic, patriotic, and strenuous efforts of marginalized people have pushed us toward greater inclusion, fairness, and equity. These movements demanded to be seen and heard. Through our work we came to believe that today’s organizations represent a new wave of activism that is required to make democracy work for the majority of Americans. Today organizations confront racism, injustice, wealth inequality, and the massive influence of corporations, and insist that the needs and wishes of the people be recognized. They do so at another

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critical historical moment in our quest to realize a more perfect democracy. The new subtitle recognizes this aspirational struggle. It is also necessary to offer an explanation about how we talk about the communities that face inequity and bias. Unlike in 1994, today’s social action organizing very much contends with issues of racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny. Correspondingly, in this new edition we also pay a great deal of attention to these “isms.” The organizations included in this new sample are mostly organizing Black Americans and other people of color, immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ+ population. And those organizing in mostly white geographies still find ways of addressing these issues. Many of the organizers are themselves members of these communities. Moreover, there is intense scrutiny over language today, efforts that we believe are well-intentioned and ensure that respect and dignity are accorded to all people. Appropriate attention must be paid to the discrimination and disparities they face. We occasionally refer to “marginalized populations,” but we most often specify the groups we are discussing—Black Americans, immigrants, other people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. We recognize that our original sample in 1994 featured organizations in the major metropolises of the northeast, primarily New York and Washington, D.C., and we did not capture what was happening in other areas of the country. In the second edition, we have broadened our reach to include other areas of the country, and we believe this edition is richer and more relevant. We had few screening criteria for choosing organizations in the first edition: they had to be in existence for at least two years, have someone they called a full-time paid organizer on staff, and have an identifiable membership. We included a number of organizations that may have pursued progressive stances on a variety of issues but were using lobbying, legal, or mobilizing strategies and not consistently pursuing the development, broad participation, and leadership of members. That is, many of the organizations included in the sample pursued influence, possibly even power, but were primarily controlled by their professional staff. They did not in any real way allow people who were most affected by the organizations’ issues to make decisions about issues, campaigns, strategies, targets, tactics, or organizational governance. As we said in our findings, members were passive and largely relegated to making donations and signing petitions. These groups were, in today’s parlance, “advocacy organizations.”

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As a result of that choice, we were able to categorize organizations as mobilizing, lobbying, or grassroots, and we had much to say about how each of these prototypes pursued power and influence. However, including such a wide range of organizations prevented us from doing a deeper analysis of the work done by grassroots organizations to develop members and leaders. Much of our analysis focused on the organizer, and perhaps this was a reflection of what we understood about the context of organizing at that time. We shall have much more to say about the new thinking regarding the roles of organizers and leaders today. In this edition we made a decision to use criteria that would exclude the advocacy organizations we included in the first edition and move the focus to what we then called countervailing grassroots organizations. Our original findings suggested that lobbying groups, and to a lesser extent mobilizing organizations, did not operate in ways that identified, engaged, and developed members and leaders. Lobbying organizations, in particular, were fundamentally staff driven. They identified a few key experts to advocate for an issue, while mobilizing organizations “focused on maximizing the number of people involved without developing their capacity for civic action” (Han, 2014, p. 52). We thought we could learn more today from organizations that believed in, thought about, and are committed to what organizers call “building the base.” This is what Han (2014) refers to as “developing the capacities of people to engage with others in activism and become leaders” (p. 8), as well as accruing power to make progressive change. We came to this new edition knowing that social action organizations were committed to this work. With that as a major interest for us, criteria for our new sample included organizations having expressed goals to build membership and develop leaders. This decision enabled us to more deeply explore the similarities and differences within grassroots organizations. We intentionally sought organizations that reflected geographic diversity; that were organizing in rural, suburban, and urban areas; that were working at different levels including neighborhood groups, statewide organizations, multistate organizations, and national networks. It was also important that organizations reflected diverse populations and issues such as housing and land use, gentrification, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, immigration, workers rights, environmental justice, civic engagement, and mass incarceration. Many organizations in

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our current sample work in several issue areas at once, highlighting the overlap and complexity of the root causes of injustice. In conclusion, we hope that our readers are as encouraged as we are by the organizing activity described in this second edition. Contrary to popular belief, ordinary people are not passive or demoralized. There is new energy in progressive organizing and new organizations are emerging in every part of the country. People are organizing at every level, and new coalitions are being formed to confront racism, sexism, and homophobia and the structural inequality embedded in our economic, political, and social context. The second edition is dedicated to telling this story.

ORGANIZING FOR POWER AND EMPOWERMENT

Chapter One

THE EVOLUTION OF SOCIAL ACTION ORGANIZING

If we can get those who are directly impacted, and for us it’s the LGBTQ folks in the South, to see their lives as connected to other people. So for instance, we often say our work is to make sure that the third shift factory worker sees their lives as connected to the drag queen, that their lives are connected. And if we can get those things to happen and those folks to be willing to fight for their collective interests and confront power and be willing to take power, to shift power, then we can build a base of leaders that can change the world. MARY HOOKS, SOUTHERNERS ON NEW GROUND (SONG)

From our earliest history, activism has been embedded in American culture. The United States Constitution begins with the words “We the People,” establishing the principle that the government is created by and is responsible to its citizens. Of course, who qualifies as the “we” has been and is still hotly argued, revised, and challenged in the courts and in the streets. Although intense and contentious debates persist over who the people are and what they truly want, most would agree that a belief in “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” has driven, sustained, and promoted active political engagement from the inception of the United States. The notion of “We the People” expects responsiveness from government. As early as 1832, in his seminal work Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously praised the United States for its free institutions of “active citizenship.” Progressive social activism has an extensive and vigorous history in the United States that includes many extraordinary moments: the struggles of organized labor, civil rights organizations, farmers’ and farmworkers’ groups, antiwar efforts, and women’s and LGBTQ+ rights movements. Indeed, activism can be found across the political spectrum. Organizing on the right also has a history of activism, and it has been unrelenting in its objectives. Although that is not the subject of this book, these groups have been formidable adversaries against the social justice goals that are our focus here.

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Even by historical standards, the current era represents a surge of progressive activism. New activity in the early 2000s focused on workers in groups such as UNITE, the Domestic Workers Union, Justice for Janitors, and the like. This activism culminated in the Fight for $15, an effort to raise the minimum wage in 2012. Major successes were made in several states, and increasing the minimum wage was added to the platform of the Democratic Party in 2016 (Fine, 2006; McAlevey, 2014, 2016). The Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 (Milkman, Lewis, & Luce, 2013) and the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 and 2014 (Ransby, 2018) foreshadowed a swelling of progressive activity across the country following the 2016 presidential election. A few examples suggest the wide range of activity, with varying degrees of success, in different locations and issue areas: • In early 2016, a grassroots movement known as the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests began to work against a pipeline project designed to run from North Dakota into southern Illinois. The pipeline would cross part of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, and in April a group of youth organized a direct action and social media campaign that drew national attention. President Obama’s administration denied an easement for construction, but this decision was reversed by President Trump. The last protestors were moved off the easement, and in February 2017 oil began to flow. • Ai-jen Poo, founder, president, and activist of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, stood alongside acclaimed actress Meryl Streep at the Golden Globe Awards ceremony of 2018. Ms. Streep and others gave full support to the crusade to end sexual harassment and abuse, known as the #MeToo movement, noting that harassment and abuse was even more prevalent and vicious among poor and working-class women who were not protected by fame and money. Famous actors introduced seven other women activists at the ceremony, including Saru Jayaraman, cofounder of the Restaurant Opportunities Center, which focuses on organizing immigrant workers in the restaurant trade to establish living wages and protect workers’ rights; and Tarana Burke, the senior director of Girls for Gender Equity and the founder of the #MeToo movement. The event gave visibility to activism and to women activists who probably had been unknown to most of the viewing public.

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• The deadly February 14, 2018, shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, sparked a national youth protest movement to end gun violence. Parkland high school students Jacqlyn Corin, Cameron Kasky, Emma Gonzalez, and Alex Wind organized and launched March For Our Lives. More than a million people attended the first rally in Washington, D.C. on March 24, 2018. That was followed by a national crosscountry tour called Road to Change, which sought to extend the organizing nationally. The students developed a comprehensive “Peace Plan’’ that addressed gun violence, established local chapters, and launched a voter registration drive. • In 2018, then 15 year old Greta Thunberg’s efforts to raise awareness about climate change led to student walkouts in more than 100 countries with more than 50,000 participants. By September 2019, during the Global Week for the Future, a global strike gathered more than four million students in 450 organized walkouts in 150 countries. In September 2019, Thunberg gave a moving and provocative speech at the UN Climate Action Summit. In 2021 at the Youth4Climate Summit, she famously mocked world leaders’ inaction, saying “blah, blah, blah,” and led a massive protest at COP 26, the global conference on climate change. • A national wave of successful teachers’ strikes began in West Virginia in 2018, spread to Oklahoma and Arizona, and continued in 2019 into Los Angeles and Chicago. These strikes were organized by labor and community coalitions as part of the Red for Ed movement. Their bargaining packages included community safety net issues such as prohibiting housing evictions during the school year and providing bus passes for students; requiring social workers, dentists, and nurses to be in each school; adding libraries and school restorative justice programs; as well as traditional labor demands such as raising teacher salaries and increasing benefits. • In 2009, a coalition of community organizations under the banner of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, led by Desmond Meade, began working to restore the voting rights of people with past convictions after they complete their sentences. Amendment 4 to the state constitution was finally passed by a ballot referendum in 2018, with nearly 65 percent of voters in favor. The Republican controlled legislature and the governor have repeatedly sought to place restrictions and impose court fines on those who will be able to vote under the new amendment, opposition that was still active during the 2020 election.

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• Since 2016, demonstrations have been held in Israel, Puerto Rico, the Czech Republic, Spain, Algeria, Sudan, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Lebanon, Chile, Saudi Arabia, India, and Iraq. The global unrest was tied to both small pocketbook issues and brazen corruption by the ruling elites, indicating an international increase in social activism. These activities may seem to have emerged spontaneously, arising unprompted out of a particular crisis, event, or glaring injustice widely viewed on social media. Mass media frequently portrays protest as the work of a single charismatic leader, such as Dr. Martin Luther King’s fight for civil rights in the 1960s, or Stacey Abrams’s fight to end voter suppression in Georgia, which came to fruition during the pivotal 2020–21 state and national elections. Sometimes the media describes a protest as an amorphous movement without a single identifiable leader, such as Black Lives Matter. But in the vast majority of cases, active long-term organizing by progressive social action organizations led by multiple organizers and grassroots leaders had taken place. In a few cases, such as Occupy Wall Street, engaged participants evolved into a new generation of organizers who then established new social action organizations (Milkman, Lewis, & Luce, 2013). It is this new surge of activity—the progressive new stirrings of “We the People”—that is our focus for this book. We examine organizations that we referred to in our 1994 book as the “Grassroots Model” and described them this way: “They believe that people must be helped to see themselves as powerful, that changes must occur on significant substantive issues, and that power must be redistributed by inducing power holders to bow to pressure on these issues. Targets are power holders, public or private figures who have formal authority and are highly resistant to change. Numbers of people organized into a disciplined organized structure are viewed as the major source of power” (Mondros & Wilson, 1994, p. 229). We begin this edition by delineating what we mean by social action organizations today and define key terms and their attributes. DEFINING SOCIAL ACTION ORGANIZATIONS, POWER, ORGANIZING, AND LEADERSHIP

A social action organization is a formal organization, most often a membership organization, of people who are directly impacted by the issues the organization addresses. These people form the organization’s “base,” and

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their goal is to increase the number of participants: to “build the base” as a means of acquiring power. Social action organizations have an explicit mission to increase the power of ordinary people to achieve social change so people have equal access to critical rights such as health care, affordable housing, clean air and water, workplace safety and fair wages, and fair and equal treatment under the law (Cox, 2018; Homan, 2016). The commitment to an organization composed of and led by an engaged leadership is one of the distinguishing characteristics of these organizations. As Han (2014) writes, “to reach its transactional goals at scale, an association needs a cadre of leaders who have the motivations, skills, and capacities to mobilize others. This cadre is developed through a distributed organizing structure. By focusing on the transformational work of building long-term capacity, organizers build up the people-based ‘assets’ of the association. The leaders that organizers cultivate recruit future activists and leaders” (pp. 15–16). We use the terms organizers and leaders to distinguish between those who are paid for their organizing work (staff organizers) and those who are not (leaders). We refer to members as the constituents who join these organizations as active participants and who, through increased participation and responsibility, have the potential to become leaders. In social action organizations, members and leaders are not passive participants, nor are they figureheads, nominally in charge. Everyone in the organization—staff and leaders—organizes, and the division between organizers and leaders is less important today than it was in 1994. Today’s organizers are more likely to be recruited and trained into staff roles based on their connection to impacted communities, including from their active membership and leadership in their organizations. Even so, there are role distinctions. Leaders have real and extensive organizational authority and power. They make organizational decisions, identify and determine the issues on which the organization will work, develop strategy, run the organization’s meetings, speak on behalf of the organization, and negotiate with elected and corporate officials and other power holders to achieve the organization’s goals. Organizers work in close collaboration with leaders, helping them to confront power, to think and act strategically, and they play a role in recruiting and mentoring new leaders in the organization. No matter how they become paid staff, organizers bring distinct skills, networks, resources, and ideological interests. The organizers we interviewed are totally aligned with the theories of change of the organizations in which they do their work. They also value the self-determination of

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impacted communities. They work in close collaboration with members to support their decision-making and their representation of the organization. Staff of social action organizations are not neutral facilitators—they work to develop the capacity of community members to be strong and accountable leaders. One of the organizers we interviewed refused the term “organizer,” calling himself an animator: someone who brings forth the innate abilities of people and helps to birth what the leadership has envisioned. We heard variations on this theme throughout our research—the belief in the capacity of people to determine what they need and how to get there when given a supportive, open environment for building knowledge, efficacy, and power. The second distinguishing characteristic of social action organizations is their explicit mission to build and wield power. Power is the ability to act and to make things happen (Mineri & Getsos, 2007), or as Garza (2020) says, “the ability to impact and affect the conditions of your own life and the lives of others” (p. 57). The ability to exercise power has an effect on the people who have a growing sense of their newfound capacity to act (promoting what might be called empowerment, agency, or collective efficacy) and moves the organization toward the achievement of a desired goal. Yet, as Garza also notes, “unless empowerment is transformed into power, not much will change” (p. 57). The accrual of power is the driving force in organizing. In social action organizations, power is a collective act, the opposite of the fend for yourself, self-blame culture. Power building relies on people’s intentional learning and understanding, finding strength in numbers, and being focused and strategic about how and when to use the amassed power to make change. In progressive social action organizing, it is always power with, never power for or power over. No one in the organization, not the board president or the organizer, has power over the deliberations and decisions of the group. And neither is it acceptable for leaders, members, or organizers to pursue power for their own individual self- interest or profit. The accumulated power is used to make real change on issues that are important to the organization’s members. As organizations have a significant impact on issues that make a difference in members’ lives, they promote members’ growing attachment of the staff and membership to the organization. The work of social action organizing is dictated by the prescriptions to build a base, develop an engaged leadership, build power to make real change, and shift social messages and dominant social narratives. Staples

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(2016) defines organizing as “collective action by community members drawing on the strength of numbers, participatory processes, and indigenous leaders to decrease power disparities and achieve shared goals for social change” (p. 2). It is often easier to define organizing by what it is not. Sen (2003) makes this point in distinguishing social action organizing from other kinds of support and activity and emphasizing the active engagement of people who are impacted by the problems the organizing seeks to address. It does not offer immediate relief of individuals for the provision of social services. Unlike advocacy, organizing removes the middleman. It is not collapsible with electoral work because it embraces a wider range of activities. Organizing [is] also distinguished from mobilization which involves large numbers of people expressing their resistance or support whether through a demonstration or signing a petition without the expectation of sustained activity. Solidarity movements can open up space for the voices of those affected, but they can never replace the clarity and power of the people who have the most to gain and the least to lose. (p. 25)

Most people think a march, a sit-in, street theater, or a protest is organizing. We refer to these activities as tactics of mobilization, and it is common to equate mobilizing with organizing. Yet protest does not necessarily develop leadership or involve the people who are most affected by a problem. Mobilization is a tactic, something the organization plans and executes to exercise its power in an attempt to make change. Han (2014) makes clear the difference between mobilizing and organizing: “People often confuse mobilizing with organizing, but as this book will argue, they are quite different. When mobilizing, civic associations do not try to cultivate the civic skills, motivations, or capacities of the people they are mobilizing. Instead, they focus on maximizing numbers by activating people who already have some latent interest. Organizers, in contrast, try to transform the capacity of their members to be activists and leaders” (p. 8). Mary Hooks, then codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), succinctly merges all the concepts we’ve described here, saying that the goal of organizing is to build “power, the righteous power of everyday people and the natural leadership that we find in our communities, and to train up, skill up, and support folks in building the tools and the analysis to advance a social justice vision.”

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THE SOCIAL ACTION ORGANIZATIONS IN OUR STUDY

This book is based on findings of a study conducted between 2017 and 2019 that included 20 contemporary progressive social action organizations. In many ways, this study replicates our original 1994 research. We used simple criteria to draw our sample: (1) a formal organization existed; (2) there had to be at least two paid staff people, one of whom had responsibility for organizing; (3) the organization had expressed goals to build membership and develop leadership in the way we have described; and (4) the staff agreed to complete a survey and to be interviewed. We intentionally sought organizations that reflected geographic diversity; were organizing in rural, suburban, and urban areas; and were working at different levels including neighborhood-based groups, statewide organizations, multistate organizations, and national networks. It was also important that they reflected diverse populations and diverse issue areas: housing and land use, gentrification, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, immigration, workers’ rights, environmental justice, and mass incarceration. Our sample is small, and we do not claim that it is representative. Nonetheless we believe that our research provides valuable insight into the work of social action organizations today. Based on our own knowledge and that of 10 key informants, we identified 43 potential social action organizations in different geographic locations and issue areas, and 20 groups agreed to participate. Aligned with our selection criteria, all of the organizations but one are membership organizations, and all are composed of people who are “closest to the pain” caused by the problems their organization addresses. The one group that does not have a formal membership is a migrant farmworker organization working with a population that is often transient. Instead, they hold weekly meetings at the same time and place and have done so since their founding in 1993, so workers can easily connect with the organization. All the organizations have boards or some kind of governing body composed of their members. A survey instrument was used to collect data on various organizational characteristics. An interview format was constructed based on concepts from the original book and revised with questions suggested by interviews with 10 key informants who described current organizing practice. That format was used to interview 40 organizers, two in each of 20 social action organizations. (In two cases there were exceptions. In one case, the

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executive director and the organizer were the same person. In the other case, codirectors were interviewed as well as the organizer.) All interviews were recorded and transcribed using Otter software, and transcriptions were reviewed by members of the research team to ensure accuracy. Qualitative software (NVivo) was then used to analyze the data for major themes. Using these research tools we continue the first edition’s model of a qualitative comparative study approach that offers a rich picture of organizing in settings and around issues that go beyond our own experiences or the individual case studies in the literature (Carroll, 2015; Cress & Snow, 2000; McAlevey, 2016; Schutz & Sandy, 2011). A more detailed description of the methodology used is included in the appendix. Organizational Longevity and Geography. The oldest organization in our study was established in 1962, and the two newest organizations were founded in 2017. Popular opinion suggests that social action is ephemeral, emerging and disappearing at historical moments (Eisinger, 1973; McAdam, 1998; Piven & Cloward, 1979), but half of the organizations in our sample have been in existence for 20 years or more, and four are more than 40 years old (figure 1.1). The organizations are located throughout the country: six in New York State, three on the West Coast, three in the South, five in the Midwest, and two organizations work on a national level.

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FIGURE 1.1. Longevity of sample organizations

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FIGURE 1.2. Funding sources of sample organizations

Tax-Exempt Status. At the time of our survey, eight of the organizations had 501(c)3 tax status, two had 501(c)4 status, six organizations had both a c(3) and a c(4), and one had a c(3), a c(4), and a political action committee (PAC). The trend to establish multiple organizations with different boards and different tax statuses has continued. This approach allows the organization to accept tax-deductible donations and foundation and government support for their c(3) work, conduct electoral work under their c(4) auspice, and support election campaigns with their PAC. Organizations use these multiple structures to diversify their strategy, using issue organizing, lobbying, electoral activity, and support for and against candidates for office based on the context and their goals. We have much more to say about the importance of this trend in other chapters. Budget and Funding Sources. The two newest organizations had budgets under $1 million, eight had budgets ranging from $1 million to $3 million, five had budgets from $3 million to $5 million, and three had budgets over $5 million. All the organizations had multiple and diverse funding sources as shown in figure 1.2. Several trends are of note regarding the financing of these organizations. First, social action organizations are heavily reliant on foundation support. Several organizers mentioned this fact as one of their major challenges

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because foundations want to fund specific campaigns or issues, and this emphasis can divert attention from the organization’s most important work, leaving more significant areas underfunded. Some organizers bemoan the erratic nature of funding, having it pour in after a specific crisis, such as a pivotal election or a police killing, and drying up in quieter times or when foundations change their focus. As Marshall Ganz, the Rita T. Hauser senior lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, told us: “They come to an organization and say, ‘we will fund you to do this.’ Now, that may fit with the organization’s strategic objectives or not. Pretty soon you’ve lost control of your strategy. Pretty soon you’re adapting to the different funder demands, and it destroys the integrity of the organization and its capacity to serve its constituency.” The overreliance on foundations as a source of revenue has led organizations to increase their activity around membership dues programs. Fully 60 percent of the organizations we surveyed have member dues. Four of the organizations have group members, nine have individual members, five have a combination of group and individual memberships, and only one (the farmworkers’ organization) has no formal membership. This is a significant trend because many of these organizations are composed of people of limited means, some of whom are very poor. Organizations committed to a system of membership dues argue that members have a stronger stake in organizing and in the organization. Diversifying funding in this way also gives members more internal control of the organization’s focus. Sandra Lobo, executive director of Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, describes the importance of member dues: Membership dues have actually come from our membership saying that they want to contribute in this way. . . . There are different payment plans. You could pay one fee up front, two payments, pay in installments, or a little bit each month. . . . Even if someone can’t pay the smaller amount throughout the year, we talk about sweat equity. . . . You might not be able to contribute, but how do you be a part of the team that does grassroots fund-raising and helps us bring revenue into the organization so that you can decide what we do with funding. Oftentimes funding directs us to do x, y, and z; you want us to do a, b, and c. We can only decide to do a, b, and c if we have the freedom, the independence to do that.

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Two new funding trends have arisen since our first edition and are also noteworthy. First, labor unions at the local and international level contribute to social action organizations working on issues and in regions relevant to their members. Although labor unions have made contributions to community groups for decades, reporting on this revenue source is new. We suspect that the percent of an organization’s budget that comes from labor contributions is not significant, but with budgets so meager, these contributions make a real difference in the ability of organizations to actively pursue campaigns. Organizers frequently come from labor organizing backgrounds, have preexisting relationships with unions, and understand how to partner with them. In addition, a number of organizations, such as PowerSwitch Action (formerly Partnership for Working Families) and Isaiah, are collaborating with labor unions on issues of common interest. The evolution of laborcommunity coalitions and their significance is addressed in more detail in other chapters. A second trend is that organizations are more likely now to provide funded services to members and use these services as a means to move people into action on issues. An organization’s government contracts can provide a base for institutional funding. Make the Road New York, for example, offers legal and housing services for its primarily immigrant members, and VOCAL-NY provides syringe exchanges and other health services. Organizations must raise money from other sources to pay for organizing staff and activities. Deborah Axt, then coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, explains their funding strategy: Our funding at this point in time is a little bit more than half from government sources. For many, many years, the majority of funding was from foundations. For many years now we’ve had hundreds and hundreds of funding streams. That has had the advantage of giving us resilience in moments of economic downturn. There are very few funding streams that we are particularly dependent on, which gives us a lot more freedom than many organizations of our type. The government funding streams actually increased as a percentage of our budget. For example, our litigation department became really a powerhouse in its own right and was no longer perceived as supplemental to community organizing campaigns, but now actually provides robust and sophisticated legal services to 15,000 plus families every year.

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Our English language classes reach about 2,000 families every year. Once those grew to a scale and a sophistication and reputation of a certain sort, then they started to be able to command their own funding streams, and that was largely through government.

Collaboration among community organizations may be one way to increase funding stability. For example, in Minnesota many organizations united in Our Minnesota Future, cooperating both on campaigns and fund-raising. Although that collaboration didn’t last, details about this and other funding issues are addressed in other chapters. Level of Organizing. The organizations in our sample work at multiple levels of government (local, state, national, and international) and are engaging members and developing leaders and pursuing change on issues at multiple levels. Only three organizations work at a single level. Fourteen of the organizations work statewide. This reflects the targeting of statebased policy as a strategy for change, and a move away from focusing solely on population centers, cities, and neighborhoods as a base for organizing. Fourteen of the organizations work in local cities or neighborhoods, three regionally, four nationally, and five internationally. An increasing number of organizations in our sample are working statewide and are focused on changes in statewide policy. There are a number of reasons for this focus. First, states often have authority over the organizations’ campaign issues, such as housing. Second, battles such as an increase in the minimum wage are more likely to succeed at the state level than at the federal level. And finally, although localities are likely to be more amenable to progressive action, the organizations can then be blocked at the state level by more conservative legislatures. Roberto Tijerina, then codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), talks about the need for statewide work and its impact on the leadership of the organization: We have a chapter in Nashville, Tennessee, a budding chapter in Knoxville, Tennessee, possibly Memphis. We have a long-standing chapter in Richmond, Virginia; Durham, North Carolina; Greensboro, North Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; a budding chapter in Columbus, Georgia. It’s beautiful that we have built deeply in these local places. But there’s also a need, given that we are in the South in these Red states, that we build statewide power. We have seen organizing work at a local level

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that gets preempted by the good ol’ boys in the state house. And so that’s the gap that we have not yet filled, but [we] are in the process of doing so. That means for us that we need to find resources so we can hire more statewide organizers to deepen our work across the state and have a different type of impact. We have had times where we’ve needed to be able to convene our people and move our membership that is in a state to fight against something that’s happening at the state level that calls for a hell of a lot of coordination, it calls for a hell of a lot of resources. Because one of the things we believe in [is] relational organizing, and what we’ve witnessed when you bring folk into a room together from all these different places where they can swap strategies and tell their stories that it can shift people’s morale, people’s interests, people’s strategies, etc.

Organizational Issues and Frames. Our organizational survey asked organizers to choose issues they work on from a drop-down list. We also included an “other category” that enabled organizers to define their issues in their own terms. All the organizations in our study work on a range of issues (figure 1.3).

Child care/elder care 1.7% Community safety 2.5% LGBTQ + rights 2.5% Police abuse 2.5% Education 4.1% Mass incarceration 4.1% Women’s rights 4.1% Corporatization/Financialization 5.0% Housing 5.8% Community Development 5.8% Health care 7.4% FIGURE 1.3. Issue areas of organizations in the sample

Civic engagement 12.4%

Racial justice 10.7%

Immigrant rights 9.1%

Worker rights 8.3%

Environmental justice 7.4%

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Many organizations focus on a core constituency and a subset of issues but consciously frame their efforts in ways that make connections beyond their constituents and among issues. For example, Southerners on New Ground (SONG) organizes LGBTQ+ people of color and has framed the interests of that community around the need to end the mass incarceration system that impacts everything else in members’ lives. They have led successful cash bail reform campaigns that focus on ending the pretrial detention of Black mothers who are unable to pay bail. Organizations also often apply frames to their issues. Frame theory was originally developed by Goffman (1974) to describe the collection of anecdotes, ideas, words, and stereotypes people commonly use to understand and respond to events. These frames provide cultural filters, a shorthand that helps people make sense of the world and encourages them to take action. Social action organizations use frames to ascribe meaning to events, activities, places, and actors (Goodwin, Jasper, & Pollett, 2001; Snow, 2013), in effect to tell a story about justice and injustice. The organizations we studied use frames that emphasize the intersectional nature of issues and echo the work of other organizations that take a similar approach on the issues. Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) works primarily on environmental justice, and it consciously links climate issues to the economic disparities that affect poor and underrepresented communities. They point directly to the needs and leadership of women. Their work is an example of the Just Transition framework that organizations use to express the need for transformational change in both environmental and economic policy. SONG uses abolition as a frame for their pretrial detention, bail, and immigration reform work. The term expresses the sentiment that racial injustice has continued to damage people in new ways. We return to these frames, narratives, and messages throughout the book. Many organizations work in coalitions with others on specific issues. Some of the coalition work is statewide. Isaiah, a Twin Cities–based organization, worked with other groups around the state to confront the power of Wells Fargo. Five of the New York City–based organizations we included in our study successfully collaborated in 2019 to win far-reaching state policy changes in affordable housing and renter protections. Collaboration at the national level is also increasing. SONG’s local and statewide campaign to end cash bail also has links in a nationally targeted campaign, a coalition in which SONG plays a leadership role. Organizing networks, such

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as People’s Action and PowerSwitch Action, also establish campaigns on national issues. Examples include fighting for access to health care and for affordable housing policies. ORGANIZATIONS THAT PARTICIPATED IN OUR STUDY

Organizers recount many stories about their organizations throughout the book. We know readers may find it difficult to keep track of everyone. This section provides a brief description of the 20 organizations and the organizers our readers will come to know in this book. Several of these people have retired or left for other organizing jobs, and we identify their roles at the time of our interviews with them. Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice, located in New York City, was founded in 2005 with a focus on organizing the Nepali community around employment and immigration issues. Working locally, their campaigns have included organizing nail salon workers and domestic workers around worker rights and working on immigration status and health care for Nepali immigrants. Pabitra Benjamin is executive director of Adhikaar, and Narbada Chhetri is the director of organizing and programs. Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) was established in 1993 and is based in Oakland, California. The organization works locally in the Bay Area, statewide, and in coalition with national organizations, focusing on the impact of environmental issues on working-class Asian immigrant and refugee communities. Campaigns include organizing against Chevron’s pollution of the Back Bay, fighting public subsidies for fossil fuels, and denying permits to industrial polluters. Miya Yoshitani was executive director, and Vivian Yi Huang was the deputy director at the time of our survey. Yoshitani is now senior strategist and Huang is a codirector. Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is an organization of farmworkers, mostly migrant workers based in Immokalee, Florida. They work statewide, nationally, and in coalitions internationally on farm labor and food standard issues. Established in 1993 to address poverty and abusive working conditions among farmworkers, they are best known for their Fair Food Campaign, which forges agreements with major retail chains such as Taco Bell, McDonald’s, and Walmart to establish humane farm labor standards and fairer wages for farmworkers in their suppliers’ operations. Lucas Benitez is a cofounder, and Marley Monacello is a staff person.

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Community Voices Heard (CVH) was established in 1994 and is headquartered in New York City. They work locally and statewide. They organize low-income and working-class people, mostly Black, Latinx, and other people of color, around employment and punitive policies that impact these communities. Recent campaigns include expansion of rent control, strengthening public housing, and protecting the SNAP and Medicaid programs. Afua Atta-Mensah was executive director and Gabe Strachota was lead organizer at the time of our survey. Down Home North Carolina was founded in 2017 to organize in underserved small and rural communities in North Carolina with an intentional focus on race and inclusivity and in opposition to white supremacy. Headquartered in Burlington, North Carolina, and now with five chapters, they organize locally and statewide on issues such as the expansion of Medicaid, raising the minimum wage, ending cash bail, and stopping the opioid crisis. Brigid Flaherty is a cofounder and was codirector at the time of our survey, and Chelsea White was an organizer. Ella Baker Center for Human Rights is headquartered in Oakland, California, and was established in 1996. The center organizes in Oakland and the East Bay with Black, Brown, and low-income people in the communities most adversely affected by prisons, punishment, and economic adversity. It works locally, statewide, regionally, and nationally. Prominent campaigns include statewide criminal justice reform, decriminalizing homelessness, and abolishing the Oakland Public Housing police force. Zach Norris was executive director, and Vince Steele was the organizing director at the time of our survey. Hoosier Action, headquartered in Bloomington, Indiana, works locally downstate and statewide and organizes low-income people in rural southern Indiana for “the Indiana we deserve.” Established in 2017 after the presidential election, it has focused on three issues: environmental justice around environmental hazards, voting rights, and expansion of health care. Kate Hess Pace is the executive director, and Tasha Coopinger is the organizing director. Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, based in Des Moines, Iowa, was founded in 1975 and works statewide. They have a long history of fighting the expansion of factory farming and preserving family farms. They work locally, statewide, regionally, and in coalition nationally. Current campaigns include fights for clean water, health care for all, immigrant

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rights, and an end to police profiling. Hugh Espey is the executive director, and Adam Mason was the policy director at the time of our survey. Isaiah, headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, and working statewide, was established as a faith-based “organization of organizations” in 2000. They have worked on clean energy, immigrant inclusion, health and child care, and mass incarceration campaigns. They work locally, statewide, regionally with surrounding states, and as part of national coalitions. Doran Schrantz is the executive director, and Catalina Morales was the lead organizer at the time of our survey. Land Stewardship Project is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and has a history of organizing that goes back to 1982. They work mainly in white, rural towns in Minnesota, statewide, regionally in surrounding states, and in national coalitions. They organize poor and working-class families around issues such as health care, the farm bill campaign, stopping factory farms, and just food care systems. Mark Schultz was the executive director and Bobby King was the director of policy and organizing at the time of our survey. Logan Square Neighborhood Association is located in a neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, and works locally, statewide, and as part of national coalitions. The oldest organization in our sample, Logan Square Neighborhood Association has been organizing parents, churches, and apartment buildings since 1962. Current issues include establishing a neighborhood land trust, expanding affordable housing, resisting gentrification, building parent involvement in schools, and changing the tax structure. Nancy Aardema was the executive director and Christian Diaz was the lead housing organizer at the time of our survey and is now director of housing. Make the Road New York is primarily a New York metropolitan area organization that also works statewide. It was established in 2007 to organize immigrants and now focuses on workers’ rights, immigrant and civil rights, environmental and housing justice, justice for transgender and gender-nonconforming people, and educational justice. It offers both immigrant services and organizing and is known for its work on the New York Dream Act and its effort to end bank financing of private prisons and immigrant detention centers. Deborah Axt was a coexecutive director and Jose Lopez was an organizer at the time of our survey, and Lopez is now a coexecutive director.

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New York Communities for Change is based in New York City and works locally, statewide, and as part of national coalitions. It was founded in 2009 to organize low-income Black and Latinx communities in New York State. Campaigns include winning universal rent control, stopping fossil fuel infrastructure projects, and working against corporate community takeover. This is one of the major organizations that worked to stop New York City from offering tax relief for Amazon’s proposed location in Queens. Jonathan Westin is the executive director, and Zachary Lerner is an organizer. Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition is located in a neighborhood in the Bronx, New York. They work locally, statewide, regionally, and in national coalitions, but their primary work is with low-income Black and Latinx residents in a neighborhood that was formerly home to a white ethnic population. Established in 1974, they have gone through a staff and leadership transition related to population shifts. Current issues include rent reform, affordable housing, gentrification, economic development, health justice, and the school to prison pipeline. Sandra Lobo is the executive director, and Crystal Reyes is the program director of the Coalition’s youth organizing program, Sistas and Brothas United. PowerSwitch Action (formerly Partnership for Working Families) is a national organization headquartered in Oakland, California. Established in 2002, this is a national network of community/labor organizations working with a low-income, working-class constituency in communities of color largely in the urban centers and metropolitan regions of the country’s largest cities. Issues include jobs and sustainable infrastructure and opposition to deregulation of industry; growing a clean energy economy; and opposition to consolidation of the e-commerce industry. Throughout the book we refer to them by their current organizational name. Lauren Jacobs is the executive director, and Felicia Griffin is the deputy director. People’s Climate Movement was established in 2014 and went on hiatus in 2020. It grew out of the People’s Climate March in 2014 and operated locally, statewide, nationally, and internationally. The organization was based in New York and functioned as an “organization of organizations,” convening multisector groups—environmental organizations, environmental justice organizations, multi-issue organizations, labor, and faithbased organizations—to tackle climate change and environmental justice.

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Paul Getsos was the national coordinator and Fletcher Harper was the chair of the board of directors at the time of our survey, and Harper is now an executive committee member. Southerners on New Ground (SONG) is a regional organization headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Founded in 1993, the organization works on LGBTQ+ issues in 13 southern states. Campaigns include the Free From Fear campaign for safety, dignity, and respect in local communities; abolition of cash bail and pretrial detention; the Campaign to Melt ICE and strengthen immigrant rights; and increased oversight of the police in local communities. The organization is committed to an abolition frame. Mary Hooks and Roberto Tijerina were codirectors and Jade Brooks was an organizer at the time of our survey and is currently the political director. United for Respect is a national organization established in 2010 by three Walmart workers. The organization is a multiracial organization dedicated to improving the lives of retail workers by changing the workplace practices of major corporations that employ them. Campaigns include women’s economic stability at Walmart and Wall Street accountability. They work in coalition with other organizations to challenge Amazon and to implement the Fair Workweek policy. Andrea Dehlendorf is the executive director, and Angela Lopez is the deputy director. United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) was established in 1970 in Los Angeles, California, as the main representative of certified, nonadministrative staff in the Los Angeles Unified School District. They are committed to building a labor/community coalition that includes students, parents, and unionized teachers. In 2019, they won a major new labor agreement with the Los Angeles County Unified School District that included salary and benefit increases for teachers and major changes for students and their families. Alex Caputo-Pearl was the president at the time of our survey and is now vice president of the organization. VOCAL-NY is a statewide grassroots membership organization that was established in New York City in 1999. It builds power among low-income people directly impacted by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness. They accomplish this through community organizing, leadership development, advocacy, direct services, and direct action. Jeremy Saunders is a coexecutive director, and Jawanza Williams is the director of organizing.

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THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZING: THEORY OF CHANGE

Our goal is to explore, portray, and explain in a detailed way the evolution of progressive social action organizations, organizing, and organizers over the past 25 years. Our research was designed to elicit the thinking and experiences of the organizers that are doing the grassroots work and organization building behind the new swell of protest. We wanted to learn what essential ideas or practices in organizing are still valued and how organizers have attempted to deepen, broaden, and strengthen those principles in their work. We also wanted to understand what has changed, and how organizing is evolving to confront new challenges. Social action organizations are founded on a set of beliefs about how to make social change. This set of beliefs is referred to as their theory of change, and it describes the relationship between the problems organizations want to address and the intentional strategies they use to solve those problems and achieve their mission. Essentially, the change theory answers this question: How do we believe change happens? In 1994, the organizers and leaders we interviewed believed that change is made through power and that organizing numbers of people into a disciplined organization was their source of power. They believed that power had to be wrested from power holders, who resist change, and they used campaign and contest strategies to “win” on an agenda of issues. They organized people in local areas based on common problems, with memberships ranging from the very poor to those with middle incomes. They had formal memberships and valued recruiting members and developing them as leaders who would come to experience themselves as increasingly more powerful. They believed members had the capacity to make substantial changes on increasingly complex policy and on issues that impacted them. Leaders made decisions in the organizations, and leadership development was crucial. Organizers and leaders played different roles in the organizations; and although organizers had low-profile public roles, they were central to the organization (Mondros & Wilson, 1994, p. 229). Our 1994 findings have been echoed by more recent researchers. Sen (2003) enumerates five attributes that define social action organizations, all very similar to our findings from 1994: (1) clear mission and goals; (2) membership and leadership structures with a way for people to take on roles; (3) outreach that concentrates on those most affected by the problem;

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(4) issue campaigns featuring multiple tactics, including direct action; and (5) a focus on changing institutions rather than changing individuals (p. 96). Minieri and Getsos (2007) describe community power-building organizations by a set of principles that include building a base of members because more people means more power, moving people into action because it fosters commitment, developing members to be leaders, implementing strategy to deliver campaign wins, analyzing power, and engaging members in a social justice movement. Similarly, Szakos and Szakos (2007) include democratic participation, developing leaders, and building political power for change. Bobo, Kendall, and Max (2010) offer three principles to distinguish what they call direct action organizing: their goals are to win real and immediate concrete improvements in people’s lives, give people a sense of their own power, and alter the relations of power (p. 9). To a large degree consensus was found on what constituted the theory of change of social action organizations. Although we have identified some renewal and modernization of thinking and action, our findings suggest that the social action organizations in our sample continue to subscribe to the same theory of change that we found in 1994 and that was supported by subsequent literature. Of course, we chose to include organizations that had a membership base of people who experienced the problems the organization was working to correct, and that choice likely predisposed the organizers we surveyed to this theory of change. Nonetheless, the major principles we described in 1994 have been confirmed over the years as organizers have found new ways to deepen them and inculcate them into their organizations. There is widespread agreement on the following principles: 1. The primary mission of social action organizing is to build power among people who are marginalized and have few avenues to express their needs and concerns. The mission to build power goes beyond any single issue, policy solution, or campaign. Social action organizations aspire to a social and economic transformation that will provide equity, voice, and opportunity to all. This transformation will rectify injustices against women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ communities. 2. Power must be built by the people “closest to the pain.” The people who experience the issues on which the organization works must be the members and leaders of the organization. People are organized on the basis of geography (Down

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Home North Carolina, Logan Square Neighborhood Association, Isaiah, Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, and Hoosier Action), a common identity or issue (Coalition of Immokalee Workers with a focus on farmworkers, SONG with a focus on the LGBTQ+ constituency, and Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice with a focus on Nepali immigrants), or some combination of both (Asian Pacific Environmental Network in the Bay Area with a focus on environmental justice, Land Stewardship Project and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement with a focus on farming issues, and VOCAL-NY with a focus on homeless people and substance users in New York). 3. Leaders play major roles in social action organizations. We found that in 75 percent of the organizations the staff are responsible for grant writing, but staff and leaders share in almost all other responsibilities including leadership training and fund-raising. Leadership responsibilities include issue selection, setting strategy, and especially being the public face of the organization. Speaking in public and negotiating on behalf of the organization was done solely by leaders in 85 percent of the organizations in our sample. 4. There is a widespread commitment to base building, identifying and recruiting members, ensuring that leadership emerges from this base, and having leaders firmly in control of the organization. Social media is helpful for outreach and recruitment, but it has not replaced interaction and relationship building, leadership development, and popular education. Technology is consistently used in innovative ways to initiate, track, communicate, and support relationship building. 5. There is unanimous support for the importance of the organization as both a political home for their members and a sustained vehicle to pursue change. Some organizations are larger, more stable, more flexible, and better funded (although still not funded enough), but newer organizational forms promote multiple strategies and targets and offer new ways of building coalitions to force change.

SONG (2019) defines theory of change as follows: “A theory of change is an explicit presentation of the assumptions about how changes are expected to happen within any particular context and in relation (or response) to our work. A theory of change maps out which actors have to do what in order to achieve and sustain a vision of success, and identifies the major linkages between them.” This commitment is perhaps best illustrated in this statement from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. They call it the

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CCC model—Consciousness + Commitment = Change—a concept common to many organizations. Consciousness. Social action organizations continue to commit, perhaps even more fervently than in the past, to building consciousness and skills through deep and extensive leadership development for people who otherwise feel they are alone and powerless. All of the organizations we surveyed provide extensive leadership training—77 percent through personal mentoring, 72 percent through retreats, 50 percent provide formal classes, and 44 percent provide printed materials and online communication. Other activities include group meetings, annual conventions, and contact with other organizations. Mary Hooks, formerly of SONG, describes the centrality of leadership development in her organization’s theory of change that not only fuels that organization but also builds a broader movement: “We have a leadership development program called The Lorde’s Werq, as in Audre Lorde, that is committed to building up the leadership of Black, queer, trans folks living in and organizing in the South. We see that as a political imperative. We’ve developed programs to make sure that we are creating a leadership pipeline, not just for our organization, but as a movement building imperative.” Leadership development is aimed first at countering the victimhood messages people receive from a harmful society, second at offering alternative facts about why and how they are kept oppressed and disempowered, and third at instructing them on how to obtain agency and power that will change their situation. Jawanza Williams, director of organizing at VOCAL-NY, describes the importance of popular education in building members’ consciousness: We have a leadership team that is made up of people that are active and formerly homeless New Yorkers, and they are the decision makers for those campaigns. The people are actual leaders and not just active members. Every two weeks leaders convene and do campaign decision making around the issue of homelessness. It’s called the New York City Homeless Union. We try to help folks understand that homelessness is not just about failing to pay the rent, but it’s a political phenomenon. There’s a whole robust infrastructure that exists in the world to help people find housing. But the reality is that there’s no housing to be found. So it’s meeting people, and presenting this

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worldview. I call it the Organizer’s Formula: “engagement + action = retention.” You can’t just convene people to talk about what they’re experiencing, we don’t want people to bleed in public. We’ve got to get people to understand how the society is failing them, who is responsible and who can give us what we want, and then we’ve got to move them to action. You’ve got to get people to act on the anger and the hope that we’re hoping to inspire or to pull up out of people.

It is important to note that VOCAL-NY calls its action committees “unions” (including a Homeless Union and a Users Union), a term which destigmatizes the members and politicizes the work, emphasizing the normalcy of membership, the ability to amass power through numbers, and their right to make demands. VOCAL’s members are not viewed as clients needing service but as leaders organizing for power. This messaging is emblematic of the conscientization process. Commitment. Social action organizations offer numerous opportunities for people to build organizational relationships, skills, and power through participating and making decisions about targeted issue campaigns that bind them more closely to the organization. This work is strategic and intentional. Carruthers (2018) defines political homes as “where we grow, where we’re challenged, and where we’re in relationship with others” (p. 63). We were often told that social action organizations are designed to buffer difficulties that their members experience in their lives. Some organizations become a lifeline for those who live in hostile environments because of their immigration status, race, sexual orientation, or among those with differing political views. In crises, as we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, many of these organizations also function as mutual aid organizations, providing access to information and connections to needed support. As Jeremy Saunders, coexecutive director of VOCAL, says, “We want to replace the issues with a politics of love and compassion. VOCAL is not just here to organize around this politic; it’s literally the political home for this group of people.” The importance of commitment to the organization and to each other is echoed in our survey findings. Commitment to the organization’s purpose and issues, ties to other leaders, and self-efficacy through performing a leadership role is the triumvirate of organizational attachment. In response to retention of members, 77 percent of respondents

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listed commitment to the issues, 67 percent listed commitment to organizational purpose, 61 percent identified attachment to other members, and 50 percent said that leader roles made people feel important. Angela Lopez, deputy director at United for Respect, says, “We develop this sense of community, love, and trust. Our members feel like it’s something that they need to do, they need to stand with the other people that are putting themselves out there.” All the organizers we interviewed firmly believe that a formal, structured, disciplined organization remains essential to building power. This commitment contradicts the early assertions and narrative of Occupy Wall Street in 2011 stating that organizations, resources, and formal leadership are not necessary. In fact, many of the Occupy Wall Street participants have gone on to found and lead organizations. The significance of the organization as a venue for people’s activity and as a vehicle for change is widely accepted today. Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minnesota, emphasizes the importance of leadership within an organization as essential to power building: “People having more power is essential to change. So people organized into powerful vehicles, and those people themselves, both individually and collectively being on a path, like crossing a bridge, having their own change of self . . . and how they see themselves in relationship to power, it’s critical work. People don’t just get mobilized into a power vehicle: they themselves become leaders . . . building something grounded in where you fit in the hierarchies of power that we live in.” Change. Leadership development is not an end in itself, however; participation must lead to change in people’s actual lived experience, influencing broad policies that improve people’s daily lives in perhaps small but significant ways. Although it may take years of effort, the commitment needs to pay off. Roberto Tijerina, then codirector at SONG, comments on how meaningful it is to people to win on an issue such as their pretrial bail release campaign when he says, “You bail somebody out, you literally are in jail one day, you are out the next. We’re not playing games. There’s something tangible about that for folks.” A good example of this comes from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers whose major programmatic accomplishment is the Fair Food Program, an agreement between farmworkers, growers, and retail buyers. This is an international certification program that ensures humane wages and conditions for

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workers who pick fruits and vegetables on participating farms. Their groundbreaking strategy was to hold retail food companies, starting with Taco Bell, responsible for the wages and conditions of the workers who pick the crops, originally starting with tomatoes, that a business relies upon. Through the Fair Food Program, retail food companies and farmers agree to abide by wage and working condition standards developed in partnership with the workers themselves. Lucas Benitez, cofounder, explains the importance of the successful Fair Food Campaign for the empowerment of their leaders, for their attachment to the organization, and for its concrete benefits: “There was a worker who came up to us after a recent agreement was signed, someone who’s been involved for many years, and said, ‘Thank you.’ And I responded to him, ‘But thank you for what? If you’ve been there this whole time marching with us and organizing together, you’ve been just as much a part of it.’ But, now the worker was experiencing the change directly in his life.” The victory made a significant difference in workers’ lives, and Benitez went on to relate what one worker told him at that time: My son is seven years old and in his seven years of life, there’s been very few times where I have been able to take him to school. This week, I just started working at a new company that is participating in the Fair Food Program and this whole entire week, I’ve had time to not only have breakfast with my son, but also take him by the hand and drop him off at school. Then, I come back home and pick up my lunch and head to work. That’s because we no longer have to arrive at the fields at five in the morning. Sometimes we have late start times, like even as late as 10, which gives us time to spend with our families.

The pursuit of change may entail a protracted organizing process, requiring that the organization keep the pressure on as it builds power along the way. As Hugh Espey, executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, told us, “It’s a constant fight. We win things and then things are taken away, and you have to go back and win those things again.” Marley Monacello, staff at the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, echoes this sentiment: “Often a victory signals not an end, but a beginning. If you’ve won a campaign, it means that you’ve won the right to create change on the ground and that is the hard work. The hard work is then actually implementing and sustaining that victory.”

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Minieri and Getsos (2007) offer another example of the protracted process of making change. Community Voices Heard (CVH) sought to end New York City’s welfare reform practice of requiring people on public assistance to work in exchange for receiving welfare benefits rather than earning a wage. This was called the Work Experience Program (WEP). Their successful three-year campaign required not just one legislative win but multiple victories to ensure implementation of a new policy. In the first round, they won legislation in the City Council to replace some WEP requirements with transitional jobs that provided wages and career training. The mayor at the time, Rudolph Giuliani, vetoed the legislation. The council overrode the veto. Giuliani refused to implement the program. CVH used a combination of strategies and partnerships to keep the pressure on, while continuing to build a base of low-income Black and Latinx leaders who could hold elected officials accountable for the long haul. CVH and its allies successfully won replacement of various elements in the program over the course of many years. More than 15 years after launching the campaign, CVH witnessed the end of WEP under the shift to a more liberal city administration, including a former campaign partner serving as a city commissioner (Devinatz, 2013; Khurshid, 2016). Gabe Strachota, a former CVH organizer, reflects on how the need to stay the course with strong leaders, beyond the victory, continues to be at the heart of the work: “Our policy victories can and are very easily reversed. It would be harder to reverse the leadership development of people, given that we are fighting this long-term struggle. It really is the biggest contribution that I can make as an organizer, is to develop long distance runners in the movement.” Organizers acknowledge that the organizing process itself can be helpful. It builds the base, empowers leaders, and moves the organization toward smaller victories. Adam Mason, then the policy director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, talks about their long campaign to stop the expansion of factory farms: “The lesson there is that even though that factory farm will be built, we were able to build power in that community, we were able to sign up a lot of members and for the first time, these local decision makers were actually siding with their community. That in itself is a victory and now we’ve got that many more justice fighters who are tied into this fight that we can continue to engage. We just have to do more of that.”

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THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZING: INNOVATIONS OF INTERSECTIONAL INJUSTICE AND CORPORATIZATION

Thus far we have presented the classic understanding of how social action organizations go about building power. We are also dedicated in this edition to understanding how things have evolved in organizing in the past 25 years, and we now turn to some of the ways in which we found organizations have changed. Organizations have developed their theories of change in areas that have perhaps always been there but that have recently become more widely and deeply held as explicit goals. We found much more clearly articulated ideology, theories of change, and vision that informs and undergirds organizing in the following areas: • Today’s social action organizations clearly articulate and implement an understanding that there is intersectional injustice in which all systems interact and combine to keep people, people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ populations disproportionately vulnerable, marginalized, and powerless. This view includes a strong commitment that all effective organizing must center on race, racial justice, gender, and the need for multiracial organizing. • The most significant change in organizing in the past 25 years is a sharpened analysis that the target of progressive organizing is corporate control of our economy, our politics, our governments at all levels, and our story as a nation.

Together these ideas create a framework for building power for democracy, equity, and transformational social movements. We briefly describe these evolutions here and explain them in more detail in subsequent chapters. The Intersectionality of Injustice. Twenty-five years ago the 42 organizations in our sample included only one organizer and six leaders who were people of color, all from grassroots organizations. No person of color held the top position in any of the mobilizing or lobbying organizations. Less than half of the organizers were women, and the women who were paid staff tended to be found in the lobbying groups rather than in the grassroots or mobilizing organizations. Organizations tended to be directed by white men. We believe that the centrality of white males in the organizing process reflected the sexist attitudes of the times, and times have now changed (Schutz & Miller, 2015).

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More than half of the leaders we interviewed 25 years ago were women, and we described in our findings how many of the issues were tied to women’s concerns about their lives, their families, and their neighborhoods. We postulated that women were often found in volunteer leadership positions because of their concern with these issues. The dogma of the time was codified by Saul Alinsky in Reveille for Radicals (1946) and Rules for Radicals (1971, 1989), and it was practiced in the networks of organizations that subscribed to his methods. They argued that there were professional organizers, that there were separate roles for leaders and organizers, and that it was unwise to move leaders into staff positions (Sen, 2003; Staples, 2016). Consequently, women leaders had little opportunity to become paid organizers. This enabled the male organizers to be front and center, if not dominant, in their organizations. Today’s organizers are much more diverse and include more people who transition from leadership to staff positions. In four of the organizations, both the executive director and the organizer were persons of color; in nine others at least one was. Overall, 43 percent of the organizers in our sample were either Black, Latinx, or Asian. Today, women of color in particular, are professional organizers and organizational directors. They are leading activist efforts everywhere. In our current sample of organizations, both the executive director and the organizer were women in nine organizations, and three other organizations had at least one female in one of these positions. Fifty-five percent of the respondents in our current study are women. And, of course, their presence is making all the difference not only in the issues undertaken but who participates and how, what strategies are used, how the organization operates, and perhaps most important, the theories of change that guide their work. Women organizers have transformed the work of organizing for power, and we tell their story in this book. Perhaps not surprising but still distressing 25 years later, in 1994 we barely mentioned the issues of race or sexual/gender diversity. According to our notes at the time, even organizers working in women’s and LGBTQ+ organizations or those organizing in communities of color rarely brought up issues of racism, oppression, or inequality. Did we not hear these concerns, or did we redefine these concerns as issues of class, which we discussed at length? Maybe we missed organizations that had a more fully developed analysis of identity. Maybe we asked the wrong questions. Maybe interviewees were

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uncomfortable talking to us, two white researchers, about those issues. Maybe we were uncomfortable hearing it. Or, because by far the majority of organizers were white men, maybe we all missed its relevance to the work. Today just the opposite is true. Social action organizing has evolved to place identity and intersectionality at the center of activism, alongside issues of social class, and organizers in every environment directly engage with this understanding. Our findings suggest that race, racism, and inequality are now central and essential in the theory of change for social action organizing and inform every aspect of the work (Carruthers, 2018; Ransby, 2018). Every organization includes an analysis of how racial disparities affect their communities and how intentional multiracial organizing shapes their work. Organizers arduously endeavor to include racial justice in their mission and goals. Intersectionality informs their choice of issues and the messages used to articulate them, their leadership development, and popular education. A feminist understanding of patriarchy is widely accepted and acknowledged among the organizers in our sample. That perspective propels them into organizing, encourages them to build organizations that are heavily populated with women, promotes the use of a gender lens to select and pursue issues, and is infused in their leadership development and popular education. Many of the organizations candidly admit that they are intent on organizing women, even at the expense of losing male involvement. Today’s organizers understand and formulate an evolved theory of change that incorporates identity. Crenshaw (1989) describes how sexism, patriarchy, and racism create “the complexity of compoundedness” (p. 166), placing Black women on the lowest rung of the social and economic ladder and rendering them at double jeopardy for discrimination and inequality in legal, economic, and social systems. Colloquially, what is generally meant by intersectionality is how one’s multiple identities intersect (race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.), coexist, and inform who we are; how we are perceived; and how we are treated by systems and institutions. This definition, focused on the individual, is widely accepted among organizers, particularly women of color, who use it to describe their own experience and path into organizing. Sen (2021) corrects this notion by suggesting that when intersectionality is understood as a form of identity it “hides true dimensions of privilege and power.” She also links intersectionality to organizing practice.

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Our findings suggest that today’s organizers clearly embrace Crenshaw’s notion of the disproportionate risk such intersectional identity places on women, people of color, and gender-nonconforming people, and the centrality of intersectionality to today’s organizing. The organizers in our sample understand that the lives of their members are complex and that they are impacted by multiple issues and the way many systems operate. This concept was captured by Audre Lorde (1982) decades ago: “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Intersectionality is also understood and addressed at a systems level. We heard a very clear narrative from organizers that racism, patriarchy, and economic justice intertwine to create “intersectional injustice”; what one experiences in one area (for example, disparities in health care) also affects other areas such as the ability to remain employed, housed, fed, and to parent effectively. People’s identity may be intersectional, but the intersectionality of injustice is ubiquitously oppressive. Perhaps more than ever, the COVID-19 pandemic (which occurred as we completed our last interviews) laid bare the intersectional injustice that we heard so much about in our research (Adhikari et al., 2020). People experience and contend with intersectional injustice built on racism, sexism, and inequality on a daily basis. Everything converges to keep marginalized people deprived, discouraged, and disempowered. Alex Caputo-Pearl explained to us how United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) chooses and messages its teacher and school issues related to biases that inhabit the intersection of both race and gender: We talk about race and gender all the time because we think it’s an absolute driving force. We talk all the time about how California’s per pupil funding ranking has dropped precipitously as the proportion of students of color in California schools has gone up. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a reflection of institutional racism and seeing students of color as expendable. When the district was trying to go for all of their injunctions to stop us from striking, we raised very specifically that it is offensive that a public institution like the LA School District is attempting to curtail the labor rights of an overwhelmingly woman workforce and that’s an example of institutional sexism and trying to keep women down. So we’re very explicit about race and gender in our overall messaging.

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Caputo-Pearl further argues that if the problems people experience are based in interacting systems the solutions are interrelated and must be systemic as well. For example, UTLA included affordable housing and no eviction for families in their 2018 bargaining package. Mary Hooks, a former codirector of SONG, speaks to the intersectional injustices that SONG confronts in their innovative decarceration campaign to bail out Black mothers on Mother’s Day. We asked our base, “how many people are caught up with pre-trial detention? How many people have had to pay out of pocket to pay bail for their cousin, their sister? Has somebody had to bail them out?” And the majority of our base that responded said, “Oh, yes!” It was so normalized inside of our base. So I think that when we look at how ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] is also moving in those same communities, most of the folks in our base know that they are living in places and counties where their Sheriff has made agreements with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I think that folks see the connection, we understand the connection, not just theoretically around the prison industrial complex and how it shows up, but also how it shows up in our folks’ lives. If the police come for you, or ICE comes for you, either way you’re gonna find yourself in somebody’s cage.

This analysis led to their campaign to end cash bail. Hooks comments: “We had a fund-raising campaign called Bail Out Black Mothers for Mother’s Day. That work allowed us to highlight the impact of what happens where the carceral (prison) system meets economic justice. In this particular fight, we stand in solidarity with the Fight for $15 and others who are taking a different side of this economic justice, but we see all these issues as connected because we see it through intersectionality.” Organizers have always attempted to link issues to one another. But in addition to descriptions of campaigns that address intersectional injustice, both Caputo-Pearl and Hooks are making additional points that describe the further clarification and evolution of social action organizing’s theory of change. First, the organizations explicitly frame their work in terms of intersectional injustice. In both the Los Angeles teachers and the Bail Out campaigns, Black and other people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are understood as disproportionately impacted by intersectional injustice.

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However, both Caputo-Pearl and Hooks also connect their campaigns to social class—that is the impact of school and bail issues on the working poor. The organizers we interviewed conceptualized their thinking on injustice in a way that enables them to address both what people have in common (social class issues) and to identify and specify who is disproportionately harmed (identity issues). There is no disagreement that people experience problems because of social class, race, gender, or sexual orientation; it is accepted that there is universal suffering. But it is also recognized that Black and other people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ communities suffer disproportionate pain. It is not a question of social class or race, gender, and sexual orientation—it is both social class and race, gender, and sexual orientation. With this perspective, organizers working in white rural areas also have cause to address racism, sexism, and homophobia and to intentionally partner with and support organizations representing those constituencies. Most important, it is a unifying message rather than a divisive one. We revisit the perspective of “both and” rather than or throughout this book. Marley Monacello, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, articulates this critical point: I think it is so central to what people have said to us: it’s not an either or but; it’s an and, common experience + marginalization based on race, gender. All marginalized people are often deeply interrelated. CIW views all of those as deeply rooted in the same imbalances of power in society and should not be treated as silos or as separate. I think that’s reflected in the work that we do and in the program that the CIW has built, which is fundamentally a human rights program that does go directly at the imbalance of power in a particular industry. All violence against women, discrimination against Black people and the LGBTQ community, wage theft, all of those things must be simultaneously uprooted. As opposed to, for example, if we had explicitly said we are trying to end rape in the fields, period, and tried to approach it with an exclusive focus on violence against women, I think we would not have had the same success in addressing violence against women. Because when you see those things as siloed, then you don’t go to the root cause. I think that’s a really important part of CIW’s approach that’s reflected in the work. The fundamental organizing principle of the organization is less about identity and more about experience.

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Lauren Jacobs, the executive director of PowerSwitch Action, offers similar thoughts: “The water in which we swim with all the systems of oppression started with wealth grabbing through land, people, and natural resources. There is no women’s liberation, LGBTQ+ liberation, immigrant liberation, Black liberation without a radical transformation of the economy because they are intertwined. Simultaneously, as we’re dealing with issues around economic justice, be they in the workplace, housing, land, land use or the use of public dollars, it’s important to really understand how everything is interacting as we’re making those strategies.” Also important to their theory of change is something we call radical pragmatism. Although organizing today is animated by ideology and a value system based on intersectional injustice, organizers and leaders act pragmatically to affect specific changes in the real world. Their understanding of the conditions in their communities is informed by a radical ideology and that is communicated to members through their popular education and training. They may use that vision to inspire a campaign. But they pragmatically insist on choosing issues that are close to the people, on selecting strategies that work, and on using campaign messages that appeal to the wider culture and that will draw in more people rather than exclude them or divide their base. It is a stunning merger of progressive values operationalized through practical approaches to what works for issues, strategy, and communication that marks today’s progressive social action organizations. These two perspectives—“both and” rather than or and radical pragmatism—are revisited throughout this book. They have special relevance for understanding how to work on intersectional injustice in the real world, and they represent an important evolution in the theory of change used by social action organizations today. Corporatization and Corporate Targets. A focus on the corporatization of our economy, politics, and government, sometimes known as financialization, is an important part of the evolving theory of change for many of the organizations we interviewed. Although there were exceptions, progressive organizing traditionally focused on policy change and targeted elected officials and policy makers. Perhaps the most significant evolution in organizing in the past 25 years is a sharpened analysis about the tightening of corporate control as a result of decades of neoliberal policies that have undermined government resources and accountability (DeFilippis, 2008; DeFilippis, Fisher, & Shragge, 2006; Sen, 2003; Speer

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& Christens, 2012). Corporations use an arsenal of resources—campaign contributions, financing projects, promising relocation and jobs, and lobbying—to significantly influence and constrain the decision-making of elected officials. As elected officials bow to corporate interests, people and communities have less recourse through the exclusive and traditional channels of targeting elected officials. Consequently progressive organizing today often expands its focus to corporate targets in an effort to resolve issues. As Hugh Espey, the executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, says, “Capital, money, and the influence that corporations and big money organizations, big money groups have over our economy, meaning our health care system, our food and ag system. That’s the connecting thing for us: follow the money. It’s corporate power.” Whether working in local neighborhoods, statewide, or nationally, all organizations have an understanding that forcefully resisting the consolidation of corporate power is their goal. It is in this area that organizations are doing deep political education and forming alliances to enact the ambitious campaigns and strategies to secure worker rights, environmental justice, community safety, housing for all, and health equity. Corporate power is not always visible on the surface, but in talking with organizers, the impact of corporatization on people’s material conditions and their psyches is all too clear. Again, radical pragmatism plays a role in this new approach: the organizers use a radical analysis to inform their strategic and pragmatic anticorporate work. Corporatization has become such an important issue for organizers across the country that we devote the entire next chapter to it, and we focus on it again in chapter 7 on issues and chapter 8 on campaign strategy. CONCLUSION

Today’s social action organizers have rethought and reimaged organizing in important new ways. They have enhanced and deepened their leadership development and popular education, and they have committed to building organizations as the vehicle for change. They have brought intersectional injustice, particularly around race and gender, and a focus on corporatization to the very center of their work. They have used message frames creatively to close the gap between identity organizing and universal classbased issues. Both their renewed commitments to traditional perspectives on power building and their innovations have been important contributions

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to the continuing evolution of organizing. You will hear much more about this work in the chapters that follow. DESIGN OF THE BOOK

We wrote this second edition to inform scholars and students of organizing and to help working organizers. We hope it will be useful as a tool in the classroom and in internships and in community service placements. We believe we have something valuable to say to the staff and leaders who want to learn how other people are working and what they think about what they do. People who watched the events of 2016 to 2021 unfold will learn more about the organizations and the people behind the headlines and perhaps, and perhaps, become inspired to do more. We focus on the evolution of social action organizing described in this chapter, but there is nothing sacrosanct about the organization of this book. As anybody who has ever been involved in organizing knows, everything is connected to everything else. You can’t talk about issues without talking about strategy. You can’t talk about leadership without talking about organizations. We hope readers will pick and choose chapters based on their immediate concerns and interests and that one chapter will lead you to others. In chapter 2 we focus on corporatization. We examine the expansion of capitalism, the ways in which it has led to diminution of government, and particularly its impact on people of color in what is now called racial capitalism. We describe the impact of corporatization on rural America. Most important, we describe the strategies social action organizations are using to fight back, and we detail the successes they have had in doing so. In chapter 3 we describe the deeper understanding of and commitment to racial justice that social action organizations have developed over time. We explain how they envision the work, how the commitment is built into every aspect of the organization, and how antiracist work is conducted even in white communities. The influence of women and gender in organizing is the focus of chapter 4. We explain why organizers are so likely to be women today, and we describe the paths they take into organizing. We discuss women’s leadership, the use of feminist theory in organizing frames, and how gender lenses are applied to issues, and finally we consider how organizations are including trans and queer people in organizing.

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In chapter 5 we describe the evolution of the social action organization in recent decades. Reliance on a structured, disciplined organization has deepened over the years, not only as a vehicle for long-term social change and sustainability but also as a political home for its membership, leaders, and staff. We describe how the organizations enhance retention and attachment. Building the base through membership recruitment and leadership development is the subject of chapter 6. We describe what organizations are doing to engage members and develop leaders. We also describe how people find their way into organizing careers. Chapter 7 focuses on how social action organizations conceptualize their issues and how the issues are framed to reflect the inherent intersectional injustice people experience. We describe the use of corporate targets and the new ways organizations are coming together to work on common issues. Chapter 8 describes how strategy has evolved, how mobilizing and electoral activity have been added to the work using new organizational structures, and new approaches including a focus on state government as a platform for activity, and the growth of community/labor coalitions. We explain how organizations are challenging corporate targets, and organizers describe their current campaigns, how they came about, what they’ve done to achieve results, and how they view the outcomes. In chapter 9 we portray how social action organizations communicate their messages and the role information and communication technologies (ICT), including social media, play in their work. We describe how important it is for organizations to communicate their own narrative and how they do that. In chapter 10 we summarize what we’ve learned about social action organizations, their strengths and their challenges. We end by examining the opportunities and the challenges social action organizing face in the future. A final postscript assesses the very serious and significant events that have taken place since our interviews, and we suggest how these events may influence organizing in the future. The appendix describes the research methodology that undergirds this book. Additional resources provides the and website for the organizations we interviewed for the book along with a list of sample national organizations with local affiliates and a list of resources that provide information about social action organizations and organizing in general. And finally, we provide that has additional information about organizing social movements.

Chapter Two

ORGANIZING AGAINST CORPORATE POWER

Now with the concentration of the markets and the size of these corporations, literally everything matters to them and they have all the resources to do anything about it. . . . On the political side, they literally can dream of doing anything. MARK SCHULTZ, LAND STEWARDSHIP PROJECT

“No one is doing well. Everyone is suffering.” We heard that refrain from organizers in interview after interview. From red states and blue states, in organizations of workers, from immigrants, from neighborhood and public housing residents, and from farmers and farmworkers, we heard again and again that the economic system operated with a blatant disregard for people and for local communities, especially for Black people, women, immigrants, and other people of color. And most of all, we heard about a United States with such a pervasive, inescapable, and insidious economic system so thoroughly and malevolently intertwined with politics that, as Hugh Espey, executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, told us, “Almost nobody has a shot at doing well.” We did not see this level of disaffection and pain in 1994. The organizers and leaders we spoke to in working-class organizations in 1994 were still very much in the mode of Alinsky’s “have a little want mores” (Alinsky, 1946, p. 4). People were organizing because they wanted more—better jobs and housing, more opportunities, improved schools, safer neighborhoods, and pay equity for women. Neighborhood groups were using the companion legislation of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and the Community Reinvestment Act of the late 1970s to dismantle redlining in poor and racially diverse neighborhoods. Public interest groups tackled fare increases in their poorly run and disintegrating transit systems.

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But the organizers and leaders still believed that elected officials could be influenced and that long and hard fights with them would result in real change and progress. Today we heard a much more sober analysis about how the expansion of corporations, especially the dominance of the finance sector and the complicity among corporations and elected officials, has led to the worst inequality in the United States since before the stock market crash of 1929. To counter these developments, organizers are inventing and polishing new tools that target corporate America and its choke hold on political institutions. Any hope they expressed was in their ability to build and align massive multiracial organizations of people “closest to the pain” to contend with the behemoth corporate system that has evolved. Felicia Griffin, deputy director for PowerSwitch Action, articulates this view: Right now, we really feel like our economy, our communities, our development, our environment, and our education systems are run by corporations and elected officials that are bought out by corporations. Especially in this time, we need to restore democracy by reining in corporate power. Our democracy is being eroded at the very highest level right now. Our communities are living in environmentally unsafe conditions affecting their physical and mental health, all so that corporations can profit off the backs of workers and local residents all the while polluting our surroundings. I think we are more imbalanced than we ever have been before. One thing that I remember an organizer telling me in the beginning of my career is once we’ve lost the power to create social policies for our communities, history shows that we never get them back. We’ve been watching more regulation, more cuts to our social safety net system. It’s scary because I think we have already strayed off our path and we have to make up for what has been taken away. We have to seek justice in so many different ways because corporate money now permeates our society and the decisions made for us, instead of by us. We have to go back to where we were 50 years ago on social safety net services, health care, all of those things that people have worked so hard for. I really think it’s about deep deprogramming. We’re like little ants responding to things. Everything that we do, everything that we buy has an algorithm and is being tracked. People feel like corporations are able to herd us over here to go buy this or to go do that. It’s figuring out how to help us

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all disconnect from that programming and actually be part of communities again, connected to each other again, seeing that our rights and the freedoms that we love this country for are being eroded. We need to wake up. For me, returning that power to working people, reinstating our checks and balances system, creating infrastructure to fight for environmental justice, and reforming campaign financing are all things that I think need to happen to restore our democracy. We need to develop the capacity of people to govern and manage democracy and the economy. Our collective power can bring corporations to heel. We can prove to the American people that it’s possible to reclaim public goods from corporate capture, reject extreme exploitation of workers, and beat back corporate overreach.

The organizers’ assessments about inequality created by the expansion of corporate power are not delusional; they are confirmed by significant economic and political data. In this chapter, we briefly review the history and sources that led to an upsurge of inequality in the last 40 years. We then discuss the ways in which social action organizations are challenging the corporate actors and the elected officials who support them, and we include examples of campaigns that target these actors. We conclude with some thoughts about the future. HOW DID WE GET HERE? WEALTH INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL INFLUENCE

There is nothing new about inequality in the United States. This country has a long, significant, and deeply troubling history of economic and political inequality. History is replete with examples of its atrocities and cruelty: the 247-year history of slavery followed by years of oppressive systems of sharecropping and Jim Crow laws, the lack of worker protections and antiunion legislation, and the Indian Removal Act that misappropriated Native American lands. Furthermore, Michelle Alexander (2020) and many others have pointed to the impact of new iterations of Jim Crow laws that prevent equitable access based on race, despite expanded opportunity. Many economists agree that the United States experienced relative income equality in the postwar period from 1950 to 1980 (Noah, 2010). This period was ushered in by more progressive tax policies, government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and the Food Stamp Program

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(Cohen, 2018). But inequality has increased again in the last four decades due to a convoluted story involving tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, the emergence of a strengthened financial sector and a reduction in antitrust activity, corporate collusion with the political system, and a major scaling back of safety net programs. Each of these factors was dressed up in and sold with a racialized antigovernment narrative contrasted with a reification of the market. Woven together, these forces have created together a web of inequality that has increasingly tightened around the working class and especially around marginalized communities. TAX CUTS FOR CORPORATIONS AND THE WEALTHY

During the past 35 years, the United States experienced two economic boom periods—in the late 1980s and late 1990s—and growth then stagnated throughout the 2000s (Gould, 2020). Additionally, corporate profits have grown steadily since World War II and with few exceptions—the 2008 financial crisis and briefly in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic—have boomed for the past 20 years (Hungerford, 2013). Corporate profits were not impeded by the higher tax rates of 35 percent between 1993 and 2017, contrary to the threatening predictions of conservatives. Yet, neither economic growth nor corporate growth has translated into wage growth for middle- and low-income workers (Noah, 2010). Economic inequality began to rise in the 1980s under the economic policy of President Ronald Reagan, which was known as Reaganomics. The Reagan administration advanced a narrative that “waved the bloody flag” reigniting racism, and arguing that the poor were undeserving of assistance, that government was incompetent and intrusive, and that prosperity could only be achieved by a growing market economy. Known as supply side or trickle down economics, it was argued that relief for the rich would stimulate new spending and help the working class. The administration implemented policies of deep tax cuts, deregulation, and cuts in social spending and eliminated price controls and removed regulations on the gas and oil industry and cable television. The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed estate taxes and lowered corporate taxes. The GarnSt. Germain Depository Institutions Act of 1982 removed restrictions on savings and loan banks, and budget cuts reduced regulatory staff at the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. As a result, banks invested in risky real

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estate ventures that contributed to the savings and loan crisis of 1989, which wiped out many community banks. The Tax Reform Act of 1986 passed with bipartisan support and cut the top tax rate by almost half. This federal law ushered in tax policies that were even more regressive in the states (Amadeo, 2021). In 2003, the Bush administration introduced additional tax cuts for corporations, reducing taxes on capital gains and lowering taxes on real estate trusts. These policies were later extended under the Obama administration. Today taxes from corporations are a distant one-third of the federal government’s revenue (Tax Policy Center, 2020). The Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 gave the largest tax breaks to the very wealthy, lowered the top tax rate for top earners, and established a massive tax cut for corporations. This legislation represented the largest one-time reduction in the corporate tax rate in U.S. history. FINANCIALIZATION

As the United States shifted away from manufacturing, the financial sector became more important to the economy. Known as financialization, this process led to an increase in mergers and acquisitions in which corporations swallowed up and consolidated smaller businesses. A mega-merger explosion occurred in the health care, telecommunications, technology, banking, and retail sectors (Liner, 2016). Using arguments that the market was self-correcting, antitrust activity simultaneously contracted, allowing corporations to grow larger and larger. Today behemoth corporations such as Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Verizon, and Walmart dominate their markets in a way unseen since the robber barons of the Gilded Age. With the acquisition of Instagram, Facebook successfully completed 67 mergers, Amazon 91, and Google 214 in the same period (Wu, 2018). Stucke and Ezrachi (2017) argue that antitrust noneconomic goals were jettisoned for amorphous “consumer welfare,” and elected officials shrugged off the historic concern about the impact of concentrated market share in an industry. Britton-Purdy, Kapczynski, and Grewal (2021) note that “deep structures of power were shielded from legal remedies and came to seem increasingly natural.” There was no longer a political appetite to protect consumers by ensuring market competition (Stucke & Ezrachi, 2017). Tax cuts and favorable laws, financialization, mergers, and the decline of antitrust activity have had a considerable impact on the U.S. economy.

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Outcomes include a consolidation of capital; an increase in low-wage and part-time and informal labor; a decline in labor contracts and a general weakening of unions; increased mechanization; a decline in small businesses and their profitability; and an expanding international division of labor that weakens the supply chain. At the same time, corporate expansion resulted in rising shareholder prices and executive salaries. From 1978 to 2019, CEO compensation in the top 350 companies grew by 1,167 percent, whereas compensation for a typical worker rose just 13.7 percent (Mishel & Kandra, 2020). This led to lower unemployment and higher poverty rates, an increase in the population of the working poor, and a growing gap between rich and poor people (American Economic Liberties Project, 2020). Big agriculture used federal economic development funds to expand factory farms in the rural areas of the South and Midwest, cloaking their activity in arguments about job expansion. This resulted in the decline of family farms, the growth of low-wage food processing jobs, and an influx of nonwhite and mostly immigrant laborers who were then vilified for immigrating (Naples, 2000). Hamilton and Neighly (2019) assert that “the economic effects of market power have disproportionate consequences for workers and communities of color, exacerbating and further entrenching existing inequalities caused by racial exclusion and other forms of structural discrimination” (p. 10). CUTBACKS IN THE SAFETY NET

At the same time, various conservative and neoliberal governments were dismantling and divesting from the welfare state. Asserting that “government is the problem,” the Reagan administration cut or reduced the budget of many safety net programs including Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and federal education programs. Cuts to social programs continued under the Clinton administration. Declaring that the era of big government was over, President Clinton famously swore to “end welfare as we know it.” His administration’s Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 stipulated that people could receive no more than five years of benefits in a lifetime and added work and community service requirements for welfare recipients. States were free to establish even more draconian measures. This law changed how welfare is administered, sending block grants to states with

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few restrictions on how it is spent. Before 1995, about 13 million people received welfare payments (Semuels, 2016). In 2019, just under 3 million did (Falk & Landers, 2021). Stricter eligibility requirements caused the decline in people receiving assistance because they no longer qualified for help. The percentage of people in poverty did not change, but more were forced into low-income jobs and fell off the welfare rolls (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, 2021). CORPORATE INFLUENCE ON POLITICS

As the new economic policies became law, wealthy businessmen, corporations, and shareholders now had more money to influence and support political candidates who would vote in their interests. As the political influence of the well-off increased, the government’s commitment to social and physical infrastructure declined (Stiglitz, 2012). The influence on political campaigns of large donations by the super wealthy and corporations was solidified by the 2010 Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. In a 5–4 decision, the majority opinion found that political spending, even from powerful corporations, was not a corrupting influence on elected officials. The decision struck down the cap on corporate, union, and independent individual spending, and it enabled nonprofit groups to anonymously spend funds on ads that advocate for or against candidates. Later in 2010, the Federal Election Commission allowed the creation of independent committees known as 527 organizations or super PACs. Within months a number of court decisions removed restrictions on the size and transparency of campaign finance laws. As a result of these actions, money from mega donors poured into super PACs to support campaigns. It is known collectively as “dark money” because of the lack of transparency about who is behind the campaigns and advertising. Within eight years of Citizens United, the number of super PACs had increased more than 16 times (Evers-Hillstrom, 2020). By 2015 super PAC spending outstripped candidate and party spending. The Citizens United decision funded and solidified the alliance between the wealthy, corporations, and the political system. Corporations have used their power to develop many ways to influence public opinion and to significantly sway and constrain the decision-making of elected officials. Advertising that appears to come from independent citizens groups is actually funded by super PACs aimed at swaying the public.

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Resources to influence elected officials include campaign contributions, financing civic projects, the promise of relocation and jobs, and lobbying efforts. Corporations bid to take over services that traditionally had been public, such as privatizing prisons and schools. They receive tax incentives for building affordable housing. Elected officials concede to corporate interests by privatizing public services, giving tax breaks to corporations, and selling public land. One of the most powerful and wealthy conservative coalitions influencing politics is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC has created partnerships between state legislatures, corporations, and business firms, and between wealthy donors and activists, to strategically draft legislation and push for conservative, right-wing policies that continue to build their own wealth (Hertel-Fernandez, 2019). When politicians are beholden to corporations, communities and voters have less recourse through the traditional channels of elected officials. Consequently, progressive organizing today often shifts to corporate targets to resolve their issues. The American Economic Liberties Project (2020) report states that “powerful corporations are also political institutions that capture and wield power over government and politics, spending billions to influence public discourse and policy. In doing so, they entrench and exacerbate economic and political marginalization among historically excluded communities.” Stated simply, Strand and Mirkay (2020) write, “If the wealthy can buy influence and others are shut out, the government ceases to be ‘for the people’ ” (p. 269). The organizers we interviewed agreed with this conclusion and are determined to do something about it. As Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect, told us, “Our purpose is to rebalance the power dynamic between humans and corporations and move a set of policies that give people much more control and stability in their lives and a voice in their affairs.” THE OUTCOME: EXTREME INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY

Corporate expansion, the consolidation of wealth and political power, and the concurrent diminution of the safety net has yielded an interlocking network of resources and power that is skewed to the wealthy few. Wage and income differentials between men and women and Black, Latinx, and white workers are generally well documented (Current Population Survey,

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2018). Inequality based on wealth—net worth based on property ownership, securities, investments, and cash and other assets—is often less discussed and understood. The U.S. wealth gap has been steadily rising since the late 1970s (Saez & Zucman, 2016), and it is wealth, not income, that is the measure of long-term individual and family success. For most middleclass people, home ownership is the primary way to build wealth. Violations of fair housing laws, and restrictive and biased bank lending policies known as redlining, denied Black families opportunities for accruing home equity wealth that were afforded to white families. Wealth can also be protected and passed intergenerationally through obliging tax laws that protect income through pensions, mutual funds, investments, estate taxes, and 529 college accounts (Strand & Mirkay, 2020). As a result, the wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016. In 1989, the richest 5 percent of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second quintile. By 2016, this ratio had increased to 248 times as much wealth. Of course, Black Americans suffer disproportionately (Luhby, 2020). In 2019, the net worth of Black families was less than 15 percent that of white families (Bhutta et al., 2020). Today the world’s top economists are explicitly placing the blame for wealth inequality on political systems. In Capital and Ideology, the French economist Thomas Piketty (2020) indicated that systemic wealth inequality is not produced by the market but is generated politically. Using antigovernment, antitax, and racialized narratives, the “inequality regime” is justified by a discourse of meritocracy and entrepreneurship that blames “the losers for lacking talent, virtue, and diligence” (p. 2). Institutions—the legal system, the educational system, the fiscal system—help sustain a certain level of inequality. In the 1980s, Piketty writes, the United States simply stopped making policy that would achieve economic equality, choosing instead to pass legislation that favored the interests of corporations and the super wealthy. It is a sleight of hand that moves benefits from the poor to the wealthy, a trick performed through the tax system rather than through the benefit system. For example, the tax cuts passed by the Republican-led Congress in 2017 cut corporate taxes by a third, cost the federal government $91.9 billion in uncollected revenue, led to a U.S. deficit running in the trillions of dollars, and added no new social spending. This systematic exploitation of Black Americans and other people of color is known as racial capitalism.

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There are obvious solutions to fix wealth inequality. Greater equality can be achieved by progressive taxes, safety net programs, public good transfers such as a guaranteed income and increased education budgets, and participation in the workplace and government. The good news is that there is a great deal of public support for reducing inequality. According to a Pew study, 61 percent of Americans feel there is too much inequality. Of those who believe there is too much inequality, 89 percent of Democrats and 79 percent of Republicans say that the government should raise taxes on the rich (Piketty, 2020). If economic inequality is produced by politics, and if people agree that there ought to be less of it, how can that be accomplished? How can we achieve a just economy anchored in a strong and effective democratic government (Kuttner, 2018)? Progressive social action organizations intend to play a significant role in answering these questions. Today’s organizations have a deep understanding of how corporatization, financialization, the slashing of benefits, and the complicity with elected officials has conspired to keep their constituencies poor and powerless. They have developed explicit messages around that understanding, employ it in their organizing, and are developing strategies and campaigns that directly confront rising corporate power. A NEW ANALYSIS OF POWER

Social action organizations adhere to, articulate, and operate on a theory of change (see chapter 1). A theory of change is a set of beliefs that explains how change can be made, linking the problems organizations want to address with the intentional strategies they will use in their mission to solve those problems. Although there were exceptions, progressive organizing in the past most often targeted elected officials and focused on policy change. One of the most important innovations in the theory of change of social action organizations today, is a sharpened analysis of corporate control of the economy, politics, and government at all levels, and the dominant national narrative that supports capitalism. Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect, told us bluntly, “Corporations are just destroying people’s lives.” Whether they are working in local neighborhoods, statewide, regionally, or nationally, the organizations work under the assumption that,

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beyond any policy change, they must forcefully confront the consolidation of corporate power. This evolved theory of change has several components: 1. Organizers recognize the existence of corporate power and its collusion with the political system. 2. Organizers understand the impact not just on the material conditions of their members but on their psyche. 3. Organizers explicitly name the insidious relationship between racism, sexism, and corporate expansion. 4. Organizations assert that this is not what was intended by American democracy and explain how to change it.

CORPORATE POWER AND COLLUSION WITH THE POLITICAL SYSTEM

To change policies relevant to the problems that members face, organizers know that they must directly target the corporations that hold power. Whether it is in organizations in New York, the Midwest, the South, or in California, whether they are organizing in big cities or rural areas, the organizers recognize that corporate power and wealth is to blame for the grievances of their members. Hugh Espey, executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, talks about the influence of corporate power in the issue areas of their work: The big issues that we tackle impact lots of people, and folks that have a lot of economic and political power are benefiting from the current situation. They don’t willingly want to change things. They kind of like it the way it is. We’re embedded in capitalism. How do you break out of that and think about economics differently? We talk about doing politics differently, but we have to do economics differently. And again, this is not a new idea. Martin Luther King was talking about it 50 years ago—that the economic structure that produces so many poor people has to be restructured. The challenges are fighting corporate power, big money, figuring out how we make advances and how we don’t just win changes, but then sustain those changes and make them more lasting for folks.

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Zachary Lerner, an organizer for New York Communities for Change, talks about the influence corporations, especially the finance sector, has in housing, climate change, and the debt crisis in Puerto Rico. We’ve always had an analysis that we had to go after the people really controlling our city, state, or country. For a very long time, we’ve always focused on working with our members to understand the role that financialization plays in many of our campaigns. Whether we’re looking at our housing campaigns and the role that Blackstone has played in acquiring private homes across the country and their role in infrastructure and other things that makes them our target, to our climate campaigns, it can’t just be about just passing policy change. It’s always been about how we go after the corporate actors who are involved. That’s what really dictates a lot of our strategies. For example, knowing the role that hedge funds have played in Puerto Rico, we’ve been very engaged in that fight and going after those companies. A lot of people say Puerto Rico made some bad decisions. But it’s actually about the hedge funds who are buying up toxic debt and then using that as a way to demand that they get paid first so Puerto Rico couldn’t actually provide utilities or get the hospitals back on. We really always make sure there’s corporate targets in every single one of our campaigns. Even in the recent rent laws fight, it was always about making sure that we are targeting the Real Estate Board of New York and making them the primary target as we continue to pressure elected officials.

Vivian Yi Huang, formerly deputy director for APEN and now codirector, describes the David and Goliath competition between their climate organization in northern California and the global behemoth Chevron: “In the work that APEN is doing, we often face opponents that are multinational, multibillion dollar corporations. These corporations spend billions of dollars each year to maintain systems that benefit them, and it’s incredibly challenging to go up against them. For example, we hear from folks who are fighting against Chevron in their own countries, in all parts of the world: the Philippines, Nigeria, Mozambique. It’s pretty maddening that these corporations have that much power and money. The battle is not just in Richmond, it’s a global struggle against extraction and against the corporations that are exploiting our resources, labor, and health.”

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Making their work even more difficult is the recognition that corporations use their powerful resources to manipulate and control elected officials. The collusion between corporate players and political actors often operates against the interests of the communities they serve. As ties between corporations and government officials have strengthened, organizations find their campaigns even more challenging. Nancy Aardema, then executive director of Logan Square Neighborhood Association, talks about their housing work in Chicago: I was listening to Democracy Now! and they were talking about a CEO of a major health care organization making $90 million. You can’t have conversations about funding health care, but you can pay the CEO $90 million? That’s a big national issue. But on the local level, it’s the same thing. It’s okay for a developer to make billions of dollars on the backs of gentrifying neighborhoods. That’s totally the way capitalist society is supposed to work, but it really isn’t. You’re talking about corporations getting public dollars. You’ve got public dollars going to help the wealthiest and at the same time drying up for the neighborhood. I guess it was always happening, but it seems like it’s on steroids now. Nobody tries to cover up the evil anymore. It’s just business as usual.

Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, describes their efforts to get a community benefits agreement in San Jose, California, before the city agrees to an expansion of Google’s operations there. The technology sector had been so influential in the area that elected officials didn’t even bother to work with community groups. In San Jose, there’s been some work around Google’s expansion into the downtown city center, where their new headquarters is going to be built on the transit station. It required a sale of public land, and the community was locked out of that decision. Working Partnerships USA, our affiliate in San Jose, engaged thousands of residents in San Jose through a series of town halls to get them to envision what they wanted, what they saw for that, the demands that they had as a community. It was a very dramatic fight when the public land sale went through and there were lots of protests in the chamber going on, both by folks that were with us and others. There were lots of groups there. They cleared the chamber completely so when they took the

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vote, it was just Google and the City Council in the room. [It was] horrifying, but I felt it laid bare to people, “this is what we’re up against.” Tech really has been driving city policy. I think the fact that folks were invited in and were informed and then asked to talk about what they wanted, that was really trying to get to a collective visioning process. That fight has actually created an updraft nationally because there was research done jointly by both PowerSwitch Action and Working Partnerships about how Google has been doing this playbook nationally. They’ve been using nondisclosure agreements and LLCs that have hidden who they are when they’ve been negotiating subsidies in other cities and towns. Residents don’t know who it is and what is happening.

Corporations have influence on politicians at every level of government, from the U.S. Congress to local municipalities. Lobbyists spent a total of $3.49 billion in 2020 (Statista, 2021b). Leading the spending were the pharmaceutical industry, electronics, manufacturing and equipment, insurance, real estate, business associations, the oil and gas industry, hospitals and nursing homes, manufacturing and distribution, air transport, and telecom services, in that order. Most lobbying is directed at members of Congress and federal agencies. At the local level, corporate players tantalizingly seduce elected officials with such benefits as campaign contributions, the allure of private contracts for services, financing civic projects, the promise of relocation and jobs, and executive positions and consultant jobs after elected terms for politicians end. Sadly, mayors of struggling cities are not immune to these offers. Cities are likely to have Democratic mayors—64 of the 100 largest cities had Democratic mayors in 2021 (Ballotpedia, 2021a)—who theoretically would be more aligned with their voters and progressive policies including rent control and affordable housing, raising the minimum wage, expanding access to health care, bail reform, etc. Therefore, mayors and city councils would theoretically to some degree be beholden to voters. Consequently, social action organizations should continue to have some of their traditional leverage over elected officials. For example, PowerSwitch Action, working with their affiliate Pittsburgh United on the Our Water campaign, beat back an attempt by a private equity firm to establish a public-private partnership of the city’s water system. They pressured the mayor to sign onto a declaration agreeing that the city would not privatize

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the water system. They also began a conversation with the mayor about green infrastructure. But the relatively liberal environment of cities is complicated by state politics. Unlike cities, state governments lean Republican. In 2021, 23 states had Republican trifectas (i.e., they held the governorship, the majority in the state Senate, and the majority in the House), 15 states had Democratic trifectas, and only 12 states had divided governments (Ballotpedia, 2021b). Corporate interests are more likely to be able to pressure state governments to do their bidding. Political parties use well-known common ploys to strengthen their state power (i.e., gerrymandering voting districts, restrictive voting laws). Less well known are state preemption laws: the use of state law to nullify a municipal ordinance or authority. According to a 2018 report by the National League of Cities, “Consistently, state legislators have stricken down laws passed by city leaders in four crucial areas of local governance: economics, social policy, health, and safety.” Notably, as of 2017, many states were passing more restrictive preemption laws to curb their more progressive cities in two areas: LGBTQ+ antidiscrimination and workers’ rights. Twenty-eight states preempted local municipalities from regulating the minimum wage, and 23 had preemption laws around paid leave. Corporate lobbyists were actively behind much of the activity limiting worker wages and paid leave. The preemption laws mean that cities cannot pass local wage increases despite the fact that costs of living are often significantly higher in urban areas. Social action organizations are deliberately challenging preemption laws. Despite the obscure and complicated nature of preemption, organizations have to move in that direction to achieve their goals. They have to help members understand why they are doing so. Lauren Jacobs describes a campaign in Pennsylvania in which the state prevents cities and counties from regulating their businesses: In Pennsylvania, POWER in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh United are putting together a discussion on preemption. Our legal department has done 2 to 3 years of work on a deep analysis of understanding state preemption and how it’s used. We’ve really tried to bust up the analysis of this as a red state vs. blue city issue, because Democrats preempt as well. As I understand it, it is a corporate deregulation tactic. If you actually look at it across the board, it’s not that cities and counties are being preempted from making legislation

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because the state feels that’s their purview. It’s that cities are preempted from passing regulations and then there’s no regulation at the state level. Uber and Lyft, the private network transportation companies, have been some of the best examples of this. In 43 states, they have preempted municipalities from regulating that industry. There’s no state regulation on it.

The complicity between elected officials and corporate power has made organizing more difficult. Organizations need to move both corporations and public officials. They need both public policy change and different corporate agreements. The power of corporate America has convinced many organizers that corporations are the more appropriate target; they are more important than government officials who, they believe, often mask and protect corporate power. Most organizers come down on the side of targeting both corporations and elected officials (see chapter 8 on campaign strategy). Marley Monacello, staff person for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, explains this thinking: “I do think that market-based solutions and engaging with corporations in the economy are equally, if not more, viable than government-focused solutions like legislation. Not that those aren’t viable or aren’t important; especially at a state level, one could argue they’re extremely important. But we need to reckon with the amount of power that corporations, large companies, and the economy have in our lives and frankly have over the government.” IMPACT OF CORPORATIZATION ON MEMBERS’ CONDITIONS AND PSYCHE

As the work of organizing has evolved to meet this existential challenge, social action organizations have developed a theory of change that includes a deeper understanding of how their members have suffered from corporate expansionism. Organizers told us that people suffer from low wages, lack of paid leave, erratic scheduling, and other abusive work policies. Communities suffer from funds needed for public infrastructure being diverted to corporate projects through tax incentives and public funding. The departure of industry has left rural communities devastated. Not only do they experience extreme and difficult to replace job loss, but departing industries often leave pollutants in the soil that threaten the water supply and result in cancer clusters in the surrounding community. Kate

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Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action, describes this situation in Indiana: The majority of small towns that we’re in have had unbelievable institutional collapse, and there is no infrastructure or investment with an eye toward the future. It has been an entire extraction from communities. And at the same time, there is just a black hole in terms of what our state government does. People have some sense of what happens nationally, at least from the big headlines, but they have no sense of what’s happening at the state and local level. Also, people are exhausted and fed up with the way politics has played out in our country. That combination has left a lot of people out. We have incredibly low voter turnout and in general low participation and incredibly high poverty rates. There’s no vibrancy to our local and state democracy. Also, we are completely impacted by the global economy, but [are] so far away from the halls of power. If you’re organizing in New York or even Minnesota where we have a gazillion Fortune 500 companies, you’re closer to power. But here, you’re much farther away from the power structure that’s moving the factory out of your town or buying up every bit of land for Purdue chickens. So people feel there’s just a depth of powerlessness and a depth of ‘I am at the whims of forces that I cannot see or articulate.’ ”

Kate Hess Pace is not the only one who described the insidious and harmful impact corporatization has on people. Organizers describe the impact not only of corporatization on people’s material conditions but also on their psyche. They blame growing isolation, depression, suicide, and the addiction crisis on the desperation and powerlessness that corporatization has wrought. Particularly pernicious is the narrative that accompanies the rigged economic system and blames people for their situation, calling them lazy, lacking in judgment, or morally deficient. The narrative is perverse and pervasive, and it is difficult to counteract. Even when the government finally steps in on their behalf and poverty declines, as it did with stimulus checks paid out during the COVID-19 pandemic, some people who themselves were saved by the help they received continue to judge others as unworthy of assistance (DeParle, 2021). The narrative embarrasses and shames people. As Jeremy Saunders, coexecutive director of VOCAL-NY, told us: “Corporate capitalism is the problem, but not the only problem.

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If you bring an analysis of corporations to the table, that’s great. If you bring an analysis of corporations and racism to the table, that’s better. But there’s something that goes beyond corporate power, as well. It’s dehumanization, and it’s dehumanization for capitalist purposes.” Later in this chapter we describe how organizations work to deprogram members from the degrading story that is so often told about them. CORPORATE POWER AND RACISM

The third component of the theory of change is that the inequality that results from corporatization is ineluctably intertwined with racism. Piketty’s (2020) work documents the historic and global relationship between economic inequality and political justifications for inequality. The organizers we interviewed based part of their analysis on historical evidence. For example, the development of the West was made possible by genocide, cultural decimation, and appropriating Native American lands; and early industrial growth was enabled by immigration and antiunion policy. Of course, slavery is by far the most extreme example of favoring the growth of the economy through abusive and harsh laws and policies that have had a lasting impact both on continuing inequality and on the political system (Piketty, 2020, p. 203). The intermingling and mutual support between economic growth and racism and its continuation into the present day is at the center of today’s organizing. Mary Hooks, a former codirector of SONG, reflects on racial capitalism: “I think racism plays a huge role in the context of this settler colony. We have to be clear about the role that it’s always played in terms of racialized capitalism, how this country was shaped, built, and grew from that ideology and belief. And I think that that’s part of what it means to be organizing, to change root causes. Some think that we don’t have to address it and that we’re in a post-racial era, that we have to let the United States off the hook for the ways in which they have created this monster that we find ourselves in. Our efforts will fall short if we think we can advance any agenda around economic justice but lack a racial analysis around it and how those two are co-conspirators.” Organizers clearly understand the historical context, and they know that disproportionate economic impact based on race is highly relevant today.

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Deborah Axt, former coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, discussed the intersection of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and the U.S. history of slavery and mistreatment of Native American populations. She described how this understanding is important to the work they do: “We’re constantly working to deepen our analysis of how that tradition [historical mistreatment of marginalized groups] continues in this day and age and how we can build awareness and consciousness among our members and the general public through our campaigns to tackle the larger systems, while of course working to campaign for things that are concretely meaningful to our membership and millions of folks like our membership in the short term.” Organizers provided multiple examples of how the current context is embedded in racism and economic inequality. Mary Hooks explains this connection: The outsourcing of jobs, the tightening of neoliberal policies, makes life that much more economically difficult, and they use economic difficulty as wedge issues. But then came the influx primarily of folks: brown-skinned folks from Mexico and Latin America. Seems like the historical race paradigm of the South. More recently, Brown folks are coming from other parts that are not Latin American countries. So I think there’s always race and economy together. And the challenge of organizing in the South is [that] you have to acknowledge and work with the realities that the racial paradigm has changed. And we also have to hold that it was founded in the slavery of Black people and that this nation got rich off slavery that is rooted in the South. We have to hold them both if there’s any chance to try to do real work.

The fourth and final component of the evolved theory of change is a belief that progressive social action organizations have the capacity to challenge the corporate power that has so devastated their memberships. Organizers are targeting corporations and experimenting with approaches that seem to be effective. We examine how organizations are challenging corporations in greater depth in chapter 7 (on issues) and chapter 8 (on campaign strategies). The remainder of this chapter is dedicated to how the organizations in our sample are currently approaching this task.

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FIGHTING GOLIATH

The social action organizers we interviewed have made an important pivot from primarily fighting elected officials for policy change to fighting colossal corporate titans for power. The realization that people lower down in the power hierarchy, including elected officials, are often controlled by these titans has made that pivot necessary. More often than not, organizers’ power analyses are identifying the corporate players behind the problems people experience. Marilyn Sneiderman, professor and executive director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organizing at Rutgers University, explains the need for this approach. In addition to the nuts and bolts of how you build organizations and power is thinking about who we should be fighting. The critique that many of us have of the labor movement, of community organizing, and of most progressive movements, is that we are usually fighting somebody at a very low level. In union organizing that means we’re fighting a subcontractor because that is who signs our paycheck, but they have no power. Or in community organizing we’re fighting a landlord but then forget that the landlord is actually owned by the biggest private equity company in the world. I spend much of my time identifying who has power, especially as the economy has become more monopolized and concentrated at the top. The way I describe it is [that] we have two simultaneous trends. We have monopolization aggregation at the top, and we have disaggregation at the bottom. Fewer and fewer people control more and more. But the way workers and community members experience it, is that it’s more disaggregated. You don’t know who’s screwing you anymore. That’s a lot of what we do, and then [we] look especially at the intersection of Wall Street and financialization, and the theft of wealth from communities of color.

Stephen Lerner, labor organizer, founder and architect of Justice for Janitors, and frequent writer and commentator on organizing, talks about the importance of targeting corporations as a means of building a broadbased movement: “We’ll never get enough money, capacity, or scale, if each campaign is separate. Nor will you get people to say, ‘I’m not going to do my campaign because somebody else’s is more important.’ But if you can

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identify these corporate actors, then you can have a series of campaigns that capture almost all of the progressive movement because they’re doing bad things to everybody.” Targeting corporate actors often means deep and extensive research because the opposition is not as obvious as a landlord, a mayor, or the director of a state commission. Corporations have multiple ways of hiding their activity, including through limited liability corporations and nondisclosure agreements. As the economist Thomas Piketty notes, corporations such as Google, Facebook, Visa, and Mastercard (as well as much smaller companies) collect an enormous amount of data about their consumers and communities for private commercial purposes. That contrasts with the paucity of information available for public statistical purposes about their corporate interests and the distribution of wealth. As Piketty (2020) quotes from Le mouvement du profit en France au 19e siècle: “As long as the incomes of the various classes of society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history of capital in the twenty-first century” (p. 575). The fact that corporations have so much information about us, and we know so little about them, prevents us from having a deep understanding of how this recent period of consolidation of capitalism and the expansion of financialization has changed our democracy. Although it is difficult to find the information needed to challenge a corporation, social action organizations take great pains to get it right. They can easily be discredited by the corporation, politicians, and the media—even by their constituents—if they do not get it right. Lauren Jacobs, of PowerSwitch Action, talks about research related to a transit campaign in Boston, the deep analysis that was done, and how it led to a campaign strategy: Our affiliate Community Labor United in Boston has been working on transit privatization, but it’s a much bigger antiprivatization fight because the same large investment house has funded a move to try to privatize the schools as well. It brings those two sectors together in a way that would not have been possible without actually doing a power map of what is happening in the state and having a clear analysis of who has been driving the other agenda. . . . One member of our team has been very embedded in that

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work, has brought in other national partners to help build a communitybased research table to map the power structure, and has worked with their researcher who has provided strategic support in thinking through how to shape the campaign along with other partners.

In many cases, the power analysis means lifting up the curtain on which corporation is financing a particular system that the organization is challenging, and then going after the corporate financier rather than the elected officials who vote on the legislation. It means exposing the corporate entanglements with government, and it is not a readily understandable story to tell. Deborah Axt, former coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, offers an example of that strategy in describing the organization’s campaign to disrupt the deportation of immigrants at the southern U.S. border that had been supported by President Barack Obama’s administration and then kicked into high gear after Donald Trump’s election to the presidency. The organization is involved in a campaign to stop the deportation policy and is helping families who were caught up in it. The campaign’s title, “Corporate Backers of Hate,” is their way of pointing a finger at the real power behind the policy. “We have our Corporate Backers of Hate Campaign, which is targeting JP Morgan Chase and their CEO Jamie Dimon as our top priority to get them to divest from private immigrant detention centers and private prison companies. Our analysis is that in order to interrupt the massive growth of the deportation machine and Trump’s anti-immigrant machine, we have to interrupt the financing, which is currently enabling those policies and enriches the corporation. Our intent with that campaign is to tell the story of what’s really happening that enables Trump’s deportation machine, being involved in that fight, sharing that narrative with our donors, our allies, our members, and new folks who see us in the streets protesting.” In many cases, the corporation and the political system are so intertwined that the organization must target both. The organization must do deep work with members to build support, clarify the issue, and have a chance for victory. In the case example, Hugh Espey describes how Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement has been in an eight-year fight for Medicaid expansion with both the governor of Iowa and a private company.

HUGH ESPEY: FIGHTING FOR HEALTH CARE ON TWO FRONTS In 2009 and 2010 we really weren’t involved in health care issues, not that we weren’t supportive of the stance that we have a problem with our health care system. We started to get more involved around Social Security issues in 2011 and 2012. And when the Affordable Care Act was passed and there was a Medicaid expansion, we were involved somewhat during the legislative session here with the fight to expand Medicaid, which Iowa did in 2013. We were kind of getting into it, and then for a year or two, we weren’t really involved. And then in 2015, our governor, without legislative approval, privatized our Medicaid system, which impacted 600,000 people here. The governor’s plan was ingenious: we’re going to expand Medicaid; then I’m going to turn it over to a couple companies, and they’re going to run our Medicaid system. The state won’t run it anymore. That got our attention because, all of a sudden, that’s a big deal: less coverage, higher costs. We started hearing from members who were impacted by this, plus other people. So in 2015 and 2016 we started thinking more seriously about the health care system in general, but it was prompted by the Medicaid stuff. We were still struggling with what’s our handle on this, not just during the legislative session but who are the corporate targets and who are the insurance companies that are making a lot of money off this? Then, in 2016, during the presidential race, Bernie [Sanders] was out here quite regularly, and health care and Medicare For All was talked about more and more. Our members were hyped up and excited about it. We started talking to more members and other people asking, “What’s your health care story? Why are you interested? How does health care and how health care is delivered affect you as a person?” We started hearing stories about increased costs, and we found out that everybody’s got a health care story. And then it’s tied to we’ve got to get profits out of health care. We’ve got a for-profit health care system that’s bankrupting folks. That was happening in 2016 and 2017. Over a several year period, health care became an issue because of what was happening around us and what people were saying to us. We made the decision organizationally that we needed to start really including this in our repertoire of issues because we’re hearing our members bringing it up, it’s (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) helping us expand our base, we’re getting in touch with more people. We’re still trying to figure this out so that it’s not just a policy fight at the State House or in Congress, but what are the corporate targets? Now, health care justice is one of four or five issue areas that we’re tackling and figuring out how we build a base and move forward on an issue campaign. Caregiving is a piece of that now too, so it’s not just improving Medicare For All, we can do that at the state level, we can do a state single payer bill. Caregiving is part of that, and it’s part of our thinking. . . . It’s not a real clean, clear cut thing, but that’s how the issue came to our doorstep, and now we’re trying to figure out how do we move forward, how do we engage people, and how do we shift the narrative? There were some dominant narratives around the health care issue too. It’s like, Oh my God, insurance companies, of course. How would you do this without insurance companies?

Not only are the issues complicated by the complicity of corporate and political actors, but as Hugh Espey notes, the organizers are also fighting the dominant narrative that corporations are more efficient, capable, and better able to handle the complex social and economic problems of today’s world. For the last 40 years, politicians have been attacking the competence and integrity of government solutions. These tropes, no matter how unsubstantiated, have seeped into our collective psyche, and as Heather McGhee (2021) said, “Beliefs matter.” The organizers we interviewed were working to come up with an effective counternarrative that refutes the pro-business story and answers questions and appeals to democratic values. Lauren Jacobs sums up the PowerSwitch Action story as “People rule, not corporations.” Her organization makes the argument that community residents know what will make their communities better. They named one campaign “We Make the City” to emphasize and empower the voices of everyday people and their role in the city. They’ve been working with people to create a vision of how public dollars could and should be spent under public ownership and contrasting it with the dominant narrative of government being incompetent and deceitful. But it is seldom so easy. Hugh Espey describes how Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is talking about the need for a publicly supported health care system.

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One of our messages around health care is this private health care system that everybody’s making money off of, we have got to get profits out of health care. We need a health care system that’s essentially publicly run, or it’s either single payer or nationalized health insurance. It’s not a crazy idea actually because all health care decisions made by insurance companies or pharmaceuticals are based on profit. The influence of money power over our health care system, over our food and fiber system, whether it’s our energy or utilities, climate: everybody’s trying to make a buck. This economic system that we’re trapped in is causing lots and lots of problems, and we need to rethink that. We talk about how we want a government for the people, that serves the common good, the public interest, not just the interests of the wealthy few; and we also want an economy that works for everyone, that serves the common good, the public interest, not just the interest of the wealthy few of the people that own and control and manage capital.

Key to this approach is that the organizations take action against the corporate target and also proffer a competing narrative to explain their actions. They aren’t just spouting rhetoric, they are moving into action. And they aren’t just challenging corporations. They are also describing and deconstructing the corporate power structure and rewriting the story. Our reading and our conversations with organizers have convinced us that changing the narrative is essential for changing policy. It is one of the three facets of power building—along with base building and campaigns—that several groups noted (Healey & Hinson, 2020). Narrative shift is critical to changing public perception so that a policy change becomes palatable. This approach requires deep and extensive leadership development. The corporate target is often invisible, the research is difficult, the strategy is complicated, and the narrative is deeply entrenched. That means intensifying the work organizers do with leaders and becoming more creative about how to get the message across. Lauren Jacobs, of PowerSwitch Action, told us that they are forming small groups of people who sit around a table and talk to each other about their hopes and dreams. They then go through the research with them so they understand how money is being moved out of communities and into corporate subsidies. She told us that people learn that having popular support for something doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you will win. Because of the massive power of corporations, people have to be prepared to think more about understanding, leveraging, and

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moving power rather than trying to persuade the corporate entities and their political partners to do the right thing. Jose Lopez, former organizer and now coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, talks about his work with leaders on the Corporate Backers of Hate campaign to stop deportations. JP Morgan Chase was the corporate target for financing the system. You’re tasked with thinking about a much bigger fight and engaging your base around that much bigger fight, so that they can understand the role of corporate entities, of big and dark money, of how it kills our democracy, and how it ties to all of the really local and state stuff that we’re doing. . . . They’re asked to think about a much bigger beast, and they’re being asked to do that collectively. Think about this huge institution that is JP Morgan, and think about their role in the housing crisis nationally. Think about their role in financing the expansion of immigrant detention facilities and how that works toward the Trump administration’s policies to separate families at the border. Think about their role in privatizing public education. Think about their role beyond immigrant detention, in expanding jails across the country for people who look like us. As you start to think about JP Morgan as the example, you start to develop a campaign that really tries to hit this institution on all fronts, leading with their role in the immigration debate because that is the big national crisis that we’re dealing with now, but also connecting to all these other pieces. Not only does that help people to challenge huge players, but also it helps our members to think about even the local fights in the same way.

Despite the difficulty, there is no lack of trying to pivot in this direction. In this new era, social activists are developing innovative strategies to do just that, and we turn to that subject now. NEW STRATEGIES AND COALITIONS

In The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGhee (2021) reports on the results of Norton and Sommers’s (2011) research on bias. They found that, despite all evidence to the contrary, white survey respondents rate antiwhite bias as more prevalent than anti-Black bias. Furthermore, they believed that antiwhite bias

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has increased in the past 50 years. McGhee then explores this question: Even though there is a mountain of evidence against their view, why do white Americans feel they are discriminated against? Through an examination of the country’s historical racism, McGhee comes to this conclusion: People understand their social status as a zero-sum game. That is, if Black people do better, it means that white people lose. Furthermore, she writes, “in decade after decade, threats of job competition—between men and women, immigrants and native born, Black and White—have perennially revived the fear of loss at another’s gain. The people setting up the competition and spreading these fears were never the needy job seekers, but the elite. . . . The zero sum is a story sold by wealthy interests for their own profit, and its persistence requires people desperate enough to buy it” (p. 14). McGhee ends by saying, “This divide-andconquer strategy has been essential to the creation and maintenance of the Inequality Era’s other most defining feature: the hollowing out of the goods we share” (p. 15). The organizers we spoke to tend to agree that the formula applies to the way Americans see many groups including immigrants, but it is most relevant and more prevalent for the way in which Black people are viewed. And they strongly concur that a narrative of “othering” is created and used by wealthy corporate interests and their allied political colleagues for their own advantage and profit. Moreover, the narrative cloaks the fact that corporations are shrinking the public sphere for their own benefit in a way that means almost everyone else is losing. That is what the fight against corporatization is all about. Organizers see the collusion between corporations and their political allies as so formidable and the crises they have created as so dire that it will take a massive number of people, organizations, energy, and commitment to turn it around. As Deborah Axt, formerly with Make the Road New York, told us, “No one of us, no one network, no one organization is capable of taking on corporate power and white supremacy alone, there is a real emerging or at least renewed openness to experimentation, to movement building, to stepping out of our egos and trying to work together.” Progressive social action organizations are experimenting with new models now. Organizations are confronting the power of corporations in two ways today: through convening coalitions that fight a common enemy and through electoral activity.

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FIGHTING A COMMON ENEMY

Organizers recognize that fighting corporatization will require more power than any single organization can deploy. Consequently, they are creating new ways of aligning organizations and, more important, are bringing their members and leaders together. Coalition building in relation to corporate expansion is an important strategy. All the organizers agree that the only way to fight corporate power is to build multiracial organizations and coalitions. Obviously and undeniably, they understand that the vast majority of people are impacted by the inequality caused by the current system, and the suffering is occurring across race, gender, and class. They also know that Black Americans and other people of color experience disproportionate inequality and therefore are most likely to both need and work for change. Gone is the description of people as “have-a-little, want mores” (Alinsky, 1971, p.19).” It has been replaced by the message that “no one is doing well and some are doing much worse.” Those who are doing worse are clearly identified: they are Black people and others of color, immigrants, women, and the LGBTQ+ community. We certainly heard a great deal from the organizers about how women are leading their organizations, and particularly about the commitment to change of Black women (see chapter 4). Organizers believe that the best way to challenge power is by bringing people together across the divide in multiracial coalitions. This is not a new thought nor a new effort (Warren, 2001). To bring people together requires that they challenge the stories, manufactured and without evidence, that are used to divide people. United for Respect is a national organization dedicated to improving the working conditions of retail workers. By the very nature of their constituency, their membership is diverse. Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect, describes how the organization sees its mission, and she makes a clear statement about the connection between multiracial organizing and corporate power. We believe that the people who are most impacted, focusing on BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] and women, hold the keys to coming up with the solutions to build the kind of economy and democracy that we all need. Our network has the ability to engage people across rural, urban, and suburban communities into multiracial communities of support and

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action. We can develop a base of leaders who can both support each other to make immediate improvements in their lives and also run high-impact public campaigns to change the behavior of corporations and institutionalize those changes in public policy. By both winning public policy in places that have an infrastructure like New Jersey, then nationalizing those policies through sectorwide corporate or public policy, we can be part of making critical and far-reaching change. There’s no pathway to paid sick time in the South right now, unless we get corporations to publicly commit to do it. So how do you challenge corporations, build momentum for public policy, get public policy, then nationalize those things through getting a sector of the economy to adopt those policies? And then also, how do we put people into motion directly against the drivers of the economy, which we really see as corporate monopolies and Wall Street? How do we go straight to them through direct action and leaders really taking them on directly. That is the way to disrupt and create space to get them to change the rules of the game.

Organizers working in rural areas talk about the importance of organizing there. Chelsea White, former organizer for Down Home North Carolina, bemoans the fact that people often make assumptions about the residents of rural areas: There is this inherent belief, this narrative, that the people in rural areas, especially heavily white rural areas, are just innately conservative, they are innately racist, they are innately bigoted. Therefore, there is this myth that it is not worth our time to be in these communities. But I know otherwise. I was raised here, my values grew from this community. And I also know that my communities are just as exploited, if not more exploited, than the urban communities that are being organized. If we make them worth our time and we don’t project that message, then we actually can get really far. Because my community is sick of working two and three jobs for literally nothing and knowing that for their children to have any hope for a prosperous future they’re going to have to leave.

Organizers in these areas believe that urban-rural organizing has the potential to bring together a multiracial, multiclass constituency around common goals. Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action in Indiana, believes it is essential to do so: “People are on edge and getting

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divided into camps pretty fast, and if we are going to see real political change in the country, there has to be a bridge built between the blue progressive parts of this country and where I am, or we are going to have more mass violence.” There is no shortage of issues that could bring urbanites and rural communities together. Bobby King, former director of policy and organizing for the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota, describes how marginalized rural communities have become, rendering them vulnerable to right-wing messages. Nevertheless, he argues that there are common issues around which to organize: “There are some things that everybody needs like health care. The solution for urban and rural people looks pretty similar, except that there’s not enough clinics in rural communities. There’s a piece of it that is rural-specific. I think groups that want to partner with rural groups must set aside prejudices and really commit to listening.” Organizers told us of a number of experiments they were trying to build rural-urban coalitions that challenge corporate power. These are often statewide coalitions that bring together people from the state’s big cities with the rural areas. Community Voices Heard works in both upstate New York and in New York City on housing issues. Similarly, the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota works with other rural organizations and with Native American organizations around housing and farming. PowerSwitch Action organizes in several states and has developed a way of building coalitions that bring cities and rural areas together. Their premise is to start by building strength against a corporate target in more progressive metro areas, then move to statewide organizing (see chapter 8). Another way social action organizations are aligning to take on corporate power is to establish coalitions to target a specific corporation that has a particularly negative portfolio in many issue areas on multiple fronts. In Minnesota, 22 labor unions, community, and faith organizations came together for a period of time, as Our Minnesota Future to work on environmental justice, housing, health care, and workers’ rights. The organizations may have been working on different issue campaigns, but no matter the issue, they agreed to target Wells Fargo Bank. Wells Fargo was held accountable for bad banking practices, for financing detention centers and prisons, and for its housing lending practices. The idea was to mobilize the people power of all the organizations to hold Wells Fargo Bank accountable. The success of organizing against Wells Fargo also sent a message to other large banks.

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A similar convening of organizations across the country has been used to target a single corporate giant. Marilyn Sneiderman, of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organizing at Rutgers University, tells the story of national work against Wells Fargo. One of the things that’s happening is we started researching who are the profiteers that are making money on guns. And it turns out that Wells Fargo is both the bank for the NRA and invested in guns. Wells Fargo is bad in almost everything. They are in pipelines, they are housing redliners. And we’re also organizing bank workers that work for Wells Fargo. One of the things most folks don’t know is that bank workers were the original whistleblowers on the Wells Fargo scandal around setting up the cheating scams. . . . We think about it as an alignment. We’ve done calls with 300 to 400 people on them. It’s Native American groups that are anti-pipeline, racial justice groups that care about housing, student groups that care about student debt, and we say “what do we all have in common? Wells Fargo is screwing us.” And then we have these fantastic discussions. . . . One idea we moved is that cities should divest from Wells Fargo. And I think we got $4 billion divested. But what also happened is environmental groups started locking down and taking over branches. So there was this cross fertilization of each group doing what they’re best at. Much historical work is trying to convince groups that our cause is bigger than their cause, and they should subsume themselves. But if you have an analysis of who has corporate power, and you can draw the tentacles of how it connects, then some people are doing civil disobedience, some people are doing viral videos, some people are doing very sophisticated shareholder actions, and it’s that combination of stuff that starts to really challenge them.

A broad coalition of local and national organizations, including labor unions, faith groups, community organizations, advocacy groups, environmental organizations, policy experts, and academics came together as the Athena Coalition in November of 2019 (Streitfeld, 2019). The mission is explicitly directed at the collusion between corporate and political interests: “We are coming together to create an economy where everyone can thrive, defend our climate, safeguard our communities from surveillance, and expand our democracy” (Athena For All, n.d.). Aptly named for the Greek goddess of wisdom and war, Athena’s campaign against Amazon targets

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their community expansion and impact that drains public resources, their environmental footprint, their lack of worker protections, and their surveillance tracking. One final way organizers are building multiracial organizations is through community-labor coalitions, a partnership that has been evolving. The Athena Coalition includes several labor unions and worker centers. The Bargaining for the Common Good Network (n.d.), convened by the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, the Action Center on Race and Equality (ACRE), and the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University convenes labor organizations, community groups, racial justice organizations, and student groups to demand that corporations pay their fair share and behave responsibly with their workers and in their communities. Such coalitions understand that workers are also community residents with concerns beyond their union contracts. And labor unions bring a great deal of clout to campaigns around community issues. These coalitions have been particularly successful at reaching teacher union agreements that include community issues (Gupta et al., 2020). McCartin, Smiley, and Sneiderman (2021) envision even more expansive and more powerful collaborations, a broad rethinking of collective bargaining that joins sectoral collective bargaining and community issues. In sum, initiatives like these are building long-term multiracial coalitions that have ambitious agendas to create real systemic change. Their goal is to curb corporate power and build democracy from the ground up. The agenda is broad, includes issues relevant to the workplace, housing, democracy, and taxation, and includes a strategy to win and a narrative that captures the public imagination. ELECTORAL ACTIVITY

We turn at last to another way social action organizations are confronting corporate power: they have established aligned organizations that allow them to campaign for candidates for political office. In some cases, their leaders are running for election. In the case example, Bobby King, formerly of the Land Stewardship Project, describes how his organization endeavors to curb corporate power by having an explicit agenda to amass greater power, electing their own members to high office, and changing

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the dominant narrative. He references the short-lived but influential Our Minnesota Future coalition and notes how electing their members to high office will provide the fulcrum to control corporate power and to achieve transformational change. BOBBY KING: BUILDING AN ELECTORAL STRATEGY FOR MORE POWER We have more and more realized that a goal has to be to actually get governing power; to put people like us, our members, into places of power within government at the township level, county level, state level. We need government working in partnership with us. Government will never be enough. You’ll always need to mobilize people to move government and to support government and push it, but we also want to have the governing power. We want to be the governor or the senator. The Our Minnesota Future coalition’s vision is that what we need is big and unless we’re willing to work for that kind of power we won’t get there. Another hard thing about it was everybody going around the room and admitting that you don’t have enough power and that we (a) have to work together collectively and (b) we have to set this as a goal if we want to get what we really say we want. We’ll always organize around issues. That will always be a part of what we do. Members will always have immediate concerns, and some of our strongest, best, and longest leaders came through specific fights on a specific issue, particularly around factory farms. But our organizing objective and what we want to achieve has to be bigger than that. Broadly speaking, we’re organizing our members to become more powerful and to act more strategically. I think we need to be part of coalitions and structures that are looking at winning governing power for us, not for the Democrats or the Republicans. There’s a dominant narrative that, for the most part, is driven by big business and economic corporate interests that have an exploitative economic model. How do we speak and live and project our narrative so that it becomes more of what’s talked about and shapes what’s possible? It was really kind of interesting actually, that harking back to more of the Catholic Worker part of my career where all of the language was aspirational: “This is where we want to work, this is what we believe in.” As the Land Stewardship Project, we did a lot of that around agriculture but not outside of agriculture. I think we must realize that it’s an arena of power that we need to have a plan around.

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CONCLUSION

For the past 40 years, corporations have grown more powerful, wealth is increasingly skewed to the upper 1 percent, and elected officials are more beholden to those interests. It is a system that has increased inequality for all, but especially for Black Americans and other marginalized groups. It has made the quest for fairness, for equality, and for justice even more difficult. And yet, as we have seen, social action organizations continue to develop new ways of organizing that are responsive to the increasingly difficult political and economic context. By enlarging their base, by doing deep research, by forming alliances that target the titans, and by developing new narratives, organizations are rising to the task. They are finding ways to link their radical analysis to their on-the-ground pragmatic action. In subsequent chapters, we describe how these organizations are evolving to challenge this rising oligarchy.

Chapter Three

INTERSECTIONAL INJUSTICE

Everyone that we approach has a story around race, being discriminated against, or feeling out of place in a world that really doesn’t respect or lift them up. We’re able as organizers to connect on that level and show people that there’s a way that we can fight and push back. VINCE STEELE, ELLA BAKER CENTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS

In chapter 1, we provide an overview of how the concept of intersectionality, as it was first introduced by Kimberly Crenshaw (1989), is also understood and addressed at a systems level in social action organizing. In our interviews with organizers, we heard a very clear analysis that racism, patriarchy, and economic injustice intertwine to create intersectional injustice. What members experience in one area—for example, losing their housing—impacts other areas of their lives, such as the ability to remain employed and healthy (Desmond, 2016). People have intersectional identities, but the intersectionality of injustice itself oppresses them. Everything converges to keep marginalized people deprived, discouraged, and disempowered. Systems do not impact everyone equally, and Black people and other people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are at the front line of impact on every issue. Rinku Sen (2003) states that organizing has long offered a political analysis of disproportionate impact and a solidarity approach to change. “We are in fact not all in the same boat—there are crucial differences in our treatment by major institutions. . . . While it is certainly important for people to see their similarities—the same boat—it is equally important when some of us are pushed up or down in the hierarchy—another boat—we do not lose our sense of commonality and solidarity” (p. 16). Sen describes a both/ and reality: our commonalities and our differences both require attention.

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Alicia Garza (2020), cofounder of the Black Lives Matter global movement, emphasizes this both/and phenomenon and its importance to her as a community organizer and movement leader: “It’s important to understand that declaring Black lives matter does not negate the significance of the lives of non-Black people, particularly non-Black people of color. But Black lives are uniquely and systematically attacked in our society” (p. 156). Garza’s views on this support the need for “building alliances that have depth and rigor” (p. 154) and doing the hard work, together and separately, that is necessary to sustain any relationship. She explicitly states that this requires confronting anti-Blackness, “the fulcrum around which white supremacy functions” (p. 155). Throughout this book we outline the ways in which social action organizations today are doing this work. They are not just tackling issues one by one, looking for policy change, or signing up people to engage in action. They are working on issues that are oppressive to a large number of people and disproportionately oppressive to Black Americans and other marginalized groups. They are intentional about building multicultural organizations while fighting for transformation and systemic solutions, which requires an intersectional approach. In this chapter, we examine the intersectionality of injustice and focus on how race impacts social action organizing. We begin with some organizing history and describe how today’s organizers have placed intersectional injustice at the center of their work. Then we explore how organizations understand the relationship between race and capitalism on both a systems level and its impact on members. These dual commitments inform organizing today in three ways: (1) how organizers build multiracial organizations, wherever they are and however they can; (2) how organizers address leadership and staffing diversity and hold organizational conversations about race; and (3) how organizers take on issues and campaigns that reflect the intersectionality of injustice. We provide illustrations of the application of these commitments in urban, rural, and worker organizing. RACIAL JUSTICE AND THE THEORY OF CHANGE

Historically, organizers have taken different positions on whether to focus on social class or race and gender identity. For Alinsky and in labor organizing, social class has been the predominant focus. In these traditions,

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social action organizing was often associated with white working-class or middle-class populations and communities. A significant amount of earlier organizing and their organizers emerged from the labor movement, and perhaps that is the reason there was a greater emphasis on social class (Lerner, 2011; McAlevey, 2016; Mondros & Wilson, 1994). At the same time, however, identity organizing focusing on racial justice and civil rights movements realized significant accomplishments in civil rights legislation and in the achievement of economic rights. This includes the welldocumented work of Black-led organizing (Ransby, 2018), as well as the legacy of the National Farmworkers Association, the Young Lords, and other organizing in Latinx communities (Lee, 2014; Melendez, 2005; Zepeda-Millán, 2016) and in Asian communities (Chin, 2015). There has also been a perhaps little known but significant history of multiracial organizing that blended identity and class-based approaches. An early effort sponsored by Alinsky was in the largely Black Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago. The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) first fought the expansion of the University of Chicago and later conducted voting registration campaigns modeled on the Freedom Rides in Mississippi, rent strikes, and a school boycott. Nicholas von Hoffman hired the Industrial Area Foundation’s (IAF, founded by Saul Alinsky) first Black organizer, Bob Squires, and the leadership was multiracial (Schutz, 2015a). A similar organization, FIGHT, was established in Rochester, New York, in response to economic and political conditions in Eastman Kodak’s company town (Miller, 2015a). Former president Barack Obama’s brief stint as an organizer was in the Developing Communities Project on Chicago’s far south side, which was supported by the Gamaliel Foundation, a faith-based organizing network that worked on school reform, job training, housing, city services, and neighborhood safety (Obama, 1990). ACORN’s (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) work also focused primarily on Black communities. Significant organizing was done in the Latinx communities as well. Fred Ross instituted wide use of the house-meeting approach, adapting to the culture of Mexican Americans in California, to organize the Community Service Organization (CSO). The CSO took on urban renewal, police brutality, and organized a major voter campaign (Various Authors, 2015). Cesar Chavez’s Farmworker’s Union, the training ground for a generation of labor and community organizers, emerged from the CSO (Miller, 2015a). One of

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the oldest and most successful of these organizations—Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS)—was founded in 1974 and expanded from the Rio Grande Valley throughout Texas to take on housing, crime and drug abuse, living wages, and school reform. COPS developed as a multiracial organization focused on finding “common ground for action across racial lines” (Warren, 2001, p. 12). Although there is substantial evidence of progressive social action organizing in Black and Latinx communities around systemic racism and bias, most of the organizational messaging focused on common issues and not on identity. We hypothesize three reasons for this focus. First was the context of the times. During those early years, confronting racism and prejudice was largely confined to civil rights organizing. Second, there was a strong belief in organizing around practical matters of self-interest as a way to convene a multiracial organization. This led to organizations that addressed the issues around housing discrimination, for example, but did not use the narrative of racism and oppression (Miller, 2015b). In this sense, organizers of that time were pragmatic rather than ideological. And third, organizing around social class was perhaps both easier and more palatable in many white and mixed race communities in those times (Sen, 2003). That began to change later as groups, COPS included, began to understand the need for and the desire of people of color and especially Black people to have deeper conversations and more fully articulated narratives about racism (Warren, 2001). Based on the need for organizing more rooted in identity, Gary Delgado established the Center for Third World Organizing in 1985. A similar path was taken by women who wanted a more explicitly feminist approach (Booth, 2015). Today organizers take a more proactive and fully realized approach that includes both common issues and a racial justice agenda. The move to position racial justice squarely and explicitly at the center of organizing may have been solidified by the outrage resulting from a series of shocking killings of Black Americans by police. Maurice BP-Weeks, codirector of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE), spoke with us in 2019 and noted that more widespread attention to racial justice began with the killing of Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. This drew a new generation of Black activists and organizers from the local area and throughout the country to take to the streets and galvanized organizers who had been working on similar issues, although largely under the radar. The shared outrage of Black activists brought heightened

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attention to how race has an impact across issues. Weeks said: “I think the spark was the Black political activity in Ferguson and other cities and also the rise in leadership of color at other organizations that we’ve seen. I think the combination of those two things has really been a spark that led folks to very seriously center racial justice as a main thing.” Marilyn Sneiderman, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organizing at Rutgers University, trains and supports social action organizers. Speaking with us in 2020, she reflected on the uprisings following the brutal killing of George Floyd, a Black man, in Minneapolis by a white police officer, Derek Chauvin, in May of 2020, and offered the perspective that the growth of the racial justice movement at that time created the disruption needed to further assert the impact of intersectional injustice. She stated that “the race and gender piece has got to be front and center in everything. You start looking at who’s being hurt when you look at doing any kind of research and who’s profiting, it’s going after people of color first. The wealth gap there is the worst.” Our findings suggest that inequality, antiracism, and dismantling white supremacy are now essential to the theory of change of social action organizing and inform every aspect of their work (Carruthers, 2018; Kendi, 2019; Ransby, 2018). Today’s organizers have added a radical perspective of antiracism and antipatriarchy. Every organization we interviewed includes an analysis of how racial disparities impact their communities and how intentional, multiracial organizing and collaboration is a base-building objective. Organizers arduously endeavor to inform and infuse the lens of racial justice into their mission and goals, their choice of issues and the messages used to elucidate them, and their leadership development and popular education. Jawanza Williams, director of organizing with VOCALNY, expresses this sentiment, asserting that the focus on antiracism must be all encompassing: “We are engaged with this question, meaningfully and consistently, every single day in our outward political work that we’re trying to move the city by or the state by, but also even our membership. . . . I think that the commitment that we have is what we need.” Overstreet, Rosenthal, and Case (2020) agree, arguing that “intersectionality’s most pressing, challenging, and radical demand for transformation is to engage it as a practice that attends to how we shape power and how power shapes us” (p. 781). Organizations choose issues and strategies that can pragmatically make change in very concrete ways. At the same

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time, organizing responds to the intersectionality of injustice with an agenda to shift power. This perspective demonstrates how organizers have developed the ability to both hold a transformational multiracial vision and to operationalize it by skillfully building the power needed to make concrete change. Race as a central component of the theory of change is the case regardless of the organization’s geographic location; it is equally true for those in diverse urban settings and for those in predominantly rural white communities. In a sense, today’s organizers merge identity organizing and organizing around issues that emphasize social class. They choose universal issues and focus on how the issues disproportionately impact Black communities and other people of color. Their vision is both realistic and hopeful. Citing what they call “the both/and logic of intersectionality,” Overstreet, Rosenthal, and Case (2020) reflect on this in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 racial justice protests we reference previously: “We have borne witness to a truth that is central to intersectionality, which is that we can exist in both an oppressive and liberatory ecosystem at the same time, while still holding fast to radical imaginations of social justice that transform our world” (p. 781). Christian Diaz, former lead housing organizer and now director of housing for the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, explains how this is grounded in communities: We believe all people, regardless of race and income, deserve the opportunity to succeed in school and in life. In terms of economic justice, especially in Chicago, but definitely throughout this country, there’s a very real inequity when it comes to race and wealth. If we want to believe that we live in a merit-based society and we also see that most of the people who are benefiting in our society are white, then that would tell us the white people are better or smarter or work harder. But we know that’s not the case. The reason that we have this incredible disparity in wealth we do think goes back to racism. You look at white flight, at the GI Bill, at gentrification. In Chicago, one of the last things our previous mayor did was approve a $2.4 billion subsidy to Sterling Bay, which is a development firm that is now being tasked with building a whole new luxury neighborhood in Chicago with 12,000 new rental units that are going to go for between $3,000 and $5,000 a month. We also live in a city and in a state that has regressive taxes in general, so people of color have to pay more in taxes relative to what they

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earn compared to white folks or wealthy folks. And how is this money being distributed? We’re giving $2.4 billion away to Sterling Bay to build a luxury neighborhood. When it comes to class, I don’t think we can separate that from race in this country.

Nancy Aardema, then executive director of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, has been associated with the organization for half of its 60-year history. She explains how the neighborhood has transitioned from a white working-class community to one of increasing diversity. They are currently campaigning against neighborhood gentrification. Here she describes how the organization takes on the universal issue of gentrification, while embedding reminders about racial and cultural inequities in their organizing. Race and cultural awareness is central to our work. We try to have conversations all the time, about not only what’s the issue, what’s the solution? But also what’s the issue in relation to the people it impacts. . . . If we just say, “everybody’s impacted,” that’s probably not true. Some people are more impacted based on their own cultural identity. Sometimes when you’re destroying something through gentrification, through the closing of a school, through the gang database in Chicago, whatever those issues might be, race makes them worse, and we have to be constantly aware of that. For example, when we did a big action on gentrification in the fall, some of the Native Americans said, “Wait a minute, we were the first ones gentrified.” So instead of continuing with what we would have normally done at that action, we started the action with some Native American dancers. They stayed with us through the whole campaign, leading the entire action saying, “We were the first ones gentrified.” Now that is very different from the kind of organizing I would have done when you wrote your first edition of the book. We’re becoming more aware that it’s not just Brown, Black, but it’s also within those cultures: most of our people are part Native American. What does that mean?

Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and former codirector, speaks to how race was central in the theory of change in founding Down Home North Carolina, a relatively new organization established in a primarily white geographic area: “For us, white supremacy is the biggest threat to our social fabric. It is

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what will destroy us as a democracy. It will be what destroys us in our ability to literally have a living planet. And so we went into Down Home trying to build out a program that starts with a race conscious lens. . . . Basically, we came in saying race has to be central. We have to fight the racial divisions, the racial stereotypes in our organizing if we’re ever going to build a multiracial “we” in our organization that is real, and if we’re going to be able to connect the dots of our issue organizing to think about those larger systems of power that we’re trying to dismantle and transform.” Our research suggests that a real evolution in the current theory of change, regardless of the core constituency or the issues, is that social action organizations must build multiracial organizations that both embrace universal issues and at the same time acknowledge the racism that disproportionately impacts people of color. The organizers we interviewed are assiduously endeavoring to put that understanding into every aspect of their work. RACIAL CAPITALISM

We concluded our interviews in 2019, and just a year later the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the intersectional injustice that we heard so much about in our research (Adhikari et al., 2020). In considering the relationship between these inequities and broader economic disparities, Whitney N. Laster Pirtle (2020) focuses on racial capitalism as a way of understanding how this was exposed by the pandemic. I extend this conversation by arguing that the research is actually capturing how racial capitalism works to have a fundamental impact on health inequities, as Black radical thought traditions suggested as much decades ago. As introduced by Robinson (1983), racial capitalism is the idea that racialized exploitation and capital accumulation are mutually constitutive. Racial capitalism created the modern world system, through slavery, colonialism, and genocide because “the development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology” (p. 2). Racially minoritized and economically deprived groups face capitalist and racist systems that continue to devalue and harm their lives, even within newer, supposedly deracialized neoliberal agendas (Clarno, 2017; Johnson, 2017). (p. 504).

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Kendi (2019) also describes the intersection of race and class as “conjoined twins”: “In the twenty-first century, persisting racial inequities in poverty, unemployment, and wealth show the lifework of the conjoined twins [race and class]” (p. 157). Since our very beginnings as a nation, our capitalistic economy has depended on racism (Piketty, 2020). The organizers we interviewed share the perspective of the devastating effects of capitalism on Black Americans and other racial groups. Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, explains the relationship between race and capitalism in their work and speaks to how race, wealth, and gender overlap and interrelate in the issues of the network of organizations she leads. Jacobs begins her comments with the importance of race: It’s dead center for everything. We don’t feel like you can talk about class or wealth inequality without talking about race. It’s foundational to the country. The first wealth building in the country was based on slavery and the forced removal and genocide of Native Americans. We understand—as we look at financialization, neoliberalism—that it is the oxygen that fuels the flames, that there’s no way you can talk about the mortgage crisis without talking about the fact that 50 percent of Black wealth was wiped out, that close to 40 percent of Latino wealth was wiped out, and that’s not an accident. If you look at drug prices that have been jacked up by the investment of financial firms in those industries, and which drugs tend to be the ones that are doubling their costs—diabetes, blood pressure medications, things that you would almost typically hit communities of color.

When asked if race plays a role in organizing, Deborah Axt, then coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, responded in a way that echoes the response of nearly everyone we engaged on this subject: “Absolutely. Yes, [it impacts] everything.” She also points to a guiding frame for understanding why and how social action organizations are confronting the two intertwined systems of racism and capitalism: “Our analysis is that capitalism in this country is purposefully and deeply entangled with white supremacy and patriarchy, that capitalists from the years of slaughtering Native Americans to importing slaves from Africa have sown white supremacy as justification for and to enable their own amassing of incredible economic and political power, and those systems cannot be addressed separately.”

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Gabe Strachota, then lead organizer with Community Voices Heard (CVH), speaks to the oppression that members experience in their lives, particularly the constituency that he organizes, the Black community in New York City’s public housing. He speaks to the intersectionality of race, gender, and class and the growing awareness of the concept of racial capitalism in the field more generally: Some of us have been part of training, particularly through People’s Action and the Grassroots Policy Project, that use a framework of racial capitalism as the system we’re organizing against. And I think that has been a powerful and helpful framework for a lot of folks. For folks here in CVH to see structural racism and capitalism not as separate systems or not as one determining the other, but seeing that they’ve always evolved together. And similarly, with “gender inequality.” I think for me there’s no way to understand what’s happening in public housing without an analysis of race, gender, and class. I think anti-Black racism in particular is critical as over 60 percent of NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] residents are Black folks. To give an example, I think we have to look at the disposability of Black folks increasingly under neoliberalism and see the disinvestment in public housing as part of that. Folks are literally being left in rotting apartments that are making people sick and killing people. So we think about Black Lives Matter and the non-valuing of Black life in particular among working-class people of color in general.  .  .  . I definitely see what’s happening in public housing as a racist form of state violence; environmental injustice, environmental racism. And the struggle for reinvestment in public housing I think needs to be seen through that lens as well.

As Strachota suggests, the objectives of organizing for power, and resisting racial capitalism, include creating new structural forms (see chapters 7 and 8). Sandra Lobo, executive director, notes how the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, with its long history of fighting for affordable housing, has taken on the development of Land Trusts as a community ownership approach. “For us, the economic democracy model has been how we build shared wealth and ownership and collective governance, but toward the things that we want to see in our community. This means that if we own it, and we are the decision-makers, we’re not going to displace

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ourselves, we are not going to undermine ourselves, we get to determine what those things look like.” One area where leaders of color face acutely consequential challenges is in fund-raising for organizing. The systems through which funds are distributed for organizing is a product of racial capitalism. Wealth is still largely held by and distributed through white individuals and institutions, and organizers of color who take on executive leadership must assume the responsibilities of navigating a system that is not designed to facilitate their success. We have more to say about this in chapter 10. We now turn to the subject of how these two overarching ideas—intersectional injustice and racial capitalism—inform and animate the work of today’s progressive social action organizations. BUILDING MULTIRACIAL ORGANIZATIONS

Alicia Garza (2020) writes that “movement building isn’t about finding your tribe—it’s about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals” (p. 136). The organizers we interviewed agree. In all of our conversations with organizers, they stressed the importance of building multiracial organizations as being critical to their theory of change. It was true for organizations in multiracial urban neighborhoods where people of color sometimes had not been as prominently represented. Sandra Lobo, of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, describes how members and leaders shifted internally to address race in their own institutional practices. She summarizes how this has impacted the development of the organization over time, including its commitment to the leadership of young people in the community. The organization was started in 1974 by clergy and lay leaders. At the time, most of the staff and organizers were predominantly white, and the folks that we were organizing were mostly of color. That was a dynamic that the organization had, that the folks doing the strategy and the decisions were often the white folks and the folks of color were on the front lines standing for photo ops. I’m actually exaggerating the reality somewhat, but the feelings of a lot of our membership resonates in that way. That is often how people remember that time, so there has been a lot of healing that our organization has had to do to say, “you’re right. We were not on point in terms of thinking

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who were the most impacted and were they at the center of decision-making and how do we transform that now to ensure that you are primarily our board, you are primarily the ones deciding our strategy, you are primarily our leadership that gets to decide everything in this organization?” That is an implication of staff and decision-making in governance. . . . I think part of the healing of where we are today was me taking responsibility for what we’ve done in the past and making commitments of how we shift in the future. Our young people, when they first formally became Sistas and Brothas United in 1999, had to fight every step of the way to have a voice in the room. They had to fight to have board seats, they had to fight to be a part of the decision-making table. We are very clear across the board [now] that they are expected to be in the room, that they are not just welcome but they have a responsibility to be in the room and that the decisions can’t be made unless we really are thinking intergenerationally because so much of our experience is through our identities and who we are and where we’re at in our lives. That is an expectation for us now, they don’t have to fight for resources, they don’t have to fight to be at the table. In fact, if there’s any fighting it’s “you need to come, we need you in the room!”

The organizations we interviewed in white rural communities in majority white states are also intent on building multiracial memberships and strategically expanding their work to include communities of color. Mark Schultz, then executive director of the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota, describes how their long-established organization took careful and strategic steps to intentionally become a multiracial organization committed to changing the narrative in rural Minnesota. He describes the following steps: (1) make a commitment to not just talk about racial justice but to change the organization in order to work toward this; (2) engage in listening, and identify how this is in members’ and the organizations’ collective self-interest; (3) seek and engage allies in communities of color; and (4) invest in multiracial coalitions. In the case example, Mark Schultz describes how the Land Stewardship Project went about making their work multiracial. He emphasizes a both/and approach: it is difficult for all farmers, but Black farmers and others have it much worse. And it is a good example of what we call radical pragmatism—the work is informed by a radical assessment, but the approach to bringing together the multiracial organizations is highly practical and based on mutual interest.

MARK SCHULTZ: STEPS TO BUILDING A MULTIRACIAL ORGANIZATION Let’s talk about white supremacy and structural racism. It was about nine years ago that we really seriously got on that path. Not just saying, “Yes, we believe in racial justice,” but “how are we a racial justice organization?” . . . Our base is rural Minnesota, white farmers, workers, teachers, etc. We had to answer that question, though. You say you’re for racial justice: How are you a racial justice organization? What we realized through that process was that we needed to bring a white rural base into the fight for racial justice, and to do that we had to understand how it was actually in our self-interest to do that. We started a whole series of internal discussions originally. We did 85 one-to-ones [individual listening meetings] with our leadership base about racial justice and ended up saying, “What we need to do is work on issues that matter to our base and that really have them around the neck,” or “This is what they really want to see happen,” and while doing that, be explicit about race. The Scandinavian Minnesota farmers can’t get a start because they can’t get a loan or because land’s being grabbed, but how about a Latino farmer? How about a Somali farmer? How about a Hmong farmer? Five times worse. We want more people on the land, we want more farmers; it’s good for the economy, it’s good for the land, and all those communities bring part of the solution: new crops, new ways of farming, new ways of organizing, marketing, all these kinds of things. We started saying this is in our self-interest, and because of the larger change we need we actually need more farmers and we need more solutions. Then it became saying, “then what?” Well, we’ve looked for allies of color. We wanted to enter into strategic relationships with organizations of color, particularly those working on farming and food issues. To do that we understood it would be a long, slow set of conversations and relationship building in order to build trust, in order to earn trust over this gulf of oppression. One of our strategic alliances that came out of that work is with Hope Community, which is actually urban but is working on food justice and food sovereignty and is an African American and East African organization. But also, more recently, we’ve been able to forge some strong relationships and now some joint work with Red Lake Nation in northern Minnesota, with (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) the Ojibwe people, and in western Minnesota, with the upper Sioux community, around food sovereignty; and our approach is that’s important to us too: you actually are leading the strategies around this. Are there things we can do that would be valuable for those strategies? After two years, sure enough there are, and we’re being invited in. Now we have to deliver, and we have to stick with it; even if things get hard, we’ve got to stay around and be engaged. So that idea of strategic alliances with organizations of color and leaders of color [is working]. Then a third one is to really invest in multiracial coalitions and collaborations where the main strategies are crafted together. Our Minnesota Future is an example of that, being involved with Voices for Racial Justice on the board, and on the national level with HEAL (Health, Environment, Agriculture, and Labor) alliances.

Adam Mason, former policy director for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, describes how organizing with attention to race has allowed campaigns to come together and support each other to become stronger. Iowa is a predominantly white state. However, we do have campaigns that are led by communities of color. We’ve got organizers actively working with predominantly the Latino community on worker justice issues and immigrant justice issues. We’ve got an organizer predominately working with the African American community on issues of racial profiling. Then, at times throughout the year, because those campaigns are led by communities of color, it allows us to also bring our predominantly white rural and urban base into alliance with those communities of color, either to support their campaigns when needed or just through shared experience when we have organizational wide events.

Holly Delany-Cole, program director with The Leaders Trust, which provides direct support for diverse movement leaders, reflects on building out multiracial coalitions. “Some of it is what groups do because they think more deeply about who their constituents are, and some of it is tactics and some of it is constituency. But I’m seeing more evolution of people not giving up on their principles, being a little bit more steadfast in holding ground so that

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everyone is brought along and not just parts of the community.” She notes the need for broader institutional support from other stakeholders to support the hard, relational work, citing a fellowship program through which organizers working together can get to know one another, “so when they leave the fellowship they know they can pick up the phone at the different organizations and make plans together and not have these rifts.” She offers an example: “There’s a group called the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, which principally have been Dreamers [undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children and pursued gaining legal status through passage of the Dream Act]. When you think about Dreamers, what pops into your head is probably a Latinx person, right? And a lot of the organizing happens in Latino communities. But this group is like, no, there are Asian Dreamers and there are Black Dreamers. So they are more conscious.” In the next section, we describe how organizations proactively develop this consciousness and structure ways to foster greater understanding about race with members while working to change the demographics in staffing and leadership. LEADERSHIP, STAFFING, AND CONVERSATIONS ABOUT RACE

Placing intersectional injustice at the center of organizing requires a commitment to expanding the diversity of leadership and staff. It also means having ongoing and deep organizational conversations about race. Jennifer Epps-Addison, then codirector of the Center for Popular Democracy, a newer but expansive organizing network, speaks to a priority we heard from many of those we interviewed—ensuring that the leadership of organizing reflects the most impacted constituencies. “One of the things that was incredibly important to the founders of the network and the founding affiliates was that the network be majority people of color and women led. Over the last several years, we’ve made a specific effort to build relationships with people of color leaders on the ground, particularly Black led organizations and Latinx led organizations.” As social action organizations address the need to build multiracial organizations, they must grapple with the needs, issues, and cultures of different racial and ethnic groups. Catalina Morales, then an organizer for Isaiah in Minnesota, describes the approach the organization uses to strategically engage leaders to ensure a racially and ethnically inclusive membership.

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West St. Paul in Minnesota is the area where there’s the longest, oldest generation of Latino communities. There’s this rumor that goes around every election that Latinos won’t open the door.  .  .  . So we have launched voter programs that are more authentic to how the community functions. How is it that the African American community and the Latino community are some of the most social communities I know, but we don’t have a list of them, ever? [My coworker] runs our African American organizing, that’s for barbershops because that’s where people really talk. That’s where people really bring up their opinion. And for us in the Latino community, we’ve been going to Latino businesses and actually having conversations with Latino business owners and talking to their clients and filling out surveys. I think the thing that we’ve been realizing is saying that people of color are apathetic or don’t care is the biggest excuse that I’ve ever heard. We just have to care enough to spend that extra time with them. It actually takes a lot of time. . . . We’re doing three-hour shifts, for example, and in a three-hour shift you might get anywhere from 7 to 10 surveys filled out. It’s not a lot if you think about it, but that conversation is worth a million, and then we can go back to that person. To me, that’s how we’re looking at race. How do you go where people are already going, where people already know that this is their community, that this is somewhere where they can go? In the Latino businesses, if people see that the owner is supporting us, they’re more likely to fill out the survey. In the barber shops, if the owner is telling them to do it, they’re more likely to fill out the survey or the pledge card.

Sandra Lobo, of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, explains what a more inclusive outreach focused on bringing in a wide range of residents looks like in a neighborhood-based organizing institution that is known for its work for affordable housing: Housing folks think of our community members as tenants. Well, they’re not just tenants, they’re parents, or they’re patients that get sick and they have to go through the medical system. They’re workers. To acknowledge that holistic view of their identities actually supports them to be even more active within our organization. If we have young people in the program, we’re actively saying your parents should be coming to this, and similarly, we have tenants that are struggling around housing, we want to make sure they know we have a youth component where they can get a variety of support

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services as well as organizing to make their schools better. You’ll see a family with different members of the family belonging to different parts of the organization or all together. But there’s a much more intentional thought about “who else is in your family?” How else can we connect? How else can we provide some connection across the board?

Multicultural organizing also means that the organization’s issues must resonate with the various racial, ethnic, and gender groups who comprise the organization’s membership. Crystal Reyes, program director of Sistas and Brothas United with the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, describes the challenges and opportunities of their multiracial organizing: “Everyone wants to be seen in the work that they’re fighting for, right? Rightfully so, because for a very long time, folks haven’t been seen in movements in general, so it’s hard to pull those things apart because they are very well connected. I think that’s where the challenge lies, trying to get folks to understand what the large vision is, even if it’s not just pinpointing those individual identities.” Reyes comments further: “That’s a challenge, but also a really good invitation. I think it pushes people to say, ‘Our campaign goals are not bold enough, we’re not actually fighting for the people most marginalized by these issues.’ It’s an invitation to figure out how to get bold enough to uplift those people who want to see their identities really be respected and visualized in a real way? I think that’s what’s been impactful, at least for us, that there is a lot of learning and unlearning of how movements have formed and how organizations function structurally.” Organizer Denise Padín Collazo (2021) notes that multiracial organizing may require people of color to change their image of themselves. She recognizes from her own experience that many Latinas face challenges in assuming leadership roles. Latinas may be overwhelmed by all the demands they face, which is why Collazo stresses the importance of having a balanced approach. She acknowledges the importance of offering new images of what leadership looks like as well as structures for channeling the power of that leadership (p. 55). She speaks directly to Latina change agents: “I am writing to tell you that I see you” (p. 2). As Garza (2020) notes, “There are very practical reasons why multiracial movements are vital to building the world we deserve. Segregation by race and class has been used throughout history to maintain power relationships.  .  .  . This is why it’s so important—and difficult—to engage

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in the complicated conversation about multiracial organizing as a theory of change” (p. 86). Organizers recognize the need for self-examination and dialogue but note that it is often extraordinarily difficult to bring together groups with a contentious history and tenuous connections. People have biased perceptions about each other. Yet it must be done. Christian Diaz, with the Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago, describes how this expansive view extends to a deep analysis of the root causes of inequality. Is there anything that’s not impacted by race in this country? I’m often told that I’m divisive or that our organization is divisive, because we bring up issues of race, as if we were the ones that decided to organize the society by racial identities. This is a decision that was made a long time ago, when, for example, the federal government said that white people could qualify for these homeownership programs in the suburbs, but Black people couldn’t. We live in a country where we don’t necessarily learn how to talk about race, or to understand structural racism in our schools, so that as adults we have to work hard for people to recognize very basic truths about race. Whether you’re Black, Brown, white, Asian, or Indigenous, because we don’t know how to talk about race, our very difficult conversations around race get stuck, and they end because people don’t know how to articulate these really complicated feelings in a productive way. One example I can give is how wealthy people support Trump [former president Donald Trump] not because of race politics but because of the tax cuts. It’s like, “We don’t agree with the racism but we agree with the tax cuts.” Here I am thinking, “How can you not see that those tax cuts are racist?” We just have so much work to do.

Felicia Griffith, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action, recognizes the necessity of conversations between Black and Latinx communities and points to the undervaluing of that as being a challenge to effective work. The conversations must be balanced with their issue campaigns, and there are too often no resources to continue this important dialogue. “We haven’t been having the conversations about healing those relationships, and for me we need those conversations to truly heal as a collective. When we’re organizing, we’re so focused on the issue campaign, and we’ve got to have the win, and we’ve got to have the numbers. In many cases, communities need to heal together and then be able to step off together, but who’s paying

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for that? No one. There’s a lot of work that I think we try to do, but oftentimes we don’t have a financial capacity and collective network to make an impact on a deep enough level.” The experience of Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect, a national organization that organizes Walmart workers, reflects changing expectations around addressing intersectional injustice. She notes that this dialogue is much harder in online forums, a space they use regularly to recruit and engage workers: “I was largely trained in the union movement at a time, where, for the most part, you didn’t talk about abortion, you didn’t talk about gay rights, you didn’t talk about immigration. Increasingly, some unions and alternative labor organizations like ours say, ‘No, we actually want to lean into that conversation so that people are hearing each other talk about how they’re being impacted as a result of racism or immigration status or gender.’ And that becomes part of the relational context of not leaning away from those conversations.” Observations of longtime white allies who support organizing summarize the evolution in leadership and representation in the field to include more people of color leading the work. Maria Mottola, then executive director of the New York Foundation, which supports much of the organizing in New York City, brings a perspective on organizing that includes efforts that have become statewide and national in scope. She speaks to the changes in the demographics of the field but also to the ways in which the field has, until more recently, not had the capacity to even talk productively and honestly about race—even as the issues and staffing diversified over time. When I think about when I first got to the New York Foundation, in the mid-1990s, my predecessor hosted a meeting for funders on community organizing and the state of the field, and it was majority white men in that room. . . . It was people who represented the big networks, ACORN and the IAF, and then a smattering of a couple of people of color. And I just think that’s completely shifted. . . . It’s really different. And it’s not just a difference that [it is] great the field is more diverse, but now, you have to have conversations about race. In the past, there were whole conversations about how to talk about issues of equity and justice. But if somebody back then had said, “it’s actually about race,” people would have been like, “What? Why are you saying that? You’re telling me I’m racist?” There was not a way to have a sensitive conversation about it. Now we’ve recognized that we’ve got to step in

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and have that conversation. We can’t just walk around it, we have to actually deal with it and the messiness of it and the hurt feelings of it and get to the other side of it and not avoid it.

Conversations about race are made even more difficult in the face of what Robin DiAngelo (2018) has called white fragility: the discomfort white people feel when discussing racial issues. The organizers we talked to emphasized how organizations are leaning into this discomfort, that organizations cannot ignore the impact of racial injustices and white privilege in our society. Organizers acknowledge that all organizing starts with where people are, and they are acutely aware of the need to influence the hearts and minds of white people regarding racial injustice (DiAngelo, 2018; McGhee, 2021). They describe persistent, repeated, and in-depth conversations with leadership on these issues, beginning with a commitment to being able to sit in their own discomfort, support members to do so as well, and recognize their shared self-interest. Angela Lopez, who moved from leadership to staff at United for Respect, describes her own evolution around race. When we’re talking about economic justice and putting the numbers out there and the statistics based on people of color, Black people, and women, the pay, everything needs to be raised up. . . . Sometimes I feel like some white people get really quiet around those conversations because maybe they’re uncomfortable and don’t understand it, or maybe they just don’t even agree with it. . . . I didn’t always have the same views that I have now on a lot of this stuff. I had great organizers and mentors . . . and I just listened a lot. I was like a sponge when I was around anybody that was talking about social justice or economic justice, and I really listened and I asked questions. I feel like I probably said some things at times that weren’t that great because I didn’t understand it. I think that helps me to be able to have conversations because, when they do get quiet, I know what they’re thinking. They’re either saying, “this is crap,” or they’re really trying to just sit and listen and learn about it. It’s because of getting involved in this movement, in this work, and taking the time to really understand it, that I did. And I had people I could go to ask “where do you find this,” or, “is there something I can read?” I could ask hard questions and feel comfortable to ask questions and have people break things down for me. I try to do that with our members.

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Brigid Flaherty describes how the founding of Down Home North Carolina in a majority white community was informed by listening while going door to door. “If you’re organizing white people, usually it’s pretty white specific, maybe more middle-class whites being organized together or focused on engaging lower-class or working-class whites.” To counter this, she says: “We used race in our listening survey to know how people would respond to it from a position of how do you see it as an issue in your community? And then what could be a solution to heal racial tensions in your community?” Flaherty describes how this first step in the process of dedicated listening led to the development of training for community members and leaders: “We needed to know how people were living race, how people were thinking about race, and then start to build more organizing that was responsive to what people were actually thinking and believing. . . . Now we actually train people to go deeper on race from those thousands of conversations that we had.” Listening to the members is also what has informed the articulation of a narrative of racial solidarity and racial hope. Flaherty summarizes this: “What divides working people are racial stereotypes: racial stereotypes of who’s taking their jobs, racial stereotypes of who’s bringing drugs in, racial stereotypes around who’s bringing crime in. That creates the ‘other’ that doesn’t actually allow people to come together around class solidarity.” As the organization itself has evolved, Flaherty says: “On the leadership development side, a lot of what we’re trying to do is really make sure that we have Black, white, Brown leaders coming together, and in deliberate trainings and with real analysis, [we] learn how to see each other, learn how to trust each other.” Chelsea White, then an organizer with Down Home North Carolina, notes, “I do a lot of educating around what it means to be white allies and breaking down white supremacy, and how white supremacy has impacted our life as white folks in a rural community.” She reflects, “What I’ve seen in leftist organizing has typically been to alienate, especially rural white communities.” In her experience, “The truth is that when poor white folks that are living in slums, trying to do the best for their kids, hear that they have privilege, that automatically removes any chance of them engaging with our movement in the way that we need them to if we are going to build the collective that we need.”

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White also uses the both/and approach when working with leaders, citing an example from her organizing in a more diverse county, Alamance County in North Carolina, where there is a larger immigrant population. There, she works with community members to help them “recognize that we are all enduring the same suffering at the hands of the same powers.” She relays a story of a member who represented Down Home, speaking in Washington, D.C. in front of 30,000 people. He was able to share his own story and take a stand against the immigrant families being separated at the border. “He spoke up, he said [paraphrasing], ‘I’m a seventh generation Appalachian white man, yet I have been through incarceration, and I know what it feels like to be separated from my child. No matter who you are or where you’re from, that is unjust and inhumane, and no one should have to go through that.’ ” In the case example, Jose Lopez, former organizer and now coexecutive director at Make the Road New York, describes how he and Make the Road New York endeavor to navigate the complexity of inclusivity in a gentrifying New York neighborhood based on the history of power dynamics in the community.

JOSE LOPEZ: WORKING TOWARD INCLUSIVENESS AT MAKE THE ROAD NEW YORK When folks are coming into our institution and talking about issues in the household, in the building, in the workplace, in the school, oftentimes the villain in their stories is a white male: “My white male boss” or “my white male landlord” or “my white male principal.” I think that’s part of the kind of discussion we’re continuing to have in house, because if we’re talking about creating a more inclusive organization based on demographic shifts, we have to be able to have those conversations about how we perceive white people in the movement, white people in our communities, and folks who oftentimes are the villain in the stories that we’re hearing in the experiences of our membership. Last year we were having a local fight around rezoning in Bushwick, and we were engaging with tenants on that block to be sure that a parking lot wasn’t turned into a luxury condo, but also that five adjacent construction

sites weren’t captured in that same application so that a post office, a laundromat, a restaurant where a lot of our folks work weren’t rezoned to become residential so that the developers can knock those buildings down and build luxury condos. But in two of those were factories where loft tenants resided, the majority of them were white, and there was an opportunity there for us to have a discussion. It wasn’t the easiest discussion all the time. There were definitely moments where our internal housing team and members were thinking we’re about issuing rights to all tenants, and we’re about making sure that landlords and developers aren’t displacing folks who already have a place to call home. But for the last decade, this population of people are the people that we’ve been pointing to saying that they’re moving in and gentrifying Bushwick. So a lot of that discussion needed to happen, and it was a good moment for us as an organization and as a committee to really talk about whether or not we’re putting blame on individual people, or whether or not we’re putting blame on long-standing institutions that have allowed for this kind of wiping out of entire communities to happen in the first place. We started to learn about and talk about a host of issues, from redlining, to how the Department of City Planning operates, to what’s problematic about ULURPs [land use review process in New York City] who represents us, to how much dark money there is in local, state, and federal politics, all of these things that we have to talk about all the time. I think sometimes it’s just the challenge of finding a space to continue to do all of this at the same time. We said “cool, we’re going to build this broad-base support across age groups, across demographics.” Some white folks showed up to our BASTA [“Enough!” in Spanish] meeting and literally stood up in a room with a committee that has existed for over 15 years and said, “Excuse me, this meeting is happening in Spanish, and we can’t understand, can you fix it?” Like, no we can’t fix it, we’re not there yet. Nobody invited you, first of all, and to stand in front of a room of like 50 immigrant families, people of color, and say, “change the language because we cannot understand it.” This is what our communities have been fighting for since the beginning of time! Language access. We’re never in spaces that are tailored to the needs of our communities. How dare you walk into our space and make that demand when this is the first time you’ve ever visited us as an organization? (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) A lot of good came from that campaign, but those kinds of hiccups also created some tension. Ultimately, we won and there was some unity on the back end, but it’s not easy work. And also the big question for us, when I was talking about our five-year plan, we want to move in that direction. For 20 years our institution has been running committee meetings in Spanish. So even just that, a shift from that—what does that mean for the way that we host space? Does it mean everything has to be bilingual now even though we understand that the majority of our base doesn’t speak any English at all? It’s just like a lot of things, like all organizations, we are grappling with and thinking about [this] as we think about our broader vision of inclusiveness across communities.

Placing race and intersectional injustice at the center of social action organizing also impacts the staff. Nancy Aardema, formerly of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, explains that recognition of an organizer’s own race has become expected, and how that impacts organizing is vital. In her early experience, “You didn’t think about it so much, ‘I’m a white person,’ you just thought this is what I’m supposed to be doing. Now I think we’re very aware of who we are. Therefore, what is a right and what is a privilege and, as we go out as organizers, what role do I play as a white woman that maybe should not be played by me?” Now she says she is “really thinking all the time about how we build our key leadership, our staff, with those issues in mind.” The presence of more people of color in professional roles in social action organizing is at the core of the changing landscape. And the approach that Collazo (2021) and Garza (2020) offer is for urgent and loving support. People need to see themselves as capable, ready, and entitled to do the work they are passionate about. This is a far cry from early texts such as Rules for Radicals (Alinsky, 1971), which clearly defines who should and should not do what in an organization. One goal of today’s experienced mentors, especially people of color, is that organizers of color will stay in the work and take it forward, sustaining professional growth and impact. This is in contrast to earlier attitudes that often promoted an only the strong survive approach, and the burnout this perpetuated.

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Leadership in organizing is still progressing toward being fully representative of the racial and ethnic diversity that exists across the base (Race to Lead, 2021). In 2019, Community Voices Heard initiated the Follow Black Women Project, which surveyed hundreds of Black women regarding political issues they care about, then engaged these women in “sister circle” conversations to voice their concerns and work with other Black women in leadership positions to develop solutions. Their overall goal is to create a plan centering the experiences of Black women in New York State toward building civic engagement and bringing more Black women into professional organizing roles (Smith, 2021). The Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO) continues to train people of color to become organizers. Other training centers offer sustained support for Black leadership, such as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD) and programming to support organizers of color and their organizations, such as the Midwest Academy. Maurice BP-Weeks, from ACRE, notes that he has experienced problems, even as his organization exists to achieve racial justice. In terms of race and organizing, he states: “One thing that I’ve been noticing a lot more is that there’s still a long way to go, and because leaders of color have not had the same opportunities and training as other folks, there’s still lots of support that’s needed for people like me who are new executive directors and new political leaders, and that’s often hard to get. I think that’s one thing that we all need to figure out how to continue to support.” CONFRONTING INTERSECTIONAL INJUSTICE THROUGH ISSUE CAMPAIGNS

The issue campaigns that social action organizations take on are also impacted by the need and desire to organize multiracially. Organizers are constantly looking for new ways to bring diverse groups together into campaigns. Mary Hooks, then codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), which organizes LGBTQ+ communities of color, told us: “if we are trying to advance any agenda around economic justice, but lack a racial analysis around it and how those two are co-conspirators, then our efforts will fall short. And we’ll continue to see those who are positioned based on their white privilege, based on their class privilege, continue to be the folks who are leading the conversation and bringing about solutions that

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actually don’t impact those people who are experiencing systemic racism and systemic violence because of those things.” Organizers whose constituencies are not Black are trying to determine how to embrace the issues of Black Americans. Pabitra Benjamin, executive director of Adhikaar, which organizes Nepali immigrants in New York, envisions a multiracial base across organizations and issues. She reflects on the potential for building enduring, broad-based coalitions based on the capacity organizations have demonstrated to be able to share an analysis and prioritize action in response to a crisis: When Ferguson hit and all the different cities were organizing around Black Lives Matter and police accountability, at that point that is what needed to be centered. All of the other movements and organizations had to figure out their positioning around it. Folks had to figure out how the movement for Black lives fit into their organizing frame and how to address anti-Blackness in their own organizing. As movements arise, this type of intersectional development happens organically or else it’s forced and it’s not going to work. But it would allow us to say, “how do we integrate these other issues that are still happening while you allow this major community and issue area to take focus?” We’re all going to support it, we’re all going to push it forward, but at the same time we’re not going to lose our deeper analysis to how it’s all connected to a broader system of oppression [and] that we have to change all of it.

Organizers also offer examples of how base building and electoral organization have come together to start changing leadership and power. In California, Miya Yoshitani, former executive director and now senior strategist of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), describes how a growing population of low-income communities of color paired with a growing fight for racial justice not only promoted leadership positions for people of color but has been a powerful force in policy change. Regarding representation in state government, she says that “racial dynamics have shifted a lot because we have to have people in leadership to actually represent and be a reflection of the communities who are going to put people into power. It’s necessary. Our policies have to reflect the concerns of people of color because there’s more of us.” She also attributes this response to the impact of organizing for power: “Over the past 30 years, if I take

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California, the demographic shifts have happened at the same time that there’s been massive investment in organizing in low-income communities of color. That was some of the backbone that led to the transformation of California from a very red state in its elected officials, governor, through the state legislature, to what it is now. . . . If you look at the transformation statewide and how race and racial justice has emerged as being the center force to the organizing and building power in the state, it has led to what I think are these pilot-level significant policy shifts that point toward a more equitable state than before.” In Minnesota, Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah, describes how they bring the practice of inclusivity into their electoral organizing. Important in this work is the development of a counternarrative to the divisive and racist narrative. Schrantz references Isaiah’s work in preparing candidates for the mid-term elections in 2018: I think we successfully equipped the gubernatorial candidates with how they lean in to what is coming at us from the other side. We actually can move people away from the race baiting, dog whistle politics strategy if we have a counterstrategy. We did this race class narrative research project that started a year and a half ago. We’ve had trainings and briefings with candidates, and we’ve worked with campaign staff [so they won’t be] on defense. In our state, the particular context that we’re in and the way it manifests itself is anti-Muslim, anti-illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants and Muslims are the particular signals. If you think about it in terms of political symbolism, they’re the battleground on which this conversation is happening. And it’s obviously anti-Blackness, but the anti-Blackness [in Minnesota] shows up as being anti-Somali.

In New York, Afua Atta-Mensah, then executive director of CVH, connects how their grassroots multiracial organizing of the largest Black-led community-based organization in New York State connected with a power shift on the state level in 2018. She cites their work and the “challenge and an opportunity: to disrupt the normal discourse, to be explicit about racial inequities, and to fight for policies that can build a truly inclusive democracy.” This is an undeniably exciting moment, but it is also a moment fraught with uncertainty and real questions about what it means to have a truly inclusive

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democracy, one that reflects a multiracial society and advances solutions to benefit all, not just a select few. While it is Democrats who are leading the charge on voting and campaign finance reforms—issues at the very heart of democracy—both parties have participated in, and benefited from, a system run on corporate money and machine politics. That system consists of a very small, very wealthy, and very white donor class that occupies the place that democracy should. . . . In the public discourse on many issues, the flag of economic equality flies high. What has been less talked about is the systematic exclusion and oppression of communities of color as a direct result of our current system. Democracy reforms are not just about good governance, they are about giving people of color access to the political power from which they are all too often excluded. Race has become a footnote in a discussion when it should be the headline, for the simple reason that we cannot achieve a truly inclusive democracy if we do not start by acknowledging who has been excluded and why . . . lawmakers, lobbyists, experts, and advocates are quick to embrace a “race-neutral” dialogue when talking about the momentous issues at stake: voting, climate, housing, health care, jobs, and more. But it is worth remembering that these issues were core tenets of the Civil Rights Movement. (Atta-Mensah, 2019)

Atta-Mensah named several issues, including on housing and climate justice, on which CVH would go on to achieve, in broad-based coalitions, some substantial victories for their members (Ferré-Sadurní, McKinley, & Wang, 2019). THE WORK AHEAD

We often heard from organizers that addressing race in their organizations, their collaborations on their issues with power holders, and often within and among themselves, is the hardest area of their work. It is challenging institutionally and interpersonally and is fraught with struggle—and it is profoundly necessary. In the evolution of organizing, the impact of race and the experience of directly impacted communities of the intersectionality of injustice stands out as having always been essential in this work. But there is so much that so many, including ourselves, have missed. Kendi (2019) says that the conversation about race is essential: “being an antiracist

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requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular selfexamination” (p. 23). But he also reminds us that to continue this work is essential because “racist policies are not indestructible. Racial inequities are not inevitable” (p. 238). CONCLUSION

In this chapter and throughout this book, we reference the literature that organizers of color are publishing on intersectional injustice and organizing for power. This is an essential and critical component in the evolution of organizing. We describe the ways in which social action organizations are more explicitly taking on the challenges of racial capitalism and forging an agenda that includes confronting the many issues and obstacles people face in their lives by building power for racial, gender, and economic transformation. We acknowledge that there are many more organizations working hard on these issues than those we have included here. However, we hope that these stories of their struggles and their steadfast commitment to the values they represent offers not only inspiration but a call to action on every level of what it means to organize for power. Understanding what organizations are doing to confront intersectional injustice underlies everything they do, and this topic will come up in every chapter of this book. In closing, we reiterate Christian Diaz’s plaintive statement: “When it comes to race, we just have so much work to do.”

Chapter Four

WOMEN AND GENDER FRAMES

We’re focusing on the issues that are relevant for our families, such as family leave, child care, and wage equality. All of those issues impact so many households that are led by women, or a single woman as head of household, those are the issues that affect our families. I think that impacts the slate of issues that a majority of women stand behind because of their firsthand experience struggling to make ends meet because of these factors. It is so clear to us that there are shortcomings of our social safety net systems for women, and women of color in particular. There’s something about the love and nurture that we as women bring to the movement, we feel it in the movement, we see it in the movement. FELICIA GRIFFIN, POWERSWITCH ACTION

Women have always played significant roles in social action organizations, but how they develop as organizers has been less understood. The civil rights movement includes some famous examples of movement leaders whose experiences as grassroots organizers are now being more deeply explored and lauded. The stories of Black women and Latinas, such as Rosa Parks (Theoharis, 2015), Fannie Lou Hamer (Blain, 2021; Larson, 2021), Ella Baker (Ransby, 2003), and Dolores Huerta (Sowards, 2019), are among the most prominent. The lists of such women, across race, gender identity, and issues is at once vast and underrecognized (Ferree & Martin, 1995; Minkoff, 1993). Despite the presence of diverse and powerful women fighters for social change, in the past the paid staff of social action organizations were usually white and male (Sen, 2003). Many were sent by national networks into neighborhoods from outside the community, and some were known to enter bearing an arrogance about their knowledge and skills. Although many volunteer organizational leaders 25 years ago were women, they were not often found in staff positions, except in organizations that were explicitly working on traditional women’s issues such as reproductive rights and sexual harassment. In this chapter, we focus on how organizing has evolved for women and around gender identity. Today social action organizations are more likely

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to be staffed and led by women, in many cases women of color (Carruthers, 2018; Ransby, 2018). In our sample, 13 of the directors or codirectors and nine of the organizers were women. In nine of the organizations we studied, both organizers were women. Moreover, we find that the evolution of the theory of change includes a clear articulation and acknowledgment of the important role of women in social action organizing and the commitment to develop women leaders and envision issues through a gender lens. Miya Yoshitani, former executive director and now senior strategist of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) in California, comments on the evolution of women’s leadership: “Women in leadership have always been a critical part of the functionality of movements in a way that has not always been recognized. The fact that there is emerging leadership, especially from women of color, in organizing and in our movement apparatuses is a reflection of a shift in culture in organizing similar to the shift toward racial justice. If you can’t speak to the needs and the desires of women in how you prioritize things as an organization or prioritize your policy agenda or your change or whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve, then you’re most likely going to fail.” In this chapter, we first hypothesize why women have become more central in social action organizations today and explore the paths women take to become organizers and leaders. We then examine the impact women have on current organizing, with particular attention to the explicit feminist frames that are used, and how issues have become “genderized” because of their involvement. Finally, we discuss the ways in which the organizations are attempting to be inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community in their work, even among populations that may be culturally parochial. WHAT BRINGS WOMEN TO SOCIAL ACTION ORGANIZING?

Women have become more present and involved in organizing today because of several factors that are connected to their increased participation in the labor market and their economic realities. First and foremost, there are more women in the workforce today than ever before. By the end of 2019, women made 50.4 percent of the workforce (Bureau of Labor Statistics, April 2021). The percentage of women in the United States over the age of 16 working full time has risen slowly since 1990, peaking at 57.5  percent before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 (Statista, 2021a).

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Despite their participation in the workforce, the gender wage gap persists. Women are clustered in the low-paying retail, food service, and health care industries, and in 2018, women made just 81.4 cents to every dollar earned by men (Current Population Survey, 2018). The gap is also compounded by race, with Black women earning just 62 cents and Latinas earning 54 cents for every dollar earned by men (Bleiweis, 2020). When we wrote our first edition in 1994, the popular image of the working class was men carrying lunch pails. Among certain communities it remains so today. In reality, today’s working class is composed of women carrying purses, diaper bags, and backpacks. Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect, discusses the organization’s work in the retail sector and particularly at Walmart, where their organizing focuses. She recognizes that women are the working class and that they deserve attention: “We have made a very clear decision and commitment that women are the center of the organizing that we do and that the issues that impact women are the core. It’s the organization’s lens. I would say that 95 percent of our leadership base is women. We do hear people say, ‘I don’t see myself in this organization because it’s so much about women,’ and we’ve just decided that that’s okay because the whole narrative around who is working class has been so gendered male and white for so long that centering BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] and women as the core analytic frame and the core public presentation of who we are and the issues that we fight around is our decision. It’s just what we do.” Significantly, women’s income has become increasingly more important in maintaining their families’ financial stability. Women are providers and important contributors in the large majority of families. In 2020, about 25 percent of families were headed by a single parent, and of those 10.2 million families, 75 percent were headed by women (United States Census, 2020). By 2017, 41 percent of women were the sole or primary breadwinners for their families. Another 23 percent are cobreadwinners, contributing at least 25 percent to their family’s earnings. Taken together, more than two-thirds of women’s salaries are needed to sustain family income. As Glynn (2019) writes, “There is still a deep and often unconscious belief that women’s earnings are not central to their families’ economic security. This same belief too often has created a tolerance for gender-based wage disparities that have resulted in fewer resources for families.” Today’s  women must

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work, their wages are critical to their families, and thus, economic issues are more urgent for them. Women often have an additional role as caregivers of family members. In 2018, more than 25 million women provided care to a friend or family member, and 55 percent of them were employed full time (National Partnership for Women and Families, 2018). According to a 2019 report by the AARP Public Policy Institute, the economic value of unpaid care was worth about $470 billion (Reinhard et al., 2019). The typical unpaid caregiver is a 49-year-old woman who works full time and cares for her mother, and 37 percent of female caregivers are members of the “sandwich generation,” caring for both children and parents. It is also worth noting that women of color are more likely to be in caregiving roles than white women (Cohn & Passel, 2018). Caregiving also impacts women’s economic status. According to the National Partnership for Women and Families (2018), “Too often, family caregivers are faced with impossible choices because paid time off to provide care is far too rare.” Only 17 percent of workers have paid family leave through their jobs to care for a seriously ill family member or new child (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018a), and nearly one-third of workers cannot earn a single paid sick day (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018b). Lower-wage workers are much less likely than higher-wage workers to have paid leave or paid sick days (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018a), and nearly 40 percent of the workforce is not eligible for job protected unpaid leave through the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA; U.S. Department of Labor, 2012). Of caregivers who do take time off to fulfill their responsibilities at home, 48 percent report losing income (Aumann et al., 2010). The organizers we interviewed experience the imperative to respond to these caregiving issues. As Felicia Griffin, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action says “We must seek to create an economy that works for everyone and ensure that women’s needs are met in each of these categories. Building pluralistic, multiracial, and feminist bases of people power through which we can transform our towns, cities, communities is central to our work.” Given their economic and caregiving concerns, women have significant self-interest in organizing for job protection, paid leave, and support for home and childcare. Another important issue compounds women’s

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economic concerns: women in the workforce face sexual harassment and sexual assault at alarming rates. Eighty-one percent of women say they have been sexually assaulted or harassed at some point in their life, most beginning at a very young age, and 38 percent of women say they have been harassed at work (Feldblum & Lipnic, 2016; Stop Street Harassment, 2018). A 2017 study found that more than 50 percent of sexual harassment claims were made in the accommodation and food services industry, followed by retail trade, manufacturing, and health care industries (Frye, 2017). These jobs are held mostly by low-income women of color. In 2014, the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United issued a report that “paints a troubling portrait of endemic sexual harassment in the restaurant industry” and noted that 60 percent of their workforce reported harassment (p. 3). Harassment at work frequently has serious financial consequences. McLaughlin, Uggen, and Blackstone (2017) found considerable job turnover and financial stress for women who experienced workplace harassment. They found that eight of ten women left their job within two years of the harassment, and that job change had long-term consequences for their income and career trajectory. Consequently, workplace sexual harassment compounds wage disparity and exacerbates economic injustice for women. Indeed, our findings suggest that organizers often uncover sexual assault, harassment, and domestic violence among their women members. Lucas Benitez, cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, discusses how the organization has focused on this issue as more women have become farmworkers. “This organization was founded mostly by men in a time when Immokalee was 90 percent men; that’s what the demographics were in this town. And today we’ve shifted our work so that much of it is now focused on eliminating sexual harassment in the fields. And sexual harassment specifically, which has mostly affected women, is something that was affecting them daily, and it’s still affecting many women daily. We’re putting more focus toward those issues that have, for the most part, affected women for a long time.” Taken together, the necessity for having a stable livable wage in primarily low-income industries, the stress and burden women face in their caregiving roles, and the degree of sexual harassment and assault women face in low-income jobs and on the home front have propelled women into

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activism. The search for economic security and safety are compelling reasons to join and lead social action organizations, and women have become primary, potent, and visible actors like never before. The traditional social class issues—wages and work—are compounded by issues of gender. The intersection of class, race, and gender becomes clear as organizations choose what issues to take up and what campaigns get priority. WOMEN’S PATHS INTO STAFF ROLES IN ORGANIZING

In some cases, women organizers come from families with a history of activism, others take a course or internship in college or graduate school that captures their interest. These are not new pathways, and four of the female organizers in our sample came to organizing in that way. Others were drawn to organizing from related fields in social services or legislative policy analysis or law. However, three trends strike us as somewhat new. Several of the organizers in our sample came from labor organizing. It is a particularly interesting pathway for the women who did so because labor unions were traditionally dominated by white males. Yet three of our female respondents had labor organizing backgrounds, all coming from more progressive unions or campaigns such as Justice for Janitors. They experienced real differences in making their transition from labor organizing where in the past the focus has primarily been on social class identity rather than race and gender. We can expect to see more women moving not only from labor organizing to social action but from social action into labor organizing. Efforts such as Build the Bench support women in taking on organizing leadership roles. This cohort program was initiated by the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, and co-led by Dr. Sheri Davis and Maria Elva Maldonado, two women associated with the labor and worker center movements. They were responding to a need to train and build relationships among managing directors of organizing networks whose growth in the movement is essential for continuity and the ability to face the complexities of today’s organizing agendas. The majority of those who have participated in this program are women. Another interesting finding was that several women organizers in our sample had been organizing for a long time. When we interviewed them, seven of the women organizers had moved from line organizing into roles

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of increasing responsibility. Nancy Aardema, former executive director of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, had been organizing for more than 30 years. Miya Yoshitani had been doing climate organizing for more than 20 years, and Doran Schrantz, executive director, had been at Isaiah for 13 years. Pabitra Benjamin became the executive director of Adhikaar after organizing for Amnesty International, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islanders Alliance, and the Rights Working Group, among other organizations. There are now women who are career organizers, that is, women whose life’s work is organizing. Several of them have families and have raised children and are still in the work. Given the long hours and multitasking that is characteristic of organizing, and particularly in light of what we know about women’s roles as family caregivers, the longevity of these women is promising. Several organizers from different organizations, both females and males, whom we interviewed had utilized their organizations’ family leave policies either before, during, or after we spoke with them, suggesting that social action organizations today are cognizant of the needs of their workers. Perhaps the most interesting evolution of pathways into organizing is how many of the people we interviewed moved from voluntary leadership positions into organizing. Nine of the organizers in our sample, six of them women, came to their organizations as leaders and later moved into staff positions. Crystal Reyes, program director, had worked with the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition’s youth organization, Sistas and Brothas United, on school safety and success issues as a high school student. Angela Lopez, deputy director, discovered United for Respect while working at Walmart. Although Narbada Chhetri, director of organizing and programs, had experience as an activist in Nepal, she reached out to Adhikaar because of immigration issues she faced while she was working in a nail salon and as a domestic worker. These organizers deeply experienced the issues that the organization was working on—they lived the pain. This trend is possible today because there is a greater potential for people to move from leadership into staff roles than once was the norm. In the past, there was a widely held belief among organizers that leaders and organizers had separate roles, that it was important for organizers to be objective outsiders and that leaders should be insiders who had a real stake in the issues, and that there should be a bright line between the two groups (Mondros & Wilson, 1994; Sen, 2003; Staples, 2001, 2016). It was thought

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that moving leaders onto staff blurred those lines. When that belief held, organizations were usually staffed by men who worked closely with strong women leaders serving in volunteer roles. That view has largely faded, and the change has opened doors for women to move into paid staff roles. Today women have choices; they are no longer relegated to roles as professional volunteers. Organizing offers interesting and local work for women who do not receive recognition or support in their low-income jobs. They come into the organization with self-interest in the organization’s issues, and social action organizations validate their talents and intellect and encourage them to assume important organizational roles. The women who become leaders in the organizations followed that pathway into staff roles. Organizing offers them the ability to work with some degree of schedule flexibility, albeit overly long hours, on issues they care about, and that too, encourages them. Here Angela Lopez, deputy director for United For Respect, explains her transition from a worker with a problem, to leadership, to salaried staff. She refers to Walmart’s Open Door Policy, which allows a worker to bring an issue to any member of management without the fear of retaliation (Walmart, n.d.). I actually came into this through the shop. I was working at Walmart in Florida, and was going through issues at work and so were my coworkers. I didn’t realize it at that time, but I was actually starting to organize in my store around people being written up about production, but then understanding how the stores made it almost impossible for us to do the production that they wanted. So they have this thing called the Open Door, and I would write people’s letters to request Open Door; how their problems with production were not their fault, and I was able to get some write ups dismissed. And then I was facing one and wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to do it or not. And I was like, if they say no on this one, what am I going to do? I started looking online and found the organization that was called United for Respect at Walmart at the time. I signed up and was contacted by an organizer; I was eventually fired for organizing in my store and letting it be known that I was a member of the organization. And so I was targeted. While my organizer and the board were fighting [to get] my job back, there was an opportunity to apply for an organizer in training position. And I came in that way.

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As women become active in the organization, their consciousness, politicization, and confidence grow. For some, having the opportunity to join the staff becomes an important step in their trajectory of growth and empowerment. Catalina Morales, then lead organizer for Isaiah in Minnesota, describes the transformational process she underwent when joining the staff and began organizing a campaign to get driver’s licenses for undocumented workers: When I graduated from high school, DACA [federal program that protects immigrants from deportation] never existed. I graduated from high school in South Dakota, so I wasn’t able to get into a university without a social security number. When I came into Isaiah, I had a lot of guilt and anger. I  thought that everything that had happened to me as an immigrant had been my fault. You didn’t go to school because you could have tried harder, or you were homeless because you didn’t try harder, or your mom didn’t try hard. This whole narrative in this country [is that] you have to do everything by yourself and if not, you’re not worth anything. I had that very internalized. The six months that I had this internship in Isaiah, this whole world had opened up and I was thinking, oh my gosh, this isn’t true! There are all these things that aren’t true, and it’s actually not much our fault. There’s a system. I went through a year and a half process where I just had to shed all this stuff, and I think that’s why I didn’t go to school right away. I thought there’s so much still here about who I am and why I’m doing this work. We were in the middle [of] the driver’s license campaign, which has been the hardest campaign I’ve ever organized. And then, after about a year I became a lead organizer myself, and the other two lead organizers had been running campaigns like crazy throughout the state. The thing within Isaiah is that we’re always taking on roles that [make us think], “I don’t think I can do this, but I’m still gonna do it.”

The organizers who come from leadership certainly understand the importance of their campaigns and of winning victories on issues important to their constituency. But they talk most passionately about how organizing changes their view of themselves, their oppression, their liberation from self-blame and victimization, and their transformation into agents of change. Here again is Catalina Morales from Isaiah describing

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a two-part process: the first involving personal transformation and the second involving the empowerment of a community that works toward instrumental change. My mom was a single mom of three and she was undocumented. Our town, predominately African American and Latino, has never been organized. I think about growing up there and about how much our communities went through. I think if someone would have organized my mom . . . you know? We were homeless for a while. I think someone should have made meaning for my mom of her oppression at that time, and if they would have, things would have been different for years for us. But they didn’t, no one organized us. I think about that all the time because it’s not actually about winning a campaign at first. It’s more about, can you have this person go through a liberating experience of what they’re capable of? If someone would have organized my mom, I know she would have been a top leader. I don’t believe we will get out of any of this unless it’s in community. And that’s what organizing is, it’s essentially bringing a group of people together to fight for this. The alternative message has been can you convince Joe to be the Moses of the people? I actually think that is the biggest mistake we’ve made, when we have left our life and our future in the hands of one person. The biggest example is Obama. Every single Latino person is upset at the elections because Obama [former president Barack Obama] didn’t give them papers. He couldn’t have, and the fact that the campaign even promised that is maddening to me. The reality is there isn’t a Moses. You are your own Moses. But we need a lot of them, and we all need to actually have a strategy together

Some organizers we interviewed see women as organizing differently than men, as less angry, less conflict oriented, and yet every bit as effective. Christian Diaz, a male organizer from Logan Square Neighborhood Association, describes this model and contrasts it to the “rub raw the resentments” approach advocated by Alinsky (1971, p. 116). “A lot of our leadership are women. I think that makes a difference because our organizing isn’t to break other people or to bring other people down in the same way that would describe a lot of Alinsky-style organizing. We organize from a place of love. What that means is when we’re out on the streets,

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we’re not saying, ‘These people are terrible, these people are awful, these people should be punished.’ We’re out saying, ‘We love our community, we love this neighborhood, we love our neighbors, we love our families, and this is our home.’ I think that theme of love is something that helps us succeed.” Being a woman organizer still presents some unique challenges. It remains the case that women organizers are sometimes perceived to be less serious and less effective in doing the work. This stereotype seems to apply to both older and younger generations of organizers. Two very different women organizers, Nancy Aardema, then the executive director of Logan Square Neighborhood Association in the city of Chicago, who has been organizing for more than 30 years, and Tasha Coopinger, who is new to organizing and working in rural Indiana, both describe the experience of being disparaged as women. Nancy Aardema: I’ve been an organizer since 1980 so, of course, as a woman in this business I haven’t been taken nearly as seriously even though I’d be willing to put my work up against almost any other organizer’s work. I think that in our profession we still have a tendency to look at the angry male as the person who should be directing our work. Within the organization, we do most of our work with women, so we are very female focused, and the issues we address—a lot of work in schools with education—are more [about] the moms who have been central and in the forefront. We’re also trying as we go forward to be aware of gender and of those traditional roles for people and [trying to] give opportunities to people. Tasha Coopinger: I think I notice it more with the constituency and the people I’m organizing. It happens with colleagues and organizers as well, but I think more often I just experience it in conservative Indiana reaching out to people, talking with them, and automatically having a certain label or less respect, particularly as a young woman. I’m only 24 years old, and people aren’t ready to take me seriously right off the bat.

Furthermore, as in all industries, harassment of women on the job exists in social action organizations. In 2016, one of the country’s most progressive labor unions—at the helm of the Fight for $15 campaign—fired a supervisor for harassing and promoting women with whom he’d had

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relationships (Lewis, 2017). Carruthers (2018) recounts how the Chicago chapter of BYP100 dealt with a staff member accused of sexual assault. Mark Schultz, formerly of Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota, reflects from the perspective of several decades of organizing: “There has not been anything about assault or abuse in our organization, but I’m sure you’re both familiar with the long list of oppressions that occur in organizations against women.” Despite all the challenges, in general we found that women organizers were excited and fulfilled in their work, and they felt that what they were doing was effective and important, even if it wasn’t always easy. Notably, they could stay in it and make careers out of organizing. WOMEN AS LEADERS

Women leaders proliferate in social action organizations. According to our survey results, 65 percent of the organizations in our sample describe themselves as primarily composed of women leaders. This includes a broad group of organizations from immigrant groups and neighborhood organizations to environmental and economic justice organizations. Felicia Griffin, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action, describes this trend as “very new for our network, which was really rooted in the labor movement, and which included the building trades. The relationships that our founders tried to make with unions and with the trades were very white male dominated. I would also tell you that the trend on the ground locally is that our organizing committees are mostly women. In a lot of our Latino communities, they’re mothers and women with children who are really stepping out to try to make some change and lift their voices.” Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action in Indiana, agrees and describes how training is much more intentional in including feminist theory and language: “I think my organization is 85 percent women. That probably would have been true a long time ago too, it’s just the way organizing works. But I think we talk about it more. We just had a women’s summit where we actually defined patriarchy as a group and talked about what it means to be a woman leader. That feels somewhat new.” Male organizers also recognize the importance of confronting gender issues. Bobby King, former director of policy and organizing for the Land Stewardship Project (LSP), comments on the necessity of confronting

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sexism in the organization: “We’ve just lately started to address gender equity more systematically. It’s always been true for me, and I know it’s true for LSP that the strongest leaders, the core leaders, were usually women. Who knows why? I think one reason [is] they’re less tied into the existing power structure, so they’re less beholden to the existing group of white male power that says, ‘shhh!’ But just living in a society where cis-white male supremacy is the model, unless we organizationally have a way to talk about it and work on it, we can’t really address the problem. That’s not just with our membership, it’s the staff too. We’ve started on that pretty seriously, and it’s tough because it’s what you’re swimming in, you know?” But despite their activism, the organizers articulate many obstacles they face in helping women assume leadership roles. Women often enter the organizational work believing that their role is to be behind the scenes, or that their contributions are not important. Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, comments on women’s initial reluctance to see themselves as leaders: “I know maybe this is a little controversial: I would say that I think the opportunity to lead entices men. The way I’ve enticed women leaders into leadership is to never call them leaders. I feel like the second that title gets thrown out they think ‘Even though I just showed up with 20 people, that’s not me.’ ” In other instances, cultural values require women to be submissive, creating a barrier for women to step into leadership roles. For Pabitra Benjamin, executive director, and Narbada Chhetri, director of organizing and programs at Adhikaar, the Nepali culture in which women are expected to be deferential creates a problem for women assuming leadership. Chhetri describes women in the community as marginalized, “therefore always behind,” and the organization must challenge and counter those cultural beliefs. Family caregiving responsibilities can also be an impediment to women’s participation, but women step into leadership despite these obstacles. Banks (2020) identifies the work of Black women as unpaid collective community work done in addition to unpaid caregiving and housework. In Banks’ view, the community is a site of production, and the emotional ties of Black women to their communities prompts activity and action. Chelsea White, former organizer for Down Home North Carolina, describes the strength of the Appalachian women she works with but adds that the burdens they face frequently constrains their activism: “I come

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from a long line of proud Appalachian women. Appalachian women are very proud because they are holding everything together. They are holding their household together, they are holding the communities together, and a lot of times holding the household’s economy together. What that means is that, unfortunately, a lot of our women come and go as they are able to because they tend to be the first responder in a life crisis. So we’ve seen a lot of women who have been able to step into leadership but who then have been pulled back into their role as the foundation of their life and the lives of those around them.” Several organizers talked about how their women leaders are impacted by issues directly related to gender, including domestic violence, and they note how difficult it is for women to talk about those issues. Catalina Morales, of Isaiah, described an encounter with a leader, and how she patiently worked to help the woman tell her story: Sometimes we don’t make that connection for leaders, even as women. I had a conversation with a biracial woman, and when I had a one-on-one with her, she had mentioned before that she struggled organizing men. And when I asked her why she was doing this work, she only told me she was doing this work because she had two young Black boys and that she was scared that they were not going to have a chance in the school system. I just didn’t believe that—I mean, I was like, that’s it? This isn’t why she’s organizing fully. So I asked her more and more and I kept digging in saying, “I want to know about your experience before you had children,” and it comes out that she had this whole story about [how] she was in a violent relationship [and] her parents were addicts. There were all these stories, and most of them had to do with her being a woman. I do think that the mistake we’re making when we’re talking to people of color is that we automatically assume their oppression is around race, which isn’t necessarily true. And when we’re talking to white people, sometimes we assume that they don’t have a lot of oppression, or sometimes their oppression is around economic oppression only. And, no, it’s a lot about their gender as well.

Organizers say that they must address the issues that hold women back from leadership. Organizations need to counter the messages through political education and build a safe space for women to talk about these issues and to heal. Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and former codirector of Down

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Home North Carolina, is a very experienced organizer. She describes her efforts to build a rural women’s leadership cohort to counter the sexism and violence that women in her state face: Domestic violence plays a really big role in a lot of women’s lives in our communities. But how do we address that if we’re not building separate spaces that are helping women’s ability to thrive and survive. When women are dealing with that kind of crisis, you can’t expect them to be able to just facilitate a meeting and do a phone bank. We’re trying to figure out how to create places for rural women’s leadership, because there’s a lot of issues that women are dealing with that we can’t do in the general space. We’re actually right now trying to build out a rural women’s leadership cohort because so much of our leadership really comes from multiracial rural women. And there are still a lot of dynamics hindering women’s leadership from coming forward. We just have to have different spaces to develop people’s and women’s ability to lead.

One organizer told us a story of a woman who was always late to meetings and whose husband was always present although he never participated. Finally, the woman disclosed that her husband had a gun and was keeping her in the house. The organization’s leaders and organizers figured out how to remove her from the home and create safety for her and the children. The organizer emphasized that this woman’s situation was not an anomaly. When women overcome the barriers to assume leadership, they often do incredibly creative and important organizing. They manifest resilience, determination, creativity, and especially talent in building relationships across race, class, even geography. Andrea Dehlendorf, of United for Respect, told us this story about the work of women leaders in her organization: Our philosophy is really supporting women leaders who have ideas. One of our leaders, Girshriela Green from South LA, had gone to work at Walmart through welfare to work and had gotten involved in our organization. She was on a leave of absence after a workplace injury, doing volunteer organizing online, and was pregnant. She called me one day and told me, “I’ve been talking to all these women around their experiences of being pregnant. I thought it was just me, but it’s all these other people going through the

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same thing. And I’ve been talking to this group of women in Texas, and do you think you would be willing to send me out there because they all want to have a meeting with me about what they can do about it?” So I bought her a ticket. And she goes—a Black woman from South LA to rural Texas to meet with a group of white women. And they come up with this idea called “Respect the Bump”—an initiative to support women dealing with pregnancy discrimination at Walmart. Then we hired her as an organizer to help lead a public campaign—and she did it! It showed us what was possible if we have a lens of supporting great ideas and initiative that come from our base. The leaders she brought together then had their babies, and the issues that they were dealing with started evolving away from just pregnancy to fair scheduling, time off, schedule control, and paid leave. This group decided to do a survey of 1,000 women who worked at Walmart to understand the issues that they’re dealing with and what’s most important. They had a meeting of 25 women to look at the survey results and then pick the core campaign areas that we were going to fight on, and that was how we ended up with a very centralized focus on paid leave, with deep partnership with gender equity groups, and a huge win—600,000 women with paid leave and family leave —a policy that spread across the retail sector.

When women organize and win on issues of flexible work schedules, benefits, and pay, men also profit from these changes. Women may lead it, but everyone benefits. FEMINIST FRAMES AND GENDERIZED ISSUES

Intersectional injustice is at the center of the theory of change for social action organizations today. It is widely accepted that the intersection of race, gender, and class compounds continued and pervasive oppression, powerlessness, inequality, and poverty. Gender disparities are considered a fundamental component of intersectional injustice, but it is not the only factor. Marilyn Sneiderman, a labor organizer for 30 years and now executive director at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization in the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations, explains it succinctly, “I just think you have to tackle inequality in an indivisible way. Unless you do race and gender and class at the same time, ultimately you don’t wind up being successful with anything.”

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Our findings also indicate that organizers are intentionally working to ensure that gender inequality does not disappear within the larger frame of intersectional injustice. Instead, they work to emphasize and focus on the oppression of women within the frame of intersectional injustice. Some organizers report using explicit feminist language to frame the missions and orientations of their organizations. Patriarchy and the privilege of men is central to their understanding of injustice. As we have said, those ideas are then infused in the popular education that organizations offer to leaders and are linked to a broader understanding of injustice. Lauren Jacobs, of PowerSwitch Action, explains her deeply feminist perspective on intersectional injustice: The other piece that we’ve been wrestling with as a network, although we are overwhelmingly women-led [is gender]. We were just at a retreat, and I was going “wow, so few men!” The men are awesome, like really comfortable ceding space and then taking space where it needs to be taken, but not feeling threatened by the fact they were in a room with mostly women. We have a feminist view and a feminist practice of how we do our organizing. I actually think we do believe that there is something to coalition work and women doing it and that there’s something about being a feminist practice about seeing collective power as opposed to individual power. We are really challenging ourselves to stretch and understand how neoliberalism and heteropatriarchy are interacting. One light bulb moment for all of us was when we convened last year with our network and some other folks in the movement around trying to develop a feminist analysis of the economy. Dania Rajendra, who was at Cornell at the time and had been on the board of PRA [Political Research Associates], said, “there is no authoritarianism without patriarchy.” I was like, “Oh, that’s true.” It’s nearly impossible to conceive of a feminist authoritarian state. That is really dependent on the definition of a big man and this very patriarchal view. But I would say that our feminism is intersectional. We do see that by centering the voices of all gender across folks, both those that are women or femme or gender nonconforming and are of color, is our fastest way to liberation because it is those folks who are sitting at the intersection of so much. By centering those voices, we have the best analysis of what’s happening because people actually understand the full complexity of the system.

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Pabitra Benjamin, of Adhikaar, talks about intentionally challenging patriarchy in the very male dominated Nepali community: We’re predominantly women: all women staff, all women board, serve 80 to 90 percent women, right now—this number is always changing. Although we actually serve a lot of male identified people, we just don’t see the men delving as deep into the organizing except around the TPS campaign [to prevent the ending of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants]; that’s been new for us, and it’s been wonderful actually. We were consciously thought of as a women-centered organization. So it was not by accident that it happened, that it’s women doing the work. There are a lot of conscious strategies in terms of why and how we have to challenge the patriarchy within the Nepali community. There are hundreds of associations and organizations just in New York City alone that work in the Nepali community, mostly run by men.

Even when gender is central to organizers’ understanding, it is only part of a larger set of factors of intersectional injustice that render people marginalized and oppressed. As Marley Monacello, staff from the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, argues, “All marginalized people are often deeply interrelated. . . . All violence against women, discrimination against Black people and the LGBTQ community, wage theft—all of those things must be simultaneously uprooted. . . . We would not have had the same success even in addressing violence against women if you see those things as siloed, because then you don’t go to the root cause.” Our findings also indicate an evolution from what might be called traditional women’s issues to genderized issues. In the past, women’s rights organizations took on what were traditionally thought of as “women’s” issues: family planning, abortion access, reproductive rights, advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, welfare rights, and electing women to office. Organizations now address issues across a broader spectrum related to class and race—from health care to housing to land use to gentrification to immigrant rights, and especially workers rights and economic justice—but with a specific gender lens. These are universal issues that have a disproportionate impact on women, affecting women differently and often more severely than men.

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This is a transition away from a focus on siloed women’s issues to embracing issues that apply to many people but have special relevance for women. In this way, the organization both attracts and represents the particular needs and interests of women. In some ways, this is not a transition at all but the continuation of work women have always been drawn toward. The work done with parents in schools by Logan Square Neighborhood Association, Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, and United Teachers of Los Angeles are examples that extend that tradition. Still we see a real surge of feminist activism beyond what might be considered “traditional” women’s issues. Organizers are explicit that this is related to the number of women in the workforce, the importance of their income to their family’s survival, and the many factors that impact the fragility of their family’s well-being. Engaging the spectrum of issues that disproportionately impact women, with the leadership of women, has resulted in a surge of women’s activism on every issue from health care to immigration to gentrification to economic development to bail reform to climate change. When organizations bring a gender lens to these issues, focusing specifically on the impact on women and their families, they employ a form of radical pragmatism in choosing practical issues for change. Although these issues also help men, they are strategically aligned with a feminist ideology. Genderized issues are especially prevalent in the area of worker justice when women, particularly those with children, make up most of the workforce. Adhikaar has pursued campaigns for Nepali women in the nail salon industry. Red for Ed largely represents women teachers but also recognizes that they are community members and parents. This overlap of their identities led them to broaden their demands beyond traditional labor issues such as wages and benefits. Alex Caputo-Pearl, former president and now vice president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, discusses how the teachers’ union has genderized it’s issues: When the district was trying to go for all of their injunctions to stop us from striking, we raised very specifically that it is offensive that a public institution like the LA School District is attempting to curtail the labor rights of an overwhelmingly female workforce and that’s an example of institutional sexism and trying to keep women down. The fact that the charter industry is targeting an overwhelmingly woman workforce, that will result in less union rights by increasing the number of nonunion charter schools, that will result

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in less stable jobs as there’s more and more layoffs because of the incursion of charter schools. For the charter industry to be targeting a workforce that is majority women is an instance of institutional sexism. So we’re very explicit about race and gender in our overall messaging. In terms of strategy, it affects everything from what looks like the big things to everything that looks like the small things. We think representation matters, so having women and women of color on stage at all strike events, leading, showing their leadership is crucial. Having child care at meetings leading up to the strike was crucial. We’re now instituting a chapter to consolidate the victories of the strike and consolidate the new leaders who came out of the strike, many of whom are women of color. We’re instituting a new chapter leader training program that will go throughout the year so we can provide support to new activists, new leaders, who are majority teachers of color and majority women. So it affects every aspect of the work.

Andrea Dehlendorf, of United for Respect, describes how the labor policies of Walmart impact every aspect of women employees’ lives in retail: We started with online advertising aimed to reach women who worked at Walmart. The big issues that came out of the survey were control over schedules, punitive absence control policies, pregnancy discrimination, lack of paid leave. The issues people wanted to take on were issues that had everything to do with people’s experience of being women and caretakers of families. It seemed that there was an opportunity to advance an agenda in alignment with the women’s movement around economic justice as being a central component. When women who work at Walmart are standing up to Walmart around miscarrying a baby in the bathroom of a store because your manager didn’t give you bathroom breaks, you create this David and Goliath story that exposes exactly why you need the policy. It focuses on this big existential battle between corporations and billionaires versus the actual human beings who are doing the work, and they are very human.

Several organizers commented on how economically insecure many households are and how dangerously close to the edge many families live. They are one health care crisis, one rent increase, one job loss, or one deportation away from devastation. Consequently, women have been front and center in the immigration campaigns of Make the Road New York,

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Adhikaar, and Isaiah. They have driven the environmental justice campaigns of APEN, and they have led the brownfield campaigns of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and Hoosier Action. Southerners on New Ground’s (SONG) campaign to end pretrial detention was propelled by the economic hardship caused by poor women not being able to make bail. Mary Hooks, who was SONG’s codirector at the time of the interview, connects their campaign to economic security and explains the thinking behind the Bail Out Black Mothers for Mothers’ Day campaign: When I think about our demands around ending pretrial detention, we know that most people who get caught up and are now sitting in cages [are there] because they can’t afford their bail. And if we can get the boot of the state off of their neck on this particular issue, there are more opportunities. People ain’t able to take a $7.25 paycheck to pay to get out of jail. If we can change that, then there is a likelihood of people not losing their job and losing their economic stability. We did some research and saw that most of the women, particularly Black women, who are held pretrial sitting in jail can’t afford their bond. They are oftentimes single parents and the family breadwinners. And after three days sitting in jail, you can consider your job a wrap. So many of our folks are living in precarious financial situations, and it doesn’t help when the state enacts its vengeance on people and you have folks who sit in jail for a year or two and have not been convicted of a thing—[they] just do not have the money for bail. So part of our work is to highlight those crises. If we’re really serious about making sure that we don’t have children living in poverty in this country, then we need to take a look at this issue of how we are caging people, whether it’s in detention centers, jails, etc.

This trend toward genderized issues rather than siloed issues aligns with the focus on intersectional injustice as an important aspect of an evolved theory of change. LGBTQ+ INCLUSIVITY

Organizers are also grappling with how best to include transgender, gender nonconforming, intersex, and queer people in the work of their organizations. The need to do so is widely recognized by the organizers in our sample. Black queer women have led Black Lives Matter (Carruthers,

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2018; Ransby, 2018) and many social action organizations, including some in our sample, and they have pushed for gender inclusivity. A longtime organizer commented on this trend: “I think the freedom that millennial and young organizers have and the way that they’ve chosen to lead and what they’ve chosen to hold as their demand has been really transformative. The demand, for example, that we center the voices of queer women of color and of trans and gender-nonconforming communities and that we hold access to poor and working-class folks of our organizations as a primary goal. It wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for the incredible queer women of color, especially, who have challenged us to transform our politics not to be more like those who oppress us but to actually imagine a world in which all of us are free.” Several organizers understand and appreciate that the queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming community frequently suffers the worst effects of intersectional injustice. Their abuse extends through various systems including health care, housing, police, prison, education, and employment. The confluence of intersecting systems impacts the LGBTQ+ communities of color the hardest (Dale, 2019). Jade Brooks, former organizer and now political director for SONG, articulates this position and the multiple and persistent ways in which the community faces economic hardship: SONG has been very influenced by the work of the Combahee River Collective statement with the Black, queer feminist lens that looks at what it means when we really center the experience of the most marginalized people in our community: Black trans women, Black women, poor women who are working paycheck to paycheck to pay the bills, LGBTQ parents of color living in Mississippi. Our membership is primarily poor working class, Black people of color, LGBTQ southerners, so a majority of our membership is dealing every day with trying to make do in this world with a huge amount of student loan debt, finding jobs in the gig economy, fighting for health care and trans and queer affirming health care with the capitalist health care system that we have, and living in red states. We don’t live single issue lives, so I do think all those things really matter, and it’s only gotten worse. I think about half of our membership lives in cities. A lot of our progressive cities where we’re trying to organize and get these wins on issues we care about are facing immense gentrification right now, so a lot of our members are dealing with the housing shortage. The housing crisis definitely affects our membership as well.

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The organizers recognize that there is a much work to do to ensure the inclusion of queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people. The work begins with promoting leadership from this population, which several organizers cite as an important first step. Mary Hooks of SONG, describes her organization’s commitment to an inclusive leadership: We see it as a political imperative. I think we saw particularly around 2013, 2014, when you see the Black Liberation Movement begin to come into the mainstream, that there was also a huge leadership gap. And we know that a lot of these social justice organizations and nonprofits lack leadership of trans and gender-nonconforming people. A lot of these organizations are led by a lot of white folks who come in as advocates and not folks who are directly impacted. So we’ve developed programs to make sure that we are creating a leadership pipeline, not just for our organization but as a movement-building imperative, because we need folks all over who are politicized, ready, and can organize their people in communities to engage in the fights for all of our lives.

Promoting leadership of this population, however, doesn’t just happen. It requires a supportive ideology, political education, and creating structures that encourage and develop that leadership. Roberto Tijerina, then codirector of SONG, explains how important it is to create leadership training that supports their development: “I think our challenge is to build ideology. Just because you’re gender nonconforming doesn’t make you radical automatically. That comes with being transformed in the service of the work. So we see it as important to have these different representations of leaders who weren’t traditionally invited to some of the tables and whose leadership wasn’t invested in. But at the same time, it’s not enough to just put people up as tokens. There also has to be an ideology and a politic that is in alignment with the desire to dismantle patriarchy. When you understand how gender-based violence works, it’s important to those who are experiencing this that we have to be able to skill up, train up, and bring folks into the work who are experiencing that too.” Jawanza Williams, director of organizing for VOCAL-NY, who came into the organization as an LGBTQ+ activist on HIV and homelessness, notes the importance of encouraging the voices of LGBTQ+ youth who contend with violent conditions on the streets and in shelters. He notes, however,

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that sometimes the organization doesn’t retain them. Williams accepts their withdrawal as the responsibility of the organization to improve their work with this population, and the need to make a deeper commitment to political education: We have to be able to create spaces in the organization if we’re going to build the kind of power that we need to win where there are trans people who are leaders in the organization. We have trans folks who are members and leaders in this organization. But, oftentimes, what I find is that they don’t last as long, we don’t retain them as long. I think one of the reasons is because we’re having to do both explicitly political work and cultural work in the organization, so that means creating spaces where those conversations happen and creating that carved out space at every meeting. One of the things I tell organizers all the time, and I’m not sure that everybody always does it, is in your agenda you have to always have a political education piece, even if there are decisions that need to be made. We’re never never done with our education.

Many organizations already have active campaigns on issues that are extremely relevant to LGBTQ+ people. Housing and homelessness is a critical area, and several organizations do that work. Eviction and homelessness is prevalent among youth, and both VOCAL-NY and the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition work with LGBTQ+ youth around permanent housing. However, other issues, including immigration and incarceration, also impact the community. Make the Road New York has been organizing LGBTQ+ young people in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn for more than a decade. Jose Lopez, then organizer and now coexecutive director, focuses on how important it is to have that population’s perspective included in the immigration organization’s work. He says, “Every summer during Pride Month, there is a workshop around issues related to our trans organizing committee [TrIP: Trans Rights Immigrant Project], where we talk about the history of Pride, the work our TrIP committee is leading, and how as an organization we can work in solidarity with and see through the lens of what it means to be a trans person of color in New York.” Similarly, in their campaign against pretrial detention, SONG sought to focus on how the issue of incarceration impacts not only women but the LGBTQ+ population as well. That perspective then helps the organization

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both broaden its constituency and highlight those who are often the most impacted. Mary Hooks offers this idea: “I think that we have been able to assert a narrative and have gotten others to align with our narrative strategically about how we understand pretrial and bail, how we understand the ancestral imperative around why we do what we do, which has also helped strengthen other folks’ work across the country and bring a different voice into this conversation around ending pretrial detention, bringing and centering the voices of women, queer, and trans people in the conversation. Issues around criminal justice and mass incarceration usually [focus on] people talking about men, specifically Black men, and no one has really told these stories. You don’t often enough hear how it impacts queer and trans people and women and mothers.” Despite the resolve to organize and engage queer and transgender people, barriers remain. Provincial and culturally conservative populations, older members, and others may not be entirely comfortable with inclusion, resulting in the disaffection of trans and queer people who are less likely to join or stay connected. These organizers are still trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between LGBTQ+ leaders and other community leaders. Zachary Lerner, an organizer at New York Communities for Change, believes that a generational hesitancy may have to be overcome for the organizational leadership to become more familiar and acceptable to one another. He tells us that it’s a slow, careful, intentional process. I think for our members, they tend to be middle-aged or more senior and don’t quite understand . . . gender nonconforming. We’ve done a lot of education with our members on understanding that because they don’t quite get it. They’re just like, “why can’t somebody identify? What do you mean? That’s a she!” I’m like, “No, they identify as ‘they.’ ” And that can also be alienating for many folks who are gender nonconforming. It’s very hard, but I’ve been working on that. That’s becoming an interesting place in organizing today. While a lot of younger folks who are organizing and coming up through the movements, this is something that’s becoming more regular for them, [whereas] a lot of people who have been involved for a lot longer than I have are struggling with some of that. . . . And for our organization, it’s part of our analysis that it’s not just about race, it’s not just about capitalism: it also has to include gender equity, and that includes nonbinary people. We still haven’t done the greatest job of it yet, it’s still a process—but we’re now really

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focused on how we are training and educating our folks on those issues. Because even going back, many of our members were religious, and it took a while even around gay marriage to get people on board. I think there’s this approach where, I guess sort of on the Alinsky stuff, where you meet people where they’re at, and that where our members were at wasn’t always right, which meant that we had to do that work. It eventually led to our members finally supporting gay marriage.

It can be even more challenging when the organization’s constituency holds cultural biases against queerness, and the organizer is gay. Pabitra Benjamin, executive director at Adhikaar, is an experienced Nepali organizer, has worked for several LGBTQ+ organizations, and has a partner and a child. She is also a Dalit, a member of a low caste in Nepal. She describes the Nepali community as both male dominated and culturally parochial, and she was understandably concerned about how she and the leadership would be able to work together. Here she describes how she tackles the difficult tensions around caste and queerness in her organization head on and moves the conversation in Adhikaar to a new level. Caste is such a prevalent part of our society. Everybody always asks what caste are you from, what family are you from? And they’re really asking what’s your caste so I can figure out how to put you in my social stratosphere. Coming from more progressive, queer people of color organizing, it is important that we not address our work as if we are colorblind or don’t see diversity. It’s important to address where we come from, the issues in our society including caste issues, and approach ourselves as whole beings. Understand how oppression has impacted the way we are now and how people get treated. Also with the queerness, I was really afraid to enter the organization being queer. And one of the things I asked from the staff is I can’t do this unless you all have my back. I’m about to have a baby, I have a partner, mom, and my dad—my mom watches our kid. I’ve already done this with my family, so I’m totally confident I have family to back me up. I’ve come out to all of my family in Nepal and here. It’s not a hidden thing for me. I’ve been out in different outlets. So if you all are not 100 percent behind me, then I’m not going to do it. They said, we got you. And they really have, and they really push the community to talk about things by my mere presence of being there,

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and my partner being there. And everybody loves our baby, they call it the Adhikaar baby, and it’s really pushed the conversation in a nonverbal way of acceptance beyond I think even just talking about the issue.

CONCLUSION

We have made several points about the evolution of women in organizing throughout this chapter. First and foremost, we have argued that women are fully engaged in social action organizing in both staff and leadership roles. We have hypothesized that the surge of activism is largely due to women’s presence in the workforce, the need their families have for their income, and their survival need to fight back against the insidious sexual harassment and assault they face throughout their lives, and especially in their workplaces. Second, women, particularly Black women and other women of color, are the new working class. Because of their working-class position, their issues are both common to their social class and distinctive to their gender. This is not an evolution in organizing that pits social class against gender. Instead it is one that articulates and organizes on class and gender issues as they disproportionately impact women. Organizers look for ways to make issues relevant to both social class and gender (as well as race). Organizers use gender frames to explain and persuade others of the relevance of genderized issues. Feminist ideology and antipatriarchy informs and animates the organizing. Radical pragmatism focuses the work on practical issues that women care about, and radical analysis is embedded in their leadership development. It is both education and action. The importance of directly addressing the topics of race, gender, and queerness in these organizations cannot be overstated. The organizers in our sample are committed to “leaning into” these conversations even in the most provincial and culturally intolerant situations: in immigrant organizations, in local neighborhoods, and in red states and rural areas. They are intentional in developing special structures and time for women and trans and queer people to grow in their organizations. They also carefully and persistently add political education on gender to everything they do, so it both supports women and LGBTQ+ community members in their growth and helps reluctant members to grow.

Chapter Five

THE ORGANIZATION AS A POLITICAL HOME AND A VEHICLE FOR CHANGE

We live in a time where people are more lonely and more isolated than they’ve ever been, and the meaning that’s getting made for them is online and at a nonlocal level. We have to rebuild local institutions and reanimate people where they have the most power. That’s why people need a political home. It feels very necessary and very absent for most people. Most people in this country are not organized into something. KATE HESS PACE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HOOSIER ACTION

Social action organizations are sustained vehicles for change and serve as political homes for their constituencies. They have evolved over the years to be more stable and complex, more interconnected, and able to take on the challenges of deep inequality and the avarice of corporations. That these organizations have become a place of support, safety, and belonging is significantly different from the now familiar socially isolated experience of most Americans (Putnam, 2000; Putnam & Garrett, 2020; Skocpol, 2003). Charlene Carruthers (2018) defines a political home this way: “Home is anywhere we belong, where we grow, where we’re challenged, and where we’re in relationship with others. . . . My political home is where I develop as a leader, where I belong with people who share values and vision and who take action for collective liberation” (p. 63). In this chapter we describe how social action organizations build on the basics that have long distinguished organizations that use base building for power from those using other strategies for change. We explore how these organizations intentionally support, love, and care for their members as a core unifying value, provide an alternative to social and political isolation and misinformation for marginalized communities, and in the face of crisis are able to pivot and adapt to respond to both immediate needs and longterm policy goals. Along with the fundamentals we explore throughout this book (e.g., issue identification, leadership development, campaigns,

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strategy, and tactics), the elements of organizations that attract and keep people engaged are vital in understanding how social action organizations shift power through organizing. Social action organizers are clear that winning change requires an infrastructure of strong, well-funded, disciplined organizations with skilled staff and leaders. Although that has always been the case, the need for organizations has been called into question in moments when the higher profile of mobilizing for mass action and the prevalence of online and digital tools have galvanized people and become synonymous with organizing. We begin by examining the debate about the importance of organizations. Engler and Engler (2016) consider the distinctions between movements and organizing and compare the Alinsky (1971) model for organizing with Piven and Cloward’s (1979) movement approach. Engler and Engler (2016) describe Alinsky’s model as the “slow incremental building of community groups  .  .  . focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time” (p. 32). Piven and Cloward (1979) state that their mass protest model encompasses “unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization  .  .  . disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly, draw on participants not previously organized, and leave elites scrambling to adjust to the new political landscape” (p. 32). Engler and Engler (2016) acknowledge that the future may well require integrating these approaches, figuring out the strengths of both and using them in tandem so that outbreaks of protest complement long-term organizing (p. 32). This integration is in fact an aspect of the evolution of organizing that we heard about from today’s practitioners. In our view, when events capture attention and move activism in the streets and online, either planned or unplanned, a strategy of disrupting the status quo is underway, and mass mobilization is often the primary action (Minieri & Getsos, 2007). However, this has not replaced the need for organizations. Later in the chapter, we explore how social action organizations are drawing on the strengths of both mobilizing tactics and the power of their organizations. First, we analyze why organizers are committed to the need for formal organizations as a means of building power, and why the development of

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an organization is an essential element of the theory of change that guides the work of organizing for power. Building power through establishing an intentional political home has the following elements: 1. Understanding the concrete problems that people experience in their lives 2. Welcoming people into a physical or virtual space with others who experience those same problems, which alleviates isolation and creates opportunities to resolve problems 3. Making the connections between problems and their systemic causes 4. Creating opportunities for action so that those who are most impacted take action and make the changes for themselves

We have seen a renewed energy to build organizations in parts of the country that are inundated with narratives of racism and despair. Once organizers were intentionally plunked down into communities not their own, but today the organizers themselves are “going home.” Following the divisive 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, two organizers in our sample founded organizations that connect both to their political beliefs and to a deep understanding of the community. They learned the art and science of organizing in diverse urban settings, in ecosystems of support in which they were not the outliers arguing about politics with their families and high school friends but feminists, strategists, and leaders. In addition, as we have seen, more organizations have pipelines to build their staff from their leadership. Brigid Flaherty and Kate Hess Pace established political homes as an intentional undertaking in rural areas. In North Carolina, Brigid Flaherty, cofounder of Down Home North Carolina, left a well-established role as an organizer nationally in New York City to cofound an organization in the rural communities where her family was living. Relocation of her significant skill set comes out of a period of strategic realignment among progressive organizers following the 2016 election. Brigid reflects on her choice: “What we’re trying to build with Down Home is really a vehicle that genuinely transforms relationships between people and transforms relationships between people in power . . . what we’re trying to do is literally create a home, a vehicle. . . . We wanted [Down Home] to be a place of belonging, a place where family comes in, a place where we’re really valuing each other from a place of humaneness and rebuilding relationships.”

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In Indiana, Kate Hess Pace’s organizing pathway was part of a similar shift. She was trained as an organizer in Minneapolis but recognized that “this is a decades-long struggle that we’re in,” so she returned to her home state and founded Hoosier Action. She summarizes how she approached establishing a culture in the organization that she knew would be needed, in the place that she herself called home: We have to build community in tandem with building power. Our membership needs to be identity forming and a part of who people are, it needs to be a space that meets felt needs, spiritual needs, as well as winning material needs for people, and also tells a different story and makes different meaning out of what has happened to this part of the country. Being in this organization fulfills multiple needs for people, and isn’t just a transactional political act. Especially where I am, and in a lot of rural communities, there’s almost what feels like complete institutional collapse. I feel like the role of an organization is actually more necessary, even as I see [that] it looks different than it did 40 years ago.

Next we explore how organizations implement a theory of change that relies on commonly held experiences and sustained, intentional efforts. THEORY OF CHANGE: WELCOMING PEOPLE INTO TRUSTED SPACES

To examine how the theory of change now encompasses developing organizations as political homes, we turn to Deborah Axt, former coexecutive director of Make the Road New York. She speaks directly to the role of the organization in members’ lives and the importance of intentionally and physically welcoming people: Our theory of change is that we absolutely need to build people’s organizations led by the folks most impacted by oppression, discrimination, and poverty, and that we do that by building spaces that feel like home. We do that by inviting people in as their full selves—as moms and dads and sisters and workers and tenants—and inviting them to come and connect with

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each other in a deeply emotional and sometimes spiritual way so that we can become our courageous, most powerful, most brave selves. Then we can go out into the streets and pick fights with folks in real power and be able to disrupt power being wielded against us. On the most nitty gritty level that involves creating inviting spaces. Our offices are really inviting spaces that people talk about as their second home. Most of our staff and members say things like, “I first fell in love with Make the Road on this day when I came in looking for help with something.” Our offices have bright colored awnings and murals, and there’s always someone cooking rice, beans, and chicken in the kitchen as you walk in the door. There are a lot of shared meals, shared art, music and ways to connect with each other in a really deeply cultural and personal way. We combine that with analysis of the systems that need to be changed, the rules of the game that need to be changed, and the recognition that we’re all going through very similar and very brutal circumstances that require us to attack the root problems.

Today’s organizations, whether they be in urban neighborhoods, industries, or rural regions, also serve as political homes for members that resonate with their commonly held experiences. The organizations foster deep and meaningful connections among members, becoming trusted spaces where people who experience common issues can join, think and grow together, safely challenge each other, participate, lead, and where, in times of need, they can turn for reliable assistance and support. The deep connections, a sense of home, and as we heard in some way from everyone we interviewed—where they win—are the attributes that make social action organizations trusted places. Organizers have a fundamental understanding of the impact of isolation and loneliness in our world, and for marginalized communities in particular (National Institute on Aging, 2019; Pantell et al., 2013; Samuel et al., 2014). The trusted space of a social action organization is designed to counter the isolation and discrimination that people directly impacted by unjust systems endure every day. The organizations intentionally promote the forging of relationships based on common cause, community, inclusiveness, and dignity, and reject the dominant messaging that serve a divisive political agenda. In these organizations, people are encouraged to redefine themselves, demand their legitimate rights, and transform themselves into political actors.

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Mary Hooks, former codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), describes how organizing LGBTQ+ people of color in the South seeks to break isolation as part of its core mission. SONG’s members and leaders describe their approach to empowering people who are most directly impacted by injustice as being “closest to the fire.” Hooks says: “So many queer folks live in isolation, and even more so if they live in rural communities where they choose to stay. So I think that there’s a part of ‘getting to the fire’ where we talk about SONG as being a political home, and what it means to find your way into this political home to build what we call a kindred network.” Organizers are acutely aware of how their organization’s constituents are targeted with misinformation and divisive political messaging. Many organizers speak to the role of social media and right-wing talk radio in shaping people’s understanding of their options and choices, compounding their sense of isolation. The presence of formal social action organizations counters this with information about rights, resources, and communities of support. Brigid Flaherty, of Down Home North Carolina, explains that in the rural places where they are organizing there is “real isolation between groups of people who are experiencing similar conditions of poverty, experiencing similar conditions around oppression, and they’re actually both geographically and socially divided . . . [the social action organization has] got to be a place where those relationships are being formed and then also the analysis and the worldview and the skills building that is required to then take that group of people who have built deep trust, genuine relationships, and get them into fighting these systems of [oppression based on] race, class, gender.” In response to the realities of isolation and high levels of need, organizations today frequently view legal and other support services as necessary components of base building and leadership development. Services provided were once considered either completely outside the purview of a power-building organization or were designed as incentives to bring people into the organization rather than as a response to a need. But today organizers explain how addressing immediate needs not only provides an entry point that brings people through the door but also is a way for the organization to have an ear to the ground on issues. Providing needed

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services forges a working relationship with members who can articulate the problems they share, and it can help to establish a base of infrastructure funding for the organization. Leaders who have a concrete support system within the organization can remain involved when they face challenges in their lives. Getting what they need from the organization builds the essential trust that connotes a sense of home. Pabitra Benjamin, executive director of Adhikaar who organizes Nepali immigrants in New York, describes this as a cycle: “The simple way for us to talk about our theory of change is that we work from serving the needs of the community, to politicizing people’s awareness of what those needs mean in this society, and how we can be agents of change. Therefore, people can become agents of change to not only get the services they need to address these horrible things that are happening, but to actually change them systematically we have to move into organizing and advocacy. I say it like that but really it’s just the cycle of services, political education, organizing, and advocacy. It’s a cycle.” Benjamin offers an example from Adhikaar in which the organization weaves together political education and what are traditionally English as a second language (ESL) services: “Instead of calling it ESL, we call it English for Empowerment. You’re teaching people the real words and language set that they need from beginners to advanced to both be in the industries that they’re working in to navigate New York City, but also in terms of understanding government and civic engagement.” We often heard in our interviews that social action organizations are now intentionally designed to buffer difficulties that their members experience in their lives. As Benjamin’s example suggests, social action organizations are not service providers who see clients in need of help but rather social action organizers envisioning potential members and leaders who need power. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic many of these organizations also functioned as or pivoted to become mutual aid organizations, providing access to information and connections to needed support. For example, Community Voices Heard (2020) issued a statement from their board of directors: “We are continuing to build power, while also providing the mutual aid that is critical to our communities during this crisis. Some examples of this work over the last three weeks include: our continued

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work to get New Yorkers to fill out the Census; our new partnership with Red Rabbit/World Kitchen to provide food delivery to NYCHA [public housing] residents, particularly those living in senior housing; our recent success, along with Housing Justice for All and Right to Counsel NYC, in getting a moratorium on evictions in New York City and our fight for a rent freeze in New York State and a meeting with U.S. Senator Charles Schumer about how to ensure the various phases of the federal stimulus is inclusive of the most vulnerable.” Adhikaar (2021) also had a COVID-19 community response plan: “In all this, we continue to do what we do best—be present and accessible to our community, respond to immediate needs, fight for what our members deserve, and build power with our members and allies. From support and services on unemployment, housing, food or medical supplies to emergency relief funds, we are responding daily to the everyday shifts of this pandemic.” The pandemic moved them to recognize their community as frontline workers as they provided support, resources, education, and adapted to their changing needs. Whether in crisis situations or the daily work of community action organizations, building power and leadership skills while ensuring members have their basic needs met continue to be vital to each organization’s work. The organizations work to destigmatize people’s needs and their experiences. Each member is viewed as capable of creating change within themselves and in the systems with which they interact. It is a model sometimes used by settlement houses (Brady & Tchume, 2009). Case examples by Jose Lopez from Make the Road New York and Jawanza Williams from VOCAL-NY describe how organizations break down what had previously been a firewall between service and organizing. We believe this is, in part, a response to the explicit goals that have evolved to build power with people who are marginalized and the gaping racial and gender inequities. Jose Lopez, then organizer and now coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, describes how the relationship between service and organizing is essentially the model for their work. In addition to its significant track record of policy wins, the organization offers legal services and various forms of direct support for navigating the housing and social service systems. With a primarily Latinx immigrant community, they also have programs that focus on youth and on LGBTQ+ members.

JOSE LOPEZ: MAKE THE ROAD NEW YORK’S ORGANIZING AND SERVICE MODEL We’re dealing with a population that has really high needs and especially in the communities that we’re working in folks are being bought out, priced out, or harassed out of their units on a day-to-day basis. The organizing work is a lifestyle for many of us because it’s not like we can clock in at nine, clock out at five, and be done. Folks from the community are texting us, calling us all the time asking for support. The hybrid model that we have here, connecting organizing and services, we do exceptionally well because we understand that there’s a need right now. And while we’re addressing that need right now, we also understand that we have to eliminate the need for the service in the first place. That’s where organizing comes in. Our model works this way: You walk into our door because your landlord is harassing you and you heard of Make the Road either because we were doing street outreach or you saw something in the news or maybe your neighbor said, “I went into this organization and received some support from a member of this organization.” You might walk into our office and say, “Hey, I heard from a friend that you guys helped a tenant with this need, and this is the same need that I have. I need to talk to an organizer or an attorney. My landlord is trying to buy me out, has not renewed my lease, is allowing my unit to fall into disrepair, and there’s nothing that I’ve done so far that has gotten my landlord to move so I need some help.” Even though you might have a legal case, and we have a sizable legal team in-house, the first thing that won’t happen is connecting you to the service, even if that’s the call that you’re making to us. When you walk into the office, the first person you’re going to talk to is our receptionist, who was trained and is in constant contact with organizers and lawyers and really understands our system. And that person at the front desk is going to ask you how you heard about the organization, what brings you in, and what the need is. The first connection we make is not to legal services, even if the person says, “I need access to an attorney.” The first connection we are going to make is to one of our organizers in the office. Then the organizer is going to be your second point of contact after reception. (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) All of our organizers are trained to do 25 to 30 minute agitational intakes. For example: I’m going to ask you a series of questions and get to know you a little bit, understand your needs, and make sure that I know whether or not we offer the kind of service you’re seeking. But at the same time, my job as an organizer is to ask you the question that I just kind of laid out. We can help you, and this will be something that we can maybe tackle over the next few days, weeks, or months. But the reality is, as an organizer, I see people like you walk into this office every single day with the same concern and it’s no longer an individual problem; we think that it’s a community issue. While we’re willing and able to offer you a service to address your need, we’re asking if you’re willing and able to address this overall problem that we see in our community, in our city, in our state, and whether you’d be interested in having a second-round conversation. I’m going to connect you to the lawyer. But I’m asking whether you’d be interested in meeting some members, having a second conversation with me, maybe coming to our next tenant meeting so that you can see how there’s so much need, and that the problem isn’t really giving you a service to address your need right now but changing the system so that in two years you’re not back in this office making the same request. How do we fix a broken system? And in order to do that, we need your help and your support. We’re going to get you what you need, but I’m asking if you’re going to be down to rock with us and build local power with us, challenge the status quo with us, push elected officials with us, and really change the dynamic we’ve been facing—depending on the issue—for the last 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years. That kind of conversation is the one that we want to have with folks so that they know, “cool, I’m at least down to come and check out the tenant meeting. I’m at least down to come and have another conversation with you and maybe meet some other community members.” If we can get them into that second space and we’re running strong meetings and doing the followup and being good organizers, what we’ve seen based on our work is that we’re pretty successful at getting them both to come that second time and that third time and that fourth time so that they can be connected to something that’s bigger than just their individual case.

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And it doesn’t mean a crazy commitment. Organizationally, we define an active member as someone who is partaking in two activities a month. A meeting is two hours: that could mean coming to two meetings a month, that’s four hours a month of your time. That could also mean coming to one meeting a month, and then going to do a local phone bank that might be 30 minutes or an hour of time on a specific campaign or to invite tenants to come to a future meeting. It could mean cooking for the committee meeting because we offer hot meals at every single meeting. Any of those things count as an activity. We have folks who come to meetings, but we have other folks who maybe can’t because of their work schedule. They plug in another way and provide support and become active members in that way. But yeah, we want to be sure that we’re not just offering a service without really honing in on how that isn’t going to change current conditions.

Jawanza Williams describes how VOCAL-NY does not call its work “service” even though they offer help to both people who are homeless and those with substance abuse problems. Instead they bring people into “unions,’’ a term which communicates a message of normalization, unity, and power. Rather than therapy groups, they offer popular education about the political and economic conditions that undergird homelessness and addiction. They provide treatment and concrete support but also organize around their members’ needs and interests to create systemic change. Williams, the director of organizing of VOCAL-NY and formerly homeless himself, describes how they work with people who are living in homeless shelters.

JAWANZA WILLIAMS: BUILDING UNIONS AMONG DIRECTLY IMPACTED MEMBERS We have a leadership team that is made up of people who are active and formerly homeless New Yorkers, and they are the decision-makers for those campaigns. There’s a distinction made between an analysis about what should happen for homeless New Yorkers and what resources we use to campaign around. Also there’s an understanding of the framework with which VOCAL (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) presents its worldview. And under that we have to find those people, and they have to be developed as leaders. Every two weeks leaders convene and do campaign decision-making around the issue of homelessness. It’s called the New York City Homeless Union. We’re doing our regular outreach. We meet folks at soup kitchens or outside of shelters, wherever you might find people experiencing homelessness. We find those folks, and we try to help folks understand that homelessness is not just about failing to pay the rent. It’s a political phenomenon that we need to address on a political basis as well. Sure, there’s the immediate needs that you have, but there’s a whole robust infrastructure that exists in the world to help people find housing. But the reality is that there is no housing to be found. If there’s no money to be had to be able to pay for housing, then we have to address this issue from a political perspective. So organizers move people they meet in the community experiencing crisis to a New York City Homeless Union meeting so that political education can happen. In that meeting, we’re able to do three things: 1. Explore issue identification to keep our finger on the pulse of what people who are homeless are experiencing right now. What do they actually care about? What do they need? 2. Present our worldview about how homelessness is a political issue rooted in all the ideologies and “isms” that I have mentioned. 3. Identify potential leaders from that community. It’s also used as a leadership development space for leaders who are on the Homeless Union Leadership team. Ideally these folks facilitate those meetings or have large leadership roles in those meetings so people are able to see examples of how it’s done. And the organizer’s job is to consistently convene that space to be meeting people in the world and creating the conditions where people are able to make those connections. And then you have got to move people to action. So it’s meeting people, presenting this worldview. I call it the Organizer’s Formula: “engagement + action = retention.” The rule is that you can’t just convene people to talk about what they’re experiencing. We don’t want people to bleed in public, but we’ve got to get people to understand how society is failing them, who is responsible, and who can give us what we want. Then we’ve got to move them to action, even if it doesn’t fit into existing campaigns. You have to get people to act on the anger and the hope that we’re trying to inspire, or pull it up out of people.

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These case examples demonstrate how social action organizations that provide services intentionally do so in ways that ensure people have the opportunity to see their own needs in relation to shared experiences, root causes, and social policy. Organizers once maintained a list of referrals for the kinds of needs described in these two case studies, but now many organizations structure alleviation of those problems into their organizing strategies. Responding to a need for help in a direct, respectful, and empowering way can be the opportunity to welcome someone into what will become their political home for building power and taking action. In the next section, we examine how this has also moved organizations to be explicit about how love and shared values underlie their ability to be successful in this complex approach to making change. THE MOTIVATING FORCE OF LOVE

The evolution of organizing is deeply impacted by identifying and underscoring love as a force for change. When organizers talk about their organizations as vehicles for transformation, they often point to a shift from being driven by anger to being motivated by love (Poo, 2010). Jeremy Saunders, coexecutive director of VOCAL-NY, states: “We want to replace the issues with a politics of love and compassion. VOCAL is not just here to organize around this politic; it’s literally the political home for this group of people.” Home is where love is found, exchanged, and strengthened. Externally, it is foundational to interactions with the world. A message of love is used politically to counter the dominant narrative of division. Nat Chioke Williams, executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, which supports youth and Black-led organizing nationally, comments: “It’s not a gooey type of love. It really is a fierce love that fundamentally recognizes the limitations that society has put on the human state of being and realizes that there is something more that we all deserve to be and to have.” We see this shift in both geographically centered organizations and more industry or network-based initiatives. At Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago, staff remain for long periods of time, women are lifted up as leaders, and there has long been a commitment to bringing community members into staff roles—all toward creation of a political home and a vehicle for change. Nancy Aardema, former executive director, underlines this, reflecting on the ethos of love at

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the core of these commitments: “We’re very clearly trying to have love be the bottom line as we organize, no matter how angry we are.” She describes how this is structured into the functioning of the organization: “We also have a theory of change that does a lot of organizing and training with people about who they are. We start a lot of our organizing training, not about injustices but about who you are in relation to yourself and to others. It’s really a lot of prep work that has to do with self-awareness and self-love.” Hugh Espey, executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, has been organizing for decades in Iowa and reflects: “I think we, as an organization, are talking more openly about love and community. It’s not just ‘fight, fight, fight.’ Yes, it is ‘fight, fight, fight,’ for what’s right, but it’s also recognizing that the reason we’re doing this is because we love. Everything we do is based in love.” Espey’s perspective reflects something we heard often following the 2016 election: love emerged as the context for organizing because hate was so rampant and destructive. Organizations are intentionally countering the narrative of hate used by the extreme right, which may be an important messaging strategy, especially in white rural areas. Espey said: “I think the challenge is . . . this hate and fear and division. We’ve seen it before in the 80s and the 90s, [but] it just seems to be exacerbated now. It’s on steroids. Why is some of this rhetoric and this speech so hateful? That’s the challenge, and it forces us to respond in a powerful way, in a substantive way. We’re stronger when we’re together, we’re better, and we’re going to stand up for each other and with each other. It forces us to lift that up and to talk about love.” Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and former codirector of Down Home North Carolina, reflects on how love is used to mitigate the isolation that so many organizers talk about as well as to recognize fundamental human dignity. These are essential to base building and ultimately to building power: “So much of what an organizer’s role is actually is telling someone that they’re worth it and hugging them when no one else touches them, or picking up the phone even when their dog has died and they can’t pay the cremation bills, which is a call that I had to do with a member a couple of weeks ago. They had no one else to turn to. . . . I think ending that social isolation, ending that pain that comes with inequality and the ways that it damages the soul, I want Down Home to make a difference in the way people see themselves and know that they’re loved and know that they’re worthy.”

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Angela Lopez is the deputy director at United for Respect, which for nearly a decade has been building the leadership of those on the front lines of retail to institute workplace changes at America’s largest corporate employer, Walmart. Victories there, such as raising the starting wage, have rippled across the industry. She echoes how even in an organization in which leadership and community building can be more dispersed, there is still a sense of loving support for one another at the core: “We develop this sense of community, love, and trust, and people [members] feel like it’s something that they need to do, that they need to stand with the other people who are putting themselves out there.” This recognition of how love connects with community building and trust reflects the evolution of organizations as political homes. Next we explore how this approach fuels their ability to serve as vehicles for power and change. THEORY OF CHANGE: BUILDING VEHICLES FOR POWER

Social action organizations are welcoming and responsive to the problems and the need for human connection that people bring, but their primary purpose is to be effective in addressing shared issues and systemic causes. Jawanza Williams and Jose Lopez both described the importance of winning on the issues that brought in members. Taking action with others and seeing results is a new experience for most people who get involved in organizing for the first time. Social action organizations are primarily vehicles to find, engage, support, track, train, and elevate those directly impacted members who need power and who have to live with the outcomes of the organization’s successes and failures. They must build power. As Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minneapolis, explains: “Our theory of change is that people have to be connected to vehicles to build their power. And that people having more power is essential to how change has to unfold.” Mary Hooks, formerly of SONG, maintains that power building is necessary for LGBTQ+ people in the South for whom SONG has become a political home, a home that spurs action and functions as a vehicle for change. The organization is explicit that a goal is to alleviate the social and political isolation its members are experiencing, not only in acting to meet their localized needs but in understanding and connecting with others around common goals. SONG’s purpose is building “the righteous power

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of everyday people and the natural leadership that we find in our communities . . . to train up, skill up, and support folks in building the tools and the analysis to advance a social justice vision. . . . But then there’s the practical ‘getting closer to the fire’ of ‘I want to make this my political home, not just in building kindred, but I want this to be where I am rolling out my political work as well.’ And this is what it looks like in that community, and we want to do it in collaboration with SONG’s broader regional vision.” Social action organizations also become a lifeline for those who live in hostile environments because of their immigration status, race, sexual orientation, or in red states, those with differing political views. Brigid Flaherty, from Down Home North Carolina, describes the complexity of their multiracial base building for power and the focused urgency she believes is needed to change the politics of North Carolina. Flaherty states that she wants to build the “we” that Putnam and Garrett (2020) recommend: We need to build a multiracial working class “we” in rural communities if we’re ever going to have any hope of having progressive change. And you have to be looking at building that multiracial working class “we” in rural communities and bridging it with urban organizing in order to have true state power. Our strategies have been leadership development, strategic campaigns, and political organizing, political change. On the leadership development side, a lot of what we’re trying to do is really make sure that we have Black, white, and Brown leaders coming together in deliberate trainings and with real analysis to learn how to see each other, learn how to trust each other, learn how to both be leaders in themselves and see each other through a process that strengthens people’s ability to see their humanity that will get us to a stronger place of that multiracial working-class “we.” The issues we choose have to touch Black, white, and Brown workingclass communities. Issues of health care, mass incarceration, and the overdose epidemic; these are issues that all of our members are feeling that they’re basically calling for because it came from them. And then again, on the political side of things, our people need to be empowered. Our people need to be running our local governments and our state governments and get to the federal government if we’re really going to see policies that reflect the needs and the experiences of our base. I will say this, I take a very (c)4 PAC heavy language around our political work, but

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we’re trying to have governing power and trying to get our people elected. Because again, that’s the only way we think we’re going to have any chance at winning on some of these issues. We have to change who’s in power now and put in our people.

Flaherty’s description outlines the many levels at which organizations need to operate to be sustained vehicles for change. She and her collaborators cofounded Down Home as a 501(c)(4) political organization and then developed an affiliated 501(c)(3). In chapter 8, we explore how the pursuit of power increasingly requires organizational mechanisms that go beyond the nonprofit 501(c)(3) structure. The stakes are high, and organizing is evolving to meet current challenges. Developing affiliated political organizations is, in a sense, another indication of the importance organizers place on building institutional strength. This approach allows the organization to accept tax deductible donations and foundation and government support for their 501(c)(3) work, conduct electoral work under their 501(c)(4) auspice, and support election campaigns with their PAC (see chapter 1). In this context, empowerment reflects the complexity of what it takes to build and sustain transformational change. Organizers talk explicitly about empowerment as putting governing power into the hands of members. Functioning as a strategic vehicle for power is the fundamental and longstanding work of a social action organization. The organizational model that arose from the Alinsky tradition grew from his experience with labor unions and relied on existing local institutions such as churches as the anchors in communities (Miller, 2015a). Social action organizations drew and activated a base of leaders from these anchor institutions. The thinking was that in a church congregation, for example, clergy and lay leaders played necessary roles in sustaining that institution, affording them a baseline set of leadership skills. The institution itself had an influential position in the community and an understanding of its interests that could be activated to win social and political change. Using this approach, social action organizations could draw from an existing base of leaders and expand the training and political understanding of individuals and the institution (Miller, 2015a). This strategy has evolved significantly as the role of institutions in people’s lives has changed. Organizers today construct new types of organizations, what some call “containers,” that hold their increasingly complex work with individuals from diverse points of entry and with many different

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affiliations. The organizational container holds and represents the collective power. Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect, describes how the organization is both using and transforming some of the key advantages of traditional base-building models to meet their ambitious goal to deeply and irrevocably, as she puts it, “change the rules of the game.” Her perspective includes a recognition that workers in Walmart and other retail outlets are not passive and are in fact looking for vehicles for change through which they can exercise their power: “There is a tremendous amount of energy and potential of folks who are really, really angry and motivated, yet the kind of containers that exist in more traditional organizing models are not quite able to harness and catalyze that and translate it and bring people in.” In addition to needing to devise new ways to channel people’s anger into sustained vehicles for change, United for Respect connects and bonds people nationally to move the retail industry. Dehlendorf emphasizes that this starts where people are: Our theory of change is that it requires a different kind of organization than what we have traditionally had in the progressive movement. There’s a Bob Moses quote from his time at SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement] that’s about, “as an organizer, you’re not creating the organization and the network, you are connecting deeply within those communities and helping people become more organized where they already are.” That’s our model, that it’s not about we just need to go out and tell people that there’s an organization that they can join that is working on the issues that they’re talking about, but rather how do we get in there with people and help actually strengthen and build new ways of connecting that is actually more effective at helping people accomplish what they have energy around? It’s not like, “here’s my container, come join it,” but rather “let’s embed with you and work with you where you are around helping leverage that to be more effective.” How do you aggregate, connect, and create pathways that take people from where they’re expressing all their rage, energy, hopes, dreams, and then channeling it into how do we actually create a mass cadre of leaders and activists?

Recognizing the complexity of their goals, United for Respect uses innovative tools such as the WorkIt app to draw people into a relationship

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with the organization (Snider, 2016; also see chapter 9). With its mix of forward-thinking technology tools, social media, and face-to-face engagement, United for Respect operationalizes the elements of a new type of organizational container, one with a wider reach that remains embedded locally; this is a political home that goes beyond the traditional neighborhood organization. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INSTITUTIONALIZED POWER AND MOVEMENTS

Doran Schrantz, whose work with Isaiah in Minneapolis engages faithbased institutions and their members, analyzes how movements and organizations intersect and how organizations function as containers: “In the context of longer term social change, I think the role of an organization is that it is a container. It becomes a reservoir that, sometimes, social movement energy will move through, but there’s a reservoir that can hold the memory of that social movement and some of the capacity of it moving forward. The forward movement and the capacity looks like people, but it also looks like analysis, intention, and implementation in both the legislative policy systems change and electoral political change.” Schrantz explains the need to frame the work of organizations as institutionalizing power for change: “There is something very important about having institutionalized power. If you don’t have institutionalized power, you just really can’t sustain either the wins that happen or move on a longer term trajectory. There’s a sense of being on a long-term arc, having an analysis of the corporate conservative movement and institutional power, and how we are building something to counteract that and to move our own agenda forward. I just don’t see how you do that without organizations.” A social action organization builds power as it intentionally builds a sense of home, with the holistic elements of love, trust, and community that we’ve described. It fosters a space in which impacted community members can learn: where they can talk about, assess, and analyze their power; exercise new ideas and skills; and hold one another and the staff accountable for their actions—all tools toward building essential institutional power. Schrantz maintains that this foundational power is needed “to change structural power, to have a longer term memory, to have a strategy over time, to build an ecosystem as opposed to just building an organization, to

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build a field, to capture energy that emerges that you don’t control, people need long-term political homes.” One essential component of a social action organization that Doran Schrantz references is accountability, which is built into the infrastructure and culture of every organization in our sample and is generally not associated with mass mobilization strategies. Maurice BP-Weeks of the Action Center for Community Empowerment (ACRE), an organization that supports power-building strategies and campaigns at the intersection of racial justice and Wall Street accountability, describes this concept: “I’m a member of several organizations, and I lead an organization myself. Even in the organization I lead, I can’t just go rogue and do whatever I want. I actually have other people who I’m intertwined with who have opinions and thoughts and have to implement things I do, and I can’t just decide something politically and start running. That’s really unhealthy. I actually don’t want to do that. I don’t want to just sort of have an idea and that will be the politics forever. When we aren’t accountable to anyone, I think it creates this very ego-driven movement that is not good for any of our longterm work. A huge part of this work is who you’re accountable to, and what are the ways in which you’re accountable.” In social action organizing, there are no free agents. Staff and leaders act on behalf of the organization and represent the collectively held goals, objectives, and ideology of the organization. They are accountable to each other (see chapter 6 for a discussion of how accountability is structured into organizational practices, including decision-making). Nancy Aardema, then executive director of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, summarizes how accountability defines the very nature of an organization: “I think the role of an organization is the continuity . . . you’re in an accountable organization where people are holding each other accountable, you don’t have Lone Ranger perspectives.” And Maurice BP-Weeks specifically notes the comparison between organizations and movements, in terms of accountability: “That’s not at all to say that very loose formations or mass groups of activists haven’t really made amazing change and done lots of great stuff. . . . But, if we’re actually going to institutionalize any change or get governing power or run longer term campaigns that are not just flash points, I just do not see that happening without actually having an organization, and that folks are accountable to each other in some way.”

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The ways in which organizers and grassroots leaders today understand the complexity of and relationship among movements and organizations marks a deep evolution of the field. We heard this from red state organizers, East and West Coast organizations, new organizers, and experienced architects for social change. Given the emphasis organizers place on the importance of a strong and disciplined organization as a vehicle for power, it is interesting that much of the social science literature generally disregards organizations as a variable for study. McAdam’s (1998) seminal work on resource mobilization treats existing institutions such as community businesses, professionals, and newspapers as the resources for mobilization but doesn’t discuss the role of movement organizations. Della Porta and Diani (2006) summarize how the literature on social movements looks at the overall movement as the push toward change rather than the organizations within it. They describe organizations associated with movements as “grassroots” and beholden to funders and ideology. These perspectives are in contrast to viewing strong social action organizations and the combined power they wield when they come together in coalition, collaboration, or via networks as the means to change. That view is represented by Mike Miller (2015a), writing that “small ‘d’ democratic and highly participatory mass-based organizations are the tools with which the vast majority of the people can claim the power that is rightfully theirs” (p. 30). The organizers have a lot to say on this topic. Marilyn Sneiderman, who directs the Center for Innovation in Worker Organizing at Rutgers University, reflects that when it comes to labor issues in particular, in which impacted workers are trying to move entire sectors, “we need to have both the organization and the movement feeling.” She says: “I do think movement without organization can’t sustain itself. But organization without any movement will never grow.” In addition to sustaining movements, organizations ensure that hardwon gains have long-term impacts. Miya Yoshitani, former executive director, now senior strategist, of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in California, states that “there’s a role for decentralized action, but for us to have effective social movements, formal organizations are still critical and not just like, ‘yeah, they should exist,’ but more like, without them our movements don’t hold, don’t retain, and don’t grow the power that is necessary for change on a systemic level.”

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Gabe Strachota, former organizer with Community Voices Heard, which organizes low-income New Yorkers on a range of issues, told us that at times, particularly when mobilization is high profile in response to events, “there’s a desperation to mobilize people and get anyone who they can get together in a room. That can have pretty disastrous impacts at worst, and even outside of total disaster, it’s just not a foundation that you can continue to build a strong organization on.” Marshall Ganz, the Rita T. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, describes the pull of mobilization in relationship to the impact of building sustained vehicles for change: “Technology has facilitated mobilizing, and people confuse numbers with impact. The appeal of, ‘oh, we’re gonna get a million.’ But it’s not even an inch deep. All it does is spend down what you have, it doesn’t invest in building anything new, in building power really. It doesn’t shift power much at all. That’s a particular challenge that I think we have in reestablishing organizing as fundamental to our politics, to our social movements, to our civic organizations and all the rest.” Although mobilization and the kinds of spontaneous numbers increasingly fueled by technology tools may be associated with a policy change, the deeper work of organizing to achieve the longer-term objectives requires organizations. Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, a national network of community-labor organizations, references the success of winning marriage equality in the United States as an example of the interrelationship between movements and organizations: Huge momentous change happens via movements, but established formal organizations, with bylaws and a budget and funded staff, can create the conditions and lay the groundwork for movements to be able to take advantage of moments. . . . Formal institutions provide training, research, the luxury of time that gets you an analysis—a lot of the points of leverage and where power is concentrated—and then it lays the groundwork on which movements have the ability to take advantage of that foundation. Marriage equality was a back and forth between the formal institutions and movements, but you could see a very strong interplay of both: Some things broke spontaneously and some things were clearly a lot of detailed work of formulating a legal framework and a strategy that were rooted in formal institutions.

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Doran Schrantz, from Isaiah, also holds a steadfast view of the importance of institutionalized power and comments about the interplay between organizations and movements: “organizations, if they’re permeable, become changed by social movements.” Both of their perspectives point to how social movements bring people forward, raise awareness, and add pressure for change. They also provide training grounds and opportunities to strategize about regional and national agendas, as Mary Hooks, formerly of SONG, has described, organizers intentionally try to build a relationship between movements and organizations that allows for both to be more powerful. In 2011, the Occupy Wall Street movement famously forced a comparison between galvanizing a movement as a vehicle for change and building formal organizations (Milkman, Lewis, & Luce, 2013). When activists took over Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street area of Manhattan in September 2011 and created a complex encampment there, they successfully focused the world’s attention on issues of inequality. Their indelible rallying cry of “We Are the 99 Percent” had an electrifying effect, challenging the status quo of an increasingly Gilded Age. Occupiers spoke out about their intentional creation of community in the park—food for everyone, onsite libraries, political discussions, and skill building workshops—even as they faced pressure to attend to the many needs people brought with them to the park. Yotam Marom (2015), one of the earliest Occupiers, reflected on his experience in October 2011, at the height of the movement, when he was huddled with a core group in a Lower East Side apartment strategizing about next steps: “The rush of rapidly growing numbers, recognition from other political actors, and increasing popular support and media acclaim is electric and overwhelming.” Yet he acknowledges, in retrospect, that there were already signs of stress and splintering: “It feels a bit like walking a tightrope.” Ultimately, the lack of organization, the demands, and the lack of leadership roles undercut the sustainability of the group at Zuccotti Park and those in communities across the country who were emulating their tactics. Marom recalls the fateful November day, just a few weeks later, when law enforcement orchestrated the dismantling of the encampments: “They dragged us out of parks and squares all over the country, arrested thousands of people. We did our best, but we weren’t organized, disciplined, or grounded in communities enough to stop it in the end. Ultimately, we weren’t powerful enough. Without the park, we were rootless.”

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The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, followed by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013–14 (Ransby, 2018), foreshadowed a swell of new progressive activity around myriad issues across the country after the 2016 election. New formations such as the People’s Climate Movement (PCM) offered a counterpoint to traditional organization building. The PCM formed to convene and focus movement elements following mass mobilizations for climate justice in 2014. Executive committee member Fletcher Harper asserts that even within this new formation, the organizations that comprised it were essential: “A lot of the campaign work that organizations need to do will get carried out more and more through more nimble coalitions or formations that come into existence at any given time and that’s very much what I think PCM has done, to take advantage of the fact that there is a moment and there was something that brought people together in a very powerful way. Without organizations, I think that it would be impossible for PCM, and I think specifically of the major labor unions and the Big Green environmental groups. They’re fundamental to what PCM has been able to do.” After the 2016 election, the onset of federally mandated xenophobic policies sent progressive organizations into a tailspin. Organizers set about protecting their community members from deportation raids and other autocratic, government-led actions. Loose networks formed in reaction to the elections. Indivisible (n.d.) was established and built local organizations, and Black Lives Matter restructured itself to support local grassroots chapter organizations (Abdullah, 2021). Over time, understanding that organizations serve as political homes and vehicles for change recognizes both the personal dignity and the worth of each person, which works to keep people connected to the organization. Through the formal organization they can act on their collective interests and values, not necessarily their allegiance to an issue or to a particular perspective on an issue or in their individual self-interest. Marshall Ganz, senior lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, comments that “in organizing, it’s really important to recognize where the energy is because the energy for change is essential for change to really happen. And then what organizing has to offer is a way to scaffold turning that energy into effectiveness. . . . A values-based organization, I think, is really important; an issue based organization, I think, is highly problematic. It just fragments.”

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ORGANIZATIONS AS POLITICAL HOMES FOR STAFF, NOT JUST FOR MEMBERS

In addition to addressing the multiple needs of community members, today’s organizations are also likely to serve as political homes for staff. The traditional line between staff and impacted community members has blurred, and today’s leaders often move into staff roles. Staff members are more likely to see their position within a particular organization as political and not just as a professional choice. Another reason for this shift is that the ways in which organizations and movements intersect has closed a gap for staff seeking transformational change. Although staff may leave their organization for other professional opportunities, as many of those we interviewed have done, they clearly express a sense of political affinity with their organizations while engaged in that work. This all starts with an alignment with the organization’s theory of change. When we asked organizers if their own theory of change was the same as their organization’s, nearly all responded similarly to Jonathan Westin, director of New York Communities for Change: “Completely.” Westin‘s coworker, organizer Zachary Lerner, concurs and added: “That’s why I’ve been here for almost eight years.” Even when working at the level of a national network, organizers maintain their commitment to the organization’s theory of change. When Felicia Griffin, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action, was asked whether their theory of change is close to her own, she replied, “Yes, extremely close.” Her rationale for why this is the case encompasses the fuller context that is defining the work of organizing today. She says her alignment with the theory of change comes from “this network, really doing analysis on power, thinking deeply about who the targets should be, centering gender and race in all of the campaigns that we’re doing, and having an analysis there.” Griffin goes on to compare what other networks she has observed or interacted with are doing and why she brought her skills to PowerSwitch Action: “What I like about this network is our affiliates have multiple tactics. I don’t think one tactic is going to do it. I think that partnerships with labor, policy and research expertise, data, organizing, messaging and communications, and shaping ideology are important to integrate with one another in order to be truly effective. I think it’s really critical. All of those things are aligned with my personal values.” Although she

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has a degree of autonomy in building the campaigns she’s responsible for, Griffin believes that a depth of interconnection is necessary: “If I don’t believe in the tactics or the campaign, the issues of the organization, I don’t think I can be very effective.” Jonathan Westin continues his analysis of why New York Communities for Change aligns with his own ideas about how change happens and reflects on the transition of the organization from ACORN, a network forced to dissolve due to lax oversight practices and purported gaps in access and power between staff and leaders (Schutz, 2015b). Westin states: “I also feel like there’s a lens, especially coming out of ACORN, that it’s not just engaging memberships and grassroots folks, it’s really having staff that is deeply in touch with the issues in their communities and able to focus, making sure that people in this organization that are making decisions are actually from our communities and understand what the issues are and what has been happening for decades and decades.” Christian Diaz, former lead housing organizer and now director of housing, began his association with Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago when he was a college intern looking for an opportunity. He was home one summer and he resonated with the organization’s work and mission. When asked if his theory of change is aligned with his job, he says: “Oh yeah, absolutely.” He takes his analysis a step further to an understanding of the role of a local organizer in the broader movement for justice: “Right now the hot topic is advancing racial equity. What I say is that conversations about racial equity that don’t include power analysis are meaningless. Because you can include people across races, but if you’re not giving them power, then what’s the point? It’s just performative. We believe the most vulnerable should have the most power, which means controlling what decisions are made and how they’re made.” A more traditional approach to the role of staff demanded so much from organizers that a brief tenure was expected from all but the most stalwart. Nancy Aardema, former executive director of Logan Square Neighborhood Association, describes their culture of support and respect, which creates a space in which an organizer such as herself could find a political home. She believes that this respect has led to deep commitment and stability: “Most of my staff have been here forever. Even when people leave, they come back. We’re proud of that because we try to live what we believe, not just outside but inside and, whoever you talk to would

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agree with this, that’s a piece of us that’s different from a lot of community organizations. We try not to burn out our staff and we try not to burn out our welcome, really thinking about how to treat one another. That’s a long-term view . . . you have the history that being here for a couple of years does not mean you get to sit back or that you get to push younger organizers around. It means you get to be part of this amazing group of people who wrestle with these issues. It’s how we try to live the organization both inside of the office and outside.” The emergence of a deeper alignment between organizers and their workplace is in part ideological and in part because more organizations have intentionally developed pipelines through which leaders and impacted community members can become staff. We heard this from many organizations in our study. For example, Jade Brooks came onto staff at SONG from the membership, and Angela Lopez at United for Respect became involved as an associate at Walmart and came onto staff after being fired from her job for organizing. At Down Home North Carolina, Chelsea White found her way into organizing that served her own community after studying social work and getting involved in activism in college. Lucas Benitez, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, was a farmworker when he cofounded the organization where he now organizes, or as he says, “animates” workers into acting from the leadership they have within themselves. Maria Mottola, former executive director of the New York Foundation, which funds locally in New York City and has seeded some of most significant community organizing in the country, describes this change: “I feel like 20 years ago, we were sort of like, let’s find a person or two who can represent the group. And now it feels like those conversations don’t even have to occur because the leaders of these organizations reflect the communities that are experiencing the problem.” Finally, political homes exist at every level of organizing for power, at the local level and in regional and national networks. In chapter 8, we describe how networks are specific kinds of affiliations that provide models, resources, training, and access to broader campaigns and decision-makers than individual organizations may be able to access on their own (Minieri & Getsos, 2007). Although the primary purpose of networks may be related to infrastructure and scale, they too have come to serve as political homes for leaders, academics, and others, in particular, staff organizers.

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People’s Action, based in Chicago, has one of the longest histories of the networks. Founded in 1968, it now has affiliates across the country and an active 501(c)(4) component. George Goehl, who led the network at the time of our interview, describes their 40-year vision for a new economy and a theory of change that blends movement, politics, and community organizing: “We want people to say ‘this is my political home, not a place I get stuff from and have to give stuff to.’ This means that the goal is more [how] people feel, like, ‘Oh, I know this is my national political home. If I want to drive something, I have a place to do it. I want to use it, and I have onroads or onramps to do it.’ And that people feel like they really truly run the organization through the delegates’ assembly process.” The purposes, evolution, roles, opportunities, and challenges of networks are complex. Each of these elements is a topic worthy of exploration and analysis that is both critical to acknowledge and beyond the scope of this book. In chapter 10 we suggest areas for further exploration regarding the role of organizing networks. THE ORGANIZATION AS A BRAVE AND SAFE SPACE

In so many aspects of organizing in today’s landscape we heard about the importance of having a both/and approach to the work. Social action organizations incorporate race and gender in their issues analysis. They seek to engage and empower new constituencies and deliver concrete policy wins. An “or” approach leads at best to the absence of inclusion and at worst to division, for example, when states and everyone in them are viewed as red or blue. In fact, commonly held experiences run through much of what these organizations seek to achieve. We heard about efforts to break down barriers in urban, suburban, and rural communities. A both/and approach leads to relationship building and to an understanding that we all suffer from injustice and some people truly suffer more. It is an understatement to observe that working across differences is a strong theme in organizing. People face complex forces that shape their daily lives, and they have different experiences, perspectives, and viewpoints that shape their opinions and decisions. These differences paired with the influence of media presents one of the most fundamental challenges to collective understanding and action in communities and workplaces across the country.

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None of this is new; it is truly the evolution of the field. Intentional, formal social action organizations with a sustained infrastructure that can hold outreach, education, survival needs, relationships, issue campaigns, and links to political action have been long in the making. In our first edition in 1994, we posited that at a time when entities including faith institutions, PTAs, and block associations were more consistently central to many people’s experience of community, the social action organization offered both the familiar concept of belonging as well as an alternative—a space to think and act differently. We concluded that “it is difficult for most people to take an opposing stance. They are afraid of being seen as ‘radical’ or ‘aggressive.’ They worry about being outsiders or different. Part of developing the peer group [of a social action organization] is to offer a new reference group with new norms and views to replace old relationships. The organization becomes a new reference group, where their new convictions are both valued and validated” (Mondros & Wilson, 1994, p. 51). What has changed is how and where organizers draw people into the community of an organization, into a social fabric in which the role of institutions in people’s lives is changing. In this chapter, examples include welcoming marginalized immigrant communities at Make the Road New York with food, community, a combination of service, and political action; drawing homeless substance users into unions at VOCAL-NY; and using an app at United for Respect to connect with workers while drawing them into new types of organizational containers for getting their needs met and taking action together. Jade Brooks, former organizer and now political director at SONG, puts this idea in context: “Our founders had a really powerful vision 26 years ago of creating a political home across race and class, gender and sexuality, to work on multi-issue, racial, and economic justice fights in the U.S. South.” Today, Mary Hooks, then SONG’s codirector, says simply: “We’re looking for people who are looking for us” with the confidence that they will find one another. As SONG has built a political home, primarily for LGBTQ+ people in the South, it has the capacity to put that vision into action in people’s lives. Hooks continues: “A lot of poor and trans folk, especially when we first come out, find ourselves in some shady bar, or some club looking for community. So [at SONG] we want to make sure that we have boots on the ground, that when folks are stepping out of that isolation, we can say: ‘and you can also be a political queer person in this

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world as well’. . . . some folk come to a SONG thing and it might be like, ‘this is cool. Y’all seem a little weird. Y’all really talk a lot about politics, that may not be my jam.’ And there are others who are deeply intrigued and say, ‘I’ve never heard this conversation.’ . . . It’s about inviting people to do collective work together.” Social action organizations are necessarily complex on many levels. Marshall Ganz references a concept outlined by Arao and Clemens (2013) that now informs his approach to leadership development and teaching about organizing. While emphasizing the importance of trust as a condition for shared action, social action organizing operates in a space that cultivates courage. “Safety is not how you learn,” Ganz told us. “Bravery is how you learn. How do we scaffold courage as opposed to scaffolding protection?” We take that idea further and propose that the political homes at the core of social action organizing today are both safe and brave. It takes courage to ask for safety and acceptance; to envision a horizon in which change is possible; and to take on the emotional, interpersonal, and material risks required to get there. Sustained, effective vehicles for building power hold the conflict and complexity inherent in this struggle with skill and intention. Brigid Flaherty, cofounder of Down Home North Carolina, speaks to this concept: “How are we going to get anywhere if we’re just afraid of conflict and we’re afraid of real people? We want purity so badly, we want purity in people, we want purity in politics. We don’t want there to be independence, we want there to be Dems and Republicans, we want people to be left and right. And that’s just not how people live. We have to love them for that complexity and figure out how to organize inside of that.” Andrea Dehlendorf, of United for Respect, speaks from the front lines of organizing one of the most vulnerable, diverse, and growing sectors of workers in our country: There is a very explicit strategy on the right to use racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and anti-immigrant sentiment to really keep people divided.  .  .  . How do you and where do you draw the line around who are you willing to work with? Because, we’ve got leaders who used to be racist, anti-immigrant, Tea Party Republicans who are now reading Michelle Alexander’s book [2020] in their free time. Where do you draw the line between where you can’t have a safe space that’s empowering for people of color and immigrants

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if you allow certain things to be out there, but then there is a certain segment of people who through struggle, relationship, and political education will move and advance on this issue? Where and how you draw the line that balances those things I think is challenging in terms of building organizing communities. I really believe that we need a multiracial movement that’s aligned around racial, gender, and economic justice and the work of building racial justice consciousness—particularly aligning around that within a multiracial working-class context is very challenging. It’s the hardest thing we’re doing.

CONCLUSION

The intentional development of social action organizations as political homes is an evolution in the field of organizing that reflects the need for community, love, learning, support, and accountability among isolated, marginalized constituencies seeking to build sustained vehicles for power. Following a period of increased social protest in the late 2010s, social action organizers are increasingly committed to the need for institutionalized power. They are building more complex organizations, utilizing and contributing to the swell of movement energy. The differences that once existed between how leaders and staff relate to their organizational homes have changed. As Lucas Benitez, cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, tells us, the work of organizing is really to be an animator—to move people to recognize their own abilities to organize and lead. That depth of trust in human capacity, skillfully held, despite both anticipated obstacles and grave challenges, comes up again and again. It is how the brave and safe space of social action organizing for sustainability and as a political home has truly evolved as the vehicle for change in our time.

Chapter Six

RIGHTEOUS ANGER Building the Base and Developing Leadership for Power

If we want to win on the issues we care about, there are two forms of power. One of those forms of power we know we ain’t got, which is money. The only form of power we know that we have is people power. And we can call what we do organizing all day long, but if we’re not actually engaging the base and building numbers and building people power, it doesn’t matter what ideas come out of your boardroom or your community meetings. We have to build the base that is going to do the work to effect real change . . . digital media, that’s all great, it’s super important. But a follower on Twitter and a friend on Facebook is not the same as an activated member in your community who’s actually taking action. If we want to win, we need to do a better job at building people power, and the way that we do that is on the streets by engaging folks. I’m committed to that, our organization is committed to that, and history teaches us that it’s the only thing that is going to work. JOSE LOPEZ, MAKE THE ROAD NEW YORK

Base building is the core strategy used by social action organizations to amass an independent source of power (Han, McKenna, & Oyakawa, 2021). Anyone who is directly impacted by the issues the organization addresses, who could potentially be a member or take on a leadership role in the organization, is considered a part of the base. Building people power is intentional; it doesn’t happen spontaneously or evolve naturally from protest or pain. It is systematic and relies on an assessment of people’s interests and abilities. It is directly about numbers— how many people organizations need to recruit to move their agenda. This is also where the science and art of organizing come together in tangible ways. Vivian Yi Huang, former deputy director and now codirector of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, refers to organizing as requiring a “system” and points out that organizers must “really understand how each individual person is different and our ability to build with them is really different.” Von Hoffman (2015) called the process of bringing in members and developing leaders “stringing beads on a necklace.”

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In 1994 we wrote that the work organizers do to involve people is called building the base (Mondros & Wilson, 1994), and describing that process consumed a substantial part of the book. The work of base building is both crucial for organizational power and an essential task of organizers and leaders in every major work on organizing (Alinsky, 1946, 1971, 1989; Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 2010; Sen, 2003; Staples 2016; Szakos & Szakos, 2007). Engler and Engler (2016) write that building a structured base distinguishes organizing from mobilizing. Sen (2003) says, “Of all the tasks progressives have, this kind of organizing is the hardest to do and the easiest to give up” (p. 24). Our original findings confirmed Sen’s point. Minieri and Getsos (2007, p. 35) define base building as engaging people in a campaign or organization and developing their ability to collectively address the issues they care about. There are defined goals for building the base, activities dedicated to achieving those goals, and a continuous growth strategy that is not a fixed or static element of the work. This includes moving people from an initial point of entry or contact into being more deeply engaged and involved in the organization’s work and developing their skills as leaders. “The making of an organization and the making of leadership are inseparable,” wrote von Hoffman (2015, p. 80), Alinksy’s biographer and early organizing partner. According to organizers today, that is still the dual task they try to accomplish each day. Lucas Benitez is a former farmworker and cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida, a long-standing organization of migrant farmworkers. He gets to the heart of what it means to build an organization of leaders who experience the impact of social injustice firsthand: “I don’t identify with the word ‘organizer.’ The way I see myself and the way I view my role is more of an animator, an animator in my community, and what I do is animate, motivate people in my community to organize themselves and then that way together, we can organize.” Benitez speaks to the leadership experiences workers bring with them to Florida. In establishing the organization many years ago, they came to realize that there was a lot of experience already that people were coming in with, all kinds of experiences from their home countries. In Haiti, they had seen so many waves of different political movements by the early 1990s. In Guatemala,

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many of the compañeros who had arrived from Guatemala were coming out of the Civil War. In Mexico, we had a lot of people from the states of Chiapas, Guerrero, Oaxaca—the southern states of Mexico—coming in with experiences of participating in different groups there. . . . It was a matter of unpacking, because people already had all of these experiences they were carrying [within] them. So it was a matter of unpacking those experiences and creating that space through the community meetings that we had so that people could unpack them and then apply them to what we were seeing in Immokalee. We know that the bosses that we were confronting had definitely not seen any organizing like that before. But in our hometowns, in our pueblos, when these kinds of situations happened, when someone was done wrong by another member of the pueblo, then everyone would get together.

The coalescence of people’s lived experience and training them with new skills is what drives the work forward. Base building for power includes the systems that organizers use to find and track people’s engagement and their trajectory as leaders. It works in tandem with the art—the assessment of potential, matching their skills and interests with organizational roles, and the relationship building among members and the staff that is the glue in organizing. Vince Steele, then organizing director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, states that “the base building part to me is the foundation of everything we do. We have an organizing department, a fund-raising department, [and] a policy department; in order to rev the engine on each one of those, you’ve got to have a very strong base. So one of my goals is base building. The organizers have certain benchmarks that they need to hit per week. We stay on top of those benchmarks. If there’s an issue with getting there, we have a conversation or one-on-one as to why you can’t get there.” In this chapter we share organizers’ insights into how they build their organizations’ base and look more closely at the skills needed to be a good organizer, describing what organizers believe are essential including leadership identification and development. The evolution of base building as a strategy reflects both the stability of well-established core tenets for deep engagement as well as the contextual changes we describe throughout this book. We focus particularly on how race, gender, and direct experience with systemic injustice impact and shape leadership opportunities in organizing.

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The steps of leadership development generally follow the process we identified in 1994, but they have become even more detailed and elaborated. 1. Recruiting: Organizers find and recruit people impacted by the issues the organization addresses, using the many tools now available to make an initial connection including, for example, in the home, at the workplace or school, a gay bar, or online. 2. Getting Involved and Moving to Action: The organization gets people immediately involved in a meaningful interaction with the organization and its members. 3. Entering Into Relationship: As people take on roles to help win on an issue campaign or to build the organization, they are considered members of the organization. This may be through attending an orientation or formally signing on in some way or paying dues. Organizers assess the potential for members to take on more responsibility and roles in the organization and become organizational leaders. 4. Taking on Leadership: Members make a commitment to enter into a training process that prepares them to make decisions with other leaders. 5. Challenging Power: Leaders represent the organization and bring their direct experience into the creation of new policies, resource allocation, and leading campaigns on other social justice issues.

We defined the organizational roles in chapter 1: (1) organizers are the paid staff members of social action organizations; (2) members are people who are impacted by the issues the organization addresses who join in some defined way; and (3) leaders are members who voluntarily take on responsibilities such as making decisions, choosing strategies, leading issue campaigns, representing the organization publicly, negotiating with power holders, supporting fund-raising, and recruiting others to join the organization. Staff organizers exercise leadership in their professional roles, but their primary job is to promote, encourage, inspire, and bring forward the experiences of the volunteer membership. As members of the community become involved—be it a geographic, identity, or workplace community—the organizers’ job is to support them to become leaders, i.e., to build relationships with them, assess their potential and interests, and train and support them to do the work of the organization. Since the earliest days, organizers have fundamentally held the value and perspective that all members have the potential to be leaders

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(McAfee, 2015). As people build power together, they experience personal transformation. Organizers believe that people who compose the base are in need of and deserving of the power to improve their lives and communities, and members soon begin to see themselves that way too. They are not victims; they are not to blame for their marginalization. Through organizing, members encounter the possibility and promise of power and empowerment. Nat Chioke Williams, executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, a national funding source for youth organizing and Black-led organizing, reflects on this evolution in the field as a response to “the trauma of the communities and the social conditions that they are trying to deal with. Transformative organizing really tries to create an awareness and a center of body, mind, spirit, and society, all leading toward individual, institutional, and social liberation. . . . I think one of the things that folks push now is a much more balanced person as a leader, and looking at personal liberation as well as social liberation.” Some organizations require members to take a distinct step to be considered part of the organization, such as attending an orientation or paying dues. Others have more formal ladders of engagement through which members move in a systematic way to gain a seat at a decisionmaking table, such as a board, or to represent the organization in highprofile meetings or events. In other organizations the process is less structured and formalized. Next we explain how base building connects with the organizations’ theories of change and delineate the steps for developing leaders. BUILDING THE BASE OF LEADERS: THE THEORY OF CHANGE

Hugh Espey, executive director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, states that “everything starts and stops with people, and we’ve got to get lots and lots of people engaged.” “Our theory of change involves base building: how do we reach more people, engage more people, keep them engaged, turn them into members, into activists, into leaders so that we have more and more people, more and more legs to the organization and to the campaigns that we’re fighting. We focus like a laser beam on doing organizing that builds our base of active justice fighters, elevates the profile of the organization, elevates our narrative, elevates our analysis about what’s wrong and what we need to do to fix it to make life better for a lot

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more people, and elevates our theory of change. Big change starts and stops with people from the ground up, not the top down.” Bobby King, former director of policy and organizing with the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota, expands on this: “Our theory of organizing includes building our base, which is not just our members, but people that say, ‘I like what you do, I want to be engaged,’ and of course we want to move them into membership and leadership.” Jade Brooks, former organizer and now political director with Southerners on New Ground (SONG) describes the various levels of connection within the organization. Our base-building triangle probably looks like many other organizations. The bottom is our biggest block, which is our constituency, who we define as anyone impacted on the issues we work on. Black people, poor people in terms of pretrial detention, LGBTQ people, trans folks, [and] sex workers are the majority of our constituency. Then we would say the next level of the triangle would be our supporters, so people who actually have heard of us and heard of our work but might not be involved. It would include a lot of the same categories, but maybe also folks who’ve given $30 for the bailouts or people who have known about SONG for 20 years and maybe made it to a campout back in the day, but haven’t been real involved. The next level would be our members. Our members are people who formally have joined SONG, affirm our values, agree with what we’re trying to do here, willing to give what we talk about—it’s kind of churchy, but their “time, talents, or tithe”—volunteering their special skills. And then the next level above members are our member leaders. These are members who are actively organizing two to five hours a week in their communities in the service of SONG’s strategy. So that’s how we are moving people up. We’re always trying to invite people to get more involved.

If base building is the core strategy for gaining the power to win, leadership development of the base is what distinguishes social action organizations from mobilizing groups (Engler & Engler, 2016). As Hahrie Han, director of the SNF Agora Institute and professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, told us: “Activism does not equal power.” Eitan Hersh (2020), a political scientist, has written at length about political slackism and hobbyism, particularly among the well-educated, that distracts people

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from the real work of building power. Disciplined, intentional organizations work over the long term to develop leaders. The leaders are developed to be long-distance runners—skilled, strong, and with enduring commitment and attachments to the organizations. Marshall Ganz, Rita T. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government, explains leadership this way: “I ground my approach to leadership by asking Hillel’s three questions: (1) If I’m not for myself, who will be for me? (2) When I am for myself alone, what am I? (3) If not now when? It is self to other to action. . . . I may need new skills, I may need to use my resources in new ways, but I also have to find the courage, hopefulness, and the capacity to inspire others with the courage to take the risks that are involved in dealing with change. . . . The definition I use is that leadership is about accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose under conditions of uncertainty.” Leadership development is a core responsibility of organizers, and they often cite leadership development as why they do the work they do (Bobo et al., 2010; Minieri & Getsos, 2007; Sen, 2003; Staples, 2016; Szakos & Szakos, 2007). Organizers frequently describe the rewarding experience of recruiting and developing people who never saw themselves as leaders but who become board members, spokespersons, and strategists. Mark Schultz, executive director of the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota at the time of our interview, describes how this plays out. “You keep doing work that engages people more and more—and you want them to join. Not just say, ‘I agree with your organization’ or ‘I’ll show up,’ but ‘You’re my organization.’ Then you keep engaging them in making decisions in the organization, in participating in actions of the organization, in giving money, and you start getting more into one-to-ones and trainings.  .  .  . You’re building really active members, leaders and emerging leaders for your core leadership, which for us includes the board and nine steering committees. That’s base for us.” Bobby King, formerly with the Land Stewardship Project (LSP) speaks to the relationships that form in the process, among members, with organizers, and with the organization: “I have a lot of memories of folks that, for them, LSP was an incredibly important part of their farm and their life and their community; it changed their community, and it changed who they are and what they thought was possible. Our members really feel strongly about

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the organization. People connect with LSP really deeply. That’s not about systemic change, but that’s the thing I like the most.” Organizations also see it as part of their job to train and support leaders to recruit new people, building the base themselves. Gabe Strachota, former lead organizer with Community Voices Heard in New York, explains: “A lot of it is going back to leaders’ ability to build a base and move it into action . . . so we’ll train self-interest, we’ll train people how to do one-to-one relational meetings, we’ll train people around cutting an issue, how to run effective meetings.” “We also train people to ask about people’s relational networks, and depending on how it goes, [we] ask people to do something with that network. We really use the tool of the leaders hosting a house meeting as a key tool for them to build the organization and a key test of their leadership.” Strachota’s comments point to how moving someone to action is not just to thrust them quickly into a public role. It can also be internal, toward the core strategy of building the organization as an act of leadership. A potential member meets an organizer, takes the step of meeting one-on-one, participating in action and training, starting to see their way out of self-blame or acceptance of injustice, then having a house meeting, inviting neighbors to come to their home to learn about building power with the organization. FROM RECRUITMENT INTO ACTION: LADDERS OF ENGAGEMENT

The practice of moving people from directly experiencing the issues the organization addresses into membership and leadership includes organizers directly telling people that they see their potential, making a proposition for power, and explaining how people can use and further develop their skills through social action organizing. Organizers ask members directly if they are willing to take on these roles in order to grow their leadership and engage in power building. Organizations are able to track and measure engagement with increasing precision. In the 1990s, groups relied on paper sign-in sheets and similar systems (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). Digital databases and tracking were coming into use but were not yet widespread. Today’s organizers rely on data management to calculate everything from where and how to do recruitment, to the number of people needed to move decision-makers,

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to the funding required to get enough people power galvanized to win issue campaigns or to influence decision-makers (see chapter 9). Organizers observe and track participation, and digital tools enable them to more effectively identify prospects for leadership development. In this section, we share examples of how organizations move people through the leadership development process. Organizations refer to this as “ladders of engagement” or use a similar analogy. No matter what the process is called or how organizations implement it, increased engagement generally includes three areas: (1) skill development, (2) political education about the root causes of problems and the systems that support injustice, and (3) a structure that enables people to make decisions and take action. Organizational structure reflects values, and the values that initiated and sustain the organization reflect the structure (Sen, 2003). This book provides an overview of this process, but it is not a “howto” guide on leadership development. For a deeper treatment of the skills related to leadership development, including the elements of a strong leadership team (recruitment techniques and assessment tools), sample trainings (how to conduct a one-on-one meeting), and detailed case examples (how to move people through each step of the leadership development process), see Mondros and Wilson (1994), Minieri and Getsos (2007), Bobo et al. (2010), and Staples (2016). One-on-one meetings are often the first step of an engagement process. As organizers recruit people into the organization, one of the core skills is the one-on-one relational meeting, which is used frequently throughout the recruitment to action process. A one-on-one is a meeting between two people, typically an organizer and a prospective member or leader, in which the primary purpose is to forge or build a relationship. They are skillful listening meetings in which the organizer encourages prospective members to talk, to freely share their experiences, interests, and opinions. Organizers use one-on-ones to build relationships, sometimes sharing some aspect of how their own life experience resonates with the organization’s goals. These meetings are sometimes considered “agenda-less,” a method for listening and probing to discover the self-interest of a potential member or leader. Simply put, the purpose is to explore this question: What does this person want to get out of involvement in this organization? It is also often a first step that indicates that the person is willing to do something, starting with meeting one-on-one with the organizer. Gabe Strachota, formerly with Community Voices Heard, explains the value of these types

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of meetings: “Definitely one-to-one relational meetings are really the core of our organizing practice, and a key moment of bringing someone in. And oftentimes, people will get invited to some kind of meeting as a first early step and we propose some kind of role or piece of work that they can take on as a next, early step.” In the case example, Chelsea White, former organizer with Down Home North Carolina, describes their leadership ladders and outlines how she moves people through the process, using one-on-ones as a core engagement tool and orienting people early on to what it means to build power.

CHELSEA WHITE: MEMBER RECRUITMENT AT DOWN HOME NORTH CAROLINA We use the community survey as one of the ways to make first contact with someone. We may go door to door or go to a community festival and have a booth there. We also use petitions as a tool if we’re doing an issue-specific thing. Right now, one of our affordable housing groups is trying to figure out what tenants of a particular landlord want to address because there are many problems. So we have a survey around housing that we’re using to gauge their interest. So step one is just getting them to engage on one of those levels. And by doing that, we can have a brief conversation that gives us a little bit of a read on what their interest level is. I follow up with a one-on-one or one of our member leaders will follow up with a one-on-one. The baseline once individuals have had a one-on-one with us is for them to come to a monthly community meeting to meet the other members and hear about all of the working groups that we have—which are issue-oriented working groups—so they can find their home in the organization. Usually that’s the first place where people are introduced to our mission and to our theory of change as a power organization. I break down what it means to build power because this is such a new concept in our communities. Usually, the first step of onboarding is reading the mission and then asking, “What does power mean to you?” We work with them through that, and then explain the difference between the organizations that they’re used to seeing, which are typically direct service or advocacy organizations, and how Down Home is different from that. (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) The existing members get to describe how it’s different, and we talk about how our goals are different. Then we offer training. We have set curriculums for Power, Oppression, and Solidarity, for Storytelling, and for One-on-Ones, and they can start to do those trainings. We have recruitment training, etc. Those don’t happen in any particular order because organizing doesn’t happen in a linear process. Our members are always setting the agenda for what’s going to happen with a little bit of guidance and help from me. As an example of how we decide which training we’re going to do, at our last community meeting in Haywood County we went through the whole Medicaid expansion strategic campaign plan: “This is what we’re going to do. Okay, so what do we need? What is the skill that we really need to be trained on right now so that we can actually work through this campaign as best as possible, knowing that we can follow up with more training?” Folks said, “Storytelling would really help us because op-eds and public narratives are a big piece of this campaign strategy, so we need to know how to tell our story.” And I said, “All right, so then we’re gonna do a storytelling training.” Our levels of membership have names. Once you become a dues paying member and are working toward being a leader, you become a Dogwood member and then a Cardinal member. If I notice that someone is a dues paying member who has come to every event that we’ve held for the last six months but who hasn’t attended a particular skills training, such as oneon-one training, I’ll say to that person, “I think you’re ready to take your leadership to the next level. And here’s what that would look like. Are you down with that?” This training would really help the person step into the next level as a Dogwood member and enable the member to start recruiting new people into the organization.

Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, describes their process, which is similarly intentional but nonlinear. A lot of us came up from the organizing school of thought of ladders of engagement. I now don’t believe in ladders of engagement, I believe in a matrix. I think we’ve had this view that “so-and-so comes in here, so start

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them out here on this very simple thing and move them up.” When people come into the organization and are ready to take a bigger leap on a particular thing, we should create space for that. Sometimes folks are going to hang out on the easier lift things, but as they gain a level of expertise they can actually do that really well. We’ve had a bunch of conversations among the folks who have been building membership about that issue—how to think about this. We’ve tried to think about how we can track this so we have a sense of how people are coming in and what they’re able to do. For instance, I  wouldn’t turn down somebody who wants to come in and help set up and break down the space for a meeting. Some folks in our organizations are saying, “I have no desire to knock on doors, do not have me do that.” We still want them to have a place in the organization or movement. “I am happy at a meeting to welcome people.” The old model would be, “No, no, no, then you’re not growing.” This different way of thinking would be, “Well, that’s a pretty important thing. If somebody gets really good at it, that actually helps the organization.” Or if somebody . . . has been to a couple meetings and has a general sense of the organization and the first thing the person wants to do is host a house party, why would we say, “No, no, no! You have to leaflet with us first?

Bobby King describes the steps in the Land Stewardship Project’s leadership engagement approach. He touches on both the core approach and how the organization has come to think more expansively about who to focus on in base building. We have a core group of leaders on our steering committees and some others like them that are really deeply engaged. And then we have lots of members that take action based on our action alerts who come and volunteer. It’s kind of this middle tier of leadership, we call them “emerging leaders,” that we want to have more of. We’re trying to track, to always enter into the database, who comes to a meeting; if someone writes a letter to the editor, we enter it into our database so we can see who is doing what; who’s not on a steering committee or deeply involved in the leadership structure but is taking significant action to increase those numbers of people. Part of it is giving people opportunities for things to do: “So what can they do?” We’re in the process of trying to be better about that. And then ultimately, we need to have more people acting as LSP in their community on their own

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without an organizer calling them up, and for people to feel confident to say, “Senator so and so, I want to sit down with you and get coffee because I’m an LSP member and I want to talk to you about the stuff that LSP is working on.” Or at a listening session with a legislator, speaking up as a new member: “I’m a member of LSP, and I want to let you know about something that we think is important” or “You said something that’s exactly right in line with our values, and I wanted to let you know how much I appreciated that.” Whatever it is, we want more people feeling like they’ve got their LSP hat on and feel empowered. We have members who do that, and those members made us think, “Wow, this person is just particularly tuned in and assertive.” But we should have more folks like that . . . Expansive base building is something we’ve been working on for five or six years now. Before, if you weren’t a member, you really weren’t on our radar. Developing a longer list of people who we call supporters and want to bring in to what we do helps increase our effectiveness a lot. Because we’re engaging more people, it’s a pool of people that become members, and it’s kind of a reality test that our message and what we’re working for really does resonate with a much larger group of people then our 4,500 members.

Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect which organizes retail workers, explains the similar, complex work-in-progress of their leadership engagement approach, which seeks to engage as many people as possible based on what they can contribute. Generally we talk about reach, which is how many people we are reaching with our work and organization. And then we talk about engagement, which is how many people are engaging with us in some way. They’re commenting on our posts, they’re in a Facebook group that we curate, they’re filling out surveys and petitions, they’re engaged. Then there’s people who explicitly support the organization and say “we support what the organization is doing.” Some of those people contribute and are paid contributors. We’re actually trying to figure out a name for that. And then we have a bucket that we call leaders and activists. Leaders are people who are leading other people to do things, but we’re also really explicit that people who might not be able to get other people to do things in their stores or online can be doing other things. Feeding people in a strike kitchen is a form of leadership. So it’s really important to us and to me that we talk about it together, that we’ve got

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some way internally to be able to distinguish between whose roles are really moving others into action versus whose aren’t. I would never want anyone to feel less than because they don’t do that, if they’re making other robust contributions, so I have a very big tent notion of what leadership is.

Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action in Indiana, explains the new tools they are using to get people to relate to the organization so that member and leadership development become possible. Although circumstances may be changing, the core objective of getting people to enter into the organization in some way so the organizer can assess and help them develop has remained remarkably durable as a core tenet of organizing. We are experimenting with different ways to get people in the door.  .  .  . [Door-knocking] is always and forever the best strategy for getting brokered in relationally—these are small towns. But we also run a set of surveys online and then follow up on those surveys with one-to-ones and meetings. We have started to use Facebook ads as a way to get an initial contact with people, and then deploy organizers to go talk to them. That has been really useful, more useful than door-knocking on the opioid crisis; people that selfselect into taking that survey, you’ve already done your first round of sifting, and that’s been useful . . . Some of the internal challenges that we’re always trying to figure out are how we reach more people, engage more people, keep them engaged in our organizing, turn them into activists, turn them into members, turn them into leaders: base building. That’s not something new, but it’s always a challenge because people are people and whenever people are involved in things, things can go haywire. Constantly figuring out how we build our power, our people power. I would say that was probably the same thing as it was in the 1970s and 1980s: how do you find issues or find people that want to do stuff, keep them engaged, get more people engaged and constantly build your base? That’s an ongoing challenge.

The system or science of organizing, the goal of having a vast pool of members to develop into leadership and mobilize for action, is both endless in its ambitions and quantifiable on a day-to-day basis. How many doors does an organizer need to knock on to find one person who is willing

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to talk? To find one person willing to say they will come to an action or meeting and then, who actually shows up? Adam Mason, former policy director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, demonstrates the math of organizing and how organizers move people to action immediately as part of the recruitment process. To reach a constituency spread out over a vast rural area, they sought people willing to sign a petition as a first step to indicate they wanted to fight against a proposed factory farm in the area. We placed the petition language as an ad in small town rural newspapers and asked people to cut those out and send them back to us. We estimate that it reached probably about 70,000 people, and we had several hundred folks that cut those out of the paper and sent them back in. And so, of course, all of those folks got a phone call to thank them for signing and cutting that out and sending it back in and kind of an engagement conversation with, “Why’d you do that? Lots of people would just flip past it, but you took the time to cut that out. Can you tell me more about why you did that and how you feel about factory farms and clean water? And would you be interested in doing something, doing this or coming to this?” if there was going to be something in their community in the near future. That was another way that we kind of looked at door-knocking.

Mason explains how they used radio to target a specific community and highlights how the organization has built a multiracial base in a majority white geographic area: “At different times on the racial profiling issue and on the immigration issue we have put those same kinds of feelers in the community, going on a radio station whose listenership is predominantly African American to talk about racial profiling and asking folks to call in or come to our office if they feel like they’ve been racially profiled. There are lots of different ways to get into communities and to ask people to self-select so that they’re coming to us with their stories. For us, it just shows that they’re there from the start. They’re willing to take action, and that is really what we need so that we can engage them and continue to develop that leadership.” Whether the first contact is at a door in an urban building, through a rural newspaper, in a Walmart break room, or on Facebook, Mary Hooks, former codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), says that an organizer’s job starts with “looking for people who are looking for us.”

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Pabitra Benjamin, executive director of Adhikaar which organizes in the Nepali community in New York, speaks to how building the base is a goal in itself. She expresses an urgency and a belief in the potential of the community that we heard from nearly everyone who does this work, who envision leaders where service providers see clients or where other types of canvassers only see potential protest marchers. At the time of our interview, Adhikaar was fighting against a wave of anti-immigrant policies following the 2016 election and strategizing with other organizations on how and where to push on the federal, state, and local levels. It is my deep belief that when you have somebody in opposition, it’s time to base build. Everybody [in organizing] I think, thinks in that way. It’s base-building time, whether we win or not, and we can’t see just winning on policies and campaigns as wins. We have to see the base building as a win, getting more people involved, reaching out to more people, inciting more anger. I think the basis of organizing is that people have to be able to get angry a little about what’s going on. If you can captivate that and draw people from everything into even caring, to wanting to create change, to attending a political education event, to getting more informed, to changing viewpoints even a little, that’s a win. I know one of the things we have to do in the Nepali community is take it out of its insularity. A lot of Nepalis in Queens hang out with each other and only know Nepal and care about Nepali politics. If we can get them to care about U.S. politics and see the solidarity we have with other immigrant communities and Black communities, that in and of itself is an achievement. It’s time to do that type of education, it’s time to do that type of base building, it’s time to really agitate.

Lauren Jacobs of PowerSwitch Action, summarizes how this urgency translates into developing leaders, which can be slower and more methodical. “It’s not quick. In fact, in the beginning, it’s quite slow. In a world wanting a six month, nine month, twelve month turnaround on goals, often that first period of base building looks like nothing’s happening. You can spend eons trying to get to your first 30 or 40 solid committed people, but that bedrock then enables the organization to accelerate much faster as it goes on. But in a universe where folks are really looking to see big shifts [in that period of] time, [base building] is not as fast as running and winning policy campaigns or doing ballot measures.”

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Jacobs asks, “How do we both prepare our base to actually think a little bit more about leverage and actually understanding power and how to move power versus only trying to convince power, which I think is the mode that some of our work can be in?” The distinction between moving power versus convincing power speaks to why leadership development is core to effective social action organizing. Organizations are intentionally designed to support leaders to fight the long fight, although we heard a great deal about the challenges this presents within organizations, alliances, and movements. This is particularly true as people are faced with highstakes problems and issues that are bolstered by the hateful and divisive messaging that marks our current politics. THE POWER OF LISTENING

Every stage in the leadership development process, beginning with recruitment and moving to confronting power, requires that organizers perform active, engaged listening. We can see this in the emphasis on one-on-one relational meetings described earlier. Jawanza Williams, director of organizing with VOCAL-NY, makes a crucial point about the importance of listening in every aspect of organizing: “Being heard is one thing. Being listened to is a different thing.” Hahrie Han, from Johns Hopkins, explains the importance of starting with a listening attitude: “The best organizers that I know see the work that they’re doing as a craft where there’s this constant reflective practice that’s built into what they do.” Even when social action organizations have different tactics or structures, Han says that they all have a set of principles that emphasize the need for members to learn skills and gain political education around the issues. They all also focus on the importance of relationships. Vince Steele, former organizing director with the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, describes how his listening encompasses hearing the full range of who people are and what they carry. He notes the importance of listening for concerns related to race, gender, and economic inequality: I think organizers are always looking for entry points. When you’re having a conversation with someone, which is the first step of organizing, you’re getting to know them, you’re breaking down the walls, and you’re trying to

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find out what that person is passionate about, what makes them tick, what their fears are, what their concerns are. I have to say race, gender, economic inequalities all normally come up in one way or another in conversations with community folks. I’m talking about blue-collar workers, the average person, and a good organizer knows how to tap into that and be able to give examples of how there have been situations in the past where this particular hurdle existed around race, gender, economic inequality and this is what we did as an organization to overcome it.

Angela Lopez, deputy director of United for Respect, says that organizers are trying to model listening skills for their leaders: “The best skill that an organizer can have is being a really good listener. And I think that’s something that I was taught through traditional organizing that’s still important and carries over into even more of our more digital and social media organizing. It’s still really important to be a good listener. And then always thinking ahead—I always think of trying to replace me or make another Angela, just moving people through those pathways to  become leaders and own the organization and actually lead it in a real way.” Lopez explains what being a good listener has meant in her own development as she progressed from being an associate at Walmart to finding her pathway as an organizer: “I’m always practicing to be a better listener. Part of it is that people came to me in the store to be the problem solver, and  people came to me because they were scared to go to management. I used some things that were already there, and I didn’t know what I was really doing. You do things with them for a while, and then you get them to start doing those things on their own. First it’s me going to the manager, then it’s ‘let’s go together,’ and then it’s ‘y’all need to own this and go. I don’t even have this problem but you do. I’ll go with you, but you guys need to speak and be the ones to say it.’ It’s just moving people out of their comfort zone, which is what I was doing, but I just didn’t realize it.” Jawanza Williams from VOCAL NY picks up on the ways in which connecting with people’s needs directly is also part of effectively hearing members and leaders: “We’re responding to the structural realities that block people from being able to access power, to be able to be heard.” Sometimes this results in integrating direct service programs into the organization (see chapter 5). Kate Hess Pace of Hoosier Action, describes how she has wrestled with the needs people bring into their relationship with the organization. There

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has long been a bright line between social service and organizing, but nearly all of the organizations we surveyed were grappling in some way with incorporating a recognition of people’s material needs into the organizational structure, staffing, and leadership development trajectory. This became more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. People needed a trusted place to turn for good information and assistance, and a vehicle for power to address the deep race and class inequities exposed by the pandemic (Garcia & Smith, 2020; Santiago & Smith, 2020). Local residents and workers looked to the organizations they trusted for financial support, community, advocating for health care, and other forms of mutual aid. However, even in 2019, not long after founding Hoosier Action, Pace was already seeing the obstacles community members faced to deep engagement: “This act of being in this organization fulfills multiple needs for people, and isn’t just a transactional political act. . . . So I think one is we’re building communities. Two, is lots of political education and leadership development and real work. I’m also exploring whether or not we should do some service provision for our members who are prevented from activity because of the amount of things that they’re faced with. I can’t decide. I come out of a tradition [in which] ‘there’s a bright line between charity and justice.’ Where I am right now, it doesn’t feel appropriate to hold that line so starkly. So we’re trying to figure out what that could look like without it absorbing our entire mission.” DEVELOPING THE SKILLS TO CONFRONT POWER

Marshall Ganz from Harvard summarizes the broader context for organizing as a power-building approach to creating change: “I think of organizing as one way of practicing leadership in which the first question to ask is not what’s my issue, but who are my people? With whom am I entering into a contract here? And second, what is the change they need from their perspective? What are the problems that they encounter, and what would change look like? Third, how can I enable them to turn their resources into the power they need to accomplish that—and I distinguish from providing services to clients, and I distinguish from marketing products to customers? It’s about enabling people to become a constituency (from the Latin con and stare), come together, stand together, decide together, act together, and win together.”

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In a mobilizing approach, where individuals come together to express outrage or even to make explicit demands, Ganz points out that the source of power comes from resources already available—people who are readily willing to sign a petition or come to a rally they heard about from advertising in some manner. As people enter into a relationship with an organization and develop leadership skills, building power is “about creating new collective capacity and developing more resources—which is what organizing is about.” In the case example, Gabe Strachota, formerly with Community Voices Heard (CVH), speaks to the essential nature of leadership identification and connects it directly with other core skills, such as agitation and an understanding of the underlying reasons that can hold people back from fulfilling their potential. He makes a powerful statement about the narrative of self-blame that pervades marginalized communities, such as the primarily Black and Latinx public housing residents in New York City who CVH organizes. For members, fighting that narrative and allowing themselves to claim self-interest, to want power, to see themselves as deserving of this—these are at the foundation of a relationship of skillful leadership with a social action organization.

GABE STRACHOTA: AGITATION AND ACCOUNTABILITY Leader identification is a key skill of an organizer: being able to identify both strong leadership potential as well as people who are already leaders and to build relationships with them and bring them into the organization. Other key characteristics are as an agitator and, in particular, being able to create tension as part of the leadership development process—pushing people and calling them to do great things. On the flip side, we have a slogan around leadership development; we say “choosey not thirsty.” Thirstiness is definitely a problem, meaning there’s a desperation to mobilize people and get anyone in the room who they can get together in a room. That can have pretty disastrous impacts at worst, and even at best it’s just not a foundation on which you can build a strong organization. For example, there’s a guy who’s now on our board. He had a hard time building relationships with his neighbors in public housing, building a base (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) there. He’s a very sharp person and makes different kinds of contributions to the organization, but he was having a hard time really building a base. Through one-on-ones I learned his story, and I made a judgment that I shared with him that some of the abuse that he experienced at the hands of neighbors as a young person was getting in the way of him wanting to relate to neighbors or even thinking that his community could be transformed. I had a conversation with him about that and created tension with him about it. I asked him to make a choice about whether he wanted to continue to let that dominate him or if he wanted to do something different. He chose to be different, and I held him accountable to it. There are different schools of thought even within CVH about agitation. Some are just about identifying a powerless behavior and asking, “Are you going to change this or not?” And that’s the way tension has been created. It’s not just in the volunteer membership, but in the staff development as well. I had a mentor a couple years ago say: “You’re not taking up a lot of space in the organization, are you going to change that or not?” Then there’s another approach, more in line with what I described previously, that looks at not just what the behavior is and the choice but where the behavior comes from, why there’s a lot of vulnerability, and that can be a formative process for folks. Nine times out of 10, I find that what’s holding people back is really deep-rooted feelings of worthlessness.

Strachota’s comments about confronting feelings of worthlessness to counter the dominant narrative of self-blame echoed throughout our interviews with organizers. Rather than being discouraged by this, Strachota describes the importance of being agitated by anger: “I think anger is a key piece of what drives people to be a leader.” “We do political education, which is working to get people to politicize their experiences, move from shame and blaming themselves to blaming the system, and the 1 percent that profits off of their experiences.” Strachota extends this agitation to understanding his own motivation as an organizer. In doing so, he surfaces an experience that we heard about in some form from many of those we interviewed. Organizing builds a

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sense of righteousness around the anger that people feel about their unfair and harmful circumstances. It is a way to use that anger to fight back as opposed to turning it inward. Strachota describes being raised in an activist community, and he reflects on his own story: “At CVH, there is a lot of emphasis on understanding your story and your self interest, and I’ve been pushed to go deeper than the story I’ve shared about why I do this work. And what I’ve come to realize is that I think what most shapes me in this work was my parents’ separation and my dad leaving my mom when she was pregnant with me and my mom having a lot of righteous anger and pain that I literally was formed inside of and born into. I think that sort of core emotional experience of righteous anger around suffering is really at the center of who I am, and organizing almost feels like the spiritual practice of that in the real world. I’m not a religious person, but organizing feels like the closest thing to that to me.” There is clearly righteousness on all sides of the political spectrum, but social action organizers describe this as a form of empowerment. They are tapping into that anger as a source for making connections with others and sustaining positive change. This was essential to the Alinksy method, and the evolution of that concept comes through in the consciousness that organizations foster among staff and leaders and direct at changing systems of oppression. Catalina Morales, then lead organizer with Isaiah in Minnesota, points to how the skill of agitation fosters her ability to move people to understand their own self-interest in the issues at hand. These two core concepts— agitation and self-interest—originally endorsed by Alinsky (1946) have always been a factor in organizing (Miller, 2015b, p. 35). Alinsky wrote about the necessity of “rubbing raw the sores of discontent” to “galvanize them for radical social change.” Today’s organizers have evolved both nuance and focus in building righteous anger. Morales describes how agitation is used to counter society’s dominant ideology, which leaders and organizers have internalized, and how she works to help leaders overcome those falsehoods so they can act: The majority of people say they are there for everyone else but themselves. “I’m here for the children that are starving.” I’m not saying that’s bad, but they’re not centered at all in themselves. We take them through a path and say, “no, that’s not why you’re here; let’s dig deeper,” and then you keep going,

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you keep going, and you show them how to build—but it’s all through agitation, all of it, all of it, all of it. It’s a week of intense self-agitation and agitation that others are doing of you because the whole week we train people, “It’s about you, it’s about you, it’s about you.”

As leadership development evolves, organizers place more emphasis on people doing things for themselves. One of the iron rules of the Alinksy model was never to do for others what they could do for themselves. In practice, we have asked if that was ever widely in use, given what our first edition revealed about how the organizer’s job was to influence leaders’ actions (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). Today’s organizers give concrete examples of how they seek and use opportunities to move leaders to be selfdirected and self-sustaining. Vivian Yi Huang of APEN says that “our members also do a lot of the organizing. It’s not just our organizers, but it’s also the leaders who are already involved who also bring in more leaders. In both Oakland and Richmond, particular leaders have brought in all their friends or have organized their neighbors to join.” Zachary Lerner, organizer with New York Communities for Change, explores this further: “I think the job description for an organizer is that no matter if you’re doing digital organizing, community organizing, or labor organizing, it is about giving the tools to folks to be able to organize in their own communities. It’s not the staff doing everything themselves, it’s really how you’re developing leaders and networks within each of these communities, workplaces, digitally, online, or wherever to actually create the structures for change. I think a lot of it also is a huge amount of education and how we are setting up for folks to be able to fight and have these analyses to be able to understand how we’re taking on corporations, political interests, etc.” Andrea Dehlendorf of United for Respect illustrates this in the case example. She first describes how an interaction with a worker early in her organizing career as a labor union organizer changed her perspective on leadership development. “People are capable of massive leaps,” she reflects, “if we believe in them and create space for them to do it.” As Dehlendorf describes it, the takeaway was clear: “Organizations that are very organizercentric and professional-staff-centric hold things too tight. People don’t necessarily see themselves in it.”

ANDREA DEHLENDORF: READY TO BE A LEADER, TWO STORIES My original first campaign was with UNITE HERE, which I think is the bestof-the-best of a real traditional Alinsky-ist model of organizing where you are spending really deep time with people. As an organizer, I was trained that you decide who the leaders are, and then you give out small accomplishable assignments. It can be really paternalistic in my view now. But it’s very much held and controlled by the organizer who then builds a committee that then takes ownership—but it’s tight. I was working on a campaign in a casino, and I had been house visiting this woman for years. She never answered the door, and everyone kept telling me, “She’s a leader, she’s a leader.” I was in the break room one day, and this woman (I didn’t know who she was) came up to me and said: “I’m ready to be a leader. You’ve been at my house, I hide [when you come], but today I decided I’m going to be a leader. Can I have my leader button?” “Well, it’s not that simple. You just can’t decide to be a union leader. I have to meet with you to talk about what that means, and then I need to give you this test to see if you can do it.” “Well, what do I have to do? What does a leader do?” “Well, a leader signs up other people to join the organization.” “Do you have any cards?” “Well, yeah.” “Give me the cards.” The worker soon came back with 20 signed union cards, and she asked again, “Can I be a leader now, please? Can I have my button?” This was a very humbling experience that taught me not to patronize the people I organize. When I was building the Walmart team at the beginning of our work, there was a leader who, when we had first launched our Facebook page and a digital staff person was writing our content, would call me on the phone and say: “Listen, don’t be mad. But like, what the f*** are you doing with this Facebook page? This doesn’t sound like us. It sounds like somebody sitting in a political office in D.C. putting out these messages. It’s not us, it’s not me, it doesn’t speak to me.” (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) I responded, “Well, what would you post?” So she started sending me posts, which were in her words—she didn’t have a high school education, but she told me, “say this,” and then I would say it, and then I would post what other people said in response. And all of a sudden this community started flourishing. It’s important to think about how we can hand over much more co-creation and leadership to people from the base to create organizations that are reflective of who they are. I think you see this in traditional unions as well: people see the union as somebody else, they don’t see the union as them. I think that’s an institutional failure. We’re building organizations that do not feel of people but rather for people, which don’t make people feel like they’re the drivers and the engines of it.

One challenge that has always been present in organizing is the need for organizers to ensure that members who are taking action steps to move into leadership are from the core constituency—those who represent the base should be making decisions for the organization and serving as it’s public facing leaders. Although residents and other stakeholders can play important roles as allies and supporters, one pitfall can be to form organizational culture around the “woke.” Following the 2016 elections, many people were mobilized by electoral politics and protest action and sought membership in community-based organizations to continue their activism. Organizers found they needed to proactively strengthen the voice of the core leadership of impacted community members in response. Chelsea White, formerly of Down Home North Carolina, describes how that organization addresses this challenge. Here in western North Carolina, in particular, a lot of our organizing circles tend to be partisan and highly white middle-class folks that consider themselves progressive. And that makes sense: they have the most time, they have the most resources, etc. With Down Home being an organization that is building power for the poor and working class, we have conversations to establish what the roles that more middle- or upper-class folks can play in an organization that is intending to put poor working people at the very

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front of the work that we do. A lot of times that means I have to address someone and say: “You are a middle- or upper-class supporter of Down Home’s work, and we are so grateful for that. And what I’m worried about is that the role that you are stepping into right now is making our less educated, less affluent members feel as if they can’t speak up because they aren’t smart enough or they don’t sound the same way that you do.” Those conversations are really uncomfortable, but it also offers the opportunity for that person to really figure out how they can help lift up folks to that same level of confidence that they have.

Leadership roles are expressed fully as leaders take action and confront power in public ways. We explore this more extensively in chapter 8 because it is through campaigns that members express their power. Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa (2021) describe this continuous, expanding, and deeper process that leaders go through as developing second-order capabilities, the strategic and organizational judgment that becomes a valuable resource to the organization (p. 121). Chelsea White speaks of how the work of an organizer includes offering and supporting people to restore their own sense of worth and dignity. She related this story of a member who got involved in the early days of Down Home North Carolina: “Sam Wilds was quoted in the report titled ‘No One’s Ever Asked Me Before’ that’s on our website. . . . She was one of the first people whose door I knocked on. She was 24 at the time, completely blind, and had severe health conditions. When I knocked on her door asking, ‘Hey, I just want to know what matters to you. What issues do you experience?’ Her response was to ask if I was sure I had the right house, and she said: ‘No one’s ever asked me before, I don’t matter.’ ” White recalls that Sam went on to testify against Duke Energy: “They were trying to increase our utility rates, and she came in and testified. She was one of those people who said, ‘I can’t do this.’ Up to the moment that we were in the courtroom listening to all the lawyers and the activists speak, she was still saying she couldn’t do it. And when she did it, it was this huge breakthrough.” White also recalls a lobby visit with one of their state senators, Jim Davis, who is anti-Medicaid expansion. She recalls that Wilds “was just fearless in speaking her truth to him and her power to him and letting him know that by not expanding Medicaid he was putting people like her and her family in direct harm. He had no idea what it was like to have to live with a disability in the same way that she did.”

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This kind of participation is the driving force of change—those who have to live with their grievances learning to take risks and pushing themselves and fighting back with the support of their organizations. ORGANIZER SKILLS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

Twenty-five years ago the organizer was at the nexus of the organization. The organizer worked behind the scenes in public settings but had a heavy hand internally in shaping the leaders, campaigns, and in many ways the culture of the organization. Even when leaders were the core decisionmakers, they were deeply influenced by the organizer’s views and style. Today’s organizers bring more conscious attention to their potential power in the organization. In the mid-2000s, Minieri and Getsos (2007) reflected that although organizers had power in the development and implementation of issue campaigns, they did so in partnership with members, with awareness of the impact of the information and opinions they brought to the organizing process (p. 249). Organizations value the attributes and skills associated with good organizers. They know the difference between what they can train people to do versus what they can’t train. For instance, the untrainable starts with a genuine interest in being in relationship with others, not just united in common cause. The trainable includes the elements of moving people through a leadership development ladder of skills. In 1994, we identified three sets of overlapping attributes that were valued in organizers: change vision attributes, technical skills, and interactional skills (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). In this section, we share today’s organizers’ perspectives and how much they have come to value the interactional skill set. We quote them extensively as their stories encompass a full range of the attributes and skills we summarize here: • Being engaging and genuinely interested in people’s experiences • Treating people with respect and dignity • Recognizing that each member or potential leader is unique and has both needs and abilities • Keeping a focus on the goals while being flexible with each unique person • Having a healthy dose of anger about unjust systems • Demonstrating a listening and learning attitude and humility but operating with confidence and courage

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• Using skills such as agitation and holding one-on-ones • Seeing a horizon in which things are better for people who experience injustice and being able to describe, motivate, and train people toward achieving that better life • Willingness to act collectively and to step back to skillfully support the leadership of others in taking action • Believing in the importance of addressing people’s direct needs as they fight for justice

Christian Diaz, former lead housing organizer and now director of housing with Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago, points out attributes of good organizers that we heard from many of those we interviewed. A good organizer has a bit of an ego, wants to be respected, and works with people who also want to be respected. A good organizer is a storyteller, somebody who can communicate values through really specific incidents, either in their own life or in lives they’ve observed. A good organizer is funny and warm and welcoming. A good organizer is relationship-focused and treats people with the respect that they deserve and understands that even though we have no reason to believe that life will be better, that we still work toward inspiring people to believe that it can be better. That’s the challenge, and we don’t always get the respect that I think we deserve or the credit for the work or the proper funding. But at the end of the day, you don’t organize for credit or for recognition or for money, right? This is not a recommended career path for somebody who wants to be wealthy. But we understand that more important than profit is the stability and the well-being of our people.

Catalina Morales, formerly with Isaiah, emphasizes the qualities of presence and risk-taking that we heard so much about. [Organizers need to have]  the ability to relate to people. The reason I say that is because we’ve hired some people who went to school and studied all about organizing but cannot relate to a person if it depended on their life. It’s because they’re so stuck in their head. It’s been interesting to see. I’ve known people who know everything about organizing, know every single step you should take, they know why they want to do it, yet they can’t sit there and just relate to someone like ask people questions, curious questions. Find out what

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is it that drives them, what is it that drives them every day to get up or things like that. I think that would be one. Two, I think it would be someone who’s willing to take risks and has an entrepreneurial mind to design campaigns or fights that go beyond what we normally see in the world. The reason I say that is because everyone in society is so structured to do A, B, C, D. We’ve known the things that we should do or should not do since we were very young in society. Some people because of that can’t get out of the headspace of “I can’t do that because that’s impossible” or “I can’t even imagine that.” I think that’s why I say [we need] someone who’s willing to take risks where we don’t even know if this can happen, but we’re going to try to make it happen anyway. I guess those would be the two main important [qualities] for me because everything else you can train.

Bobby King, formerly of Land Stewardship Project, says that what he’s looking for in organizers can be a bit ephemeral. “We’re looking for people, even if it’s a small thing, who have taken some type of action to right some type of injustice that they felt was meaningful in their life. You want an attitude that you should be working to make things better, to work toward justice in some capacity. The other thing we want to see is people who really want to work with people, that don’t want to drift into becoming a lobbyist or some type of advocate for people but that have a hunger to really bring people together to work on collective change together. Those are the two things I’m trying to suss out of people the most when I’m interviewing them.” Jose Lopez, former lead organizer and now coexecutive director, is very clear about what they look for at Make the Road New York, beginning with a willingness to work hard in exchange for the rewards of building a more just world and sustaining the community. Folks need to be willing to work, willing to learn, and have some social skills. But also some belief in what we’re trying to build. We want to create a healthy, positive work environment, but it’s hard to say that this is all the time going to be a nine to five job. Organizationally, we’re not even structured that way, all of our committee meetings happen from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. If you’re not willing to leave your desk and knock on doors and stop people at the train stations and stop people on the street that you’ve never talked to before, completely cold contact, then it’s not going to work for you.

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You have to be willing to get up and go talk to folks. If you fundamentally don’t have the same belief around the kind of community, the kind of city, state, country, and world that we’re trying to build toward, this is the wrong organization and wrong job for you.

Lopez also speaks to the importance of teamwork and intentional, personal outreach. Also, it’s important for folks who are willing and want to build in teams. And not just colleagues who are your colleagues in the workplace like other staffers, but also understand that the way that we try and work and operate is that the people most affected by any issue should be the people on the front lines identifying solutions to those problems. If you’re someone who thinks you know it all and talks too much, this is probably also not the right space for you. I’m sure there might be some other role for you in the movement, but this isn’t it because we want to make sure that we’re putting front and center people most impacted by the issues that they’re bringing to the table. I’ve had some challenge, for example, with some folks who are like, “I did massive outreach on Facebook.” Cool . . . that is complementary to the work that we need to be doing, but did you get off your ass and actually hit the streets, did you knock some doors, did you do the follow up, did you stop people at train stations, did you go to where you know young people who are older, workplaces, restaurants, whatever, depending on the issue that you’re working on? If the answer is no, if you’re not willing to get up and do that work 10 times out of 10, I’m pretty confident saying that you’re going to have an unsuccessful solution to the problem that you’re trying to solve.

Crystal Reyes, program director of Sistas and Brothas United, the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition’s youth organization, describes how being engaging, forthright, and confident are the foundations for doing skillful leadership development. She says that an organizer has to have “the ability to move people, and that can mean different things. I think the ability to be flexible, because there’s so many different personalities. Being able to work with five or six different people with five or six different needs but still being able to guide them in that same direction of moving away from oppression and addressing the root cause issues and all those things. I think that’s number one: an organizer cannot be shy, cannot

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be afraid to hold people accountable, whether it’s the leaders that they’re working with, the elected officials, or the targets. Whoever it is, they cannot be hesitant in those moments and have to be ready to move.” Ultimately, organizers need to have the flexibility to respond to what different people need as they move leaders toward action in issue campaigns. Jade Brooks of SONG agrees, adding that the organization’s goals of achieving transformational change—in their case, the abolition of all systems of incarceration—extends to the transformation of staff members in the work of achieving this goal. An organizer needs to be able to listen more than they talk, to what we call ‘walk with the people,’ be humble, revel in the experience and wisdom of ordinary people, and want to change the world. I think an organizer needs to have courage, to not be afraid to tell the truth even when it’s unpopular, and to motivate other people to have courage, really feel their courage. And then I think the organizer needs to develop other leaders to invite folks into the work of social change, and be able to really encourage them to take more and more risks. . . . [We need] people willing to create within ourselves the emotional resilience to hear hard feedback, and to be willing to be trained. And what we talk about in SONG is to be willing to be transformed in the service of the work. So folks who come to us with a lot of analysis, read a lot of books or Instagram posts, or have been to college, or have been through a lot of training programs, but do not have a lot of willingness to learn on the ground and to talk with ordinary people, and to show up again and again and to try something and have it fail and hear that from your comrades, we struggle with that. And the folks who are really willing to learn and to grow and are dying for mentorship actually do better in the organization.

Lucas Benitez, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, explains that collective leadership and representation are important components of their base-building strategy, and that everyone on staff adheres to this. This is an enduring distinction in organizing that we heard much about. No one is “the leader”; organizations view these roles as “our leaders.” Benitez says, “The press, different media outlets, and social media, often report on a single person. They profile the one individual who’s leading the group or one individual who’s leading the movement. And that’s something that we’ve always pushed back against. We’ve always tried to make sure that it isn’t just

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one person who is visible and that it isn’t just one person who’s representing the whole group. Just as I’m sitting here right now, it could be any one of our other staff members who could be sitting here with you.” A core belief in the ability of ordinary people to make change, no matter their starting point, is at the center of doing this work. We see this in the evolution of social action organizations serving as trusted spaces and political homes (chapter 5) and in the many ways in which race and gender have become central in an analysis of intersectional injustice and the culture and practice of organizing (chapter 3). Vivian Yi Huang, with APEN, sums it up: “In order to activate people’s belief in their power to make change, an organizer has to have that belief very deeply. There’s going to be many moments where it is going to feel like it’s not enough or what we’re up against can be so much. That’s a really important, fundamental orientation, and it ends up permeating everything, that belief in our ability to make change.” This belief in the power to make change is what leadership development builds with members. They become the primary communicators of the organization’s goals and the foundation of its power. PATHWAYS FROM LEADERSHIP ONTO THE STAFF

One of the most significant changes in the structure of leadership in social action organizing is the intentional process of hiring staff from the membership of the organization and creating pipelines so that people can move from experiencing the issues the organization addresses to being hired into staff roles (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). Sandra Lobo, executive director of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition in New York, an organization that has been established for decades, comments: “We’re very proud to say that 95 percent of our staff right now is from the community.” This change has been underway for some time. In the Alinsky approach, there was a bright line between staff and member leaders (Alinsky, 1946, 1971). Organizers were taught that they must be objective about what would benefit the organization and that they could not be effective if they were aligned with one group or person. It was important to be an outsider: “The advantage of the outsider (and they were all men in Alinsky’s days) was that, not being a part of any one of the groups or identities within a large neighborhood, he could be a part of them all. Because he

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possessed great empathy and imagination, he was able to stand inside the shoes of each” (Miller, 2015b, p. 34). Today the thinking is quite the opposite; organizers believe that they can be both connected to the issues and people and be viewed as impartial and helpful. Lucas Benitez, of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, focuses on the positives of organizers having direct knowledge of the issues they confront: “The greatest skill that we all have is knowing how to work in the fields and coming into this organization with that firsthand knowledge of knowing how that picking is done. Not only knowing that work very, very deeply, but then also being able to talk about it, and being able to speak to what it takes to be a farmworker and express to people what that experience is like.” This has long been the approach at Immokalee, and many organizers are more intentionally recruiting staff organizers from the constituency today because it enhances their work and increases their legitimacy within the organization. One aspect has not changed; when impacted constituents move onto the staff, they have a different role than that of a member. Their job is always to build the base and to bring in more leaders. Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah, points out that “if you’re not building a base, then there really isn’t a role for you at Isaiah.” She does acknowledge, however, that sometimes it is appropriate for them to represent the organization publicly due to their connection to the issues. We’re less rigid about that than we used to be. Our lead organizer does public leadership in the immigrant rights world. You’ll see her at the front of a march sometimes, she is quoted in the paper. But we still think it’s important in the orientation of an organizer that your fundamental job is to build a base. Your job is not to be the movement leader, your job is to build a base. And the base of people that you’re building are not just the activists and the people who are already there. The base that you’re building is a broad base of people who are not yet woke, working-class regular people. . . . And the orientation about building a base is that you are building leadership and it’s more healthy for the organization if that leadership is in the front. But we’re not as rigid about that as we were 15 years ago.

Jawanza Williams with VOCAL-NY, describes how he found out about the organization while living in a shelter. His story points to both a pipeline

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into the organization and the intentional ways the organization distinguishes between the roles of staff and members. I started to draw the connections between the state not serving the people the right way, how the stories that Angela Davis tells about the role of capitalism, exploitation, of patriarchy, racism, and white supremacist ideology [formed] the conditions that people were experiencing, and the same worldview or critical awareness or analysis that the Black Lives Matter network and the movement was talking about all became crystal clear to me in that moment. Then I realized, oh, I’m supposed to do something about this. While I’m having this almost psychosocial ontological experience in myself, in the shelter someone knocks on my door and presents to me this organization called VOCAL-NY that does this thing called organizing to end mass incarceration, homelessness, the drug war, and the HIV and AIDS epidemic, and they do it through developing leaders and building political power among those communities to fight back. I said, oh, that’s literally exactly what I want to do. So I became a member of the organization.

Williams navigated his own experiences of being low-income and needing Medicaid benefits and rental assistance until he was “no longer dependent on the state to pay my rent. That removed me from the direct experience, so even if I was a member or a leader, I was not so close to the issue anymore.” He describes the approach VOCAL-NY takes of organizing members into unions where they can build and practice leadership functions “as a moral compass for us and a check and balance for the organization.” He explains his commitment to radical pragmatism, in which his ideology informs his work but the needs of his members are first and foremost: Perhaps Jawanza, the individual, thinks that we’ve got to be explicitly anticapitalist, and any plan that the city has to close Rikers has to have no new jails. But perhaps our members’ priority is different. So it keeps us humanized and within the scope of our membership. I’m trying to move them along to deeper degrees of political analysis, but also they are reminding me that there are immediate concrete material realities that people are contending with, so perhaps the demand is not to dismantle capitalism right now, the demand is to build more shelter beds, the demand is to build more

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low-income housing right now for this particular community. I think this is a very important thing about VOCAL-NY—this apparatus functions both in a material sense as we build our material power but also ideologically to keep us rooted in the community.

BECOMING AN ORGANIZER

In this section, we share the stories of three organizers whose experiences are directly connected with the base. These stories illustrate how organizations intentionally build points of connection and entry for community members to enter professional staff roles through structured programs and by creating the welcoming spaces we describe in chapter 5. In the case example, Jose Lopez summarizes many of the engagement elements discussed in this chapter. At the time of our interview, he was a lead organizer with Make the Road New York, and in 2021 he became the coexecutive director.

JOSE LOPEZ: FINDING A CAREER PATH IN ORGANIZING I’d been living in Bushwick, Williamsburg, all my life, and it was the summer after eighth grade when I finally got that piece of blue paper that says that I can go out and get a summer youth job. I tried to enter the workforce, and I was walking up and down the local shopping districts to see if I could find a job at a commercial store, maybe folding some jeans for the summer, just to keep a little bit of money in my pocket. I was unsuccessful. Then one day, cutting from Myrtle to Knickerbocker Avenue on the train tracks, something told me to hang a left on Grove Street, which is a block that for some reason I never walked down before. I was like, “Cool, I’m gonna cut this way.” I was probably 13. I saw an awning that said “Make the Road by Walking,” and on the storefront of the window were all these images, signs, and messages that talked about community, dignity, and respect. I hadn’t seen anything like that in the neighborhood before, at least not something with those words, with those kinds of messages, so I crossed the street to peek in. My cousins

were inside the office talking to the then founding director and organizer, Oona Chatterjee. I’m already intrigued by what’s going on, I see my cousins inside, what do I do? I walk in. There was an initial conversation happening between the organizer and them about a lack of access to youth programs and youth services in Bushwick. I was able in the moment to just testify to that fact: “I’m trying to find a job, and I can’t find one! There’s really nothing else for me to do as a young 13-year-old student.” Chatterjee was excellent in that space of having us think about—without calling it organizing—what it would mean to transform our community in a way that got us the things that we said we didn’t have in the moment. She was excellent at challenging us to come back at a future date to continue the conversation about the lack of youth services and the lack of investment for schools, jobs, and programs. Then it got to a point where the organizer set down the challenge and introduced us to a film titled Pa’lante Siempre Pa’lante. It was a documentary about the Young Lords party growing out of Chicago and then having its base in New York; it was about young, Puerto Rican and people of color activists who were talking about how their communities were marginalized and suffering and didn’t have access. Chatterjee asked us what was between the crew of young people sitting in the room today talking about the fact that there’s not much opportunity for them in their district, and what was being said by the Lords in the 1960s and 1970s around how there was no real opportunity for their communities at that time period? It was at that moment that she challenged us to pick up the fight: “Look, we don’t have many resources here, but we have this space. If you want to engage young people on this question, and bring young people together and think about doing something collectively, you can use the space.” She also offered us each a $50 stipend to keep us engaged and to have us think about that question some more and actually form something that we felt good about with her support. We started the Youth Power Project, which is still operating today. In fact, I think it’s the largest youth organizing arm of any organization across the state. Our first campaign was called Wise Up, and it was a campaign that targeted local legislators and the council to fight for us in the legislature and in the City Council, so that dollars could be earmarked to create specific investment in our schools, local job training, jobs, and youth services for us (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) as a district because there was so much disinvestment over the years before that leading to the fires and the blackouts in the 1970s. The range of young people at that time was probably between 13 and 16, and I was one of the youngest. Then it got to the point, probably close to a year in, when just like today you continue to hear, “There’s no funding, there’s no money. We care about these issues, but there’s no way to pay for it.” And about a year in, there was a citywide discussion that had started because a capital plan was put forward by the then mayor that set aside $64.6 million in capital funds to expand Crossroads and Horizons youth detention centers, one in Brooklyn and one in the Bronx. We were young, but we weren’t stupid. For a year we’ve been hearing, “there’s no money”—that’s our money. What do you mean you’re going to expand two youth detention centers that at the time weren’t even at 70  percent capacity? So we engaged with youth organizers from across the city and became steering committee members, as young people, of a campaign called No More Youth Jails. Wise Up turned into the No More Youth Jails campaign, and we basically said that we needed to disinvest from building prisons and jails for young people and reinvest that money into the things that we had been calling for in the first place. We had a pretty big win in that very first campaign. Of the $64.6 million, I think something like $3 million was taken out of the capital plan to expand Crossroads and Horizons. We were all super young. Being introduced to the work, having access to other young people, doing something you feel passionate about, but also wanting to build a community and have access to a space that you feel like is yours [kept us going], and the organization gave us that space. We became part of a citywide movement of young people, which felt really empowering. And then we won! It’s one thing to organize, and it feels good to organize and represent your block, your neighbors, and your community. But there’s a unique feeling when you win. You want more of that because you know that what you’re fighting for is the right thing, that it has a real impact on real people’s lives. I think being a part of that early on, but also winning early on, kept me connected to this organization and work. That was in 1999; it’s 2019 and I’m still here.

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Christian Diaz with Logan Square Neighborhood Association found his way to organizing by stopping at the storefront location in his community and getting involved. “My mother brought me to this country when she was 19 years old. She came here as a single mom. She didn’t speak the language, didn’t know anybody, but she knew and we thought that in this country if you work hard and you play by the rules, you can be somebody. . . . The Logan Square neighborhood that we’re in was the kind of neighborhood where, even if you didn’t speak English, you could still live a full life because the shops in the neighborhood, the hairdresser, the doctor—you could go anywhere and people would speak your language.” Diaz learned about the organization as a young adult, home from college on a break, and noticing how the storefront was different from others in the neighborhood. He volunteered, then got an internship there, and joined the staff after graduating and returning to Chicago. He started out registering pro-immigrant voters and fighting for driver’s licenses for undocumented people. Diaz describes the various ways most people come onto their staff, emphasizing again the intentional pipelines from the community through the membership. He describes Logan Square’s leadership and fellowship programs, which are based in their organizing in schools: “We bring in some of the moms to help in the school, and then we’ll notice some of the moms have a real passion for this, and then they’ll get promoted in the organization.” He notes, “Most of our staff are women; most started off as parent mentors, as parent leaders in the school, in the classroom. We were able to nurture their skill set as organizers. Eventually they became employed with us or even at other nonprofits.” Logan Square is also intentional about creating pathways specifically for young people. In the summers, they recruit more than 100 students from high school through new college graduates for jobs, and they invite some of them into an intensive fellowship. They learn organizing skills, connect with other organizers throughout the city, and engage with city agencies such as the Chicago Department of Public Health. Diaz says, “We’re creating a network of young people who are being exposed to community organizing, the culture of our organization, the culture of nonprofits, and the culture of city agencies and public agencies. We’re also teaching young people that social justice is a career option.” Diaz echoes what we heard from several organizers who are now in leadership: “I didn’t know [about

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social justice] until I was 22. If more people knew that social justice was a career option, I think they would move toward that. We need to put a lot of effort into developing the next generation of organizers.” In the third example, Jade Brooks of SONG describes how her political consciousness, informed by personal experience, came to coincide with opportunities to connect with organizing and changed her career trajectory. She recalls growing up in an activist family and realizing that the environmental movement lacked an analysis of the political and class structure in which they worked. I was born into an environmentalist community in Oregon, and my parents and their friends were very passionate at the time about stopping logging of old growth forests. I knew that people organized across the world to make change happen. My Dad was in Seattle for the WTO [World Trade Organization] protests. But I felt stifled by that community because it was so patriarchal. And it was also really white. I didn’t have the words for it, but [there was] a lack of engagement with antiracism or acknowledging [that] white supremacy [was] at work in the environmental movement. And at that time in Oregon, there was a battle that I learned about later between the environmentalist movement and working-class logging communities who were decimated by corporate greed. There was a lack of a class analysis. I came into movement as an adult with SONG. I had been working in book publishing and had [learned about] political analysis through college and through reading and my social community being in an LGBTQ space. But I wasn’t an activist or an organizer until I moved to North Carolina and was invited to participate in an organizing school that SONG held there in 2009. That was definitely my first taste of a southern movement legacy, and also of the theory of change that SONG is working with.

CONCLUSION

Many organizers told us that at the end of the day organizing is about people, and every individual person has a history, a trajectory—a story. Base building for power is the work of building relationships among people. It is the methodical and artful work of listening, agitating, learning new skills, and coming to terms with the righteous anger we heard so much about in our interviews. The demand for dignity, to be seen and heard, is what has always lit the fire in the belly of organizers and leaders.

Chapter Seven

ISSUES The Rubik’s Cube of Organizing

As soon as you win one victory, you have to move on to the next, so there’s always going to be something to fight for, this work really is never done. That’s always the way that we like to look at it, that every single individual deserves basic human rights and what those basic human rights cover are dignified wages, access to employment that can actually sustain you and your family, employment that actually dignifies you and holds you up. That’s the framing that we use—it all comes back to human rights that everyone deserves. LUCAS BENITEZ, COALITION OF IMMOKALEE WORKERS

In 1994 we wrote, “Social action organizations work on public issues, not private troubles” (Mondros & Wilson, 1994, p. 96). We described a process whereby organizations generated and identified issues, selected among issues and developed working agreements of organizational priorities, collected information and deepened and extended their members’ commitment for the organization’s position, and finally monitored the progress of organizational issues. We also offered criteria organizations used to choose issues including their relevance to their members, the ability to successfully resolve them, the conditions of organizational readiness and resources, and the ability of the issues to further the organizations’ social change goals (p. 110). Other authors generally supported our earlier understanding. Bobo, Kendall, and Max (2010) and Minieri and Getsos (2007) agree that issues are collective and not individual problems, and they add the important point that issues that can be organized around must be able to be at least partially resolved by a specific action (Bobo et al., 2010, p. 21). Sen (2003) writes that issues are grievances that have a constituency and that have solutions and institutions that can be held accountable for the grievances (p. 48). The broad problems social action organizations usually take on (for example, poverty, climate change, unfair and unjust labor practices, racism, sexism, and homophobia) must be partialized and operationalized

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in ways that lead to a solution for which some institution or person can be held accountable. The radical commitments to antiracism and antipatriarchy must be transformed into tangible, pragmatic policies and actions that begin to resolve their members’ grievances. There is also general agreement on the criteria for what constitutes an “organizable issue.” Minieri and Getsos (2007) argue that “good” issues are those that resonate with the membership, make a concrete change, offer the possibility of success, have a clear target, build organizational power, and support the organization’s mission and values (p. 132). Staples (2016) writes: “when choosing an issue, a [social action organization] must be concerned about not only whether it can be won but also how the campaign will develop the group” (p. 123). He encourages organizations to think about both the depth (how deeply people care) and the breadth (how many people care about it) of issues, which Bobo et al. (2010) call “cutting the issue” in a way that as many people as possible experience the grievance and are in favor of making it an organizational priority (p. 22). Criteria include consistency with the organizations’ goals, the capacity to unite people, the organization’s capacity to take something on, the potential for organizational growth, the opportunity to educate people, the likelihood the organization will get credit for the change, available resources, the potential to identify allies, the tactics available, and the potential for victory (Staples, 2016, pp. 126–138). Bobo et. al. (2010) list 16 criteria that elaborate and further detail those of other authors. The theory of change employed by social action organizations explains that issues are assessed for their potential in delivering three kinds of change: substantive change on the problems people experience, empowerment of its members, and increasing the organization’s power. This can be assessed by asking a few practical questions: • • • • •

Will the issue result in an actual improvement in people’s lives? Is this issue something people care about deeply and broadly? Will the issue build membership and embolden and educate leadership? Will the issue grow the organization’s power and resources? Can the issue be won, moving the organization toward realizing its broader goals and vision for change?

Issues arise in various ways and from many different sources. Sometimes the political, social, or economic environment introduces an issue.

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As Zachary Lerner, organizer for New York Communities for Change, says, “it’s really about the fight that’s in front of you.” Sometimes the members raise it, sometimes one issue leads to another. Sometimes organizations join together to pursue an issue, and sometimes a national network will send an invitation for action on a given issue. However the issue emerges, it has to be validated and endorsed by the leadership of the organization. Sen (2003), quoting Marian Steeg, the former staff director of Working Partnerships, makes this point: “Some issues you choose. Some issues choose you. Even when they choose you, you still have to decide whether or not to act like the chosen people” (p. 50). We also found that today’s organizers, like their predecessors, support tackling multiple issues in concert with Audre Lorde’s (1982) famous statement, “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.” Consequently organizations respond to the needs of their members on multiple fronts. All the organizations in our sample are working on several issue campaigns at any given time. They emphasize the connections between them, often analyzed through a lens of what we call intersectional injustice. Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, represents this view: “I don’t want to say it’s all about money, because I don’t think it is. I think power and culture are currencies too. But I would say that the roots of our culture started with wealth grabbing through land, people, and natural resources. There is no women’s liberation, queer liberation, immigrant liberation, Black liberation without a radical transformation of the economy because they are intertwined. We’re dealing with issues around economic justice, be they in the workplace, housing, land, land use, and use of public dollars. We may not be able to talk about everything at the same time, but we better understand how everything is interacting.” Today’s organizers continue the tradition of working with leaders to ensure that issues are linked to one another, that people understand the connections, that organizational priorities are agreed upon, and that there is deep and broad buy-in from membership and leadership. Deborah Axt, former coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, describes how the organization handles that process. One of the major challenges in our work is it is really easy for each issue committee and staff on each issue to operate in a silo because it requires a lot of work to drive campaigns in that issue area. We have a strategic planning team that’s staff-based that does a deep retreat twice a year, and that’s

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an important place where we identify the top organization-wide priorities, grapple with how our different issues connect to one another, and figure out whether we’re realizing those points of intersectionality and whether we need to make adjustments in our operation. In our leadership schools, leaders from each different issue area come together and do a deep dive so that, for example, leaders in our LGBTQ+ Organizing Committee are learning about the history of the labor movement, which might not surface as much in their work, so that folks have the benefit of delving into history and knowledge that will serve all of us. Doing it together, building those relationships. We create a joint platform every year for city and state work, and that requires leaders to come together and grapple with how those priorities will fit. For example, next week is our Democracy Day in Albany, where several hundred of our members will lobby elected officials from all of our different geographies. That’s another time where our members are making sure to talk to each other so that we’re all prepared to talk about all of the different issues and how they relate to each other. There’s a lot of practical spaces that we need to create to link those things together. And then ultimately, the Board of Directors sets the priorities. Everyone who sits on the board is sent by an issue committee, but that is the space where we must wear the hat of the organization as a whole. That’s where decisions are made. If there’s some prioritization to be made it’s at the Board of Directors level.

There is broad agreement that issues are collective problems with an achievable goal, on the criteria for issue selection, and working on multiple issues. We found that these principles are taken for granted by today’s social action organizations. Miya Yoshitani, former executive director and now senior strategist of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network in California, sums it up: The issues that we work on always have to result in real quality of life changes for our members and leaders but that also helps us continue to build power. The way that we choose those issues and campaign strategies must allow us to continue to build the power of the organization for future fights. Our organizing tries to recognize that we don’t always have power on that first try to actually make systemic changes, but the solutions that we’re offering always have to have an element of systemic change so that we’re putting in

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building blocks for that ultimate systemic change that’s necessary instead of always thinking, “we don’t now have the power that we need.” Instead we think “how do the fights that we choose help us to build the power that we need to continue to fight for systemic changes that are necessary?”

ADDITIONAL CRITERIA FOR ISSUE SELECTION: INTERSECTIONAL INJUSTICE AND CORPORATIZATION

The assessment of an issue, the decision to pursue it, and its connection to the other issues of the organization have always been questions about the environmental context in which the organization, its leaders, and its organizers work. Is the issue of sufficient importance to the members and leaders? Who are the opponents, and does the organization have enough capacity and power for the fight ahead? Is this issue in line with the organization’s mission and broader vision of systemic institutional change? These are all contextual concerns, but the way organizers think about identifying issues has evolved. Today’s organizers have more complicated and nuanced approaches to assessing issues, messaging them, and locating solutions. We hypothesize that this evolution is primarily due to the fact that the environmental context has become much more complex and contentious. As a result, for today’s organizers the set of linked issues is not only pragmatic but also radical. The issues they work on operationalize the organization’s values and a radical vision for a more just society. As Marshall Ganz, Rita T. Hauser Senior Lecturer in Leadership, Organizing, and Civil Society at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, told us, “A valuesbased organization, I think, is really important. An issue-based organization, I think is highly problematic. It just fragments.” The focus on intersectional injustice, the expansion of corporate power and its impact on public life and public issues, and the essential commitment to include all voices—particularly those of Black Americans and other people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community—have added new urgency, convolutions, and intricacies to the subject of issue selection. Each issue is assessed for its alignment with a vision of societal transformation. To figure it all out is increasingly challenging. As Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minnesota, told us, “It’s like a Rubik’s cube.”

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The opposition to intersectional injustice and corporatization is central to today’s social action organizing, and its importance cannot be overstated. The commitments to equity, diversity, and inclusion and resistance to corporate expansion of wealth and power and the deleterious practices of capitalism certainly informs and animates issue selection. In both cases, these commitments become an additional lens through which issues are raised and evaluated. The lens of intersectional injustice, based on Crenshaw’s (1989) early work, has been widely accepted as a criteria for issue selection. Sen (2003) quotes the Center for Third World Organizing’s explicit criteria for issue selection that focuses organizers’ attention on issues of race and other marginalized communities. Their criteria from the early 2000s argue for issues that are: • Clearly discriminatory; • Promote gender- and race-based research; • Advanced the rights of vulnerable populations economically, electorally, or socially; • Have good antidiscrimination handles (data, laws) beyond moral arguments; • Solutions which not only increase opportunity for marginalized populations but undermine the privilege of whites and elites; • Introduce clear and more forceful language; and • Use tactics that challenge cultural domination and are in harmony with the culture of the people engaged in the organizing.

This last criteria is a deeper expression of one of Alinsky’s (1971) rules to “never go outside the experience of your people” (p. 127). The organizers we interviewed were uniformly in support of implementing these criteria as conditions for issue selection in their organizations. In some cases, the relevance of intersectional injustice to the issue at hand is obvious. Former president and now vice president Alex Caputo-Pearl led the 2019 teachers strike for the United Teachers Los Angeles highlighting the gender and racial inequities inherent in the teachers’ and parents’ bargaining demands. He describes his thinking in that very diverse part of California: “I think there’re lots of opportunities to frame up intersectional issues that affect people as workers, as families, as communities of color, as

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women, etc. We certainly see that in educational work where the majority of workers in the education field are women and the majority of parents we work with on the parent community organizing side are women and women of color.” The message of intersectional injustice may be easier to communicate and more palatable to constituents in cities like Los Angeles, but organizers in rural areas and in red states also work hard to make the case. Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and former codirector of Down Home North Carolina, describes how her two-year-old organization with little history working in a majority white rural part of the state still found a way to talk about race. She frames issues as not about race or social class but as race and social class. Although most people are doing poorly because of the unyielding persistence of white supremacy, people of color do much worse. It’s done through our training, how we talk about issues, just being in community with people. But we couldn’t wait on moving into action with issues because we went into communities where we had no footprint. We had no name recognition in areas that have never had organizing happening there. So we had to really think about how we are always talking about race, organizing around race, but also using our issue work and moving forward at the same time. . . . We designed a Saturday three-hour political education training, and at the center of that was a set of popular education principles around wealth consolidation and unpacking how race is played out for people. We’re trying to figure out how to embed race as a structure, white supremacy as a structure, completely embedded with our economic system in a way that has really, really harmed most people who aren’t wealthy.

Organizers in less diverse parts of the country find creative ways to do antiracism work. Mark Schultz, former executive director of the Land Stewardship Project in rural Minnesota, describes finding common cause with a Black housing organization in Minneapolis and a Native American organization on a reservation that led to successful multicultural collaborations around critical issues. Significantly, the work involves both using clear language about race and justice in multiracial organizing and working toward common ends that will achieve practical improvements in many communities, but particularly in communities of color. They are doing

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multicultural organizing by working in alliance with organizations of communities of color. With Hope Community, the original work started simply because they’re a housing cooperative; they have 410 units, and they had another lot that they were also thinking maybe that’s a food space. They wanted to make a fairly sizable urban garden farm, and we connected around that. They asked us for some support in doing that work, and so we did. That set up a more engaged set of conversations that started to get at other things like there’s some green space: how do people of color have control of that? It goes through our neighborhoods. Is there an urban-ag component of that that they own or control? Then it started moving to policy with the Minneapolis parks and the Minneapolis City Council and mayor’s office. Again, if you’re going to say, “we can have urban-ag in the parks and equity will be a main concern,” to force the city to say “racial equity” was actually something that Hope Community was saying was critical. Now, though we’re predominantly rural (about 30 percent of our members are in the Twin Cities, about 20 percent in Minneapolis), we can move our white city base right in behind and push an issue that’s being led by an ally of color. Red Lake [tribal government] is very rural, this is four and a half hours from the Twin Cities and it’s poor. I think it’s the poorest area in the state. They want to start more of their young people growing food, farming, and they want there to be some connection there to native crops. We were showing interest, they’d invite us up for their annual conference, we started going. We have this Policy and Organizing program, but we also have a Farm Beginnings program, which is literally about helping new farmers get started. They looked at that and said, “we like these four components, and we think these ones will be good,” and now they’ve invited us up. We’re going to be doing a Farm Beginnings course, nine classes with them on the reservation. Again, that doesn’t sound earth shattering, but the thing is that the project will unite European settler farmers who took the land with the descendants of those they took it from around and say what do we now do together?

The organizers are testing many ideas about how race informs their issues. There are no recipes, no clear directions, and it is often a matter of trial and error. As Sen (2003) writes, “Identity movements and community

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organizing have both been growing, but largely along parallel tracks; they speak little to each other and share few issues and resources. The question is how to achieve the goal of scale without leaving important non-majority issues and constituencies by the wayside” (p. 63). Pabitra Benjamin is the executive director of Adhikaar, a 20-year-old Nepali organization where the majority of members live in the most diverse neighborhood in the United States in Queens, New York. She expresses the sentiment that the work is unfinished, getting to scale is a problem, principles should be developed, and long-term relationships need to be built. I think that the broader movement as a whole has not figured out how to really build an intersectional approach to our work that is really rooted and based in working with multicultural, multi-issue-based organizing. Honestly, I think that the Democrats haven’t figured it out. They don’t know what the real Rainbow Coalition is. It’s an add-on for people. If we can figure out that with a real deep power analysis in terms of how to really do our work. . . . Even having been around for 20 years, you see waves, right? There are times that certain issues are on a higher priority list, especially with the advent of social media and media generally; and it’s good, and it’s at that time that we need to build. But if we had a base of a stronger coalition consistently working together that was rooted in a good analysis of how we work across race, ethnicity, queer issues, climate justice, whatever, that we would build deeper. And I think that just is going to be about generations of organizing.

In addition to the emphasis on intersectional injustice, a heightened consciousness and opposition to the expansion and injurious practices of corporate capitalism has added a new dimension to issue development. A  few early issues focused on corporations (notably the redlining fights in Black and working-class white communities during the mid-1970s), but most organizing was squarely positioned to target government and elected officials. Today’s organizers have a much clearer assessment of the role and influence corporations play in public life, and that assessment directly impacts issue formulation. Hugh Espey, executive director of the Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, makes a statement that is typical of this view: “Capital, money, and the influence that corporations and big money organizations have over our economy, our health care system, our food and ag system, that’s the connecting thing for us. Follow the money.

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It’s corporate power. We’re putting our analysis in front of members. Our e-newsletter goes out to about 12,000 Iowans, so those are folks that we communicate with regularly. We want to put an analysis out there about politics, we want to put an analysis out there in front of people about our agriculture system, our health care system, because we think our analysis, similar to other organizations, captures what’s going on. Not just what’s wrong but what’s right, what do we need to do about that?” Organizers understand that corporations have influence across many issues and that corporate actors often have tentacles in many places. As in all else, they must engage members and help them understand how corporations impact the issues they care about. In the case example, Jose Lopez, then lead organizer and now coexecutive director for Make the Road New York, describes the process they have gone through with membership to make the links and the targets broadly understood by membership and leadership.

JOSE LOPEZ: EDUCATING LEADERS ON ISSUES AND TARGETS The big piece now is thinking about our role in challenging big money and corporate players. I think there’s been a lot of excitement organizationally around designing what that looks like, going after what we call these corporate backers of hate. I think the recent Amazon fight [in New York City] was a story of how doing that well can win a fight that many thought was unwinnable. Last year a member in a meeting said, “Because we have issue committees and because a lot of the discussion happening in those issue committees are specific to that issue, oftentimes to me as a member, a win doesn’t always feel like a win. If I’m in the housing committee, and the workers committee has this huge win, it’s not the thing we talk about all the time in the housing committee, it feels like I’m a part of the win because I’m under the banner of Make the Road as an institution. But at the same time, it doesn’t really feel like I’m a part of the win. We should think a lot more about how to change that dynamic because I may not be the only member feeling that way.” That was early on in this five-year plan, and it’s really what led us to thinking about how we can be sure that there are issue-based organizers because that’s effective, but also how can we be sure that we’re fighting bigger

fights that cross all issue areas, that challenge a lot of these corporate players on top of the issue-based work. You’re also tasked with thinking about a much bigger fight and engaging your base around that much bigger fight, so that you can understand the role of corporate entities, of dark money, of how it kills our democracy, and how it ties to all of the really local and state stuff that we’re doing. I think that the fight against JP Morgan and Wells Fargo over the last two years has reenergized our base in a way that we haven’t seen before. That’s because they’re fighting for the things that got people to walk into this organization in the first place, but they’re also being asked to think about a much bigger beast, and they’re being asked to do that collectively. Think about this huge institution that is JP Morgan, and think about their role in the housing crisis nationally. Think about their role in working with the Trump administration to separate families at the border and underwrite financing to expand immigrant detention facilities. Think about their role in privatizing public education. Think about their role beyond immigrant detention, in expanding jails across the country for people who look like us. And then as you start to think about JP Morgan as the example, you start to develop a campaign that tries to hit this institution on all fronts. We lead with their role in the immigration debate because that is the big national crisis that we’re dealing with, but also plugging in all these other pieces. Not only does that help us challenge huge players but it also helps our members think about even the local fights in the same way. So we’ve been seeing a lot more of reaching out from committees to other committees saying, “we’re fighting this spot rezoning, which is bad for tenants.” But also “hey workers committee, there’s a laundromat and there’s a Dominican restaurant where those workers will get displaced if zoning change happens and the developer gets the approval to convert that manufacturing land to residential land. So while we’re engaging the tenants, can you guys join this fight, go talk to those workers, bring them in and help us think about the worker angle?” “Young people, there’s a boxing club on the second floor of the laundromat for all high school students and middle school students. As the Youth Power Project, your role here would be to go into the boxing club to show that they know that this is happening and engage them around access to youth services and youth programs; this is what we got and you’re trying to take it from us.” Then how do we pool all of those players together so that there’s a unified front? We’ve expanded it to not just talking about housing, which is how we initially engaged, but also talking about the jobs angle, talking about youth programming.

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Under the banner of racial capitalism, organizers too are joining the lenses of intersectional injustice and corporate influence to focus on and articulate issues. What’s more, the lens of corporatization moves organizations away from class-identity silos and encourages people to see issues as a merger of class and identity. As Marilyn Sneiderman, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, told us, “We did a leadership training recently with lots of community organizations, and they actually called it racialized capitalism and talked about the importance of challenging it. It was really clear about the intersection: it’s basically class and race and gender.” BOTH BIG AND SMALL BUT NO MORE STOP SIGNS

A tenet among organizers, particularly those from the Alinsky tradition, was that organizations should focus on narrow winnable issues with clear targets that are easy to influence. That way, the theory went, quick wins would give people the experience of victory that would validate their belief in themselves, in organizing and the organization, and propel them into more action (Alinsky, 1971; Weick, 1984). The classic example was organizing to get a stop sign on a busy neighborhood street corner. Critics argued, sometimes legitimately, that these small victories resulted in a lack of vision and an endless series of small battles that many organizations would never get beyond and that didn’t add up to significant change or power (Engler & Engler, 2016). The insistence of organizers to stay with the self-interest of residents sometimes had disastrous consequences, especially as white ethnic neighborhoods like Back of the Yards in Chicago turned inward, reactionary, exclusionary, and racist (Schutz & Miller, 2015, p. 41). Organizers in our sample believe in focused concrete issues that respond to the immediate concerns of people. But they also have an ambitious agenda, a bold vision to take on larger issues culminating in transformational change The term self-interest, once distinguished by Alinsky organizers from selfishness, seems now too cold hearted, potentially divisive, and limiting to describe what they are trying to achieve (Schutz & Miller, 2015, pp. 34–35). Today’s organizers start with the immediate needs

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of people, but they go far beyond it with the intent of organizing as wide and diverse a community as possible. Gabe Strachota, former lead organizer from Community Voices Heard in New York, explains the struggle to think more expansively: I think the debate in the organization generally is around the “winnability” of campaigns. “Alinksy-ism” says you should never fight a campaign that’s not winnable. There is a tendency to say that we have to figure out how to make the impossible possible, focusing more on the battle of ideas of how we do that. We definitely had struggles around that in the organization. For example, when I first started, we were organizing around private development inside of public housing developments, and those schools of thought were definitely present in the organization and in the movement around who are we fighting to stop this and propose a bold alternative to rethinking the New York City Housing Authority. Or should we say it is impossible to stop it, and we should fight for a better version of the private development plan?

Organizers express a degree of frustration with the slow pace of tackling incremental issues; they are much more interested in pushing the organization to take on bigger challenges. Here is Jawanza Williams, director of organizing for VOCAL-NY and himself a survivor of homelessness, expressing the typical organizer impatience. I know we can win some of these more concrete campaigns, like we’re going to get (New York City Mayor) de Blasio to increase his homeless set asides for his affordable housing plan. That will probably happen. But will we end homelessness? That’s what I’m trying to do. How do we radically transform society and build out the kinds of material structures that make the crisis of homelessness a relic of a different, more barbaric past? How do we do that? I want to see measured advances toward that in my lifetime. I think that that’s the kind of thing that we can end. How do we get that power? That’s where I am, and that’s why I’m building movement leadership, because I think the kind of power that we need to win on these issues will not be born from concrete, issue-based campaigns. It has to have a wider scope than that.

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But the organizers also know that the issues that draw people to the organization and into action are those that are most oppressive in their daily lives. They know that people across the board are suffering daily from debilitating problems that require attention, and the organization would be negligent in ignoring those complaints. They warn that you can’t stray too far from those realities. Still, they recognize that immediate issues are a concrete expression of the broader concern; that the first step is to deal with the most pressing and immediate concerns people experience as the path to transformational change. For Make the Road New York, that meant attending to language translation services rather than welfare reform as the beginning of taking on immigrant rights. As Deborah Axt, then coexecutive director, explains: Our name comes from this Antonio Machado poem, “searcher, there is no road, we make the road by walking.” That’s obviously been a deep philosophical commitment of the organization from the beginning, but the reality of it also emerges in practice. When our founders Andrew Friedman and Oona Chatterjee started [in the mid-1990s], they came in saying, “this thing called Welfare Reform is an outrage and we’re committed to working with the folks most directly impacted to fight back.” They started convening folks in Know Your Rights sessions and community planning sessions and conversations and everyone said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about Welfare Reform. But my food stamps case keeps getting cut off because I get letters, I can’t read them, they’re all in English. I don’t know what’s going on.” Through conversations about the big systemic issues with folks directly impacted and with respect for what they were facing, they discovered that the immediate problem was language access and nobody had the right to translation interpretation services. This was a short-term fight obviously. They were [also, at the time] dealing with some outsider-ness and a little lack of awareness of what was up in the community. At this point in time, obviously, we’ve been embedded in the neighborhoods here with a staff that is mainly from our base communities, but there still is always that cycle of conversation and analysis where we’re talking to academics and other allies across the country and the world [about] what’s emerging in the economy and in our politics, and then we’re constantly having the conversation with our members about how that’s landing in everyone’s everyday life.

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For organizers it’s not a question of either systemic or on-the-ground change but a both/and approach. It is not a case of specific on-the ground issues or long-term vision; it is the immediate pressing issues and longterm systemic social change. The organizers in our sample can hold both realities at the same time. They hold onto their commitment to achieve large-scale social change even as they continue to work on smaller issues. Mark Schultz, former executive director of the Land Stewardship Project, comments on this: For a variety of reasons, I think more and more people understand that they’re left out or pushed down. Part of that is because as the racial diversity changes, it is changing quite a bit in Minnesota, they’re not part of this equation. We just saw a Supreme Court hearing [referring to the nomination of Justice Kavanaugh] that said, women aren’t part of this equation. Family farmers, people that if you saw a picture of a farm you’d say, “Oh, that’s a Midwestern farm,” but the big guns in agriculture would say, “no that’s not, that’s too small,” and they might have 500 acres! It’s just like hardly anybody counts anymore, and maybe it’s been like that for a long time, but I think more people realize it. If we can actually deal with gender oppression, if we can actually deal with white supremacy, structural racism, and can come in and come together, then we can take on bigger change. That feels possible to me. It’s daunting in a way, but it’s not a stopper, we can do this.

How do organizers today manage the dilemma of being both attentive to on-the-ground issues and their desire to make large-scale change? In a version of Patrick Geddes “think global, act local” dictum, organizers work locally on specific issues but offer a broader vision in their leadership development work with members and leaders. They work toward winning real change in people’s lives while proffering a vision of transformational goals. Both messages are communicated to members and leaders, and that informs the issue selection process. Organizers have developed tried and true methods of responding to the local issues people care about and sharing a vision of broader change. Whether they use the language of root causes or broader goals, they clearly convey and communicate the fact that specific local issues are related to broader social change goals. Marley Monacello, staff at Coalition of

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Immokalee Workers (CIW) in Florida, describes their work on sexual harassment of female migrant workers in this way as a microcosm of broader social injustice: All marginalized people are often deeply interrelated. CIW views marginalization as deeply rooted in the same imbalances of power in society and should not be treated in silos or as separate. I think that’s reflected in the work that we do and in the program that the CIW has built, which is fundamentally a human rights program that goes directly at the imbalance of power in a particular industry. That all violence against women, discrimination against Black people and the LGBTQ community, wage theft, all of those things are simultaneously uprooted. For example, if we had explicitly said we are trying to end rape in the field period and tried to approach it with an exclusive focus on violence against women, I think we would not have had the same success even in addressing violence against women. Because if you see those things as siloed, then you don’t go to the root cause. So I think that’s a really big important part of CIW’s approach and that’s reflected in the work.

Similarly, organizers frequently offer a “big umbrella” approach to issues wherein the concrete local issues add up to a broader understanding of the constituency’s needs and the changes that are required for them to thrive. Issues converge around a central idea, and also impact multiple constituencies in different ways. Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, describes the “big umbrella” approach and describes how they think about tackling issues in ways that lead them to a long range vision. “When we look at things, we think about the lives that people experience: people get up and go to work, they live in houses, they have to take transit to get places, they need to buy food, they have energy sources that are coming into both the place they work and where they live, their kids are exposed to toxins in the air and in the soil. Then we say those are all worker issues.” Organizers also consider that the vision for social change will require the organization and people within it to see beyond their own pressing needs. Sandra Lobo, executive director of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition in New York, makes this point about what they see in working with ally organizations: “We often see folks organizing around one issue. Within our organization, we were also doing that. We had different

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teams and committees of folks organizing around one issue and then pulling them together. Seeing very concretely the intersectionality of the work is a real challenge for us to move that forward in other coalition spaces. Folks often want to just talk about one issue. I think that’s a false premise of not knowing or not really fully grasping what is needed to create real systemic change.” Crystal Reyes, program director of Sistas and Brothas United from the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, argues that dialogue and structured discussion can extend people’s vision: “We want to be more radical. Bold campaign goals stem from that. We went into a planning session where a lot of our members were saying, ‘We cannot keep fighting for this little bit of stuff, we’ve got to actually ask for bolder things and be bolder with our asks and where we want our people to be in all of this.’ That was staff, including young people and adult leaders, who were part of that conversation.” Sandra Lobo, a longtime member of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition before she became executive director, speaks to the range of skills and perspectives she gained as a member of the board and as a resident whose life was impacted by the organization. Under her leadership, the organization has made progress in tackling larger issues and in moving from “fighting back to fighting forward.” The shift for us is not just around changing policy or fighting against something, it’s also building the alternative. At least for our organization, it often was about fighting bad things in our community versus building what we want to see. I think that’s a narrative shift that’s happened. Economic democracy and racial justice are the two pieces that we shifted our mission to back in 2012, and we only started to implement them when I came on board because of our financial crisis. But that feels like a very different and exciting opportunity for us to shift the way that policy is done, the way the development is done, the way that alternative models are being built in all those sectors of society. I think that isn’t something that was there when I was in the organization 20 years ago. So that feels like an opportunity, as well as just the political landscape. I think that Trump becoming president created a crisis to such a degree that we actually see folks coming out of the woodwork that were never activated before. And while it is challenging for our communities, I actually think it also offers an opportunity for folks to really see what the system is made of.

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Although organizers might use different language to communicate the connections between local on-the-ground issues and their long-term vision, they all make sure to communicate the message to leadership and membership through individual discussions, at meetings, and especially in their training and popular education sessions. Mark Schultz describes his approach to clarifying the vision with individual farmers, even as they first consider joining the Land Stewardship Project as members. Every person who starts a garden cares for that land and feeds themselves. That’s good. But if we only do that, we don’t get the change we seek, right? On the other end of the spectrum is the societal or systemic change: public policy, shifting the narrative, building new institutions, and other kinds of larger pieces that we need in order to take on corporate control of our economy and our politics. But if you only do that, then you don’t know the reality on the ground, of the community, of the people. We really feel like we have to link those two things, we have to do both of them. The interesting thing in terms of member or leader development is having that conversation. So many people just want to do this thing on their farm, or they only want to help support a new beginning farmer: “can I just donate to that?” We’re like, yes, we’re doing that. But you’re donating to the whole thing because it only makes a big difference when it’s together. You may be more comfortable in your own work, doing the local specific individual thing, that’s fine, but you need to recognize and support the systemic change. Or you may be a big thinker policy guru, that’s great. We need you, but you need to recognize that when this individual farmer comes up and says “that won’t work,” they have more authority than you do in that case.

Make the Road New York uses a model that involves experts in their issue discussions who try to expand the organization’s vision from the more narrowly defined issues to broader legislative solutions. Deborah Axt, former coexecutive director, describes this model: “Another thing that’s fairly unique to us is the extent to which technical experts are embedded with our members. We have, at this point, a staff of about 60 attorneys and advocates who don’t just provide services for our immediate membership but do have very deep relationships with our membership and spend a lot of time in our member meetings. When we do policy innovation and policy design, which is one of the four core pillars of our strategy, it’s a constant

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conversation with our members and then the technical experts (who are attorneys or health policy experts) thinking about what are the things that are happening on the ground that we need to fix?” Whatever the model, the organizers in our sample clearly understand the need to address specific painful issues of their membership and at the same time communicate a broader and longer-term vision. They find multiple creative ways to do both things simultaneously. THE IMPORTANCE OF NARRATIVES AND FRAMES FOR ISSUES

Marshall Ganz (2001, 2011), of Harvard University, has written and taught extensively about the importance of narratives in social action organizations. He describes narrative as “the discursive means we use to access values that equip us with the courage to make choices under conditions of uncertainty, to exercise agency”(Ganz, 2011, p. 273). Narratives help leaders answer the question of why the issue matters, and why there is an urgency for action: “Leadership, especially leadership on behalf of social change, often requires telling a new public story, or adapting an old one: a story of self, a story of us, and a story of now. . . . A story of self communicates the values that move us to lead. A story of us communicates values shared by those whom you hope to motivate to join us. And a story of now communicates the urgent challenge to those values that demands action now. Participating in a social action not only often involves a rearticulating of one’s story of self, us, and now, but also marks an entry into a world of uncertainty so daunting that access to sources of hope is essential” (p. 282). Developing narratives has become an important part of organizing. As evidence of its importance, the Narrative Initiative (n.d.) was established in 2020 with funding from the Ford Foundation and other foundations. Board chair Alvin Starks of Open Society Foundations emphasizes this point: “Narratives create meaning. They define our past and what it meant as well as our future and what is possible. If we want transformational change that defeats growing inequity, racial injustice and othering that divides society, our movements must excel at creating compelling and contagious narratives” (para. 6). The organizers in our sample all work with leaders to articulate narratives—for the organization as a whole, for issues, and for each campaign.

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Organizers realize that the organizations’ narratives must shift the dominant societal explanation that as one organizer described it “is the water we all swim in.” Hugh Espey, executive director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, whose membership includes rural farmers, talks about shifting the dominant narrative in their organization: “A dominant narrative right now around agriculture is we have to feed the world, Iowa has to feed the world. That’s why we have to plant ‘fence-road to fence-road,’ we have to farm and cultivate 24 million acres of corn and beans because it’s our job to feed the world. We’ve been sold that bill of goods by corporate agriculture because it puts money in their pocket. We have to shift the dominant narrative, we have to shift in people’s minds what’s possible: free college education, that’s possible. We need to not just crack down on factory farms, we need to shut them down.” He goes on to explain how they developed a broad narrative about economic injustice that is articulated by the organization’s work and serves as a link for all issue work: We talk about economic justice, the economic system that we’re trapped in and how it impacts environmental issues, how it impacts clean water issues; that we have a water quality crisis in Iowa with nitrate and phosphorus in the water. That’s because of the influence of corporate Big Ag, which is tied to the influence of big money corporations over our food and agricultural system. Not just our food and ag system but also our political system. It would be the same thing when we talk about the Fight For 15 or raise the minimum wage. That’s got economic justice written all over it. Our biggest opponents are the Restaurant Association and the grocers and the messages they’ve been putting out for decades and decades: that you can’t raise the minimum wage, you’re going to force businesses to cut jobs and it’s actually going to hurt the people that you want to help. I think we tie economic justice to everything we do, whether it’s the environmental issues we’re working on and the pollution or the caregiving and health care. One of our messages around private health care is that everybody’s making money off of it. They have to get profits out of health care. We need a health care system that’s essentially publicly run, either single payer or nationalized health insurance. It’s not a crazy idea actually because all health care decisions that are made by insurance companies or pharmaceuticals are based on profit. That’s not a good way to run a health care system. I’d say on

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economic justice, money, and the influence of money whether it’s our health care system, our food system, energy or utilities, climate: everybody’s trying to make a buck. It’s tied to this economic system that we’re trapped in that’s causing lots and lots of problems, and we need to rethink that. We talk about wanting a government of, by, and for the people, that serves the common good, the public interest, not just the interests of the wealthy few; and we want an economy that works for everyone, that serves the common good, the public interest, not just the interest of the wealthy few who own, control, and manage capital.

Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action in Indiana, also works in rural farm areas of her state. They have developed a different but equally effective narrative that captures the organization’s ethos and is particularized for multiple issues: “We have a lot of places with environmental justice issues, we have a significant drug crisis that is both opioids and meth, and real problems with our Medicaid system and health care. To me, those are very much linked to overall health and care for one another, and we want to be able to tell a cohesive story about everything we work on and why we work on those things and how they connect with one another.” Isaiah, a faith-based organization in Minnesota, uses yet another narrative that flows from their congregation-based work. Doran Schrantz explains their thinking: We collectively try to piece those things into something coherent that is embedded in an analysis and a strategy so that you don’t have just a lot of separate issue campaigns. We try to make it coherent. For example, when we went into precinct caucuses, we had the base go through an “agenda” building process, which then got messaged as a democracy that honors everyone’s dignity and an economy that allows all Minnesota families to thrive. So underneath the economy stuff we had this care agenda and analysis that was the intersection of child care, paid family leave, elder care, health care. And then we had paid sick days in there. And then we have work on criminal justice reform, the immigrant defense, but also a proactive agenda for immigrant inclusion. And then we’re working on climate, which is newer.

Developing effective narratives that engage people and help them come together around common goals is an incredibly important part of organizing.

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Narratives must be culturally syntonic and palatable to the people you want to organize and to the public at large. Narratives tell a whole story, whereas message frames describe how issues link and constitute an agenda for change that will transform the future. According to Sen (2003), today’s problems are too complex for simplistic organizing. Frames are needed to develop leaders, raise consciousness, provide strong evidence on the issues, and attract media attention (Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001). Message frames—a slogan or tag phrase of a few simple words—are used as shorthand to help members and leaders make sense of and envision a world that is equitable, inclusive, and where people’s needs and rights are more important than corporations and their profits. The slogans also signal to other organizations, to the general public, and to the media that they are joined in a progressive agenda. The Asian Pacific Environmental Network uses the frame “Just Transition” to summarize their agenda. It captures their commitment to reduce inequality and injustice in society as it relates to climate, energy, and environment with the aim of achieving a societal transition from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy (Movement Generation, n.d.). Just Transition is understood to mean that environmental justice cannot be achieved without economic justice and sees climate justice from a human rights perspective. In fact, human rights, the foundations of which are found in the Charter of the United Nations and its Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are often used as a frame (Heffron & McCauley, 2018), for example, to summarize and encapsulate the work of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Abolition has become an important frame for organizations working on decarceration issues. According to the Critical Resistance (n.d.), prison abolition is both an organizing tool and a long-term goal that describes the need to end “the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” Moreover, the term abolition reflects the history of slavery and signifies the carceral system as a continuation of that oppressive history (Alexander, 2020; Stevenson, 2019). Mary Hooks, former codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), which organizes LGBTQ+ people, makes this clear in her statement: “I think it’s also important to name that SONG has strengthened and developed our abolitionist politic, abolition of the prison industrial complex. We are very clear that ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the police are all the same;

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moving in different ways with different types of authority, but all wreaking the same amount of havoc, whether it’s a detention center or a jail cell. All are wreaking havoc, all are carceral solutions white supremacy has developed. So I think we understand it in terms of the broader vision to dismantle the prison industrial complex and the immigration system. Both of these issues having a clear impact in our folks’ lives.” Narratives and messaging frames are essential tools for organizations. They help members and leaders make sense of their work, they communicate to allies and other organizations, and they are interpreted by the media, elected officials, and the broader public. Their utility is described throughout this book. BOTH LOCAL AND NATIONAL BUT ESPECIALLY STATE FOCUSED

Historically organizing was either neighborhood-based (the Alinsky approach) or national (e.g., civil rights, the women’s movement). Labor organizing was a little of both—locals organizing in workplaces that were affiliated with large national unions by sector. Organizations in our sample represent all of these traditions. The Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition and Logan Square Neighborhood Association are traditional neighborhood organizations. PowerSwitch Action is a national organization with local affiliates, and United Teachers Los Angeles is the local teachers union in Los Angeles County. But we also saw other organizational variations. VOCAL-NY, Community Voices Heard, and New York Communities for Change operate locally and statewide. Isaiah, Land Stewardship Project, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Down Home North Carolina, Hoosier Action, and Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement have chapters in different regions of their states. SONG organizes regionally in 13 southern states. Make the Road New York is one of five northeastern statewide groups that organize under the Make the Road banner. People’s Climate Movement was a “table” of existing organizations throughout the United States. In addition, all of the organizations work in partnership with other groups or are affiliated with a national network, such as People’s Action, Faith in Action, or Center for Popular Democracy, with which they often work on issues. Some are allied with several networks around different campaigns or make use of their resources. And finally, many of the organizations

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have established separate 501(c)(4) and PAC organizations to support their electoral work. What we saw among these organizations was a proliferation of new arrangements that gave the organizations some flexibility to pursue their issues on multiple levels—from local to state to regional to national— and in multiple ways: from organizing to mobilizing to electoral activity. Much more about this proliferation of organizational forms is described in chapter 8. As a group, the organizers are firmly committed to the importance of organizing people locally. Andy Mott, a veteran organizer and former executive director of the Center for Community Change and now senior advisor to the Community Learning Partnership, talks about the importance of the local level, but he adds that organizing needs to be scaled up and that national-level organizing can assist with that task. Obviously, you have to organize a constituency at the local level. I think it is an essential building block toward building something bigger. I think what this bigger activity really misses, and I worry about, is the tremendous importance in terms of individual empowerment and leadership development of dealing with the most serious issues that people really care about, the issues they face immediately in their lives, in their communities and so on; community building, which is crucial in terms of strengthening the social fabric, which is in such danger in so many communities in the U.S.; the reinforcement of values and the feeling of personal worth that can come out of organizing. You can’t have those impacts by just doing quick movement building on the latest hot issue on the national level. Local base building is crucial in itself, it’s crucial as an element of building things, and for the future, but somehow it’s got to become possible to do that kind of community organizing in far more communities then we have been able to reach so far. Therefore, we have to get serious about where the money is going to come from. Where are the leaders and organizers going to come from? Who can duplicate the best kind of community organizing in all the communities that need this? White, Black, or Brown, low income, mixed income. I think it’s a critical part of having a decent society and having a democracy that works.

But Mott also recognizes that national organizing is important because it moves real change forward, and it gives local-level organizing a model

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and tools for their work. Referencing a successful campaign from his past work, Mott says: “We fought for the home mortgage disclosure at the national level in order to give tools to local organizers so they could get the handles and the information they need to organize at the local level. That combination—That’s the challenge.” The organizers we spoke to clearly supported the importance of working locally with local leaders on local issues. The direct contact on issues people care about draws members into the organization, beginning what Land Stewardship Project’s Mark Schultz calls “the tornado of base building,” the foundation of the organization’s power, and a subject we discuss at greater length in chapter 6 on leaders and organizers and again as part of campaign strategy in chapter 8. Yet they also acknowledge that solutions often can only be addressed at city, state, or national levels. Although members find and join the organizations because of local concerns, the solutions at state and federal levels are further away from their experience and more difficult to access. The American federated system of government distributes power between states and the federal government. It renders government complex; states having authority in certain areas, limited authority in others, and their authority is preempted by the federal government in still others. This complexity poses both problems and opportunities for organizations as they choose the level of government they want to appeal to on any issue. Adam Mason, who was policy director for Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement at the time of our interview, describes that complexity around their work on factory farms and the expansion of Medicaid. We tackle the factory farm issue in three ways. The first is local organizing fights to stop factory farms. That’s going to be the way that people come in. From day one in a factory farm fight for folks who were engaged in that campaign is that the laws that are on the books aren’t being enforced. We need state agencies and federal agencies that are willing to enforce the rules and laws that are on the books, everything from permitting standards at the state level to the Federal Clean Water Act and the Farm Bill. Then there’s money in the farm bill that props up factory farms. So that becomes part of the analysis. The third prong to that strategy is that we need better policies. We need stronger state laws and stronger federal laws. Again, that’s part of the overarching strategy that we would use on this issue for the long haul.

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It would be the same with health care. Maybe you come in because you’re on Medicaid in the state and the state switched to privatized Medicaid servicing, and maybe the service that you’ve been getting for five years was suddenly denied. You’ve called them, you’ve emailed them, you’re getting no response so you come to us, and we would engage you in that campaign. The first step is to get you the services you need, but then, two, there’s a problem with the companies that are servicing Medicaid, and, three, there’s a policy that’s allowing these servicing companies to do this. We need to unprivatize and ultimately, on the federal level, we need Medicare for all, or single payer. We need profits out of health care. In each of those organizing campaigns, there’s going to be connections immediately from the local problem to hopefully a corporate target or an individual target, whether it’s the health care company or the wage fee for the factory farm. Then there’s going to be kind of a state agency target because at some level there’s enforcement fights that we can engage yearround, and then the policy components at state and federal levels.

Our federated system of government offers social action organizations a variety of options about where to locate their grievances and how to position them. They can analyze target options for organizing around an issue, when to mobilize, and when to do electoral work (see chapter 8). Choosing the level of government in which to locate an issue involves an assessment of context, power, opportunity, and the ability to leverage agreements reached at one level for agreements at others. Organizations can choose to go back and forth, organizing first at one governmental level and then another, and then back to the first, depending on opportunities for change. Organizers describe choosing to position their issues as an evolving puzzle, putting pieces into place as the context changes. Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minnesota, describes the choices the organization has made based on an assessment of the political environment and the organization’s opportunity for influence. Local, state and national—it’s like a Rubik’s cube. The trick is to look at how those things fit together into a 18- to 24-month strategy, depending on what arena of power we’re trying to impact. I think about it like this: what’s the season, and what’s the arena that we can organize a lot of things around? This year it was the 2018 election. So then the local work is resonating into those arenas. This last year, we worked a lot at the county and city levels on things like immigrant inclusion, housing, ICE, separation ordinances,

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things that allow for a lot of local organizing, but also resonate in the political arena. If we’re having that fight in St. Cloud, it helps us with that swing House District and with the governor’s race. I ask: is the local work in concert with other local work, and does it take us toward a state arena? And in terms of federal work, sometimes that’s the hardest one to figure out.

Even on issues such as immigration reform, which appears to be governed by federal laws, there are opportunities at the state and local levels for social action organizations to move an issue forward. The organizations find ways of working back and forth between solutions at the federal, state, and local levels and keeping an eye on shifting contexts that make work possible. They also find creative ways to use multiple strategies, including organizing, mobilizing, and electoral activity. In the case example, Mary Hooks, then codirector of SONG, describes her local and national work during their antideportation campaign. They focused on mitigating the implementation of a federal law, known as the 287(g) provision, that created partnerships between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and local law enforcement agencies, allowing local sheriffs to identify and deport undocumented immigrants under the 287(g) provision.

MARY HOOKS: WORKING AT LOCAL, STATE, AND FEDERAL LEVELS We were moving at a national level with the Not One More Deportation Campaign to declare stop deporting people. Maybe you can’t agree on immigration reform, but stop deporting people in the meantime. And we were able to take that demand and move it in the state of Georgia through the Georgia Not One More Deportation Campaign, which went county by county. We didn’t get all of them, but we went to counties to get sheriffs and other commissioners to not allow these heinous laws to pass like we saw happening with Arizona. And then once [former President] Obama was pushed around DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals], [then President] Trump came into office, and that literally shifts what we can do. We could make a demand of Obama to do DACA, but now we have the unpetitionable. . . . In Trump’s first two years and even now, I’ve seen a lot (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) of folks that instead of being able to move strategies that confront the state have had to move to protect and defense strategies because literally kids were coming home [to find that] their mamas had been thrown into detention centers. Last year we did a big mobilization when everyone learned about what’s happening with the children, mobilized folks from the national group through California, San Diego, and then we did the thing in Arizona. Because we know that’s what’s happening to trans folks and GNC [gender nonconforming] folks. Because of all of the national buzz and conversation, we knew about the 287(g), but I think we have been able to expose more about the ways in which local sheriffs and mayors are finding themselves in bed with ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. With that information, we went through a process, talking with members about what our strategy to melt ICE is going to look like, and we see that we can move some stuff in solidarity with national organizations, but this fight is gonna happen right in our backyards. And it’s about 287(g), but it’s also about the other grievances. I think we have more tools and more buttons we can push because we understand the role of sheriffs, in particular, who are voted in. So there’s an opportunity with 2020 on the down ballot level to be able to push this issue on ICE and make folks who want to run for office actually have to take a stand on this issue. For example, in North Carolina you had a lot of folks saying, “I side with North Carolina, we don’t want ICE here”; you had a lot of Black sheriffs that were running, many of them ran on the platform saying they weren’t going to collaborate with ICE. And many of them did not and held that line once they got in office. We also see the use of traditional civic engagement tactics and methods to bring into this and have learned a lot from our comrades from Mijente, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, and others who have used the electoral cycle as a way to advance this issue around melting ICE. We’re going to be testing some stuff to see if it actually gets some traction with people.

Although local and national solutions are sometimes possible, states have emerged as an important option for positioning an issue (Amenta & Young, 1999). We can hypothesize why this is so. First and foremost, local governments in cities and counties seldom have the resources or

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legal authority to fix the problems that the organization’s members face. Housing, health care, clean water and soil, worker safety protections, immigration, mass incarceration, sexual assault, and gun control are not easily remedied at the local level, especially when there is little money or legal authority. Mayors and county executives mostly concentrate their efforts on providing basic services. Second, corporations have an arsenal of resources, including campaign contributions, private contracts for services, financing of projects, the promise of relocation and jobs, funding for bonds, and lobbying efforts that they use to significantly influence and constrain the decision-making of local elected officials (see chapter  2). As elected officials bow to corporate interests, people and communities have less recourse through traditional local channels. Taken together, these factors make local officials inadequate targets for what organizations want to achieve. National politics is daunting because of the diversity of the population, the deep cultural divides, the number of elected officials who have to be persuaded to make a change, and the difficulty finding compromise at the federal level, to say nothing of the cost and complexity of organizing nationally. Corporate influence is also a major factor in national politics. Consequently, state-level changes offer certain advantages. States have the resources and power to make some changes, and the changes that are made can be leveraged at both local and national levels. Fletcher Harper, executive committee member of the People’s Climate Movement, describes the reasoning for state positioning this way: “For the first time there was an organized state approach in five or six states of Colorado, Michigan, Illinois, some work in Florida. And I think that’s a really good development because the issues were more specific there. My sense is that at the national level there’s the danger of polarization and ideological posturing that’s both the pleasure and the temptation of national-level work, whereas at the more local level it’s like the thing for mayors: how do you get the streets clean and the garbage picked up? It’s a little bit more pressure to be practical.” Positioning is also a strategic choice: Which level of government is likely to be more amenable to a positive resolution to the organization’s issue? If local governments are more likely to be supportive, then organizing happens there first. This strategy has the advantage of being closer to the local people, enabling the organization to educate leadership on the issues before taking on the state. Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch

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Action, describes how organizing in the big cities of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh can lead to change at the more conservative state level. Our theory is that you start at city levels. Those groups have an agenda on the workplace, housing, the functions of democracy, tax, all those issues—a very clear agenda and how those things fit together in a way that’s a path forward and a vision that is able to capture public imagination. We can’t keep being the movement of “we’re against . . . !” We have to be able to articulate what we’re for and in a very big and less episodic way. We see cities as a foundational building block, and moving from cities to metro regions, from metro regions to states. We have several projects that do that. So for instance, in California right now, the seven affiliates there that have achieved some level of power in the seven different cities and regions in which they work are now forming a joint table in which they’re trying to think about articulating their view of how workers organize at the state level, and how they engage on housing issues at the state level. Our two Pennsylvania affiliates who have done door-knocking and built membership outside of their cities after building a very strong progressive majority inside Philadelphia, inside Pittsburgh, are now forming a statewide table. The first thing they are tackling is state preemption rights [see chapter 2]. That is how we talk about setting a vision for what democracy can look and feel like for regular folks.

In other cases, however, both the local counties and the state pose conservative roadblocks. In the case example, Chelsea White was serving as an organizer for the relatively new organization Down Home North Carolina, and she discusses their options during living wage and Medicaid expansion battles.

CHELSEA WHITE: WORKING ON ISSUES IN A CONSERVATIVE STATE I want us to be able to make change, so we have to be able to do that at whatever level we can. When it came to living wages, we connected it to the statewide issue last year by saying that the minimum wage in North Carolina has been the same since 2009. That’s a statewide issue. That being said, we also know that in the state of North Carolina we have a preemption law

that prevents our local municipal governments from enacting their own minimum wage that is higher than the state’s minimum wage. In Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, although they have a much higher cost of living than they do in Jackson County, they cannot say, “our Buncombe County minimum wage is $15 an hour.” They have the same $7.25 an hour. So we knew (1) we have a statewide fight on our hands; (2) we knew that it could have been a local fight to raise the municipal minimum wage, but we don’t have that option; (3) we also knew that it wouldn’t be possible for us to raise the statewide minimum wage through collecting petition signatures and getting it on the ballot even though the majority of North Carolinians support it. So we broke it down to a big statewide issue that is impacting us here locally because $7.25 is not enough to live on here and low-income jobs are the biggest employers in rural communities. So we thought, if our local governments start paying living wages to their public employees and start passing resolutions asking the General Assembly to raise the minimum wage, then we can start to make a change for public employees on a statewide scale. So we lobbied our local town of Waynesville, and they passed a living wage for all of their employees that was tied to this idea that the whole state needs to raise the minimum wage. And we said, we can’t win a statewide minimum wage right now, and this is the fight that we can win that will have the biggest impact on our people. Similarly with the health care issue, rural hospitals are being hit by not expanding Medicaid. We have already had hospitals in the communities that I work in that have lost a palliative care unit, lost a labor and delivery unit; five of our hospitals in western North Carolina are at risk of either losing services or shutting down entirely because we have older, more disabled, and poorer populations that are highly dependent on government insurance. And without expanding Medicaid, our hospitals have to swallow a lot of the unpaid medical expenses. It’s a huge local issue that we know can only be changed on a statewide level. We have to get Medicaid expansion passed. That is a really easy issue to tie to the statewide work. Then on a national scale, I’m going to be totally honest, I do not have the capacity to even think about the national level stuff because there’s so much that is happening in North Carolina and in our local communities. I don’t want to say that we disconnect from the national level, but when we bring things down to our level, it helps our members feel and recognize the level of control that they have.

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Positioning an issue at the state level may have benefits for national organizing, or at least move issues forward in other states. More liberal states can more easily be positioned to pass progressive legislation that can leverage change in other places. For example, the state of Washington was the first to pass the $15 minimum wage, other states followed, and eventually it was added to the 2016 Democratic platform. We found a number of examples of this strategy among the organizations in our sample. Vince Steele, then organizing director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland, describing a campaign in California to decriminalize homeless communities in Oakland. The Martin vs. Boise case in Idaho was heard in the Ninth Circuit, which pretty much criminalized a sweeping number of individuals. This decision said that if the city has admitted there’s not enough shelters to house your homeless community, then it’s illegal to sweep them [off the streets]. So we used it in our Unshelter Campaign. Oakland had already made a declaration that we are in an emergency situation, we don’t have enough shelters. Meanwhile, they’re still sending cops out there to rough up the homeless community and sweep them to other parts of the city. You can’t do that based on this decision. So, yes, we will kind of toggle back and forth from things that happened outside of the state to what they’re doing here. To be honest, we just had the hearing, there was a plaintiff that we found in the shelter community to challenge what Oakland is doing based on that Ninth Circuit ruling. We should hear the findings of that this week.

State-to-state sharing opens new opportunities for organizing, especially when leaders are involved in the discussions and learning from each other. Zachary Lerner, organizer for New York Communities for Change, describes this process on a campaign for rent reform. We spent a lot of time, for instance, with our members in preparation for the rent laws fight, educating them about what happened in California with the rent fight when Blackstone contributed millions of dollars to fight the ballot initiative that our sister organization ACCE in California had been working on to repeal Costa-Hawkins, which was a law limiting rent control. We had members participate to understand what they’re doing there, how do we prepare for that here? And showing that once again, it’s still the same

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people that we’re targeting in all these different areas, and that they’re the behind the scenes figures. Also, we’ll have our members get on calls with other groups, where our members are able to interact with members from other groups around the country.

Many organizers see state change as a stepping stone to change at the national level. That goal is never out of sight. Bobby King, former director of policy and organizing for the Land Stewardship Project, told us, “We’ve done a little bit on the ACA [Affordable Care Act], but 90 percent of it is state level. Our goal is to work to get Minnesota to single payer and be a model for how a single payer system might work.” He has reason for his optimism; the ACA itself was modeled after legislation passed in Massachusetts. As states pass progressive legislation and experience success, organizers believe that the idea of the change is normalized and made more palatable, leading to national change. Mark Schultz, former executive director of the Land Stewardship Project (LSP), describes a collaboration that lasted for about two years in Minnesota and resulted in deeper relationships and critical organizing in rural communities, building a statewide agenda, if not a new permanent formal organization. LSP has been now built into a powerful primarily rural organization, and we’re part of a collaboration of 22 base-building organizations, Our Minnesota Future. What I see is that the Land Stewardship Project can continue to build a permanent progressive base in rural communities for change on three big obstacles—white supremacy, patriarchy, and corporate capitalism—and in doing so build the elements of a more egalitarian economy where the land is held by many, not just a few, and a healthier land where the water is not contaminated and the soil is healthy and we’re not destroying the planet through climate change. You can see it, we can do those things. I actually don’t think that the things we all care about can happen without organizing in rural communities and building powerful bases. I think that’s been the lesson of our time, one of the lessons. But on the national level, I think it’s got to be built state by state and then we’ll take back the rest.

Given the success of a variety of statewide organizing initiatives and their impact on change on a number of key issues, we are likely to see positioning issues at the state level continue to evolve and grow.

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Finally, national work on issues is being done, sometimes operating locally but coordinated by national organizing networks, and sometimes trickling up to national networks from work done by local organizations. Whatever the direction, organizers are coordinating their efforts to amass power. One organization’s actions propels other national affiliates to follow suit. Gabe Strachota, then lead organizer for Community Voices Heard in New York City, describes a local-to-national effort on housing in which New York City organizations led the way to national organizing. In public housing there’s a very clear need to work on all levels. At the beginning of Trump’s term when he proposed massive cuts to HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], we initiated a No HUD Cuts coalition and first organized it within New York City and then organized it nationally and had a day of action with over 20 cities participating in it. We had a big action in D.C. So in that case, it was really initiated by us and some of our close allies; New York Communities for Change had played a big role. The No HUD Cuts campaign that we did kind of pushed People’s Action to do more work nationally around housing; they hadn’t had a national housing campaign for some time. They created one as a result of that, and we’re part of it, and fighting on the federal level around the idea of a home guarantee—the idea that everybody should be guaranteed a healthy and affordable house. So there’s this big, bold platform and part of that is to preserve and improve public housing, but it also is calling for the creation of 12 million new units of public housing.

Related to the national work on housing, a more limited but still robust commitment of $213 billion to build and renovate housing for low- and middle-income families was included in the proposed 2021 American Jobs Plan (Parlapiano & Tankersley, 2021). Just as often, the national networks help to coordinate local affiliated organizations that are working on similar issues. They connect organizers and leaders working in common areas, share research and ideas for action, and assist in identifying policy solutions. Catalina Morales, former lead organizer at Isaiah, describes how she and two other organizers coordinate with Faith in Action, one of the large national networks. We are affiliated with Faith in Action, and there’s a set of us organizers who relate around these national agendas depending on the work we’re doing on the ground. For example, I’m part of the La Red Commandantes team,

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which is a group of organizers around the country who strategize around the national work on immigration. If there’s something happening federally around immigration, we try to disperse that information down. For example, if we have a leader that’s getting picked up, or if we’re doing a press conference around driver’s licenses, then we try to push that information up so it gets national attention and it’s connected to other national fights that are happening that are very similar, like around sheriff ’s races, or things like that. We also invite core leaders to go to those spaces too. Sometimes, for example, core leaders are on calls with the national network around national campaigns that have everything to do with what they’re fighting for. Whether we invite board members or core leaders to those spaces or we invite the network to come into our spaces, that’s how we try to connect the most.

National networks play an important role in fostering learning among leaders in different organizations. What happens in one affiliate around an issue is then used as a model for organizing in other cities. In some cases, local organizations get known for particularly good work in some areas and that becomes a national model. Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago, for example, has established a Parent Engagement Institute that was used as a model by organizations in Arkansas and Seattle. Leaders learn about the issues, find solutions that others have used, and can see themselves connected to a bigger national movement. That engenders hopefulness and empowerment. Affiliates coordinate action so that people participate in local events around an issue on the same day, increasing media attention. In the case example, Zach Norris, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, talks about how work in Oakland around prisons and policing has been shared and used to shift the narrative through several national networks.

ZACH NORRIS: SHARING STRATEGY THROUGH NATIONAL NETWORKS We’re sharing our local work with other organizations across the country through Freedom Cities and Black Freedom Collective and the Center for Community Change. We helped cofound Freedom Cities as a national network after the election of Donald Trump. We’ve both participated in webinars where (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) we learned from other groups and led webinars where we share information about our campaigns. We’re going to do a webinar on our work moving resources from the sheriff and probation department because a lot of organizations talk about divest/invest but have not yet been successful in actually moving resources away from a punitive approach to a more public health approach. Our success in moving our county to redirect resources in that way is something that other groups have been interested in, and we’ve been able to share this through peer-to-peer learning cohorts. I think another example is national initiatives that we have developed. One example is Night Out for Safety and Liberation. Each year, basically since the murder of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in 2012, we’ve been doing an event we’ve called Night Out for Safety and Liberation in which we highlight the public health approaches to safety. It is done on the same night as National Night Out, which is a night where people come out to reclaim community safety, but traditionally that’s been really police-centric. Community members have been told “you’re the eyes and ears of the police,” and we think that community members have more than eyes and ears, that they have hearts, hands, and minds and other ways to contribute to community safety by mentoring young people, by offering a job to a formerly incarcerated person, by hosting a restorative justice circle. There are a lot of ways that people can contribute to community safety, and with Night Out for Safety and Liberation we’re trying to bring that more expansive public health–oriented vision of community safety. This past year more than 30 cities participated, and it’s a way in which we’re able to connect with other organizations across the country who are moving a reinvestment agenda.

Organizing that engages labor and community groups to work together holds enormous potential for realizing substantial change on critical issues. Labor unions are powerful organizations with the assets and large memberships that could be used to gain power and make change. But most unions were largely focused on the traditional worker issues of wages, benefits, and grievances. Newer organizing, including worker center activity and the innovative work emerging from Bargaining for the Common Good to promote organizing campaigns that community groups and labor unions engage in together, is working to expand labor’s agenda. Union members,

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organizers argue, are also community members who share the same grievances as other residents. Therefore, common cause is possible around many issues. Local community organizations already include residents, parents, youth, and faith-based organizations, and they can benefit from the merger with unions that enable them to fight their campaigns with greater resources and power. Often the targets are corporations. Marilyn Sneiderman, from the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers and former national field mobilization director for the AFL-CIO, describes an exciting new effort to build community-labor coalitions around the national affordable housing crisis. When you’re talking to me about Wall Street and billions of dollars, it’s actually hard for a lot of folks to get their arms around that. We’re planning to do a much bigger popular education that groups can then take back and work with their members on. Once you talk about it, the light bulbs go off. You start realizing it’s the same players that are impacting all of us. The question is how do we link our campaigns to actually expose what they’re doing? We’re having a meeting next week in Chicago on bargaining for the common good and housing justice. These private equity firms are some of the biggest landlords right now. So what unions can we link to this work and how? It’s one thing to get your increase in wages, but if housing and rent is going up fast, it won’t make a difference. There’s such excitement about this meeting because you’ve got all these housing groups that are saying, “wow, unions would be interested in this?” And the unions are saying, “we didn’t realize our members were focused on this.” So how do you link this together? We’re doing research about who is basically buying up all the buildings—who are we fighting? We have this research committee that we put together that has unions and community groups and housing rights groups that are all working together. We have 14 cohorts coming from across the country, and they’re researching all the commonalities about who is defunding, who’s raising the rents, to come up with some strategies that everybody can work on together.

The merger of unions and community organizations holds enormous potential for working at the statewide level to tackle some of the most vexing societal problems at the core of social and economic injustice. It would bring together workers and residents, Black, white, and people of color, men and women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Nevertheless,

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holding a coalition of this size and diversity together is exceedingly challenging. Union leaders have a sense of their own entitlement and power, and a union culture may make it difficult to participate as an equal with less powerful community groups. Union leaders are also often white men and, as we have seen, the community groups are more often led by women of color. These are potential obstacles that must be addressed. CONCLUSION

The issues of today’s progressive social action organizations are complex, institutionalized, and long term. Issues must both meet immediate needs of members and hold a vision of transformation toward justice and equity. Moving issues forward means paying attention to context, positioning them strategically at different levels of government at different times, and evaluating them from intersectional justice corporatization perspectives. Transformational goals have been established, and to accomplish them will mean finding innovative ways of working together, expanding memberships, and scaling up the work. No wonder issues are like a scrambled puzzle that organizers and leaders patiently work to resolve.

Chapter Eight

CAMPAIGN STRATEGY Fundamentals and Innovation

No one of us, no one network, no one organization is capable of taking on corporate power and white supremacy alone. There is a real emerging or at least renewed openness to experimentation, to movement building, to stepping out of our egos and trying to work together. DEBORAH AXT, MAKE THE ROAD NEW YORK

Strategy is the technology of social action organizing: it is how social action organizations get their work done. It includes the analysis, actions, and processes used to achieve desired goals. In 1994 we called strategy the organization’s “game plan for change”; this plan includes short-term goals that lead to larger long-term changes. To resolve injustices and achieve real policy solutions, strategies include using actions (tactics) that seek to influence the identified power holders (targets). Tactics are lawful actions, but they can be cooperative, persuasive, or disruptive. The purpose of a tactic is to dramatize the issue, hold the target accountable, and communicate a narrative that convinces a wider public of the issue’s legitimacy and urgency. Campaigns are “planned activities in sequence, each one building on the strengths of the one before” (Booth, 2015, p. 266) with a specific goal in mind (e.g., the pursuit of an eviction protection law, a change in bail processes, or stopping an abusive labor practice). Strategy is the overall plan of how an organization works to achieve the goals of any given campaign. The topics of strategy and tactics have been debated extensively in the literature by Alinsky and his followers, labor organizers, and in the civil rights movement. Mike Miller, who served as program director for Alinsky and is now director of ORGANIZE! Training Center in San Francisco, says that “the multi-strategy character and tactics of Alinsky’s work is

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what is most known about him” (Schutz & Miller, 2015, p. 31). In Rules for Radicals (Alinsky, 1971), “Of Means and Ends” lays out the essential rules of Alinsky’s strategic thinking, which have been endlessly debated in communities, college classes, and among organizers for more than 50 years. Every book on organizing devotes several chapters to advice on strategies and campaigns (Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 2010; Engler & Engler, 2016; Mineri & Getsos, 2007; Mondros & Wilson, 1994; Moyer, 2001; Sen, 2003; Staples, 2016). Social movement scholars, too, have focused on how change is made. McAdam (1998) and others examined historical protest movements to ascertain the factors leading to protest (Jung, 2010; Van Dyke, 2003). Arguing that the poor have few resources for influence, Piven and Cloward (1979) assert that their only opportunity for power is to use disruptive tactics such as boycotts, marches, and sit-ins. They also argued that protest spontaneously emerges during certain historically propitious moments (Della Porta & Diani, 2006; Piven, 2021; Piven & Cloward, 1979). Their work is cited by a long list of social scientists (McAdam & Boudet, 2012; McAdam & Scott, 2005; Moyer, 2001; Tarrow, 1998). There has been an ongoing debate between the structure-based organizing strategy of Alinsky and his followers and the momentum-driven campaigns described by Piven and Cloward (Engler & Engler, 2016; also see chapter 7). We return to this discussion later in the chapter. An important characteristic of social action organizations is that leaders are always involved in the development of strategy and the execution of the campaigns. Leaders work closely and with organizers to continuously analyze power and to assess contextual opportunities and obstacles, their opponents’ reactions, public response, and the organization’s resources for making change. Research on targets is necessary (Sen, 2003), and well-developed and widely used power analyses identify key targets and the external forces surrounding them (Minieri & Getsos, 2007). It is a nearly sacred principle that tactics escalate in their assertiveness when the organization is attempting to bring increasing pressure against a defiant opposition. Much of what the organizers in our sample told us about the process of designing strategy and carrying out campaigns is not new. It dates back to the earliest roots of organizing and is foundational in organizing practice.

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EVOLVING STRATEGY

As with everything else in organizing, strategy and campaigns are not solely about the instrumental goal of achieving change on issues. They are also evaluated for their capacity to grow membership, develop leaders, and increase the organization’s power. Strategy and campaigns have additional functions: they hold the potential to build relationships with new allies, turn the tide of public opinion, and strengthen the reputation of the organization as a powerful influence on public policy. Sen (2003) captures the multiple roles that campaigns play within social action organizations: “Campaigns indicate sustained intervention on a specific issue; they have clear short and long term goals, a timeline, creative incremental demands, targets who can meet those demands, and an organizing plan to build a constituency and build internal capacity. Within campaigns different tactics accomplish different goals. There are tactics for building a base, recruiting allies, educating the larger public and proving a point, in addition to those that pressure targets” (p. 81). This work drives more people into the organization and strengthens the confidence of leaders to pursue further change. MEMBER ENGAGEMENT

Leaders are engaged in reviewing strategic options and ultimately decide what the organization will do. Through this process, members learn to think strategically about how to move a campaign forward. Organizers have developed innovative ways to ensure that members are totally involved in strategic analysis and decision-making. They become strategists, not just activists. For example, in addition to their campaign committees, Southerners on New Ground (SONG) established a “Spokescouncil,” which has two members from each of their chapters, that makes overall strategic decisions for the organization. SONG also created space for Member Initiated Projects, in which members from different states jointly submit projects aligned with SONG’s vision. The Spokescouncil awards projects with mini grants, and Spokescouncil members then return to their chapters or working groups to discuss strategy, bringing feedback to the council.

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Member engagement in strategy discussions is important even for groups that organize nationally. In these cases, the logistics can be quite challenging, but organizers are committed to the principle of identifying multiple pathways to engage people in discussions. Andrea Dehlendorf, executive director of United for Respect (UFR), which organizes Walmart and other retail workers, explains how her national organization involves leaders across the country in making decisions about strategy. [Because we’re a national organization,] we’re very matrixed. We have people who are working geographically, on issues with particular corporate employers or Wall Street firms, and also around people’s identities. You could be a leader in Washington State who is a new mom who really wants to work on paid leave, is an immigrant, is connected to UFR’s Latinx committee who works for Walmart and thinks her schedule sucks. This person could plug into a Latinx community, they could plug into our Local Fair Work Week Fight, they could join a national women’s community, our national campaign to get Walmart to expand paid leave to part-timers, our local Fair Work Week policy fight and then our national narrative about Fair Work Week. They could be a peer expert on WorkIt, which is our platform that we use to leverage and provide peer support to people. . . . We do our best to figure out how to match that person’s interests with discrete strategies that we’re moving around particular arenas. A major challenge is how do you make it transparent and have easy entry points for the person to choose which of these multiple things most speaks to her—that she most wants to lean in on—and make it visible, accessible, and not burn people out because we’re asking everybody to do everything?

ESCALATING TACTICS AND EFFECTIVE NARRATIVES

Similar to the ways in which issues are assessed and selected, organizers and leaders develop strategy by going through a continuous process of evaluating the organization’s opportunities and challenges in its political and social context, defining possible targets, identifying the target’s vulnerabilities and assets, and reviewing their options through a process called power analysis. The organization may make an initial strategic overture to their opponents before escalating their tactics. They use drama to focus

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public attention on the issues. Vince Steele, then organizing director for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, describes a recent version of the typical escalation of tactics in organizing that targeted the Sheriff ’s Department in California. In the “Audit the Sheriff ” campaign, the Ella Baker Center was trying to understand how incarceration rates have gone down, yet the sheriff continues to go to the Board of Supervisors and they give him a blank check to increase his budget? We started by asking: “Can you please tell us what you’re doing with this money? It’s my money. We’re taxpayers, I should be able to know.” We’re looking for a line item, step by step, and we keep getting the door slammed in our face. We started off with “here’s the olive branch, let’s work on this together, what can we do? We’re really concerned community members.” But then we’re going to go ahead and storm the Board of Supervisors meeting and we’re going to have public comment to shame you about the fact that you’ve decided not to meet with us, about the fact that you continue to hide the budget and give the sheriff this ridiculous amount of money to do what he wants with it. We had an action on October 2nd. One other thing is that the Alameda County Sheriff has been responsible for 34 in-custody deaths in the last five years. So we took 34 body bags, we marched them from the Detention Center to the Board of Supervisors building. We had about 75 community members with us, and we dropped those body bags right in front of the building to reflect how the sheriff is not being held accountable. We’re now at that point where it seems like we’re getting nowhere with the talking and the emails, and we’re starting to really put on the pressure.

Effective narratives and frames continue to be important in strategic campaigns just as they are around issues (Ganz, 2011; Goodwin, Jasper, & Polletta, 2001). Narratives are very much used in campaign planning. Organizational messaging is essential in combating the dominant narratives of our society about who is worthy and who is not, who is to blame, what is fair and what isn’t, and the penalties that people pay based on their status. Dominant narratives are the stories told about our American culture and ethos, what Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, called “the water we all swim in.” The messages of the organization must both reflect cultural values and persuade people to draw different

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conclusions. It is so important to counteract the dominant narrative that organizations have developed their own communication systems. Social media affords organizations greater control over disseminating their narrative and communicating it to their base and the larger public consistently and regularly. Local media may choose not to spread this message or may be absent or communicate it poorly. The role of social media is discussed in depth in chapter 9. Campaign narratives and frames are essential because they “make meaning” for participants, bystanders, and opponents. Cress and Snow’s (2000) research shows that the most effective narratives are narrowly defined messages that identify the problem, hold the target accountable, and propose a policy that alleviates concerns. Successful organizations tell their narratives diagnostically (explain the source and legitimacy of the grievance), prognostically (project a logical solution with broad appeal), and motivationally (say why the public should care about the problem). Diagnostic and prognostic messages are more important than motivational messages that urge support. A diagnostic narrative is important because it focuses on an issue, shapes its understanding, and directs the blame at a target. Prognostic narratives are important because they identify remedies and strategies to get there. Research confirms the obvious—organizations with good stories are more effective than those that do not have them (The Third Way, 2021). Framing issues around a popular belief can influence elected officials (Cress & Snow, 2000), and Sen (2003) recommends crafting messages that appeal to basic values. The organizers we interviewed talked about messages of love and inclusion that were deliberately constructed to counter the divisive and angry messages propagated by right-wing organizations and conservative politicians and commentators. Messages that are politically toxic, undermine collective goals, and provide political fodder for the right are assiduously avoided. A study by the Third Way (2021) showed how dangerous to the ultimate goals the wrong messaging can be. In the case example, Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minnesota, tells a quintessential story of using a cultural narrative to beat elected officials at their own game. She talks about going on the offense when the organization is attacked and how the organization’s social media presence can be used effectively to spread a different message.

DORAN SCHRANTZ: USING A CULTURAL NARRATIVE TO GO ON OFFENSE Right after the 2016 election, the Republican Party was putting out incredibly horrific things about [the gang] MS13, illegal immigrants, Sharia law. Isaiah radically expanded our Muslim base in the last 18 months. We have the Muslim Coalition of Isaiah. We were training people in mosques to go to precinct caucuses, and all of a sudden Republican legislators tried to go after us for it. We had a Facebook video of a training that went viral, 46,000 people saw it. And we went on offense instead of running away from it. We had a press conference, we took screenshots of Republicans’ Facebook pages, we sent them to journalists’ blogs, we got it in the Star Tribune. We  said it’s disgusting that people are attacking precinct training for Muslims. This is un-Minnesotan. Is there a religious test for participating in democracy? Minnesotans want to bring people together! Some politicians and some lobbyists and the greedy few are trying to divide us. And not only that, but here we are having a press conference at the mosque that was bombed right after Donald Trump was elected and we have 200 Somalis and white Christians phone banking together to go to the precinct caucus tomorrow. The Republicans ended up having to take all their anti-Muslim stuff down, all the Republican candidates for governor and the chair of the GOP had to come out and go, “yeah, there’s no religious test for participating.” We  had an immigrant leader who got detained by plainclothes policemen while he went to court, and we got it all on video and then we figured out a way to make it go national. The video has been seen millions of times. And we used that to basically position the Democratic candidates: here’s how you talk about what happened to Carlos. We’re also working at the county level. It’s about how do you not get caught flat-footed by those attack moments but go on offense? And then, build a drumbeat that there’s another way for us to be Minnesotan than what they’re offering you? And which team do you want to be on? Do you want to be on Team Hate? Do you want to be on Team Really Nasty and Mean? Or do you want to be on Team We Care About Our Neighbors and Dig Each Other Out of the Snow? Which team do you want to be on?

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The organizations in our sample offered myriad examples of effective campaign messaging. They know how to craft clever taglines that garner attention (for example, SONG’s anti-immigration campaign was called “Melt ICE,” referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement). They know how to tell a succinct and compelling story that is connected to basic American values and tugs at heartstrings. Their websites use direct and specific language rather than jargon, and organizations frame their work in terms of fairness and democracy. The messages are not divisive even if the frames behind them (e.g., abolition, see chapter 7) are quite radical. For the organization’s members, the narratives were truly their lived experience. Mary Hooks, then codirector of SONG, describes their campaign for pretrial bail out of Black women in prison. They called the campaign “Bail Out Black Mama’s for Mother’s Day,” and it was extremely successful in helping desperate women and families. This narrative appealed to both their members’ sense of urgency and the public’s sentimental attachment to Mother’s Day. Moreover, it allowed SONG to remain mission driven, raising awareness about unequal treatment for Black women and members of the LGBTQ+ community. It highlighted a population that often goes unnoticed in dominant narratives. As Hooks says, the campaign emerged from a radical analysis but used a pragmatic approach to reach a wider audience for change. We did some research, and we saw that most of the women, particularly Black women, who are held pretrial and can’t afford their bond, are oftentimes single parents and family breadwinners. And after three days sitting in jail, you can consider your job a wrap. One of the ways in which we were highlighting this crisis [was by] fund-raising to Bail out Black Mamas for Mother’s Day. This work allowed us to highlight the impacts of what happens where the carceral system meets economic justice.  .  .  . A lot of our budget increase has to do with the Black Mama’s Day Bail Out. In my mind this is an old tactic; my ancestors have done this through chattel slavery. People were excited, particularly post Trump getting in office, and folks were saying, “we need to do something right now.” So I think it also met a political desire for people to do something relevant that could have concrete material changes in people’s lives. You bail somebody out, you’re literally in jail one day, you’re out the next.

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FIGHTING FORWARD

Campaigns have always been about making policy changes and increasing the organization’s power, but organizers have come to understand these strategies more clearly over the years. Not insignificantly, today’s social action organizers are more explicit that campaigns must serve the values of the organization and enhance its power to achieve its vision for justice. Organizers are increasingly thoughtful about how each campaign moves toward societal transformation. Gabe Strachota, then lead organizer for Community Voices Heard in New York, reflects this view: “We have started thinking about how those short-term campaigns fit into a longer-term strategy about structural reforms and thinking about campaigns through the lens of not just how does it improve conditions that people are angry about, but how does it shift power and wealth? For example, we trained around how the Voting Rights Act is a clear example of a structural reform that was strategic; it shifted decision-making power. And so in our public housing work our demands for investment is one piece of it. But we’re also calling for the creation of a Stakeholder Council that gives residents more decision-making power over how money is used. We’re trying to think about how our campaigns are part of a longer term strategy.” It is also true that social action organizations have always tried to do more than just organize in opposition to a target’s policy, behavior, or decision. Instead, they have tried to craft positive solutions that would improve the lives of their membership. Sam Rayburn’s warning that “any jackass can kick down a barn door, but it takes a carpenter to build one” is widely quoted among organizers (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). In the mid1970s, for example, when organizers fought banks and insurance companies about their lending policies, they also proposed establishment of revolving community loan funds that the organizations owned and operated to ensure that community residents could purchase property. Now organizers think more precisely about strategies that fight for a solution that improves not only the lives of their members but also increases their power and control over the systems that impact them. They intend to have an ongoing voice in the institutions that impact their communities and are unambiguously using language to describe what they are looking for. Two of the organizers in our sample talked about a strategy that “fights forward.” Lauren Jacobs of PowerSwitch Action, said this: “We are

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trying to ‘lead with vision forward,’ which has been hard because we are very accustomed to leading with ‘we are against the thing you’re doing.’ . . . We see that as a core because we are constantly contesting the right-wing’s argument that makes public ownership sound like it’s subpar.” By fighting forward, organizers also mean that they are developing campaigns that not only lead to positive solutions that solve problems but also give the organizational leaders more power and control for the next round of change. In the case example, Sandra Lobo describes how the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition is working on that approach.

SANDRA LOBO: A FIGHTING FORWARD APPROACH LEADING TO GREATER POWER We’ve been fighting back for 45 years, and our people are just as poor. So what does fighting forward look like, and how do we ensure that we do both? If we no longer fought back, by the time we build the things that we want to build, we might all be gone. And at the same time, if we just fight back, we will never actually get to the place we built and where we own and that we govern. It is really a balance. That has been embedded within our 20-year vision for our Bronx, what are the 10-year goals that have a balance between the fighting back and the fighting forward, and then what’s the path to ensuring that those get done? . . . We started around housing organizing. The last year or two we had some big wins: the Right to Counsel [for tenants facing eviction] and a Certificate of No Harassment. At the end of the day, though, we’re just getting legal services against eviction. That’s not helping us to really build our wealth. Our people still have to fight for their homes. Community Land Trust is a model we are in the final stages of incorporating. We’re educating our people around that, we are working with our base to identify the low hanging fruit, what the data tell us are the opportunities, who are the mission driven developers that will work with us right now so that we can become those developers and be  able to take over these buildings? What  are the models that we have where tenants can go and purchase? What are the policies we can advance to have tenants be the first to purchase if it’s for sale? We have models of this from other cities. That’s the fight forward example, and we have teams working on that so that at the end they will build shared wealth

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and ownership. At the same time, we have a Right to Counsel organizer who is ensuring that people know their rights. We still have organizers who are helping build associations to ensure that landlords are giving them the basic services. Those are the two pieces that we’re working toward. Youth organizing was another example of balance. We have our people fighting current policies in the Department of Education’s discipline code that are very punitive, especially for youth of color. You can get suspended for up to 10 days for chewing gum or wearing a hat in class—that’s disproportionately used on Black men and women—so they’re fighting to change those policies. And at the same time, our young people are creating restorative justice models. They’re training each other, and they’re piloting them in schools. They’re training staff and administrators in those schools too, so if you eliminate the current models, there are new models to shift to. You can go to the mayor and the chancellor and say we want to eliminate metal detectors and school safety agents. But what will you replace them with? We want to make sure that our young people are designing the alternative, not some bureaucrat, because the youth know what will illuminate their learning and what will support them in their academics. They are the ones who need to be creating the alternative.

Designing campaigns that serve multiple organizational purposes, assessing and escalating tactics, developing effective narratives for campaigns, ensuring that leadership is fully participating in decision-making and action, and putting forth proposals for change that result in greater control and power are all standard organizing practice today. These strategies are perhaps better understood, articulated, and validated by the many years of study and practice by thousands of campaigns of social action organizations over the years. Although the strategies remain similar to those practiced 25 years ago, new thinking, interesting debates, and important new innovations have emerged in social action organizing strategy. We turn to those innovations now. INNOVATIONS IN STRATEGY

In 1994, we concluded that strategy was too often driven by the organizer’s ideology rather than by a careful analysis of opportunities. The mobilizing organizers leaned heavily on events such as marches and protests, the

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lobbying organizers attempted to persuade elected officials, and the grassroots organizers (the sole subject of our current research) used meetings and dramatic actions that escalated confrontation between them and their identified targets. We critiqued how organizers let their ideology circumscribe opportunities that could have been employed to build power and win victories. This was a major finding of our original research, and we urged organizers to “fill out their strategic hand” by trying different strategies and building new alliances among groups (Mondros & Wilson, 1994, p. 247). It turns out that we were not particularly prescient. Many organizers were already thinking about those problems, and since 1994 many have made substantial progress in developing their strategic options. In the following sections, we address five of the most important strategic advances employed by social action organizations today: ending strategic silos, building new alliances and establishing real coalitions, including intersectional injustice in their demands, identifying and holding accountable corporate targets, and ensuring follow-up to their successes. THE EVOLUTION OF STRATEGY SILOS

Sharp distinctions have been drawn between mobilizing, organizing, lobbying, and electoral strategies. Engler and Engler (2016) summarize an age-old debate that contrasts mobilizing approaches with organizing models. They describe the organizing model based on Alinsky as “slow incremental building of community groups  .  .  . focused on person-byperson recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time” (p. 32). They contrast that to the mobilizing or mass protest model championed by Piven and Cloward as being “unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization . . . disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly, draw on participants not previously organized, and leave elites scrambling to adjust to the new political landscape” (p. 32). Han (2014) and McAlevey (2016) also compare these models with advocacy (lobbying and electoral) work. In mobilizing and advocacy methods, people self-select themselves as activists, usually for short-term single-issue campaigns. In organizing, the focus is on developing leaders who come from the community into

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a  strong grassroots organizational base that can grow to make change across multiple issues. The social psychology literature appears to primarily address mobilizing methods. Della Porta and Diani (2006) describe organizing as coming in waves, “from institutional protest to enthusiastic peak to ultimate collapse” (p. 189). This is exactly the criticism most organizing scholars have regarding mobilizing strategies. Some argue for mobilizing approaches (Hunter, 2015; Moyer, 2001), but others find little efficacy in the model. Yotam Marom (2015), who was part of the Occupy movement, later reflected that their formless leaderless movement ultimately suffered from a “politic of powerlessness.” Understandably, the organizers in our sample come from what McAlevey calls “structured organizations” and express skepticism about the long-term impact of relying on mobilizing and advocacy methods. Marilyn Sneiderman, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organizing at Rutgers University and former national field mobilization director for the AFL-CIO, explains the weakness of this model: “Everybody goes to the Trump Hotel in [Washington,] D.C. almost every week. Come to the White House, and yell at the White House; come to the Trump building, and yell at the Trump building; come to the Senate, and yell at the Senate. I don’t go. There’s no strategy because implicit in that is this almost utopian naive belief that if we just express our opinion and tell the story of why it’s wrong that will impact those who are in power. That may help get more people involved, but it’s not a strategy to win.” Some scholars of organizing see advantages in recognizing the assets and the challenges of both approaches. “While community organizers tend to focus on specific institutions, movements have the additional goals of influencing popular culture, language, and thought. These differences can lead community organizers to build groups that are unable to see beyond themselves, and can lead movement activities to design tactics that don’t build permanent power” (Sen, 2003, p. 22). Sen recommends an approach in which organizations employ and join protests when auspicious moments arrive. McAleavy (2010) agrees that both strategies are necessary, writing that movements without organization can’t sustain themselves, but without igniting a movement organizations will never grow. Engler and Engler (2016) recount the history that led to the bright line between mobilizing and organizing. They note that Alinsky himself was

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far more pragmatic about methods than is generally assumed. They argue that “the future of social change in this country may well involve integrating these approaches—figuring out how the strengths of both structure and mass protest can be used in tandem—so that outbreaks of widespread revolt complement long-term organizing” (p. 32) Furthermore, they advise organizers to develop skills to address the aspects of mobilization that can be influenced—assessing when the context is ripe for mobilization, escalating mobilization that is occurring, and learning how to channel disruption into longer-term goals and structures. Healy and Hinson (2020, p. 2), writing for the Grassroots Policy Project, recommend a model that blends organizing, mobilizing, political action, and the creation of public narratives. They suggest three ways social action organizations can build power that is dynamic and integrated: 1. Organize people and resources for direct political involvement in visible decision-making arenas. 2. Build durable, long-term political infrastructure: networks of organizations that are aligned around shared goals and can shape political agendas. 3. Make meaning on the terrain of ideology and worldview.

The first domain is what we think of as traditional organizing; it involves recruiting and developing leadership into structured organizations. The second refers to convening diverse groups that are often involved in mobilizing (for example, faith-based, racial justice, and environmental groups) along with labor unions and community organizations into an established and reliable affiliated network capable of political action and dedicated to building long-term and sustainable collective power. This requires establishing deep and enduring alliances that will build leadership to take on corporate power. The third area denotes the creation of public narratives that challenge dominant messages of society. The dominant messages— blatantly or subtly racist, homophobic, and misogynistic that are also individualistic, pro-market, and antigovernment—legitimate the status quo and make change less palatable to the public. Organizations need to provide culturally grounded narratives that draw different conclusions. When these three strategies are integrated, Healy and Hinson argue that networks and alliances can be built to transform society.

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Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa (2021) find that leaders support an “inside and outside” game (that is, electoral, mobilizing, and organizing), supporting a “both/and” approach (p. 104). Organizers in our sample concur with the view that multiple methods for change need to be employed: anything and everything that works and reflects inclusive values should be used. These methods now include mobilizing, advocacy, and electoral work as well as traditional organizing. Organizers caution that this must be done strategically, with organizing at the center. The various activities must reinforce each other and serve the ultimate aims of the organization for leadership growth and development, issue resolution, and strengthening organizational power. Several organizers referred us to the “Base-Building Tornado,” which draws on Healey and Hinson’s (2020) work. As shown in figure 8.1, the main components of building power form a triangle that begins with building a base of people with shared problems, changing the narratives people hold about social problems and solutions, and moving toward achieving structural change. Adam Mason, former policy director of Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, explains this model: “The first arena is people: a bigger base of people who are in a common struggle for what they want. The next arena of power is narrative . . . the world around us that’s shaping what is possible.  .  .  . Changing that narrative and the worldview and the way that people think is critical. It’s an arena of power that we have to contend in. That third arena of power then is structural change. That is the organizing fights, the policy demands, those are all the things that we’re doing that actually move us forward and make life better.

al

tur e

g an ch

Na rra tiv e

uc

Str

People

FIGURE 8.1. Base building tornado

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Those three are not in isolation. We try to think about it as a way to build comprehensive campaigns that are building base, shifting narrative, and hopefully winning stuff.” Isaiah has implemented all three of the strategies recommended by Healy and Hinson (2020): they have a history of traditional organizing, they have aligned with other groups throughout Minnesota to work on various campaigns, and they have an organizational communication strategy that sends effective, culturally relevant, and counterculture narratives. Isaiah does electoral work and advocacy and they have used mobilizing tactics during campaigns. The organization is, in Gamson’s (1990) term, “combat ready,” capitalizing on the progressive energy that was stirred by the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump and various other events. Making all the moving parts work together is complicated because staff and leaders must be aligned with the various functions. And still, it all begins with developing leaders that build strong organizations. In the case example, Doran Schrantz explains the beliefs that ground this multistrategic vision for Isaiah.

DORAN SCHRANTZ: ISAIAH’S MULTISTRATEGIC APPROACH We are building a vehicle that can move people who are differently positioned in a white supremacist patriarchy. And we have to build a multiracial, populist, big grassroots base that has a long-term power analysis for change in structural power. We operate in the policy and political arena to change it. Nothing about that has changed; it’s not like you scrap that work because the world is on fire. In fact, we have to do more of it. There must be more bases of real people owning their destinies politically. The urgency has been that Isaiah must get our hands on the levers of politics. We’ve been spending years asking how we change things with the legislature. How do we change things at agencies? How do we change things in city council? How do we change things with corporations? So we also have to have political power. It’s not [that] we didn’t do any politics before, but there is urgency to build the infrastructure for an almost party apparatus: a party apparatus that isn’t the party. In 2016 we started a (c)(4) called Faith in Minnesota. It has grown a lot because we quickly adapted, we became a vehicle that could capture the

resistance and energy. It became a relevant vehicle for people in their lives and a thing that they could do, and it’s practical. It’s time for a new “federalism.” We’re going to try to cut Trump’s stuff off city by city by city by city by city. We’re going to try to get our public officials and our mayors to fight for local democracy by fighting preemption that’s completely connected to Trump. It became a vehicle for people to act. Now we’re really seeing what we’re up against and orienting people that this isn’t about issue-by-issue policy change right now. This is about protecting our communities and then going on offense by strategically building the kind of politics and organized movement that is a sharp and clear alternative, that can express itself politically as opposed to what’s being offered by this white nationalist movement. But it still is all about grassroots power, all the basic stuff that distinguishes organizing from advocacy or mobilizing. In Isaiah, it used to be that the only staff were organizers. And then as we’ve grown in funding, in relevance, and in the sophistication of what we’re trying to do, we have a policy person, a data person, a digital organizer, and a communications director. The challenge was how do you make decisions that allow those other capacities to deliver strategic capacity, but keep the organizing as the central priority. Organizing is the thing that we do, the bread and butter. And if anything we’re doing is getting in the way of that, then we have to change that thing, not the organizing. Sometimes the way I put it is the leaders deserve a lobbyist, our grassroots people deserve all the nice things. We have three lead organizers who run the organizing team. And then those lead organizers with the leaders build the program and the strategy together. For example, we’re going to get people elected to the state convention. It’s a very complex project and requires all kinds of leadership training, it requires people to have a political analysis of why we’re doing that, it requires that people have a program for figuring out how they’d organize people to support them. Then we need a communications plan. So the lead organizer becomes the partner to our communication director. The lead organizer on whatever program is unfolding becomes the director for that moment so that all the capacities are aligned and accountable to the organizing. It’s quite lateral. The baton passes in terms of who’s leading so that the organizing is central, but it pulls on all the other capacities that we have.

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Like Isaiah, organizations are quickly finding ways to expand their strategic repertoire. Two of the most important mechanisms that enable them to vary their strategies are establishing new organizational structures and developing new systems to secure unrestricted funding. Historically, social action organizations were incorporated under the 501(c)(3) tax code for charitable organizations. This tax code helps the organization by allowing private donors to take a tax deduction for their contribution and is usually required by private philanthropy and government grants, but it limits the ability of the organization to participate in electoral politics including taking positions on candidates and supporting them, and running candidates for elected office. This constraint was critical for social action organizations. As Sen (2003) warns, “We cannot pin our hopes on government intervention as we have in the past. . . . increasing corporate control of government and the overall reduction of government itself suggests that we need a plan that allows us to take over government rather than just influence it” (p. 6). Today it is increasingly common for social action organizations to establish a 501(c)(4) organization either instead of or alongside their existing 501(c)(3). A (c)(4) tax status allows organizations to do explicit advocacy and lobbying and to engage in election politics. Although contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations are generally not tax deductible and they cannot generally accept philanthropic or government funds, the status allows the organizations to do electoral work without jeopardy from the IRS. About half of the organizations in our sample had followed this route and had both 501(c)(3) organizations as vehicles for their organizing and 501(c)(4) organizations for their electoral activity. And some of the organizations have established their own political action committees (PACs) as well. A PAC can raise money for political activities such as parties, candidates, committees, or associations and use it to influence an election. Although the organization cannot receive tax deductible contributions, it can collect unlimited funds and put that money behind the candidates they support. Organizations are using their PACs to run their own leaders as candidates for elected offices. The establishment of (c)(4) structures has been transformative for many organizations. It has allowed them to add a voter strategy to their basic organizing so they can throw their weight behind candidates who back the policy positions they have developed. The organizations’ members and

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leaders become a base of support for candidates and their positions and are able to hold elected officials accountable for their votes. They can use these relationships to change policy on the issues they have been organizing around. Using their PACs, organizations are competing in elections. The organizing, voter, and leader strategies all support one another on behalf of the changes the organization envisions. Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement is a good example of how adding a 501(c)(4) and a PAC has allowed them to work on their campaigns against factory farms in multiple ways. Adam Mason describes this process in the case example.

ADAM MASON: ELECTORAL ENGAGEMENT AND ACTION The decision to form a (c)(4) came out of a strategic planning process that was led by members. Hugh [Espy, executive director,] tells a story about members wanting to weigh in on elections back in the 1980s during the farm crisis, and they might have sent out a flyer and then they realized they couldn’t do that. From then on, staff were actually holding members back: We can’t do that as an organization. So that hunger has always been there, especially in a state like Iowa. We were able to push it to the limits so that our issue could be debated within an election. But it was really members that said, “No, we need the additional capacity to be able to talk to voters about our work and to say what we want to say about candidates running for office.” Finally, we conceded to the members and said, “Okay, let’s do it,” and took the time we needed to figure out how that structure works and what it’s going to take to fund-raise to make sure that we have the capacity on the (c)(4) side that we need. I would say the more local the target versus the more statewide or even national or global the target can impact what strategies work and, of course, there’s a whole toolbox full of different tactics and strategies that we can use. On a local factory farm fight, or a local wage theft fight, where there is a local person in that community who’s building or developing the factory farm, or there is a local contractor or business owner who’s not paying their workers, community pressure remains one of the best tools that we have: the bread and butter, organizing people to get together and going to the target with the demands, putting pressure on them, and power mapping that, all of that traditional community organizing is still effective. As corporate (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) power continues to consolidate, a lot of the time those decision-makers are farther and farther away from our communities. It could be that the factory farm developer is now a corporation based out of North Carolina or that the privatized Medicaid servicer is a company based out of Delaware. Those decision-makers are farther and farther away from us, which presents a challenge. As an organization, we have continued to evolve too. We have transitioned to issues where we can make a statewide impact, and there is a way of taking people from the immediate issue into the larger enforcement or state agency and policy work. With that we’ve had to evolve with a recognition that our members, especially the ones that stick around for a long time, are political animals. They are following politics. We formed a (c)(4) in 2011 because we needed to be more political and more engaged in elections, and through a member-led process we organized the (c)(4) arm, Iowa CCI Action Fund. Fast forward to this year [2018] when the (c)(4) formed a PAC because over the last seven years of the (c)(4) weighing in on elections, we then started to think about another pathway—recruiting and training our own members and leaders to run for office in our vision for movement politics. An additional strategy now includes not just choosing from those who decide to run, but us choosing who runs, so as a candidate, our leaders can advance the issue organizing, and the issue organizing shifts the political environment. What we found was it’s great for a (c)(4) to be able to weigh in on elections, but if we want our members to run for office, we can’t just let them run and then once they become a candidate stop talking to them. We have to be able to communicate with them and coordinate with them. Otherwise, once they’re in office, they’re simply co-opted by the establishment political powers that be. We needed the PAC structure to be able to coordinate with our members while they’re running for office, and to keep that movement politics throughout the campaign process and use that as one more venue to build power. When we’re knocking on doors as part of a electoral campaign, we’re leading with the issues. We’re not leading with the personality of the candidate. I might be door-knocking for a candidate and the first thing I’m going to say to you if you’re in rural Hardin County is, “Hey, I’m out here today talking to folks about factory farms. You know, Hardin County’s got some of the most

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polluted water because we’ve got 300 factory farms here. Is that something you care about?” And they’ll say, “Yeah, yeah, I don’t like ’em here either.” It’s like, “Well, that’s exactly why our organization has been fighting them and actually your neighbor Nick has been fighting these factory farms for over seven years as a member of CCI, and he’s running for county supervisor now. Have you heard about Nick?” Then I would pivot, but we would always lead with the issues rather than “Hey, I’d like you to vote for Nick.” It’s much more engaging, and through that process we’re going to identify more potential activists and supporters, and that capacity is not lost after election day.

The work to achieve greater power becomes that much more urgent in rural areas and in red states where progressive change is stymied by elected state officials. The hope for change relies on building a large enough multiracial constituency, including community groups, labor unions, and political groups, that can vote in new and more progressive leadership. This is the strategy that was used by Georgia STAND-UP, the New Georgia Project, and Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, among others, leading up to the 2020 presidential and senatorial elections (Herndon, 2020). There are early indicators that this strategy is working: it seems to have worked in Arizona (Abramsky, 2021) and at least in the mayoral primary in Buffalo, New York (Goldberg, 2021). Organizers are enthusiastic about their (c)(4) and PAC work, but they emphasize that it grows out of leadership development and buy-in around important policy issues and transformational change. That’s what makes the work different from an election campaign that is focused on electing a candidate to office. The work is not about the candidate but about a candidate who the organization has nurtured and trained and who will clearly work in the service of the organization’s goals. When it is carried out within the context of a social action organization, electoral activism is a strategy that builds organizational capacity and power rather than the candidate’s career. In a sense, the candidate is just another venue for the organization to achieve its mission. The significance of this distinction cannot be overstated. It is the considerable and momentous difference between basic electoral activity and a strategy for transformational change.

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To no small degree, the fact that social action organizations have developed new ways to fund themselves has opened up strategic opportunities. That is especially true for the (c)(4) and PAC structures. Membership dues and small dollar donations have in many ways freed organizations to be more bold and creative. Moreover, this new money replaces philanthropic dollars that often came with strings attached about the work the funders wanted done and the issues they wanted them to undertake. The new dollars come from people, mostly members, who are already committed to the organization’s mission, vision, and strategic methods, and contributing their money reinforces their ownership of the organization on both the (c)3 and (c)4 side of their work. Jennifer Epps-Addison, then codirector of the Center for Popular Democracy, explains the significant of this new strategy: The ability to direct small dollar giving and allow people to make one, two, five, and ten dollar donations has given a lot of flexibility for people to decide, for example, to take an action at the border that institutional philanthropy may find too risky or not be willing to support; to bring together a convening of folks and to crowdsource and fund-raise to get people there instead of asking for institutional philanthropy to support it. I think that’s given rise to a lot of the boldness that we’re seeing both in new elected officials and progressives being elected into office, but also in the policy agendas: in the Green New Deal, in this version of Medicare For All, which truly cuts the profit margin and motive out of our health care system, on the demand to abolish ICE. We’re seeing these demands as largely coming from groups who are funding themselves through digital means rather than through institutional philanthropy. And it’s enabling us to really open up a conversation about transformation rather than just reforming the system.

Organizers’ flexibility in using new and multiple strategies to realize their aims is particularly encouraging. The new ways organizers are thinking about their work—using different strategies, establishing different structures to support them, and especially placing leadership development and traditional organizing at the center of what they do—holds great promise for the future of progressive change and social transformation.

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NEW ALLIANCES AND REAL COALITIONS

The community organizing literature has long debated the efficacy of coalition work (Minkler, 2005; Mizrahi & Rosenthal, 2001; Pilisuk, McAllister, & Rothman, 1996). Bobo et al. (2010) write, “Coalitions come in a variety of forms. They can be permanent or temporary, single or multi-issue, geographically defined, limited to certain constituencies (such as a coalition of women’s organizations), or a combination of the above.  .  .  . Their goal is often to bring together the major progressive organizations to build a base of power capable of winning on issues of mutual concern. Other coalitions are best set up on a temporary basis. . . . The reason for this is that apart from a common interest in this one issue, the programs and constituents of the member groups could be very different” (pp. 97–98). Coalitions can bring the work to scale, but this can be inherently problematic because the organizations are not always aligned around the relative importance of issues, around the strategies to be used, or around the demands. These differences can lead to tension among leaders and organizers. Such was the case when the People’s Climate Movement (PCM) brought together unions and environmental groups. Unions argue for emissions policies that sustain jobs whereas environmental groups urge zero carbon emissions. Constituencies that are able to align around a broader agenda are not always able to overcome their differences. Fletcher Harper, director of GreenFaith and executive committee member of People’s Climate Movement, describes the problem. The single most important benefit that PCM can bring into the mix is this ability to be a table where you’ve got labor and environment and the faith community and the cultures that they represent trying to find a way to not just tolerate each other, but really to build. If those constituencies succeed in tolerating each other’s presence with some level of enjoyment, we’ll do some good, but we won’t reach our potential. I think the key question is: Can we find a way for those constituencies to be together that really engages people passionately? To me, that’s the fundamental challenge. Given the politics not only in the United States but also globally, I think that’s a really important challenge. PCM wrestles with culture and class issues, and that wrestling

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with those explicitly is something that is really missing from the climate movement, and from the labor movement. The climate movement and the labor movement are both good at talking to their own people, but not necessarily good at figuring out how to survive, or to get what they want. They have no choice but to reach out beyond where they are. And the faith sector is in the same position in a lot of ways. But that’s hard to do, and it’s hard to stay committed to that.

The assets and challenges in collaborative work are real, but some scholars make a distinction among types of collaborations. Sen (2003) contrasts coalitions, alliances, and networks based on the degree of formality of the relationships and the degree of political alignment. In her view, alliances are fluid and are based on goals and the level of agreement among the groups. Coalitions are organizations of organizations that ultimately vote to support positions and actions the coalition will take. Networks are looser formations generally built on a relatively vague statement of purpose that allow many groups to sign on but don’t require a high level of participation. Minieri and Getsos (2007) distinguish among alliances, coalitions, coordinated campaigns, and sign-on campaigns based on the goals and duration of the work. In their view, alliances are strategic partnerships that seek long-term power, and coalitions are designed to win specific demands rather than long-term transformational change. Coordinated campaigns have similar goals (e.g., around the just transition or abolition), but they pursue them separately. In sign-on campaigns, one organization takes the lead and other organizations support the work through letters or petitions or sending their people to actions. Staples (2016) writes that alliances are organizations that retain their independence but agree to work together on a common campaign or goal, whereas coalitions have a central organizational structure requiring member organizations to give up at least some autonomy. This literature suggests that collaborations array along a continuum ranging from loose and episodic affiliations of sovereign organizations to more structured coalitions that require a high level of cooperative decision-making, accountability, and action. Social action organizations today are using multiple ways of working together, from strategic alliances that seek long-term goals and power to loose affiliations with national networks that offer financial support, training opportunities for staff and leaders, information, research and best

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practices, and occasions for joint action on campaigns. Alignment models around a long-term vision for transformational change or a need for organizational resources are preferred over formalized structures. Affiliations allow organizations to associate in ways that enable them to learn and grow and to pursue campaigns around their issues but remain strongly autonomous and accountable to their memberships. Such alignments heed Sen’s (2003) caution that “an alliance or coalition is no substitute for organizing a constituency and building a powerful organization” (p. 139). We describe some of the trends in affiliations next. NATIONAL NETWORKS

National organizing networks are national organizations with affiliates that may function in a variety of forms. They have been around for a very long time, beginning with the Industrial Areas Foundation established by Saul Alinsky in 1940, and they proliferated from the 1960s through the 1980s. Gamaliel, National People’s Action (now People’s Action), ACORN (now disbanded), the Midwest Academy, and PICO (now Faith in Action) networks were established to convene local organizations around issues and campaigns, unite and deploy their power nationally, and offer resources such as leadership and organizer training and research. Often they serve as fiscal conduits for emerging organizations or to disburse philanthropy donated to the network. Some of the better-known networks today include Gamaliel, People’s Action, Faith in Action, Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), Community Change, and PowerSwitch Action. It once was the case that social action organizations aligned with a single network, but today they may align with two or more, using network resources differentially or joining national campaigns that reflect the needs of their members. A full analysis of national organizing networks is beyond the scope of this book and requires further analysis, but we report here on what the organizers we interviewed told us. Organizations also affiliate with coalitions and networks that are identity based or issue related. It is common for the organizations to have affiliations that reflect their constituencies’ racial, gender, and ethnic identity, specific campaigns, common issues, or that help them access needed resources such as financial sponsorship, research, or leadership training. For example, SONG plays a major leadership role in the Movement for Black Lives and the National

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Bailout Collective and is in a relationship with Mijente, which describes itself as a national hub for Latinx organizing. In this way, they are linked by both common issues and common identities. The Asian Pacific Environmental Network works on the impact of climate change on Asian immigrants and refugees in Oakland, and their affiliations reflect that: they work with the Global Justice Alliance, the Climate Justice Alliance, California Environmental Justice, API for Civic Empowerment, and Grassroots Asians Rising—all organizations that are relevant to their issues and cultural identity. Organizations focusing on workplace rights, such as United for Respect, affiliate with groups that work on women’s economic rights, financial reform, and racial justice. Down Home North Carolina, Hoosier Action, Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, Isaiah, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Land Stewardship Project, and Logan Square Neighborhood Association are geographically based organizations. They affiliate with one or more of the national networks where they get help and support: Center for Popular Democracy, Gamaliel, or People’s Action. Some organizations are also networked statewide. Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and former codirector of Down Home North Carolina, talks about the importance of those connections for a young organization in a red state. For us, it was really important to affiliate with a national organizing network that has at its core how to build power in rural and small town communities across the country. . . . The only group that I really saw doing [that] at the national level was People’s Action. So that cohort is grappling with the fundamentals of organizing that makes up our model. We’re looking at basebuilding challenges and how we can be more creative about getting to scale. It really is a difference between when you’re talking about base building in a more urban place that has apartments and all of the density versus where we are where we’re literally on sides of mountains with one or two homes and knowing that knocking on doors still matters. We’re talking about communications in this cohort. And we felt like we couldn’t do that alone. . . . [There are] relationships with some 20 groups across the country that I can call on to say, “we’re running up with this issue around Medicaid expansion with work requirements. Many of the other states in this cohort have the same thing. How are you doing this in a red district?” And then on our state level, part of our work with America Votes is really about building our

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capacity to do sharper electoral organizing. We have a (c)(3), a (c)(4), and a PAC, and part of what we’re trying to do is contend for independent political power. We want Down Home to be able to influence how politics are run in our state. We can’t actually change people’s lives without changing who’s in power at the State House. America Votes gives us the tools, they give us the technical assistance and the training to up our capacity in our (c)(4) operations. And then on the (c)(3) side at Blueprint, they are beginning to look at race, class narrative work, and thinking about building out a cohort around that. Even though it is nice to be connected to national groups, we also need to build a community of practice in our own state. It is also really important because we are actually working with folks who understand the cultural context of North Carolina.

Some organizations have even wider network affiliations. Isaiah, for example, affiliates with four national networks (Center for Popular Democracy, Community Change, Faith in Action, and Gamaliel) and also with labor through the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). PowerSwitch Action is involved with the Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, Jobs with Justice, and Climate Justice Alliance. Alignment with organizations that do research is critical because they often don’t have research staff within the organization or the capacity to do deep fact finding, and they benefit from the accumulated knowledge that the research partners have. ACRE (Action Center on Race and the Economy) and Little Sis were mentioned by a number of the organizers as being particularly helpful. Partnership for Public Good is a western New York organization that includes researchers, grassroots groups, and academic institutions. It has a roster of researchers who provide analysis to community groups. Most are academics with deep knowledge about the community issues relevant to Buffalo, New York. It is a university-community partnership that could be replicated across the country. What drives affiliations is the organization’s identity, its need for resources, and most important, its need to be more powerful. These multiple and fluid affiliations work well for organizations determined to remain close and accountable to their base and yet meet organizational needs and grow their capacity for large-scale change. National networks give local social action organizations what one organizer called “political capital at the federal level.” For the most part, these loose affiliations meet their needs

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for both autonomy and resources. There are, however, some notable exceptions. More durable affiliations have emerged out of the need to amass greater power and strengthen the organizations’ capacity for change. These affiliations occur around campaigns, around statewide organizing, and in sustainable community-labor coalitions. The most obvious reason organizers want to establish more significant and coordinated affiliations is to pursue a campaign around an issue or target. Jose Lopez, then organizer and now coexecutive director from Make the Road New York, describes connecting their local housing work to a national coalition to impact housing: Right now we’re talking a lot to CPD [Center for Popular Democracy] because our state fight is universal rent control and we’ve just identified six states across the country that have the very same universal rent control fight. Oregon is about to pass a universal rent control measure to extend tenant protections across the state, and in these six states are organizations that are members of the Center for Popular Democracy just like we’re helping to lead the fight in New York State. So CPD is just saying, “let’s convene all six states and partners to come together to think about if there is a way to elevate this issue nationally, understanding that there’s a 2020 election right around the corner and that housing really hasn’t been a national discussion for 30 to 40 years in this country.” That’s an example of how now we’re thinking about highlighting a state issue that we’re working on nationally to draw attention to it.

We also found that coalitions convene to challenge a particularly egregious target. For example, five organizations in our small sample of 20 were involved in a campaign against Amazon. Local organizations were involved because of Amazon’s expansion into various communities around the country, and worker rights and immigrant rights organizations were involved because of Amazon’s labor practices. This large-scale coalition is a prime example of affiliating with the explicit purpose of amassing greater power to fight a specific corporate target. Another example is the work Bargaining for the Common Good is doing to target Wells Fargo Bank, which has nefarious interests in many issue areas. Native American groups that are anti-pipeline, racial justice groups that work on housing, student groups organizing for student debt relief, environmental groups, and organizations

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against gun violence all agreed to target Wells Fargo related to their specific issues. We have more to say about both these campaigns later in the chapter when we address corporate targets. STATEWIDE COALITIONS

The second important innovation is establishment of statewide coalitions that are sustainable over time and through various campaigns. A promising example in our sample was in the state of Minnesota, where both Isaiah and the Land Stewardship Project were members. At the time of our interviews, 22 labor and community organizations in Minnesota with grassroots bases had come together to form Our Minnesota Future. The coalition existed for a couple of years, and they worked together on many issues including affordable health care and housing, environmental justice, and worker rights (Land Stewardship Project, 2017; Narrative Initiative, 2019). This type of initiative is important for many reasons. It gives the organizations statewide reach and power on any number of issues through the range of partnerships that it fosters. It allows the organizations to coordinate their campaigns against a particularly egregious target, in this case, Wells Fargo. Its successes provide a template for other statewide coalitions. Moreover, statewide coalitions hold the potential for large-scale social transformation by building alliances between cities and rural areas that can be leveraged for power and change. As Mark Schultz, former executive director of the Land Stewardship Project, told us, “A lot of hope right now rests here in the state of Minnesota.” This strategy also holds potential for red and blue states to align, offering the tantalizing prospect of a new rural-urban progressive movement, reminiscent of the national Farmers Alliance and the Industrial Union of America of 1857. That possibility holds great promise for transformational change. COMMUNITY-LABOR COALITIONS

The third noteworthy innovation in coalition work is the growth of community-labor alliances that seek to convene community residents and union members to work on both workplace and nonworkplace issues (McAlevey, 2016). These alliances understand that workers are also community residents with local commitments, needs, and relationships, and

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who share the grievances of their neighbors. They seem to work particularly well combining service industry workers in organizations such as Jobs with Justice, Domestic Workers Alliance, Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC) United, and SEIU with community groups working on campaigns related to health care, housing, and education (McAlevey, 2016). Notably, service unions are often composed of women who contend with family budgets and problems. Unions and community groups hold the potential to build a powerful and sustainable base that can develop leadership and pursue power. Several of the organizations in our sample were engaged in such alliances. Isaiah has an affiliation with SEIU. Lauren Jacobs, of PowerSwitch Action, an affiliation of community groups and labor unions in 20 cities across the country, comes from the labor movement, was familiar with that world, and could easily understand and communicate local problems through both a community and a workplace lens. She understands people as both workers and community residents and uses that perspective to develop strategy: “We’re always trying to think about if we’re going to have a campaign to make sure that transit stays public, that it’s expanded, that youth are able to get passes on it and keep more cars off the road. Then how are we also pulling in a number of other issues at the same time? If there’s going to be expansion, who’s building it, or who has access to those jobs? We do try to think very much about looking at whatever is the core issue—what is the opportunity to take advantage of in a moment and then try to think about the multiple factors that we can affect simultaneously.” In other cases, such as the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), a community-labor alliance was established for a specific purpose. It offers an excellent example of labor and community leaders working together on common issues. In this case, the coalition was driven by the teachers union’s upcoming 2018 contract negotiations. In the case example, then UTLA president (now vice president) Alex Caputo-Pearl describes the strategy of convening the teachers union, parents, youth, and community groups to develop support for union demands as well as education issues  favored by community organizations. Both were included as part of the bargaining package. A more detailed description of the campaign can be found in the 2019 case study published by the UTLA (Dingerson, 2019).

ALEX CAPUTO-PEARL: BUILDING A COMMUNITY-LABOR COALITION STRATEGY Reclaim Our Schools LA was our labor-community coalition. One arm is building the labor-community coalition with existing community organizations and then every week jointly strategizing and doing joint work. It’s not just a letterhead coalition. The other strand is training our own teachers to engage parents at their school site. Those two strands are really important. Reclaim Our Schools LA launched a vision in late 2016 that came out of lots of community meetings around the city and meetings of the teachers union and community allies. We did forums and dialogues with parents and community groups around the city about what their priorities were. Reclaim Our Schools LA launched a broad vision based on that. Then in 2017, as we were doing member surveys on bargaining priorities to get ready for contract bargaining, we also doubled down on the Reclaim Our Schools LA regional meetings and forums and town halls—not just the broad vision that was presented in 2016 but what specifically are parents, community, and youth interested in taking to the bargaining table as a part of UTLA’s contract campaign. So things surfaced out of that, and we basically ended up with two types of contract bargaining demands. One type that was more typical for UTLA negotiations was around salary, class size, staffing, additional counselors, librarians, and issues of special education, which are all bargainable for us in California. There was that strand of demands that were very aggressive and very progressive just because that’s who we are and the union that we’re building. And then a second group of demands were what we called our Common Good Proposals. And this comes out of the Bargaining for the Common Good Movement and included things that were very atypical. For example, we took a bargaining proposal to the table saying that we wanted LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] to commit to investing money in a community schools model, helping schools transform into essentially community hubs that are not only schools but also broaden their curriculum to include arts, music, ethnic studies, etc. They have systematic parent engagement programs where it’s essentially the school doing community organizing to bring folks in and have them see the school as something they’re all trying to collectively drive forward. This involves getting wraparound services at schools, dental clinics, health clinics, etc. (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) Another example is a concrete proposal around expanding green space at schools. We brought a proposal that the district use its leverage to try to get the city to offer free student bus passes on Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses. We brought a proposal to end the practice of random searches where students are lined up and taken out of class supposedly randomly and searched. Those issues are not typically brought into contract bargaining. We brought community allies and youth and parents into the bargaining room and had them explain all of these to the district. And that was a huge step forward in the coherence and commitment that we all had to each other. A lot of it was mobilizing support around these demands, around both the common good and the contract demands. This meant parents canvassing at schools, and the continued monthly meetings of parents who wanted to get more involved and who could develop their leadership. Eventually, we held press conferences in the final lead up to the strike where well known civil rights leaders stood with the labor-community coalition and said that they support the strike. If a strike happens, it’s because teachers are standing up for their students. During the strike, there was something called La Escuelita, which was where students, parents, and community members got together each day of the strike. First, they would walk picket lines in the morning. Then they would get together, and they would do political education work on school funding, charters, privatization. And then they would develop an action to do that night. So they would target school board members’ houses, the superintendent’s house, going to the houses of billionaires who are supporting privatization. The labor-community coalition got extraordinarily involved both in demand development, the bargaining table, building support, and then direct actions. Meanwhile, the second strand of parent work was training our chapter leaders to actually reach out to parents at their school site. That really took off, and we saw during the strike many spontaneous actions just come up because our chapter leaders did a good job of working with parents, getting them to understand what was at stake around class size and other issues. For example, we have multiple Facebook pages that immediately got tons of traction that were led by parents. We had an action called Hands Across Colfax, where 1,000 parents went out to a major avenue in the San Fernando Valley on one morning of the strike and just locked arms along the

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boulevard. We  saw tremendous engagement, and LA is supposed to be a spread out place where you can’t do anything centrally. And three times in one week during the strike we had 60,000 people come downtown to demonstrations, which meant we had about 30,000 of our own members, and it meant that there were about 30,000 others, many parents, community members, and youth who were with us. Within UTLA we worked with our board of directors, which is a board of rank and file educators, around changing the culture within the organization where it was about organizing, it was about helping schools develop their contract action teams, it was about outreach to parents. Our board bought into this approach and helped lead. Our board of directors played huge roles in this. Each of the anchor organizations—Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) Action, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), Students Deserve, and UTLA—devoted paid staff time to all of this work. Many chapter leaders took it upon themselves to do parent and community organizing. Of course, the officers of the union and the field directors of the union managed a lot of this process, but there was a ton of leadership at the board of director level, the rank and file chapter leader level, and then the community organizers who were all devoting time to Reclaim Our Schools LA. We actually did have housing demands as part of our common good proposals, and a number of housing groups came in and helped us move those. We were not able to win anything significant, but the district did move on studying the feasibility of giving over some of their vacant land to lowincome housing developers. So even though we wish we could have won that as a result of the strike, we did make the demand, we did take it to the bargaining table, and there has been progress on the issue. We definitely want to do more on housing.

Affiliations based on common campaigns and targets, statewide coalitions, and community-labor collaborations hold enormous potential for amassing power. Their common purpose and mission and the agreement around methods, goals, and theory of change make for a more stable association. Furthermore, Gillion (2020) finds that coalitions, especially those that are locally led but connected nationally, can influence the political

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mood, offering evidence that organizing can result in changes in public opinion and ultimately political change. We hope they also lessen the competition that sometimes characterized earlier coalition and network efforts. The affiliations are rooted in local base-building organizations and accountable to their own members, perhaps reducing tensions around autonomy. Finally, the coalitions are established on a solid base of members and leaders at the grassroots, rendering the coalition more stable and sustainable. We look forward to the progress of these important new innovations. INTERSECTIONAL INJUSTICE AND MULTIRACIAL CAMPAIGNS

We dealt extensively with the emphasis today’s social action organizations place on issues of systemic inequity caused by racism in chapter 3, and we have seen how those issues play an important role in every aspect of organizing. It is no surprise, therefore, that organizations are increasingly including the impact of intersectional injustice when building their strategy. Miya Yoshitani, former executive director and now senior strategist of Asian Pacific Environmental Network, identifies four areas on which campaigns are expected to have an impact: leadership development, civic engagement and support, policy change, and multiracial work. The expectation that a campaign will nurture the organization’s multiracial organizing and address issues of intersectional injustice reflects the commitment we have consistently found among today’s organizers. Yoshitani explains it this way: [It] is a combination of direct leadership development and community organizing with something like civic engagement, like a voter engagement strategy that allows you to approach change on a much bigger scale. You’re able to bring a much broader swath of people into the fight, and then build the leadership numbers in the base of your power. A third pillar is the policy agenda that actually reflects what people on the ground really want to see and the vision for that transformation they have in their communities. That’s really reflected in the policy fights, the campaigns that we’re winning. . . . in order for that energy policy to be transformative, it has to fundamentally center on the needs of people that have been most impacted by fossil fuel

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pollution; actually help them achieve greater health and air quality and economic control and economic benefits; and support the vision that they have for a clean and healthy environment in their local community. If it’s just something that builds more solar on rooftops anywhere, it doesn’t do the job of being impactful, and it doesn’t engage people, doesn’t make people feel like they want to fight for it. The leadership development, local organizing, civic engagement policy work, and then the fourth major strategy for us that’s in combination of all [this] is the multiracial alliance building and coalition work.

According to the organizers in our sample, everything in a campaign must align with its commitment to speak to the needs of Black Americans, other people of color, and women. Issues and solutions must directly affect their circumstances, and they must be actively engaged in all decisionmaking and be part of the campaign. The campaign must communicate clearly who is being most hurt by the target’s actions. Fletcher Harper talks about the importance of intersectional injustice in the climate change movement, how he believes that oftentimes mobilizing around climate change has not included communities of color, and how to fix that. He references the work of the People’s Climate Movement (PCM), now on hiatus, as well as the work of the organization he leads, GreenFaith. A lot of time is spent in messaging and conversation within PCM on issues of racial justice and economic justice. African American and Latino communities are not a big part of the people who turn out for marches. I think the reason for that is that we have not yet had the time or the commitment within PCM to really dig deep into what does it mean to take the needs and interests of those constituencies seriously. And this is where the mobilizing approach fails, because if all you’re doing is mobilizing, these constituencies don’t identify climate as a top tier issue. Unless you take the long-term approach, which we’re trying to do in our GreenFaith’s organizing work, of spending a lot of time with Black church leaders and Latino faith leaders so that they see that we’re committed to them. If you don’t do that, then it remains transactional, and the coalition does not build the kind of power that it needs to change stuff. So I think that it’s really good that in this last iteration of PCM we weren’t just doing a big anchor mobilization, but we

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were doing mobilizations at the state level because I think the more you push stuff down to a local level or a regional level, the more that you’ve got the opportunity really to engage in that kind of way.

This often means changing the public’s image of who is most affected by the policies and actions of the target. For many people, the image of the “working class” is white men in blue-color jobs. That outdated perception drives sympathy for those white male workers and makes it more difficult to envision or sympathize with women and people of color. Andrea Dehlendorf states that “women had been marginalized from the center of the narrative around working-class reality,” and United for Respect is focusing on women in leadership and women’s issues. Lauren Jacobs discusses the role race plays in PowerSwitch Action’s infrastructure strategy to ensure that people are fully engaged: In 2016, we thought and still do, that infrastructure was going to be a big issue, and we wanted to change the definition of it because the debate we could see would be circling around bridges and roads, and big beefy, largely white men in construction hats. I think that is not accurate. It’s an image of infrastructure that suits business. Everybody needs the roads and bridges, but those are the pieces that business and the very wealthy are most concerned with. They’re less concerned with schools. They are less concerned with water because if you’re able to source your own water, it’s okay that Flint has lead in their pipes, right? We wanted to really blow apart the idea of infrastructure as those things and expand it to take in all the structures that make life function and wonderful—schools and care and parks—that is a feminist definition of infrastructure. We wanted to lift up the role of women and people of color in working and making infrastructure and lift up the expertise of regular people.

A FOCUS ON CORPORATE TARGETS

The second major evolution that we have followed throughout this book is the increasing attention social action organizations have given to corporate targets. The focus on corporate targets is not entirely new. Campaigns in the 1970s focused on banks, insurance companies, and

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realtors whose lending practices were egregiously racist and discriminatory against working-class communities. Since then however, social action organizations have developed a clear perspective on corporatization that has led to a surge of organizing aimed at corporate targets (see chapter 2). The  campaigns that identify and oppose corporate targets are seen as fighting a capitalism that funnels money and power to the wealthy and siphons it from workers and communities, particularly those of color. We saw multiple examples of this work even within our small sample. For example, Brigid Flaherty, then codirector of Down Home North Carolina, described their campaign against Duke Power. We’re calling out the power of the wealthy, calling out the power of the rich, calling out the power of corporations, and naming them as the main targets of why we’re struggling and why people are dying unnecessarily. And then trying to think about how we are also including in our policy work corporate campaigning and taking on corporate power through direct action that would, again, begin to change the power dynamics between those who have a lot and those who have nothing. We’ve identified a few corporate targets in our work that we think would change the state’s power equation, one of which is Duke Energy. It’s the largest utility company in North Carolina. Duke Energy tried to create a rate hike of upwards of $20 a month per person because of a coal ash spill that they were responsible for years back. Basically, the millions of dollars that they were fined, they tried to pull a fast one and put that fine on the backs of working people. And one of the first things that we did in building Down Home was listening surveys, but in moments of opportunity, we were doing petitions around specific issues that we thought would resonate with our constituency. And so the Duke Energy rate hike was our first real targeting of our corporate bad actor. We collected over 4,500 signatures on that and started to then take people from that petition and get them into the Utilities Commission hearings to publicly name the damage that would be done if we had to pay that and also the responsibilities on the shoulders of a multibillion-dollar corporation who is polluting our waterways and killing our people. We’re always looking for the ability to build leadership among the poor and working class, the ability to target and name the bad actors—corporate targets and rich people who are driving this economic pain—all of that informs our campaign work, our leadership development work, our narrative.

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Several of the organizers pointed out that some corporations— particularly Wall Street corporations, banks, and investment firms—have financial commitments entangled in issue areas that impact the lives and well-being of the members of social action organizations. They often have investments in gas and oil companies that oppose climate change initiatives, in real estate that encourages the gentrification of neighborhoods, in building private prisons, and in the infrastructure that supports reactionary immigration policies. Furthermore, some corporations, particularly tech companies, have practices that are particularly nefarious and encourage taking over public land and promoting abusive worker practices. These corporations tend to be targeted by many different organizations across the country. As Zachary Lerner from New York Communities for Change told us, “It always tends to be the same folks.” Despite the claims of corporations, elected officials, and the right-wing media, social action organizations are not antibusiness. Rather, they are against out-of-control capitalism that destroys communities and people’s lives. They want corporations to work with and for the people, providing good jobs and other opportunities and helping their communities thrive. Marley Monacello, staff of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), describes how they worked with growers, companies, and fast food chains to provide basic worker protections in the farm industry: “In general, the market and the economy, especially in its current formulation, can be very dehumanizing in a way that causes mass exploitation. The Fair Food Program is harnessing the power of the market to protect people’s rights, but it is not disassembling the marketplace. . . . And I’ve seen that to be extremely effective. And I’m not saying the market is neutral, but I think it can be harnessed in a way that is effective when harnessed by the right people, which takes building power and grabbing it, but it is there.” The Fair Food campaign resulted in 14 agreements with major food companies and continues to add more. Lucas Benitez, cofounder of the CIW, describes the concrete difference these agreements have made in the lives of farmworkers for the empowerment of their leaders, for their attachment to the organization, and for its real benefits: “When one of our recent agreements was signed, a worker came up to us after that agreement was signed, someone who’s been involved for many years, and said, ‘thank you.’ And I responded to him, ‘But thank you for what? If you’ve been there this

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whole time marching with us and organizing together, you’ve been just as much a part of it.’ But now the worker was experiencing the change directly in his life.” Corporate targeting focuses on the alignment of organizations with the goal of amassing greater and more diverse power, which is needed to enable them to confront massively well-resourced and powerful corporations that are networked with, and protected by, elected officials. One way affiliations develop is by identifying organizations impacted by the corporate targets’ investments. Marilyn Sneiderman, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University, comes from a labor union organizing background, and her views on corporate America have developed over many years. In recent work as part of Building the Bench and Bargaining for the Common Good, she has trained organizers in both the community and labor fields to understand the impact of corporatization and how to build strategy around it. In convening a broad array of organizations targeting Wells Fargo Bank, she explains the difference between coalitions and alignments: “This is not a coalition. I call it death by coalition, which is where everybody commits to something they don’t have time to do. So we think about alignment. . . . We try to set it up so it can get much bigger, so it’s not command and control.” That work involves giving organizations autonomy so they can target a corporation using their own issue campaigns and their own strategy. All campaigns require a power analysis and deep research on the target, but corporate targets may require more careful analysis. First, companies often have many legal ways of keeping their information secret and covering their tracks. Second, it is critical for organizations to get their information right. Incorrect information can and will be used by the corporation, its media machine, and elected allies to discredit the campaign. Deep and thorough research on the corporation is critical to success. Organizing around corporate targets is complicated and involves other partners, identifying allies, using the media effectively, and employing multiple tactics nimbly. The case study by Zachary Lerner, organizer for New York Communities for Change, is an example of complex organizing around a corporate target. Make the Road New York and Community Voices Heard were also part of the coalition that worked on this ultimately successful campaign.

ZACHARY LERNER: THE CORPORATE CAMPAIGN TO STOP AMAZON We were working with a bunch of organizations that had already decided to go after Amazon, and we thought there’s no way they’re going to pick New York [as a headquarters site], we’re not going to give them enough [in city and state incentives], but then the news came out [that they picked New York]. A year before, when they first announced the Request for Proposals (RFP), we had already started doing work: [we and] Make the Road New York, ALIGN New York, and RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union] sent letters pressuring Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio and other elected officials not to submit for the RFP process. . . . We knew Amazon was bad before they announced the HQ2 deal, and then when they selected us, we had to react and build the strategy pretty quickly. When they announced that they had selected Long Island City [a neighborhood in New York] for Amazon HQ2, our organizations and many other Queens groups had come to the conclusion that there was no way that you could try to negotiate around this. The second that we started saying, “Amazon can come if they do x, x, and x,” we were already giving up our power. Our power came from our ability to say, “No, we don’t want Amazon HQ2.” We’ve seen what’s happened with community benefit agreements in other places, we’ve seen what Amazon has done in Seattle. And so because we came with that, it really put Amazon in a bind that they couldn’t just say, “we’ll give a little bit of money here, we’ll give a little bit of money there” and try to negotiate. We figured that our power was our ability to say “no” and just repeat that over and over, no matter what. Amazon and Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio were going to keep making concessions regardless of us making demands around it. Our analysis was that whatever amount of money they gave there was no deal that we could make that wouldn’t displace many people. Immediately as the announcement happened, they were selling condos in Long Island City to people in Seattle by cell phone. This became a fight around economic development policies, and we figured our strategy to winning was through the new State Senate that we had helped elect. The proposed Amazon site was right by [Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] AOC’s district, and she had already won. That had made it clear that elected officials in Queens felt that “if we don’t support this, then

we’re going to get ‘primaried’ from the left,” and we wanted them to feel that way and be scared. That allowed us to create a strategy that worked closely with state senators to block the Amazon deal. The analysis [was] that the only way we could block it was through the Public Authorities Control Board, which is some obscure board, so the strategy was: How do we create enough pressure on Amazon through direct actions and engagement of people to offset what we knew they were going to do based on who they had hired as consultants and because we know their general strategies? SKDKnickerbocker [the Amazon consultant] and all those folks use the same things, so we were able to try to get in front of a lot of that. That meant organizing people in public housing developments and other parts of Queens, and then bringing in people from Seattle and other places to try to influence a lot of our local elected officials, [and show them] what happens in places like Seattle. We were just throwing as much at them as we could. Our strategy was how do we get enough pressure that Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the Senate majority leader, would appoint Mike Gianaris, who was our strongest ally and deputy majority leader of the State Senate, so that he would be in position to vote “no” on the PACB [Public Authorities Control Board], which would block $500 million of the subsidies plus the actual public land that was there. They didn’t really talk about the fact that a huge amount of the project was going to be on public land that was designated for schools and affordable housing. And $3 billion [was committed to Amazon], and continuing to use that message over and over again was the thing that really agitated a lot of our members and ended up being one of the major talking points. We also were beating up on Amazon outside of this deal. It became this broader critique of Amazon as a corporation, which meant including the workers’ rights abuses. We had already been organizing the Staten Island facility and talking to workers there, but we sped up people going public because of the importance of making sure the workers’ voice was out there. Amazon was saying, “Our workers love it on Staten Island! They love all of this”; then workers talk to the press about the amount of pain they have every day after they leave the warehouse, the conditions, and the massive commutes all for the wealthiest corporation in the world, and the helicopter pad that was negotiated as part of this deal. Then we found the ICE (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) relationship. Amazon through Amazon Web Services provides essentially the backbone of the entire ICE data network in addition to the facial recognition technology that they tried to sell to ICE as a way to help them better track undocumented immigrants to detain them. We had done a lot of work to educate elected officials around that. During the City Council hearings they asked Amazon about their relationship with ICE because we are a sanctuary city and a sanctuary state. The executive from Amazon said, “We believe every government agency deserves the best technology available.” And the fact that they were so viciously antiunion—I couldn’t have predicted how badly they would prepare their executives to speak at these things. Using these moments at the City Council hearings where the City Council had zero power in this decision, but getting them to call for hearings because Cuomo and de Blasio cut them out, allowed us to get them to create these terrible sound bites [from] the Amazon executives who weren’t used to ever being challenged. We filled the City Council chambers every single time that had people laughing at the executives every time they lied, or booing, and they’re not used to feeling that. This created a climate where they felt harassed every single moment, and it also fired up the City Council folks to go after them. We picked our tactics to hurt Amazon’s brand through actions with workers, immigrants, just hitting them from every angle possible, to continue to show all the problematic things they do, and then working also the political strategy of gaining support among the State Senate as a way to create the leverage for blocking the deal. At our first coalition meeting, a lot of groups just popped up. There was so much genuine grassroots energy because people in Queens were so angry about this. We ended up doing a meeting, a week after the announcement was made, with Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and over 100 different groups from around the city and state, so that we could go hit them quickly. I think it was [also] using the power that we just had built with the State Senate to create leverage around this and then direct actions and community outreach, continuing to do protests all the time hitting Amazon, but also doing mass amounts of canvassing to educate people in Queens. We worked with groups like DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in Queens who are helping lead, and a lot of groups like DRUM [Desis Rising Up and

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Moving, organizes low-wage South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants] and CAAAV [organizing Asian immigrant communities], and a lot of the grassroots groups to run these town halls and things so they could actually talk to people in the neighborhoods. Even up until a few days before Amazon pulled out, we ran a 100-person canvas by volunteer members in the community. Those are the things that we did, and it ended up working. I think we learned that there’s a lot of power in just saying “no,” and having a really good analysis behind that. Social media became hugely important because of the way that both reporters and elected officials follow everything. We were able to build super strong hashtags on Twitter and get tons of people tweeting about this and going after any elected officials that said they were in support of it. They were getting hit right away by people [saying], “How can you support giving $3 billion away to the wealthiest corporation in the world?” It’s the political power. We wouldn’t have been able to do this if it hadn’t been for the work we had done that election season prior to primary a bunch of Democrats and which moved politics to the left in New York. If we hadn’t done that, there’s no way that we would have won.

FOLLOWING UP, TAKING CREDIT, AND EVALUATING OUTCOMES

At some point, organizers have to summarize and communicate the results of a campaign: what constitutes a victory, how to celebrate it, how to evaluate the organization’s success, and how the organization takes credit for the change (Bobo et al., 2010; Minieri & Getsos, 2007; Mondros & Wilson, 1994; Sen, 2003, Staples, 2016). Sandra Lobo, executive director of Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, reflects on the evaluation organizers do when assessing campaign results. Key result areas that everyone is responsible for are base building, leadership development, campaign development, and movement building. We might not win a policy that particular year, but did we build the leadership that can then pass it next year? Did we pull people together and educate and train them around the political landscape and do political education with them in order to then move them to create more power in the coming year?

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And then what are the movement building pieces? What does that look like across the borough? What does that look like across the city, the state, the country? There are metrics across these areas to celebrate, and there are some devastating losses. For the Jerome Avenue rezoning, we won a Certificate of No Harassment, we won Right to Counsel, but we lost so many things. We did not win what we wanted, but how do we then measure those three and a half years by the number of people who really got activated, who saw their role in shaping development and planning in our community, and how are they now activating in a new way around the Community Land Trust. They’re doing that because of their experience in the rezoning. For us, it’s not just about a policy or just about winning that one thing. There’s a holistic view of thinking about our work that is around power building for our communities and having them set the path in the direction of what they want in their own communities.

In mobilizing events, Engler and Engler (2016) describe how activists developed an approach of “declare victory and run” that “made a show of strength and let insiders worry about muddling through the aftermath” (p. 136). In earlier organizing days, a similar approach was sometimes used (Mondros & Wilson, 1994). As organizations have increasingly taken on systemic issues, campaigns have become longer and are more complex, and what constitutes success is even more difficult to define. Leaders and their organizers who worked hard on making a change are also invested in seeing that their wins are protected and implemented. As organizations challenge larger and more powerful targets over deeply rooted and contentious issues that threaten their profits and power, it is critical for organizations to follow the implementation of the agreement to ensure that it has, in fact, become practice. Deborah Axt, then coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, explains the importance of following up: “A specialty of Make the Road has become really understanding what is in our laws that make them either enforceable or not so enforceable, and the loopholes that corporations or the opposition is using to get away with not complying with the rules that we believe we have won on the books. That’s a particular strength and obsession of ours—trying to figure out how we make it so that we don’t just win a big victory and then find it to be meaningless on the ground and unenforceable on the books.”

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There are many stories of organizations that believed they had won a desired change but then found that the change was subverted by additional actions. For example, for many years the Florida Voting Rights Restoration Coalition, composed of many social action organizations, worked on the restoration of voting rights for people who had completed their prison sentences for felonies. The amendment to the state constitution finally passed by 62 percent in a 2018 referendum. However, in 2019, the Florida Senate passed a law requiring ready voters to first pay all fines, fees, and court costs that arose from the felony conviction, a move that deeply undercut the law’s intent and made ongoing follow up essential. Following the implementation of the change can take as much work as the campaign itself, but it is critically important if the change is to become real. In the case example, Marley Monacello, staff of Coalition of Immokalee Workers, describes the persistence and follow-through needed to ensure that real change is made “on the ground.” Some literature suggests that the victories of social action organizations reverberate far beyond the actual change. Tilly (1999) writes, “By any standard, ‘success’ and ‘failure’ hardly describe most of the effects” (p. 268). The story begins by influencing public discourse (Della Porta, 1999). Tillman (1999) argues that these successes can have an effect when they change the public’s preferences and its intensity of concern about a particular issue and increase the saliency of the issues. Gillion (2020) writes, “As these protest movements begin to form and their interests overlap, they start to create a broader political mood that increases the salience of the underlying ideology. In addition, as more protests arise within the particular political area, they move on to other ideological protests, further deepening the political mood” (p. 37). These stories also begin to frame the arguments that elected officials use to vote and pass new legislation (Gillion, 2013).

MARLEY MONACELLO: THE IMPORTANCE OF FOLLOW-UP AND IMPLEMENTATION For 10 years, farmworkers and consumers protested, marched, fasted, and wrote thousands of letters to these massive companies, and won legally binding agreements with them by adequately threatening their brand. (continued next page)

(continued from previous page) Even though we had won agreements with Taco Bell, Burger King, Subway, Aramark, Sodexco, Trader Joe’s, and all of these big companies that said that those companies would pay an additional premium on their tomatoes that would go toward farmworkers’ wages, and that they would only buy from farms that were implementing the Code of Conduct designed by farmworkers, the growers themselves—the people on the ground who employed farmworkers and who would be responsible for implementing that code—banded together and said, “Absolutely not, we’re not doing this.” So any of the money that was paid toward workers’ wages from those big companies  . . . was put into an escrow account and was not distributed to workers. Obviously, none of those changes or protections required by the Code of Conduct happened until we got to a tipping point of agreements with those big companies. Finally in 2010, the combination of all of those agreements, the market pressure that they represent, combined with a series of horrific forced labor cases that reflected very badly on the tomato industry in Florida, led to this seminal agreement with 90 percent of the Florida tomato industry saying: “We’ll implement your code of conduct, we’ll pass these wage premiums onto workers in order to combat poverty.” That was a huge victory, that was the victory of victories. It followed nine victories with some of the world’s largest corporations, leading to an almost overnight agreement with the vast majority of one of the state’s largest agricultural industries. But that was still the point at which we’ve won all that power, and if we had just said, “great, we have these agreements signed, that’s what we wanted, we’re going to pack up and go home,” or say, “well, they signed these agreements so therefore, surely they’ll abide by them,” nothing would have changed! So instead what the CIW did was then take a deep breath and do the hard work of creating a heavily enforced, monitored program that utilized the power we had won and made it into real change on the ground. That involved creating and funding a brand new third-party auditing body, it meant hiring a ton of new staff to do education all across the state of Florida, it meant creating a ton of new materials, it meant constantly being vigilant about making sure that rights were actually being respected. It took years to clean up this industry using that power, and now it is taking more years to expand that.

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CIW had the persistence and a broad horizon and vision to be able to work for over a decade before actual change was seen on the ground. [CIW] understood that they needed to build power first, and then do something with it, instead of just building power for power’s sake, instead of just signing an agreement on a piece of paper, and then saying this piece of paper represents victory, or worse, represents change. No piece of paper represents change, whether it’s a piece of legislation, or an agreement, or a set of standards, or a code of conduct: it means nothing unless there’s an enforcement mechanism behind it and unless the enforcement mechanism is constant, long-term, and deep. . . . Social movements are combating systems that have been in place for centuries. It is not going to be easy or simple to overturn them, and there is nothing to indicate that winning a victory, agreement, or concession is going to equate with real change on the ground.

The fact that the victories have an impact far beyond individual campaigns makes it more difficult for credit to be given to the organizations that are responsible for the victory. Claiming credit is important for many reasons. First, it encourages and emboldens leadership to continue to participate and engage in the organization’s work. Second, it builds the organization’s power as power elites recognize that it is a force to be reckoned with. And credit builds the organization’s capability as allies, money, and other resources are engaged. However, it is often difficult for organizations to claim credit for the victory. The media often attributes victories to a single charismatic figure, an elected official, or an imprecise and amorphous “movement” rather than to the long and hard work that led to the success. Meyers (2016) writes that crafting a story and tailoring it to the source helps in attributing credit to the organization. Numerous story elements are available in public events, including efforts of an activist group, changes in a policy, changes in political conditions, and speeches and public statements. A convincing story will draw from these elements, heavily editing, and adding plot. But crafting a story is only part of the larger struggle in promoting it. The effective storyteller is mindful of distinct audiences, their values, expectations, and likely responses to different

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narratives, as well as the demands of different settings in which stories are offered. Daily newspapers, for example, offer less space than longer-form journalism, and thus respond better to shorter chains of causality and simpler claims. Ultimately, widely accepted stories combine an edited version of available elements, consonant with accepted facts, perhaps supplemented with fictions that resonate with longstanding national myths, widespread cultural beliefs, or familiar plots. (Tilly 2003, p. 207)

Because claiming credit is important but difficult, many organizations have developed their own means and mouthpieces to disseminate the success stories from their perspective. It may be that taking credit publicly is a double edged sword: it is needed to increase the organization’s power but may expose them to attacks from its opponents. That is a subject we take up in chapter 9. CONCLUSION

Strategies in social action organizing include fundamentals about assessing targets and tactics and creating good narratives. Campaigns use multiple methods—build stronger affiliations, emphasize intersectional injustice, and engage corporate targets—to succeed in this complex environment. In addition, consistent follow-up and monitoring implementation are necessary to turn victories into changes on the ground. Innovations build on the fundamentals of organizing and move the work forward.

Chapter Nine

USING INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES

Social media is a really great tool to change narratives in our work. But I don’t think social media advocacy in and of itself is enough. But when you pair social media advocacy with grassroots advocacy, your message can be amplified. That’s important. CHRISTIAN DIAZ, LOGAN SQUARE NEIGHBORHOOD ASSOCIATION

Technology was supposed to be the great innovator for organizing. Much has been made of the “democratizing power” of technology, generally, and social media in particular. The ability of computer technology to perform calculations, store and retrieve data, and process information held the promise to more easily and efficiently manage an organization, attract donors, and handle administrative tasks. Social media was seen as a powerful force to get information out widely and quickly, to reach new networks, to circumvent establishment communication systems, and to share messages that are culturally discordant, unreported in the media, or suppressed by authoritarian governments. It promised to be the disruptive force for activism that it had already been in so many other fields. The swell of protest that swept across much of the Arab world in 2010, known as the Arab Spring, certainly seemed to be a harbinger of its power (Howard & Hussain, 2011). The optimism about its potential continued in 2011 when the protesters of Occupy Wall Street went beyond the use of Facebook and Twitter to develop their own technology of take-action platforms and established what was called a “global square virtual commons” (Bennet, 2012, p. 30). The protests of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street prompted research and scholarship on digital activism and advocacy, as well as suggestions for how to use social media in organizing (Community Tool Box, n.d.). Murthy (2018) lists the many advantages of using social media

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including the ability to mobilize resources, organize transnationally, communicate with multiple constituencies, recruit new members, engage the public, build and organize campaigns, co-create and share knowledge, and develop and maintain a sense of community. These assets of the online movement were identified early on (Edwards, 2004). Murthy (2018) also notes the disadvantages of social media, including creating meaningless noise and developing hierarchies of responses, but comes down on the side of using social media: “Ultimately, social media often creates rippling effects which touch many different aspects of the movement’s process from resource mobilization to actual interventions. They may also be making SMOs [social movement organizations] more democratic, breaking down traditional hierarchies between activists, other stakeholders, and movement leadership” (p. 2). Hestres (2017) is more ambivalent about the various claims made about the use of social media, questioning whether it enables a new nontraditional form of organizational activism, whether it strengthens activity that is already occurring, and whether it has had a marginal impact in bringing in new voices or merely creates a false sense of activism. Hersh (2020) describes political action on social media as a form of “political hobbyism” or “slacktivism” that makes people feel as if they are “politically engaged” but isn’t true engagement. Knibbs (2013) worries that social media will be used in lieu of traditional person-to-person organizing, giving a false sense that being active on social media leads to wide scale social change. Despite the changes in technology that have occurred in the intervening years, the organizers we interviewed expressed exactly the same pros and cons, the same advantages and disadvantages, that the literature described about social media’s utility for activism as early as 2001. They believe that technology and social media are important new assets in their toolkits, and 65 percent were either planning to hire someone to handle digital communication work or had already done so. They use electronic databases to track participation and access new communication technologies to send their messages to members and to wider audiences, and they have been creative in finding new uses for information and communication technologies (ICTs) in their work. However, simply blasting out messages cannot replace the hard in-person work that goes into base building (see chapter  6). As Garza (2020) states, “Hashtags do not start movements—people do” (p. xi). They are skeptical of organizing that is done only online by signing petitions

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or taking polls; one organizer called this “click activism.” After all, Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, both dependent on social media rather than base building, dissipated quickly. They agree with Ransby’s (2018) twopronged description that “it can serve to mobilize, publicize, bypass a disinterested mainstream media, and force issues into the public eye, or it can serve antithetical and nefarious purposes” (p. 101). The challenge is to figure out what does work and what doesn’t, and how to make best use of what works. It is the both/and approach: organizers utilize technology and social media’s assets while remaining true to core principles of organizing. Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action, expresses the tension she feels between her commitment to on-theground organizing, her interest in building the relationships required for the small town work she does in Indiana, and the need to incorporate newer technologies that enable greater efficiency: I’m trying to figure out the right balance of knowing that a communication strategy is so critical to power building and also at the same time I feel so personally frustrated by the online world. It feels like a barrier to good relational work, and I think it’s embedded in lots of things that aren’t good. I have to wrestle with that tension. But we’re going to hire a communications person. We’ve definitely done stuff online. We have been experimenting for the last year on different ways to get people in the door. Knocking on doors is always the best strategy in getting brokered into these small towns, getting brokered in relationally. But we also run a set of surveys online and then follow up on those surveys with one-to-ones and meetings. We have started to use Facebook ads as a way to get an initial contact with people, and then deploy organizers to go out to talk to them. That has been really useful, more useful than knocking on every door. We surveyed about the opioid crisis and for people that self-selected by taking that survey, you’ve already done your first round of sifting, and that’s been useful.

If anything is clear about information and communication technologies (ICTs), it is that they change rapidly, and any of the digital tools we include here are likely to be supplanted quickly by new ones or existing ones with extended capacities. In this chapter, we focus on social media, various platforms for text messaging, and other technology used by the social action organizations we studied. This includes Facebook, LinkedIn,

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WhatsApp, YouTube, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, videos, electronic databases, and electronic messaging. We recognize that we are capturing technology at a moment in time, and thus we examine the organizers’ attitudes about the usefulness of ICTs, and their ambivalence. We also discuss the advantages and drawbacks of depending on technology and its effectiveness when used in certain communities. In addition, we describe the many innovative ways organizers have employed information and communication technologies in their work. INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES AS ESSENTIAL TOOLS

For most of the organizations in our sample, the norms used for outreach and tracking—flyers, sign-in sheets, and fact sheets—have long ago transitioned to information and communication technologies. ICTs and social media, in particular, are seen as needed tools to help the organization reach a larger audience and for younger organizations to grow faster. At the time of our sample, multiplatform messaging apps such as Hustle and WhatsApp, and social networking sites, particularly Facebook, were among the most cited tools to make recruitment and outreach more efficient because they accelerate and expand communication and information sharing. Paul Getsos, former national coordinator of the People’s Climate Movement, states that “we cannot get to mass scale without digital. Digital allows us to get the scale with limited resources and limited staff.” Social media has many advantages in getting out the organizations’ news with their particular spin, in follow-up with members, and in sharing information. Databases are essential to reach and track members. Networking sites offer new ways of connecting, and distance technology and apps can enable leaders to learn and act together across distances and in different ways. But technology advances are not seen as the end all and be all that was once predicted. Organizers believe social media works best to quickly mobilize people to take an action—to attend a march or join a protest— but it is less helpful for long-term base-building work. Digital activism worked for Occupy and the Arab Spring because they were designed to be mobilizing events. But its utility for groups committed to base building and structural organization is less certain. Fletcher Harper, director

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of GreenFaith and executive committee member of the People’s Climate Movement, reflects this view. From where I sit, what it represents is another widely used channel, just like the telephone used to be, for sharing information and for evoking a response. As we’ve seen with all the stuff over the last couple of years, it has a tribal dimension to it. Social media works best to segment your audience and identify what messages work best for that audience, and you hit them hard. It’s not a nuanced communication tool. It’s something that’s designed to tap into emotions, and for good and for ill, that’s what it’s done. I think it’s reasonably well suited for a mobilizing approach because with mobilizing you need lots of regular reminders, lots of small snippets coming across your screen on a regular basis. When it gets into the longer-term movement building, I tend to think that the face-to-face work remains really of paramount importance. It can amplify your core messages and it can help build energy and momentum at the time of an action. And it can help reinforce the high points of a movement narrative.

Organizers agree that social media is not a replacement for person-toperson contact but a complement to it. They are committed to in-person face-to-face contact, to building relationships, to working deeply with people around a transformational vision for change, and to ensuring that people’s participation, engagement, and activism grow. As we saw in chapter 5, the organizers believe deeply in the importance of the social relationships people develop that encourage and strengthen them in the work so that the organization becomes their political home. For many organizers, the social media environment is detached, permitting people to remain disengaged, disconnected, and aloof from friends and neighbors and constraining their ability to have deep conversations about their immediate context and beyond. Felicia Griffin, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action, suggests that social media “has removed some human connection. People drive into their driveways or go into their apartment, and the neighbor or the neighborhood around them isn’t relevant because they have everything they need to connect with on their little device or their computer or the TV. That’s their window to the world. That’s their neighbor. I think technology has actually impacted our natural human instinct to connect with one another. It gets transferred

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to the digital realm. And we think that is a real connection, and it’s not. Before we had all this technology, we would love for someone to come to our door and have a conversation about what’s going on in the neighborhood or the world.” Another concern is that social media is a place where people only relate to those they already know, talking to each other over and over, rather than expanding the circle of conversation. Furthermore, they talk in the same jargon and have the same ideas, which limits their ability to reach people beyond their own narrow network and doesn’t add much to the conversation. That doesn’t expand the base, and as we have seen, that is a core principle in organizing. Paul Getsos believes digital organizing is essential in taking an organization to scale, but he recognizes its limitations: “I think the problem with social media is that it has the potential to create an echo chamber so that if you create a social media post on Facebook and all your friends like it, and the only people who read it are other activists and organizers, then what have you done?” He describes some of the core ways organizers are trained to build relationships, which include one-on-ones—individual meetings in which organizers listen and explore the interests and experiences of potential members or partners. And he points out the difference between staff comfortable with online work and those with organizing skills: Digital can really be a barrier to people developing core organizing skills, building relationships, doing one-on-ones. I have sometimes had to ask organizers or staff directly to “pick up the phone and call people.” They say, “I emailed them, they didn’t get back to me.” I say, “Text them or call them.” And they say, “Oh, I can’t do that. It feels aggressive.” . . . But that’s how you build a relationship. You can’t have a conversation via text. It’s the reason you do one-on-ones. And people love it. I had an organizer who would say, “I don’t know, I can’t get anyone to come to the meetings, to the committee. I keep emailing.” They didn’t want to pick up the phone! Another organizer will set up meetings by calling people, and I said “Good job! That’s what we need.” When we were having a hard time getting SEIU [Service Employees International Union] to buy into our digital program, I set the organizer up with a relational meeting with our SEIU contact, over lunch. They did a one-on-one. The organizer is smart, personable, and produces. The SEIU contact then trusted the organizer to have a relationship with the SEIU digital director. It was then that SEIU started pushing out our stuff.

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Organizers doubt that social media replaces the emotional impact of actually attending a protest or meeting or action event with your fellow leaders and activists (van de Donk & Foederer, 2001). Being among your friends at an action fuels commitment to the issues and strengthens the camaraderie with others. Marilyn Sneiderman, executive director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers and former national field mobilization director for the AFL-CIO, talks about attending marches after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis in 2020 along with the young people of color who are most affected by police abuse and racial injustice. She told us: “To have an 11-year-old African American girl get up and give a speech that knocked people’s socks off, that’s not something that social media can do. I mean it helps, it can amplify it, which is really good. But there’s basic organizing pieces that are important.” The organizers don’t believe that digital contact is enough to get people involved and active. As Zachary Lerner, organizer with New York Communities for Change says, “There’s still a need to actually go and talk to people in their neighborhoods and spend huge amounts of time there. It can’t just be ‘post the Facebook event up’ and hope that people show up.” However, there is something to be said for using social media and base building approaches together. As Maria Mottola, then executive director of the New York Foundation, told us, “[Facebook] has become a fundamental tool, it’s essential, it’s how groups mobilize. I  don’t think it’s how groups build the base. And I think the connectivity and the ease of connectivity it provides is super powerful and helpful, but I don’t think it replaces doorknocking and actual relationship building and all of that good stuff, but it sure facilitates that.” Digital tools do help growth, spread information, and reach a larger audience, but they can distract from the core concepts behind organizing. As Zachary Lerner says, “I do think it’s the complement, not the replacement. How are we continuing to find digital tools as a way to grow faster? I do think that there are ways to make things more efficient through tools like Hustle, WhatsApp, Facebook, etc., but I’ve seen some organizations replace some of the traditional means of organizing with that, which then I think doesn’t work, you can’t solely use those things.” The challenge for organizations is how to capture the positive aspects of social media—how it generates attention, gets a message out widely, and connects people who may not be in proximity to each other—and wed it

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to the more traditional and valued practices of organizing. For organizers, social media is like the firefly in the bottle: it lights up and glimmers but easily disappears. Stephen Lerner, labor organizer, founder of Justice for Janitors and frequent writer and commentator on organizing, reflected on changing technologies: I remember when the fax machine came out, and people talked about how this was going to dramatically change organizing. And then the VCR came out, and I was in a meeting where people said “we won’t need organizers anymore because we’ll have the little TV with the VCR built in, and we’ll just show up at people’s door and put the videotape in.” What hasn’t changed is ultimately, if lots of people aren’t in motion in larger and larger numbers, willing to directly confront and disrupt those who are in power, all this other stuff doesn’t matter. So I look at it as they are tools, they help; we do lots of social media, we do all that stuff. But in the end, you look at the Gun March yesterday [March for our Lives (2018)]—800,000 people in Washington is what gave it life. The viral videos emphasized it, but if that hadn’t been a mass movement, it would have just been a blip.

In this chapter, we examine the way organizers are using ICTs in their work, and how they are trying to close the gap between the core work of base building and the virtual world. We also discuss the limitations of these technologies, particularly in rural communities and where the membership may not have access to technology, and suggest alternative tools. THE POWER OF TEXTING: BRINGING PEOPLE INTO ACTION AND BEYOND

The lesson learned from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street was that the major asset of ICTs is to simultaneously alert a massive number of people simply by clicking send. Information and communication technologies work very well as mobilizing tactics, promoting what is called scale shift (Bennett, 2001). Various platforms of text messaging allow organizations to target their members and beyond, telling them where to be, when, and what to do. It permits them to send frequent reminders and to mobilize people in both a mass and focused way. Microblogging (Twitter and Tumblr) and social networking sites like Facebook enable

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organizations to put their own spin on the communication, using clever subject lines and hashtags that members and others will recognize. Although we conducted our interviews prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we know that the use of ICT has grown significantly and is evolving rapidly to meet this moment. When texting comes from a peer, someone you know or can connect with directly, it seems to be more effective at getting people out. Paul Gestos, former national director of the People’s Climate Movement, reported that peer-to-peer texting in his organization had a five times higher rate of contact than did digital emails: “I would say within four weeks, we built a list of 30,000 contacts. We just did an analysis of everybody who hit the streets [for a protest], we had about 50,000 people hit the streets. We surveyed the people who are on our digital list, and 70 percent said they hit the streets because of a text. . . . Technology is amazing. Communication wise, you can never have an impact if you don’t have a digital program and a strong, good cutting-edge digital program. Super strong hashtags are important.  .  .  . Otherwise, you’re in a bubble. That’s the power of it.” Most of the organizations we surveyed have established a 501(c)(4) and several have developed a PAC, which enables them to pursue electoral activity, and they have successfully used peer-to-peer texting in that work. The rapid response that texting offers seems to be particularly well suited to electoral activity. Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action, describes how they used their texting program in 2016: On election day using Hustle we texted 150,000 people throughout the electoral cycle. It was an interesting lesson to me in terms of the potential to get into relationships. We had incredibly long lines and we had one county, our gerrymandered county, where the machines crashed. On election day, we were able to coordinate food and lots of resources for people who had been at the polls for three hours. And that was another lesson to me in the way that these tools can be really used. We have a membership to deploy in real time. We were texting people, and they texted, “I’ve been here for two hours,” and we could go to that church and bring pizzas and drinks and keep people in line. On election day, 10 of our members texted like 22,000 people in five hours and made sure they got to the polls. That’s new, that’s exciting. There’s a reach and a scale that was just impossible even 15 years ago. There’re opportunities there.

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Isaiah in Minnesota, which has been established much longer than Hoosier Action, also used texting in that election, combining it with videos on their Facebook social networking sites. They also created Facebook groups to appeal to specific populations. Members of their 501(c)(4) organization, Faith in Minnesota, received texts and videos from their peers, personally and persuasively validating for them the organization and its candidates. In the end, it translated into people becoming interested in the work of all aspects of the organization. Catalina Morales, then organizer for Isaiah, describes the importance of peer-to-peer connections, and how it is strengthened by their digital presence: We were doing a lot of election work with Faith in Minnesota, and we realized how powerful [ICT] is and the reach we could have with it. Right now, for example, every single time the leaders are out door-knocking, canvassing or doing phone banking or text banking, we’re taking videos of them. We’re constantly uploading as much action as we can onto our Facebook pages. We’re trying to run on Instagram, and constantly be the most present we can digitally, having that reach and pushing those things out. We sometimes pay for ads when we can. For example, for the canvassing we’re doing with the Latino community, we’ve created a Latinx group within Isaiah, and we’re constantly pushing things in Spanish. There are now videos of leaders talking, videos of people doing actions, and trying to get people to fill out surveys digitally. “Click this link and you can fill out this survey.” We realized that our leaders are the best messengers. For example, right now through elections, people are so cynical about candidates. They can be a great candidate, but if they are coming and telling you on a video to vote for them, a good number of people are going to go “yeah, yeah, yeah.” But if you go on your Facebook page, and you see your neighbor or your aunt saying to go vote for this person, it has a deeper impact because you feel “I trust this person, I know this person.” That’s what we’ve been realizing with the digital stuff: the messengers should always be the leaders because it takes away the cynicism that a lot of people have, and it also creates more hope for the bystanders. It’s also created an opportunity for people to say, “I really like what you guys are doing. How do I get involved?”

The big payoff of information and communication technology for Catalina and others is that it can help bring people into a deeper engagement

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with the organization. As described in chapter 6, the organizations in our sample want to do more than just motivate people to join a protest or to vote; they are working toward building the base, developing leadership, and establishing powerful organizations. Consequently, they are examining how ICTs can be useful in recruitment and engagement of members. Several organizers described how they are using texting to get people to meetings. At Community Voices Heard in New York City, then organizer Gabe Strachota was using peer-to-peer texting to reach residents in the city’s high rise public housing developments. He describes his efforts to use various ICT platforms to bring new people into the organization: Hustle, Relay, Open Solutions, and Open Data are peer-to-peer texting programs, mass texting. We use that with our membership base to send a text. It sends personalized texts pretty quickly to 100 people. But we’ve also been experimenting using it for outreach. An intern went into the Voter Activation Network and tagged every NYCHA [public housing] address in the city. We now have lists of all the voters in every housing development, and then we’re able to put that list into Hustle so we could create a list of all the textable East Harlem NYCHA resident voters. I think there were 6,000. Then we had a leader write a personalized message inviting them to come out to a meeting, and we had like 40 people show up. So we’re still experimenting with it and we’ve only done that a few times, but it seemed to show some promise and is potentially much more time effective than door-knocking.

However, the 160 character limit on texts on older phones (newer phones can segment and rebuild up to 1,600 characters, and that too may soon change) means that messages must be simplified. That does not allow for the more in-depth conversations the organizers prefer to have with members and leaders. Newer text messaging services at the time of our interviews, Open Data and Open Solutions, allow more in-depth conversations, and organizers can use other means to get people engaged. Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and then codirector of Down Home North Carolina, goes beyond texting to recruit people to come to meetings, adding links to legislation and asking people to sign their petitions. Several organizers used Hustle to invite people to complete digital surveys. Texting and other communication technologies are useful with some populations and not others. Jade Brooks, former organizer and now political

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director for Southerners on New Ground (SONG), says that it has been important to continue to counter the social isolation that is so often a problem for LGBTQ+ people in rural areas: “I think social media for our base—many of whom are facing isolation as LGBTQ southerners or trans and gender-nonconforming people who can’t be out in their lives, in their workplace—is a huge connector and a huge way to affirm our identities and affirm our values and who we are to each other, even if we can’t or don’t get that affirmation in the places we live or in our families. So I think that’s been really important, specifically for small town and rural members of our base.” Lucas Benitez, cofounder of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, advises that the assets of social media depend on how the community you are organizing receives information. Populations that are particularly mobile—such as farmworkers or hotel workers—are best reached by quick texts. They cannot stop to read documents or answer surveys. For both the Filipino Workers Center, an organization of domestic workers, and Immokalee’s farmworkers, deep leadership development and educational work has to be done through person-to-person contact. Benitez explains: “When it comes to technology, we send text messages to people, maybe Facetime with some people who have access to that. It has a lot to do with the way that the community receives information. If they’re out working all day, they’re not going to read a news article on their phone to catch up on the work that’s being done. Instead we depend on in-person interactions: knocking on people’s doors and visiting them at home, even going out to the fields and doing education sessions with the workers.” As helpful as it is, communication technologies have limitations, especially in rural areas with little or no broadband access and poor cellular reception. This lack of access, referred to as digital disparity, limits not only the organization’s reach but how people receive information. In these areas, organizers find it a challenge to do both traditional door-knocking and reach people digitally. In rural communities, local radio stations and what remains of local television and newspapers are still important. Some organizations have established their own radio channels to get out their stories and perspectives. Chelsea White, former organizer with Down Home North Carolina, discusses how they use two strategies—one to reach out to people without access to broadband or technology and the other to reach younger people who have it. “One of the things that is a reality for western

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North Carolina is broadband is not easily accessible. I had to fight to get internet at my house, which is right outside of the city limits. I’m not even talking about broadband being inaccessible way up in the Boonies, I’m talking about you can be downtown and have no internet. So social media and digital is not actually as big a part of what we do. We do have a social media and digital presence because there are those with broadband, and we do have a college in Jackson County so we want to engage those folks. Really, local media is a huge tool for us. Local newspapers people really trust, and then local news channels and radio stations people still listen to.” In sum, ICTs have many uses, offering increased capacity in many communities for outreach and information sharing. However, these new technologies haven’t changed the fundamental need for personal contacts, connections, and relationships. In addition, access is not yet equitably available. Still organizers see ICTs as an evolving asset to be explored and used creatively. GETTING THE WORD OUT: AMPLIFYING AND INFLUENCING THE MESSAGE

Organizers report that ICTs, particularly social networking sites, can be a megaphone for the organization—they get the organization’s messages out to members as well as to a broader audience. Adhikaar, an organization for the Nepali community in New York City, was organizing around the country’s Temporary Protective Status (TPS) for immigrants, and posting on their Facebook page about a rally. The Facebook megaphone is used to create enthusiasm for the event. Sometimes the numbers can be surprising. Pabitra Benjamin, executive director, describes what occurred: “I told my staff don’t count on Facebook for hard numbers. But what Facebook does is it’s another form of contact. You know you need three contacts or five contacts to bring out somebody. I told my staff when we had a big rally for TPS, Journey for Justice, ‘if you contact 10 people, five are going to show up,’ and they came back to me and they said, ‘we contacted 10 people, and 15 showed up.’ Depending on the event, numbers are different. But it’s another touch. It’s another way of letting people know that we’re out there.” Social networking sites and social media have also been useful for reaching an audience beyond the geographic limitations of the organization. It allows organizations to reach beyond their membership to others who may

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become allies and to affiliate organizations, opening new opportunities for the organization. Nancy Aardema, then executive director of Logan Square Neighborhood Association, said they used social networking sites to connect with parent organizations around the country, sharing their model for building effective parent influence in schools. Marley Monacello, a staff member of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, located in a very rural part of southeastern Florida, explains how social media expanded their network: “Social media is one of the key factors in our success in being able to build that broader decentralized movement all across the country from the small dusty town of Immokalee. That wouldn’t have happened without the internet. That does provide an opportunity to connect and to spread information very quickly and in a very democratic way.” Coalition of Immokalee Workers cofounder Lucas Benitez adds, “We have an organization that we work with closely, it’s called the Alliance for Fair Food, and the organizers for the Alliance for Fair Food will organize with people of faith, they’ll organize with students and youth. Especially those individuals who work with students and youth, they rely on social media very heavily, not just to spread the message, but also just to communicate with the folks that they’re organizing with.” Jawanza Williams, director of organizing at VOCAL-NY, uses a variety of social media techniques to reach a population who use drugs and who are homeless. It is not an easy population to reach. In the case example, he offers a step-by-step description of how to use ICTs for recruitment.

JAWANZA WILLIAMS: UTILIZING MULTIPLE ICT TOOLS I’ll just explain one event, and how I use digital tools. Whenever the event is conceived, let’s say it’s a New York City Homeless Union meeting, what I do first is I create a Facebook event. I create a registration page in our PowerBase (a CiviCRM database and web-based platform) event, which is also how we track the number of people that have expressed interest in coming to an event. Then I create a cute little Bitly link for that, because the URL for the registration page is always long and stupid and ugly. So I create a Bitly that gives a hint about what this is about. I mention that the link is available in the description on the Facebook event and in the ticket sales area. And I’m always explicit at

the top of the thing that this is a free event, open to these folks. And then I add a graphic. . . . Once those two things are done, then I create a group of people. Normally the group who I want to come to this meeting is already saved as existing members or recent contacts. If I create this Facebook event and now it’s live, there could be people that find it who we’ve never talked to that click that link and fill out that information. Now I have that contact in my database, even if they don’t come, so I can follow up later and say, “Hey, I saw that you were interested in this meeting. You didn’t make it, but we should talk more. Why did you sign up?” That’s the organizer’s job. Then once the Facebook event is created, the PowerBase event is created, I then craft an email. In that email, I always have a link for them to register in PowerBase, and I create a hyperlink for them to share the Facebook event. I say something quickly like, “Hey, don’t forget we’re building a movement, and we need as many people to know about this as possible. So please click here and share this Facebook event.” And then that goes out to people. I also post on other groups on Facebook, because groups on Facebook are still a thing. Even the Act Up New York group [from the 1980s] has 5,000 people in it. I post the event there, and I say, “hey, please spread the word to people that want to get involved in AIDS activism or around homeless or housing assistance related issues.” Then there’s also other networks. So just be intentional about finding the networks that your base may be a part of. For instance, in New York there’s also a Queer Network of New York, and they have a thriving Facebook group that you can be a member of. So I’m a member of all these groups, and I also create my own groups. For Queerocracy, I created a group because I knew that a lot of LGBT youth that I wasn’t meeting were on Facebook, and they are probably searching via Facebook for LGBT specific events. I was explicit that Queerocracy is a space for LGBTQ youth of color. And you want to create the conditions where that stuff lives by itself, where you don’t have to be populating it with information all the time. There are ways to elicit a culture, you’re facilitating a space where people can use the group as a community resource, and then you can use it as a way to get the word out to a wider number of people that you’re not actually coming into immediate contact with. I use Twitter too increasingly. We use Instagram. I know for Queerocracy that they sometimes use the stories feature on Instagram to appeal to a younger set of folks. (continued next page)

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(continued from previous page) I also like to create little snippets of VOCAL in action that I can use whenever I want. Whenever members show up and do a great thing in the work or advance a campaign in some way, we’re intentional about advancing it on Twitter by posting these videos in a hyperpolitical way. But I’m also understanding how important it is to archive the work that members do, and we’re uplifting good work as an example that encourages continued leadership activity, and other people start to be able to see what it is we’re talking about. I’ve created these compilation videos of VOCAL over the last year, I have two or three of them. And whenever I have bigger membership assemblies, I play them at the opening of the meeting so people can see what happened in the past year.

Technology can also help organizations target particular messages to specific audiences, avoiding the trap of overwhelming people with mail that doesn’t interest them. But organizations also want to communicate to membership about all of their campaigns, so that they can perhaps generate interest in their other issue campaigns and continue to offer the organization’s analysis. Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement’s e-newsletter goes out to 12,000 people. Adam Mason, then policy director for Iowa CCI, discusses the tension between too much communication and the organization’s goals to increase awareness in other ways. As organizers, we want to tell everybody everything all the time. So it’s good to have staff that are dedicated to communications so that we can prioritize. We’re not going to send out multiple emails on one day, and we’re going to try and segment our communications. If you came in on the clean water issue, I’m not going to start sending you action alerts on health care until you’ve told me that that’s something you want to talk with the organization about or that you want to follow with the organization. We do have ways through our e-newsletters where they are finding out about those issues, and then we’re tracking who clicks through. Every Friday, we send out a comprehensive e-newsletter, and we’re tracking the clicks. Maybe you were a factory farm fighter, but you click through the health care issue so now

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you’re going to start getting health care issues too. You just told us that’s something you care about too. There’s a lot of internal prioritization, making sure that we’re not overcommunicating with our lists, but at the same time using that data culture to prioritize who and how we’re communicating with and also look for opportunities to teardown those divisions. Maybe you are a rural Iowan who came in on the factory farm fight issue, and maybe your community tends to be a little bit anti-immigrant. But what you’re going to see in our e-newsletter could be a gateway for you to start having a stronger analysis around the fact that Iowa should be welcoming and that we’re all Iowans.

Mason also points out the importance of messages that are inclusive and intersectional. The organization avoids divisive messaging, but that doesn’t mean giving up on influencing people’s views in other ways and over the long haul. Then the messaging is intentionally crafted to be disseminated through technology tools. Using social media affords opportunities not only to get out the organization’s narratives but gives them greater influence over what is said. This becomes increasingly important as local media shrinks and fewer reporters cover local issues and protests (Abernathy, 2020; see also chapter 8). The large national media outlets are corporations themselves, sometimes controlled by the very targets that the groups are opposing. For instance, Jeff Bezos, founder and former CEO of Amazon, is also the owner of the Washington Post. Even when the mass media reports the story, they often focus on its more sensational and salacious aspects rather than the serious organizing and organizations behind the work. For example, coverage was given to the problems of ACORN in 2009, conflict that emerged among leaders of the Women’s March in 2017, and tension in the Black Lives Matter chapters in 2021, whereas there was less coverage of the serious issues organizers worked on or the slow and careful growth process that had taken place over many years. Even articles that talk about social change movements often attribute it to the work of individuals or as a spontaneous burst of energy. There are exceptions; the New York Times has done articles on organizing work in Georgia (Herndon, 2020) and on labor organizing around Amazon (Kim, 2021). But routinely, the organizations are not covered, and when they are, the focus is often on their problems rather than their successes.

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Media coverage is important to social action organizations, especially when they are taking on a national issue that requires federal action. Such was the case when Adhikaar was organizing on Temporary Protection Status (TPS) for Nepali immigrants. Pabitra Benjamin explains the lack of media interest: “A lot of our communication work right now is not media work, though we want it to be. We want to target New York–based media because once you target New York–based media, it can make a national impact. The Times is in New York, but not just the Times. If you start with Bloomberg or anything like it, it can spread. New York is the media hub. I know we could do more if we have the capacity. Even with TPS, we pitched a lot of stories and we worked with America’s Voice, which is a national communications firm that does immigration, and we just couldn’t get a lot of stories picked up.” Major news media have reduced their staff reporters, which translates into even less coverage. Paul Getsos told us that Twitter is critical in getting reporters’ attention. The days of relying on the press release are long gone. The limitations of today’s mass media requires organizations to get their own messages out. They also want to have influence over the message, and social media enables them to do so. As Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah, told us, “It’s one of the tools in the toolbox to advance a narrative and its strategic and political communications.” The capacity to refine their message and tell their story effectively is very much based on and supported by Marshall Ganz’s (n.d., 2001, 2011) work on narratives, the Leading Change Network (n.d.), and the Grassroots Policy Project (Barish, 2019; Mann, 2019). Many of the organizations in our sample are working on issues that are in the forefront of national debates and politics. They must get information out to several constituencies: their membership and leadership, people who are potential recruits, their friends and allies, and the public at large. They also want and can sometimes get exposure in the national media. If the stories are positive, they may have an impact on public opinion. It’s even more complicated when the constituency requires communication in several languages. In the case example, Deborah Axt, then coexecutive director of Make the Road New York, describes how the organization used both digital and media communication strategies to reach Spanish- and Englishspeaking communities and the public during the height of the immigration restrictions coming down from the Trump administration.

DEBORAH AXT: ICT WITH BILINGUAL COMMUNITIES We use lots of intersecting communication strategies. Our members and organizers often communicate on Facebook and WhatsApp, as well as by phone. We do robocalls if there’s a key moment. For example, in the Trump presidency, when terrible actions are rumored to be coming, we have a text blast list and a robocall list of 25,000 plus. So we keep people informed by text message, robocalls, WhatsApp, and Facebook. We convene town hall meetings, and we put the word out through social media. If something critical is happening in the country or in our communities, we can convene round-the-clock workshops and town hall meetings so people can come in and hear firsthand what’s really going on from a trusted source. We often have media present at those convenings: Univision, Telemundo, New York One, other news outlets may come and broadcast pieces of that. We broadcast ourselves on Facebook Live and on other live streaming so people can share things nationally and internationally, which happens a lot. Some of that is about communicating with our own base or with people in the community who are similar to our base. We place op-eds written by our members about what their analysis is of what’s going on with an issue. We do a lot of media where we have press conferences, protests, and other events. That’s a huge part of communicating with the outside world. In the age of Trump-resistance organizing, we have convened a group called “Aliadxs” (Spanish, gender neutral translation of “allies”) so that people who are newly activated, folks that want to fight against Trump and all he stands for right now, and want to do it following the lead of members of Make the Road, can join our Aliadxs network. Folks have opted into text alerts: 15,000 or 16,000 people. There have been moments when we’ve put out a call for a march and 15,000 or 30,000 people showed up. Also there are smaller working groups of that network who keep in touch and respond if there’s a family facing deportation that needs support, needs to have diapers provided, or any of those sort of nitty-gritty things, we also are able to reach out to that network. They’ve helped to beef up our Rapid Response Network, which responds to ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids, or rumors of ICE raids. We have a citywide and slightly less robust network in Long Island and Westchester to respond in those moments. Those folks we can reach by email and phone and text.

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Several organizers use videos to reinforce their message, particularly videos that involve leaders talking about their work or taking action. Jawanza Williams, of VOCAL-NY, uses it with their homeless union and users union leaders. Catalina Morales at Isaiah used it in their electoral work. Crystal Reyes, at the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition and program director of Sistas and Brothas United, established a YouTube channel called “All Tea No Sugar” where youth members post videos talking about their issues and campaigns. Videos reinforce leaders’ activism and are more engaging and persuasive to peers. United for Respect executive director Andrea Dehlendorf uses videos to build excitement and momentum after organizational victories: “We then did a webinar on how do you actually enforce our win. There’s a whole piece that we do around [how] it’s not just about winning things, it’s also enforcing what we’ve won.” Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, talks about a new video pilot project designed to tell the organization’s story in a new way: We are trying to use video to shift the narrative. We have been engaged in a project with a number of other organizations that was focused on housing but has been expanded a little bit, trying different ways of telling stories. Luisa Dantas, a filmmaker out of New Orleans, has been leading that, and she’s brought experts like Center for Story Based Strategies, Anat ShenkerOsorio, and some other filmmakers into the mix. We are thinking about our goals to disrupt austerity as a frame, and we had to really think about all the ways that penetrates our language. One of the problems Anat identifies is the prevalence of the passive voice in our issue framing and not naming who did the action. The thing that stuck in my head is when she said, “you always say people lost their homes. I’ve lost my keys, I may even forget where I put my car, but I have never lost a house.”. . . . There’s been some element of thinking about videos that are less about words and talking heads, but [more about] images, poems, art installations, just trying to think about the variety of means—and memes—that can be used to communicate.

Finally, social network sites and other ICTs are used by many organizations to raise funds. A donate button is prominent on almost all of their websites, and fund-raising campaigns are conducted through Facebook and other sites.

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The age and ethnicity of the membership or the audience the organization is trying to reach is a factor when using social networking. Younger members are more likely than older ones to be savvy users of technology, and they are attracted to digital environments. Some organizations have developed two communication strategies: using traditional means of mailings and newsletters for their older members and using a digital communication model for the younger ones. This is the case at the Land Stewardship Project, which still has a membership of older farmers in rural Minnesota. Ethnicity and language are also important factors in the deployment of ICTs. As Paul Getsos told us, “there are a variety of platforms. It’s understanding Instagram versus Facebook versus Reddit. All those platforms are really important, particularly if you want millennials and younger people. It is also important to create culturally appropriate content.  .  .  . I hired a 23-year-old Latina woman who has a very particular style[for producing] content to recruit young people, particularly young people of color, which is very different from the content you would produce for the 40-something woman.” Pabitra Benjamin talks about how Adhikaar has approached reaching different sectors of the Nepali community based on a detailed understanding of the platforms their constituency uses: When we could not get the media to cover TPS, we said let’s start with communications to our base. We said we know that we can organize online. We get a lot of followers on Facebook from Nepal and the U.S., and we have a lot of young Nepali followers on Instagram. We divided up the two platforms. Facebook moves the older community, and we have a large base of older folks. By older I do mean like 30+ versus younger than 30 who are on Instagram. So we’re constantly taking age groups, women, men, we’re doing a lot of targeting on Facebook and Instagram, buying ads and looking at how to actually influence both donations and organizing. When our campaigns and communications manager came on, I told her “I need you to get Facebook going” because we have good interaction there. When we have done Facebook Live, it works really well. And we also need to work with the online Nepali papers or online Nepali news  . . . because you can get up to 80,000 viewers on certain things. For us it became a mobilizing tool, but also an educational tool. And we also realize

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everything needs to be in Nepali and English, so most of our posts are in both languages. I think that was really important. We get a lot of Facebook messages around [immigration] cases, around volunteers, so we’re constantly using Facebook as an organizing tool. And for Instagram I said, “just make it pretty.” We realized that by making it pretty and having beautiful photos on there, it’s really capturing younger folks. Younger folks raised in the U.S. that love Instagram are coming in and interacting with us in that way. And then we do emails, but emails are more for the donors, so we’re not as into email. We’ve done email actions around petitions using Action Network or change.org, and we’ve gotten 10,000 signatures. But then we just feed that into our email list and for emails it’s more updating people, and then once in a while having people take action. We get good open rates, but it’s just not the main medium by which we communicate with folks who are our constituents and beyond.

The ability of social media and other technology to be employed as a communication device, to get the organization’s story out, and to attract people to it, is a prized asset for social action organizations. It affords them a real opportunity to communicate widely and well. They still need mass media, but social media combined with texting has created opportunities for them to have an independent and loud megaphone. ELECTRONIC DATABASES FOR TRACKING AND EVALUATION

Lists are the currency of organizing. Social action organizations have long relied on the most current tools available for list building and have innovated in their use. Electronic databases have become increasingly sophisticated and are absolutely essential, but their importance is rarely discussed in the scholarly literature on technology and activism. The ability of the databases to merge and sort, to produce information about participation and increasing engagement of members, is critical to their ability to build the base and to find people interested in different campaigns. It also helps organizers identify new potential leaders based on increased participation, and it enables them to do meaningful evaluation of what works and with whom. The databases allow the organization to take a snapshot of its membership over time, even if the population moves around. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers gives people who have participated in

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the organization for a certain amount of time an Immokalee identification card, called a “Human Rights Defenders Card.” Cards like this are valuable in a population that often cannot get identification cards because of their undocumented status. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers now has a database of more than 6,000 cardholders—individuals who have participated over the past 20 years. The usefulness of electronic databases cannot be overstated. Jawanza Williams describes how VOCAL-NY has come to rely on tracking information to maintain contact with people in shelters, a very mobile population by using CiviCRM, an open source database tool specifically designed by the Progressive Technology Project through its PowerBase project for organizing and advocacy groups and includes the ability to track data in areas of fund-raising, communications, organizing, advocacy, membership, and events. Sometimes we collect data if people are in shelters: Which shelters, if they’ve been incarcerated or not, what their postincarceration status is, are you on parole? The more information we collect, the more specific we can be about who we contact about specific issues, which becomes increasingly important whenever we’re working on such a vast array of issues. It’s important that people are not called for things that they just simply are not interested in. You can alienate people if you inundate them with information. I think we have to become increasingly sophisticated about how we engage, [and about] who, when, and what we engage people on. We try to be intentional about that, and it’s not always easy. I can’t even imagine organizing without using our CiviCRM software from PowerBase. I’ve heard about these phone trees that we used to use. I’m so much more effective because I have access to this database.

Electronic databases have been used to track leadership identification and participation for years, but groups have gotten increasingly sophisticated and creative in using their databases. For example, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement and Isaiah both use their databases to track participation and have created leadership ladders. Doran Schrantz describes how Isaiah uses its database to move people from the fringes of the organization to its core and even on to its staff: “We have a database that tracks every level of leadership development based on engagement levels, so that

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we’re tracking it in a systematic way. And if someone doesn’t have contact within three months, that re-engages the organizers to have a one-on-one with that person to assess what’s happening with them. We then have a ladder of participation that goes Supporter, Volunteer, Member. Then we have a track that starts to get people into paid staff or up on our Central Leadership Team.” Bobby King, former director of policy and organizing for the Land Stewardship Project, describes how their database helps them both track leadership and look at specific actions leaders are taking: “There’s a part of that database where you would record if someone wrote a letter to the editor, somebody testified at the legislature, somebody led a key part of this meeting. There’s a list of things we have that we feel fit into the category of worth noting.” The organization then uses this to set goals for leadership, measure their success at creating new leaders, and hold themselves accountable to reaching that goal. This task is critical to base-building organizations committed to developing leadership from the grassroots. King continues, “We call people who do at least three of those actions ‘emerging leaders.’ We’ve got an internal goal of how many new people and how many more emerging leaders we are creating. We’ve set a goal, and we want to track and reach that goal. As that pool of people gets bigger, [we] figure out other ways for them to engage more.” Andrea Dehlendorf, of United for Respect, uses their database as an assessment tool for the organizer, including it as a part of the debriefing assessment with their organizing teams: “I just did a diagnostic meeting with one of our teams in a state and they had [an assessment of] how many humans did they turn out for x set of activities. So that was part of the assessment and diagnostic. And right now for part of our field alignment, I’m asking folks how many people today could you get to go do something in the real world [not digital] right now?” Mary Hooks, codirector at SONG when we interviewed her, muses about turning ICTs over to the members, allowing them to track their own participation and create their own organizational profiles. “We had a conversation about how we can develop a cool app that would allow members to track participation themselves and be able to utilize the technologies at our disposal. We want to be able to do that more so folks can even participate, but can also ‘clock their commitments’ because we talk about ‘you have to give your time, you have to make a contribution, or give your talent in the organization for it to work as a member.’ This is,

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once again, a way to activate members to build the organization and make things happen.” Ongoing evaluation is a critical component of organizing, and digital tools have vastly expanded that capacity for social action organizations. Organizations are often required to do program evaluations by their funding sources, but that kind of evaluation may be irrelevant to what they want and need to know. Today’s databases offer capacity for deeper and more meaningful evaluation of the organization’s impact and success. Zach Norris, who was executive director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights at the time of our interview, talks about how their organizers track impact by tracking media coverage of their publications (Ella Baker Center, 2014). And the results are encouraging. “We used Google Analytics to track the number of mentions and articles connected to criminal justice, and we saw a strong upward trend after the publication of Who Pays: The True Cost of Incarceration on Families that we could actually see in chart form using Google Analytics. Since then I think we continue to try to find ways to measure our perception shift. I think it’s also just being able to see how many organizations support criminal justice reform. One example is the closure of youth prisons. When we started our campaign to do that in the early 2000s, that was seen as super radical and really far left. Now you have mainstream foundations like Annie E. Casey saying we should close all youth prisons.” Doran Schrantz also has her eye on tracking shifts in the public perception, particularly around the messaging being used for the organization and its campaigns: “We’re using stories that [allow us] to message the issues and a narrative frame of hope and inclusion. And we haven’t been able to track if any of this is moving the needle? We are working with People’s Action to try to get more rigor, working with Demos and other researchers to do testing, more systematic ways of looking at how our narrative work is impacting because I really want to know that. That to me will help us understand if we’re on the right path or not.” Electronic databases have become increasingly important to social action organizations in a wide range of applications. They make it possible for organizations to sustain their contact with membership, to better understand their base, to track the development of members and leaders, and to set and hold themselves accountable for achieving base-building goals. The potential to track the degree to which their narratives shift public opinion on their issues and elections is there and holds great promise for making their work more effective.

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INTEGRATION, EXPERIMENTATION, AND ONLINE TO OFFLINE

Many of the social action organizations in our sample are experimenting with platforms that do different things and they are learning how to integrate information and communication technologies to align tasks and activities. They are testing the use of apps and artificial intelligence (AI) to expand their work in new ways, and perhaps most important, they are blurring the bright lines between organizing in-person and organizing online. These technologies have become part of the organization’s toolbox, expanding and enhancing the main work of the organization. Technology can support the meetings, events, and campaigns that take place in-person and are the core organizing activities. Felicia Griffin, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action, offers an example: “One of the tools that many of our affiliates are using is the texting tool Hustle. It’s a subscription based tool where you put members’ phone numbers in there, and you can send them reminders about meetings as a group. We are still using Facebook to promote events and meetings and activities. Many affiliates are using private Facebook pages to keep information flowing and keep people connected. Twitter, we use more for the campaigns, definitely member outreach or organizing. We’ve done a few digital surveys as well. You can push those things through Hustle and Facebook. We’re also using Instagram, especially at events or at meetings where [people are] posting pictures in real time and live.” In Minnesota, Isaiah is also trying to integrate various platforms. Doran Schrantz envisions this integration as a new form of organizational infrastructure used to support much of the organization’s core work around base building, campaign work, and messaging. She explains it this way: “This year we spent a lot of time trying to upgrade the software in the organization, integration of database and e-advocacy and social media and how that connects to our website, all that kind of more seamless infrastructure that allows us to do increasingly sophisticated things at the intersection of organizing, social media, and public communications.” Some organizations are experimenting with apps. Both Isaiah and Make the Road New York developed apps that train people in rapidly responding to immigrant deportation crises in their communities. Isaiah created and

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used their app to train 1,800 people as guardians to protect people from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In a truly remarkable accomplishment, United for Respect developed an app called WorkIt. This “shop steward in your pocket” not only answers work-related questions but allows United for Respect to continue to involve people in organizing around their problem. Andrea Dehlendorf explains how it works. We built a digital platform called WorkIt. It uses artificial intelligence to scale peer support from leaders. Basically, you can go on there and say, “my job is being eliminated,” or “my kid is in the hospital and I’m going to get a point and be fired if I call out to go be in the hospital with her.” Then either a leader who is trained on the backend of WorkIt will look up and give you the policy that’s relevant to make sure that you’re able to assert your rights, or the AI will recognize the question from an existing answer bank based on existing support that leaders have already given others and will answer that question directly. It’s basically like a having a “shop steward in your pocket” on your phone that scales peer support and enforcement of existing rights and policies, and then pulls you into a community with other people who are going through the same thing. Then it tracks who’s weighed in on what questions. Let’s say that you’re in Texas, and two years ago you asked a question around sick time and we’re now working on a sick time policy initiative in Texas. You would get a push notification saying, “Hey, we’re about to go to the Capitol to lobby on this thing. Do you want to come with us?” It’s basically taking what the potential is on Facebook and social media, but then building our own platform to do what Facebook can’t do in terms of vetting quality expert support, and then scaling it so that multiple people or thousands or hundreds of thousands can benefit from the one piece of advice that one person gives one person.

We began this chapter by noting that social action organizers maintain that technology does not replace the in-person work that is central to their commitment to base building and developing leadership. They were not in favor of “click activism.” However, most organizers recognize that inperson organizing and digital need not be siloed. Paul Getsos explains that “traditional offline organizers treat digital as a siloed program, but digital is a strategic tool. Sometimes people are thinking, ‘the digital department’s

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over there, and the organizing department’s there, and the media communication department is over here.’ And that’s wrong. They all need to be integrated. On my leadership team, the digital director, the media communications director, and the organizing director are working together to build a plan. That’s not how most people do that. But all three are integrated. And when you incorporate digital into your base-building work and your organizing plan, you’re able to use digital for leadership development. You use digital to lead people through the ladders of engagement.” Video conferencing was perhaps the first step leading to a more blended model. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, when video conferencing platforms became ubiquitous, some organizations were using them to bring leaders and organizers together. Organizations with national memberships, where distance is often a factor in convening the leadership, and national organizing networks were using this technology to call together affiliates. Organizers began to understand that it could be both/and online and offline organizing, or better yet: online to offline organizing. In these organizations, the online work facilitates the offline work. Andrea Deheldnorf of United for Respect, describes the mix of using online connections to spark relationships that drive people to come together at in-person meetings and actions. What we do is reach people online, bring them in, then work with people to bring in other people that they know, either human people in the real world or people that they know online, into that community and then we help support people to organize in-person small gatherings. We recently had a house meeting that they video conferenced the organizer into to help them facilitate their meeting in somebody’s living room, for example. Also, as people are in the network, we’re really watching closely who’s got real leadership and who’s helping each other. We will then invite those folks into leadership training meetings. Some of those happen locally, some of those happen regionally, and some of those happen nationally. We then support those people to then go back and apply what they’ve learned into helping support them to build out the communities where they are. When we were starting out, you had the organizations that were doing geographic-based work, on the ground work, and then you had the organizations that were doing digital work, and they were two different worlds. The people on the ground had maybe an email list, maybe pushed things out.

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And then the online groups didn’t really have a ground game. There’s a few innovators on this, clearly Color of Change is amazing around this. . . . But we kind of coined our model to be online to offline and that online is a place to do organizing. It’s not the organizing. It’s a vehicle: the social media tools and the technology is a set of tools through which we can apply and do our organizing. And it’s not different, it’s just another place to do it, which I think is a little different from just trying to move people into online action. Yes, we do some online action, but really the goal is to get people who will do things, be leaders, and take action, not just click.

Offline to online makes sense in national organizations where ICTs can solve the geographic distance between members. But it also makes sense in local communities where technology may help local organizations more efficiently recruit interested people. Zachary Lerner discusses how the online to offline approach, borrowed from United for Respect, works at New York Communities for Change. We’ve also been applying online to offline to our neighborhood organizing, experimenting with it as a way to make things a little bit more efficient. During the old days we would do a lot of cold door-knocking. You had the numbers you had to hit . . . 40 doors a day meant that you talked to 10 people, which meant that two to three signed up as a member, which meant an organizer spent three or four hours maybe not talking to that many people. So what we’ve been experimenting with is actually using targeted Facebook ads in certain neighborhoods on, for example, rent stabilized housing to find people who are having issues around housing. Then an organizer would follow up using Hustle. You can have tons of conversations via text messages all at the same time using this program, and what’s really valuable about it is it makes it personal. And then what we found is that people just don’t pick up phone calls as much as they used to, so it’s actually had a higher rate, and it’s been cheaper for us to use targeted Facebook ads. Then we do outreach using this as a way to meet people. Once you find an individual through that, you can go with that person to door-knock in their building and so you’re finding hot buildings right away, or you can target based on zip codes in certain areas that you want to build density in. Closed Facebook groups also can be a way that you can distribute information, articles, surveys, and things like [that] much more efficiently among our membership. We’ve been trying to

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create a closed Facebook group in general, and it’s also a good leadership development tool. We have people who may not be geographically located in Flatbush, or in one of our neighborhoods, but they can still engage with the organization as a whole.

CONCLUSION

Information and communication technologies are not everything in social action organizing, but they now are critical tools that augment the handson base-building work that organizers do. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of technology and expanded the range of digital tools used in organizing as it has in other sectors. ICTs can identify interested people, notify them of meetings and events, bring them out, and communicate the organization’s message. ICTs serve as mouthpieces for organizations, communicating their frames and narratives. Electronic databases help organizers better understand and serve their members and have the potential to help them understand which of their messages are most effective in shifting public opinion. ICTs make the essential tasks of organizing easier and more efficient, and creative organizers are learning to merge different technologies, using each to its best advantage. They are exploring the prospect of building apps and using AI to facilitate information sharing. And most important, they are finding ways of using online and offline together. They are truly becoming hybrid organizations. The COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in 2020, shortly after we conducted our interviews, clearly accelerated the use of technology and expanded the range of digital tools in organizing as it has in other sectors. We are interested in what other assets that will bring to social action organizing and comment on this further in our concluding chapter. In chapter 10, we summarize the ways in which the evolving tools, strategies, and skills of these organizations illustrate their durability, resilience, and vision. We point to how these organizations are fighting for democracy and what they need from all stakeholders in order to be successful, as they shape the future of organizing for power and empowerment.

Chapter Ten

CONCLUSIONS The Next Evolution of Organizing

Our purpose is to rebalance the power dynamic between humans and corporations and move a set of policies that give people much more control and stability in their lives and voice and in their affairs. ANDREA DEHLENDORF, UNITED FOR RESPECT

The election of 2016 was the impetus for a second edition of this book after a hiatus of 25 years, but a great deal of organizing had been going on before then: worker-centered organizing, Black activism against police violence and mass incarceration, environmental justice organizing, women organizing to end sexual harassment, and the anticorporate Occupy Wall Street protests. But the election of Donald Trump, Republican control of Congress, and an extremely conservative Supreme Court majority reawakened the country, and certainly focused the attention of progressive social action organizations. The global Women’s March was held the day after Trump’s inauguration and was the largest one-day protest in U.S. history. Their  expansive agenda included women’s and LGBTQ+ rights, immigration reform, health care reform, disability justice, racial equality, reproductive rights, environmental reform, workers’ rights, freedom of religion, and religious tolerance. It seemed obvious to us that there would be much to report regarding this surge of new activism, but we had no idea how true that would be. Immediately after the election, Trump ordered a Muslim travel ban. He attempted to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and the administration imposed a zero tolerance policy for people crossing the border, which resulted in at least 1,400 children being separated from their parents. Within months of completing our interviews in 2019,

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Breonna Taylor, a Black woman sleeping in her own home, was killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky. In March of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States with full force, closing California, New York, and soon after many other states, causing the most serious health crisis in more than a century and ushering in the first major economic crisis since 2008. Soon after, George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by a white Minnesota police officer, and Derek Chauvin, who was eventually convicted and sentenced to prison, was seen in a video holding his knee to Floyd’s neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds. Protests quickly spread in more than 2,000 cities and towns and 60 countries in support of causes associated with the Black Lives Matter movement. Polls indicate that at least 15 million people participated in at least one of those protests. The Yale School of Environment (2020) notes a “staggering increase” in extreme weather conditions such that a global warming crisis can no longer be denied as unique and unprecedented weather is experienced throughout the country. And finally, in what is often seen as the most serious threat to U.S. democracy in our history, Trump and his allies attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, stoking a false narrative that the election had been “stolen.” Rightwing protesters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and a variety of states have since then passed new laws curbing voting rights. Although we completed our research in 2019, it is no overstatement to say that we wrote this book as the United States confronted five major crises: a new reckoning with a long history of racism, a crisis of democracy, a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a climate crisis. The organizers we interviewed and the groups they lead are deeply involved in every one of these issue areas. They are all actively responding to these crises, helping people make it through the pandemic, organizing around their issues, and working on election campaigns. We receive their emails, read their communications, and scan their websites. We worried that our interviews missed this critical moment of history, rendering our research less timely, but we continue to believe important lessons can be learned from our work. Organizing always occurs in a dynamic political, economic, and social environment (Han, McKenna, & Oyakawa, 2021). Scholars who study this area recount stories about a particular historical moment that may fade from memory, and then they must “catch up” as organizations evolve to respond to future conditions. Although informed by historical inequity, organizing is aimed at changing, challenging, and charging on to tackle new obstacles and take advantage of new opportunities within a constantly

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shifting environment. Organizers and their organizations go where the members’ pain is and identify the targets with the power to resolve their grievances. That is what organizing is, that’s what members and leaders do: They transform themselves to confront whoever is causing the pain. Although researchers capture and portray organizing at a moment in time, the most important finding from our research is that social action organizing is constantly evolving—organizing is, as Nicholas von Hoffman once said, really always about reorganizing (Miller, 2015c, p. 323). The reorganizing must be done not only to reinvent and confront systems of inequality and oppression but also to infuse and grow power with new energy and ideas, emerging leaders, new issues, effective strategies and campaigns, evolving technology, and now, new organizational structures. Organizing reorganizes to remain relevant, competitive, and responsive to dynamic conditions. Alicia Garza (2020), a longtime organizer and cofounder of Black Lives Matter, writes: “Hope is not the absence of despair—it is the ability to come back to our purpose, again and again. My purpose is to build political power for my community so that we can be powerful in every aspect of our lives. My work is to transform grief and despair and rage into the love that we need to push us forward. I am not, and we are not, defined by what we lack—we are defined by how we come together when we fall apart” (p. 289). Our findings are consistent with Rinku Sen’s (2003) analysis that today’s social action organizations grew out of the ideas of Saul Alinsky and have evolved in response to the many valid critiques of his work and to the skills, interests, and commitment of a new generation of multiracial organizers and leaders. Today’s organizers are informed by the Alinsky tradition, and many are members of networks that emerged from it. Yet, they are equally aware and animated by the successes of the civil rights movement and the experience of labor unions and are creating multiracial organizations and narratives that echo those traditions (Warren, 2001). Today’s organizers bring to and blend all that history in their work. A clearer, more focused understanding of intersectional injustice is at the core of social action organizations’ theory of change, and every part of the organization emanates from it—issues, strategy, popular education, and leadership development. The relentless existence of intersectional injustice is at the center of building organizations that are political homes designed to counteract what their members endure in the world. Organizers’ radical ideas about justice consistently inform the pragmatic work of the organizations.

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The history, knowledge, and skills of labor union and worker-centered organizing is also very much present in today’s social action organizations (Fine, 2006; McAlevey, 2014). Four organizers in our sample, most of them women, came from labor organizing backgrounds and brought that experience to the work. The gap between labor and community organizing has narrowed. Organizers understand that workers are residents and vice versa, and organizations attend to both workplace and community issues. Labor unions and community organizations are working side by side to improve conditions in both domains. Our second major finding is that today’s organizers are taking the lessons of history and using them in their work, innovating, and evolving in ways that are untethered from the kind of rigidity that sometimes characterized the early organizing associated with the existing networks. Aaron Schutz (2015a, 2015c) warns against the dangers of holding to truths in organizing, but we did not find that organizers confine themselves to one approach. Today’s organizers have fewer sacred cows, construct fewer silos, and are much more open to different traditions. We found that organizations are associated with multiple networks and get assistance from a variety of national organizations, and there is a great deal of sharing going on between groups. Much of the dogma of earlier organizing has been replaced by experimentation with new approaches. We were constantly amazed and impressed with how open organizers are. They are very much in the mode of “both/and” rather than “or.” They are not organizing around social class or identity, they are organizing around both class and identity. They see people as both workers and community residents. They are not organizing on local issues or with a national vision, they are organizing both locally and with national affiliations. They eschew strategic silos. They don’t choose between traditional organizing approaches or mobilizing protests or electoral action; they are open to organizing and mobilizing and election work. They continue to use organizing strategies under their 501(c)(3) organizations, employing protest whenever needed and promoting and joining them when they spontaneously occur, and they use their 501(c)(4) organizations for electoral work. This greater range of strategies helps to build out their repertoire, using multiple tools at the right time and in the right place. They do not choose to do organizing or provide service; they both organize and provide service. They don’t choose between organizing online or offline; they work both

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online and offline. They both develop successful narratives and fight on issues. They fight both forward and in resistance. Most important, they don’t close off alternatives, they are open to all of them. They embody the flexible organizations recommended by Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa (2021) and the “whatever works” mindset described by Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minnesota. In sum, the ideas that originated with Alinsky about building power through establishing organizations, building the base of a people’s organization, and encouraging people to develop as leaders are foundational to today’s organizing. But today the perspectives and experiences of civil rights and labor organizing are interwoven into their vision, their theories of change, their narratives, and their strategies and campaigns. Mike Miller (2015c) writes that organizers “cannot ‘stand for the whole’ without engaging the whole. . . . This means developing an organizing effort that the majority of Americans come to know—as they knew the farmworker boycott and the Deep South civil rights movement—and identify as their own; about which they will say, ‘that’s my voice’; in which millions of Americans will be actively engaged” (p. 319). This is exactly why today’s organizers place such great emphasis on scaling up the work to include more and more people in more and more diverse places. In this chapter, we explicitly capture progressive social action organizing as it has evolved at this moment in time. We identify what we saw as foundational practices that have become stronger, deeper, and more articulated in today’s work. We then turn to aspects of organizing that may have been present earlier but have been tested over time and strengthened as practices today. We also identify the new trends and innovations that we found. Finally, we describe what we and the organizers we interviewed believe are the challenges and opportunities for the next evolution of progressive social action organizing. FOUNDATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF ORGANIZING

The set of beliefs that organizers hold about how to make change has remained fairly consistent. Although the theory of change is articulated and expressed by each organization according to its constituency and goals, the overarching understanding about how change can be achieved has been relatively unchanged across the years, groups, populations, and geography.

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These ideas are recognized and articulated by scholars in the field (Bobo, Kendall, & Max, 2010; Han et al., 2021; Minieri & Getsos, 2007; Mondros & Wilson, 1994; Sen, 2003; Staples, 2016; Szakos & Szakos, 2007). There is general consensus about the following principles that comprise the theory of change of these organizations: 1. The primary mission of social action organizing is to build power among people who are mostly marginalized and have few avenues to express and resolve their needs and concerns. The mission to build power goes beyond any single issue, policy solution, or campaign. It aspires to a social and economic transformation that will give equity, voice, and opportunity to all. This transformation must particularly rectify historic and current injustices experienced by Black Americans and other people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ communities. 2. Power must be built by the people “closest to the pain.” The people who experience the issues on which the organization works must be the members and leaders of the organization. People are organized on the basis of either geography or a common identity or issue or some combination of these. 3. Leaders play significant and central roles in social action organizations. There is widespread commitment to base building, to identifying and recruiting members, to ensuring that leadership emerges from this base, and that the leaders are firmly in control of decision-making in the organization. The process of leadership development happens through personal contact, regular interaction, training to assume leadership roles, and popular education that offers them a social, economic, and political analysis and context to inform their work. As members become more active, going through the process of becoming leaders and even organizers themselves, they not only gain knowledge but are empowered with confidence, self-respect, and agency. 4. There is unanimous support for the importance of the organization as both a political home for their members and as a viable and sustainable vehicle to pursue change. Although we found new organizational forms that promote multiple strategies and targets, and new ways of building coalitions to pressure for change, the importance of an organizational venue as the driver for change cannot be overstated. The organizations are grounded in constituencies and have members and leaders that stand together and participate regularly, which enables them to take on powerful opponents. The organization transforms the actions of the membership and leadership into political power (Han et al., 2021). Furthermore, these organizations serve as both a safe and brave

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space for members to interact, to question and learn about each other, and to struggle together around difficult topics that challenge the status quo and counter dominant narratives. The organization is the place where Marshall Ganz told us that people learn to “scaffold courage.” 5. The goals of organizing continue to be both about building the power to make economic, social, and political change and offering people experiences that encourage personal transformation. Although some literature eschewed the term empowerment, social action organizing continues to address how the trauma of intersectional injustice and dominant narratives leave people feeling worthless and isolated. Empowerment in social action organizing is the result of an experience of successful action, efficacy, and confidence that grows over time and is internalized through relationship, membership, and collective action. People are in this work to build the power to win, and they are transformed by their actions and success.

These principles reflect a traditional understanding of the foundational principles of social action organizations. But today’s organizers have added greater detail. They express their ideas in new and deeper ways that are grounded in their own experience. At the same time, their views are based on the “good bones” of previous thinkers, organizers, and scholars of organizing. Their discussions with us on these points confirmed these basic principles. STRENGTHENING ASPECTS OF EARLIER ORGANIZING

Social action organizations have strengthened earlier aspects of organizing, elaborating and enhancing these ideas. But these features have become more widely and clearly stated as explicit goals and consciously embedded in organizing today. We draw attention to those areas here. An understanding of basic inequality and unfairness was always part of the mission of social action organizations and their messaging, and inequity and oppression continue to drive social action organizing. Organizers endeavored to build organizations that were diverse, but earlier organizations were often homogeneous. They were established as local organizations in neighborhoods where housing was often segregated or through churches with segregated memberships. Instead, they brought people together in citywide coalitions. It is also true that earlier organizations were widely

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criticized for having staff and leadership that was too often white and male, that did not consider the identity of the participants, nor adequately respond to the cultures and norms of communities of color (Delgado, 1997; Sen, 2003). Although acknowledging that racism and other forms of oppression must be articulated in social action organizations, there was still a bias toward class solidarity and class-based organizing—toward the “have-a-little-want-mores” rather than a focus on race or gender (Miller, 1996). It is fair to say that explicit statements on race or gender were rare or muted. Criticism of this approach led to the emergence of new organizations based on identity with an explicit agenda to address issues of race, gender, and the LGBTQ+ community. Today’s social action organizations have gone well beyond these early models. They unambiguously and unequivocally commit to an understanding of intersectional injustice in which all systems interact and combine to keep all but the wealthiest people in general and particularly people of color, women, and LGBTQ+ populations disproportionately vulnerable, marginalized, and powerless. Today’s organizations demonstrate a strong commitment to effective organizing that centers on racial and gender justice and equity, and that commitment informs everything they do. They build multiracial organizations whenever and however they can. Their narratives and communications, even in the most politically conservative areas, are explicitly antiracist, feminist, and gender inclusive. The commitment to antiracism runs deep, going well beyond the superficial representativeness that Garza (2020) criticizes. It is intentionally built into every aspect of the organization’s work. Organizers and leaders of color now have a direct path to the top positions of the organizations. Their voices are being emphasized. White-led organizations are developing explicit means to bring in a new generation of multiracial organizers. Organizations in primarily white communities are consciously building respectful collaborations that are attentive to intersectional injustice. In some cases, this requires them to listen to the priorities of people with different experiences and perspectives and to be good allies rather than take the lead role. They are taking on the hard, intentional work of popular education on race and insisting on difficult but necessary dialogue among staff and leadership. Our conversations affirmed that Black organizers and other people of color will be primary leaders in the next generation of progressive social action organizations. In addition, across race, ethnicity,

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gender and class, many social action organizers will continue to come from the organizations’ base. This trend is a distinct evolution from the previous generation of “professional organizers” who were dropped into a community from a centralized organizing network that prohibited leaders from becoming organizers. We also heard from many organizers about their particular commitment to organize women around women’s issues. The political education programs that are used to develop leaders include content on historical and present racism, educating leaders and holding them accountable to these core beliefs. They ensure that people struggle to understand and work against the racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and apocalyptic messages that are embedded in our culture and are dog whistled by politicians and elites. Organizational messages are stated positively and are inclusive and full of hope. Women make up a large percent of their membership, and organizations are more likely now to be led by women, particularly women of color. The organizations provide women with support and assistance around all sorts of issues. Social action organizations have also strengthened their assessment of the culpability of corporate interests in establishing a society that is increasingly inequitable and unfair. Economic conditions have become so much worse that the “want-some-more” characterization has become anachronistic. Today the analysis is more “those that have everything and those that have nothing.” There is strong evidence to support this growing inequality. Organizers, as well as economists and scholars, have come to the conclusion that exploitation of low-income workers and the ruinous impact corporations have had on communities has resulted in a racialized and genderized capitalism. That perspective is built into social action organization’s theories of change, their popular education, their narratives and messages, and certainly their campaigns. In some earlier campaigns, social action organizations targeted banks, insurance companies, and realtors around fair housing and lending practices. Nevertheless, most organizing focused on elected officials as targets for change. Organizers then understood elected officials and bureaucratic heads of public departments as beholden to voters and therefore easier to influence, and they had the power to make the changes the organizations sought. Targets have shifted beyond elected officials to include corporations today because of the excessive influence corporations have on

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political actors. Today’s organizers have an accurate analysis that corporate power is pervasive, entrenched in many political institutions, and elected officials and bureaucrats are complicit in enabling corporate influence. This has led to both distrust of democratic institutions and recognition of the political unwillingness to act in the interests and needs of the people. For social action organizations, that has meant that it is essential to target corporations. Targeting corporations requires organizations to alter their campaign strategies. They are conducting deep analysis involving investments, budgets, financing arrangements, and byzantine legislative rules and regulations. Older tactics are being reassessed. Protest has become normalized, and perhaps it was always better suited to elected targets who seek voter support than to the new corporate targets who are harder to hold accountable. Corporate executives are beholden to their shareholders, not to the public. Corporate executives need not accept invitations to meetings, and if they agree to attend, they are likely to send public relations staff or others in the corporate hierarchy who do not have decision-making power. The real decision-makers are more often than not far away from the local organizing effort. Social action organizations are continuously challenged to come up with effective strategic options, innovations. and experiments. INNOVATIONS IN ORGANIZING

The innovations that are appearing in social action organizations today are impressive. The fading away of old dogma and rigid practices has freed organizers to invent and experiment, and make adjustments accordingly. New thinking and new action is ongoing. We describe some of the most noteworthy developments here. The most obvious change is who the organizers are today. Labor unions, community organizations, and movement organizations were once staffed, with rare exception, by organizers who were white and male. Today women, Black people, people of color, and particularly women of color are the very core of social action organizing. Of the 42 organizers we interviewed, 22 were women, of which 11 were women of color, and 18 organizers were people of color. Moreover, the divide between organizer and leader positions has shifted, and seven of the organizers in our sample had come up through leadership ranks. Indeed, all of the organizations provide opportunities for

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people who are increasingly active in their organization to take on more leadership, many in quite structured ways, which includes the opportunity to join the staff. Jose Lopez of Make the Road New York and Crystal Reyes of Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition had come to their organizations as teenagers. Today Lopez is his organization’s coexecutive director and Reyes is her organization’s youth organizing director. The fact that leaders can move into organizer roles is an outgrowth of an emerging concept of co-leadership, which many of these organizations have pioneered. This trend has had important consequences. Today organizations are intentional about identifying and hiring staff who both share the organizations’ vision and are trained to do the organizing work. It is also a result of how organizations have become political homes for leaders, places of safety, but also places where the dominant narratives are challenged, where their preconceived notions are debated and reconsidered, and where they come to new realizations about society and their roles and potential within it. It is where they can often both access services they need and begin to take power on their own. These organizations are fully available to their members and leaders, offering both opportunities and support. Even the youngest of these organizations has a mature analysis of how an organization can be essential in members’ lives. When we began our research, we expected to find that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) would have had the most major impact on organizing. Our findings are mixed on this subject. ICTs, especially mass texting platforms, are used extensively by organizations to facilitate recruitment, to move people to become more active and engage them in actions, and to keep them informed about issues and campaigns. ICTs provide pathways into direct in-person contact, both with the organizers and other members and leaders. But direct face-to-face interaction, continuously and over time in a collective work and learning environment, remains the most valued contact, and it is used to build the base and develop leadership. This is true even for organizations with national memberships that may use video conferencing. They still find ways to convene people in person to meet, think, act, and grow together. Organizations are committed to a model they call “online to offline.” Although the use of online tools has accelerated in all areas of life and work in recent years, direct personal contact, gathering, and public mobilization is deeply embedded at the core of effective organizing.

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ICTs also serve as the organization’s megaphone, communicating its agenda, vision for change, and narratives. The narrative goes beyond the concept of a concise message. It is a story that identifies a specific problem, offers a solution, and appeals to our cultural values. Even in a divisive political climate, where extreme views on both the left and the right can seem to dominate public debate, organizations strive for messages that are grounded in the lived experience of their members and that reach out to a diverse and inclusive audience. Their messages are used both as a mantra for the organization and as a rationale for action campaigns. As Garza (2020) recommends, their pragmatic messages build broad support without watering down their politics or denying their radical vision. The organizations use various social media platforms, adding pictures and videos to personalize their communications and to promote an alternate perspective to the dominant racist, antigovernment, business friendly, and blaming narrative that members and the public often hear. This “organizational mouthpiece” has an important function because, as we have seen, so much misinformation, division, and demeaning characterizations exist in “the water we all swim in.” Other developments in the use of technology show potential. For example, in chapter 9 we describe how United for Respect has developed an app that members can use to answer a host of questions about workforce rules at Walmart. The app was created by members of the organization, and when an answer is not fully sufficient on the app, members are available by phone to provide more information. The organization’s system that links members to members is far superior to what they might get from Walmart or the service most of us get from the corporate apps we are increasingly forced to use. It is yet another way for the organization to take care of their members, generate loyalty, and model what true support looks like, while creating a tool for engaging more workers than traditional techniques could ever reach. Social action organizations have also evolved their thinking about campaign strategy, and most of the change has occurred as a result of an updated analysis of what needs to change and how to change it. Organizers now understand that corporate power dictates most political as well as economic decisions, has great consequences for their members and communities, and is particularly exploitative of Black people, women, and other communities of color. The complicity of elected officials and corporations

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has had a devastating impact on both urban and rural communities. Such powerful and concentrated opposition has called upon social action organizations to be creative in their strategic planning and campaigns to forcefully assert the interests of people, and they have responded with a number of important innovations. All of the organizations have developed alliances that enable them to amass the power of multiple organizations against a target. These are not the constraining coalitions of old. Today, social action organizations have multiple affiliations around issue areas, identity, and network support, picking and choosing what is relevant to them at any given time. Some organizations help with research, and others help with messaging. These affiliations are unlike the coalitions or networks of the past. They are much more fluid and do not require organizations to sign on to an agreed-upon set of criteria or for a long time period. Instead organizations come together around a single campaign, around an election, or around an agreed-upon target. Labor-community coalitions target corporate interests and organize around worker and community issues simultaneously. Efforts such as Our Minnesota Future, an association of 22 organizations, deepened relationships and alignment even though it only existed for a brief period. It provides an example of how organizations can bring urban and rural leaders together to target corporations at a statewide level, allowing organizations to intensify pressure over time and around different issues. Organizations involved in Bargaining for the Common Good allow affiliates to use their preferred tactics. Some use civil disobedience, and others have strategies to influence shareholder meetings (Gupta et al., 2020; McCartin, Smiley, & Sneiderman, 2021). We see this kind of experimentation as positive for several reasons. First, the multiple affiliations suggest that organizers are working together across their differences and are able to agree, perhaps not completely, but enough to allow joint action. Where conflict among organizers and organizations was once the norm, now we see more strategic relationships forming around shared interests. Second, these affiliations go beyond local organizing, enabling people to come together across various divisions—race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, religion, and rural/urban geographies. As people work together on their common grievances and goals, there are more opportunities for success and personal growth. And, perhaps most important, the affiliations have the potential to amass greater

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power and influence to challenge behemoth corporations from retail to farming and solve some of the pressing problems that their members face. That is the thinking behind the campaigns we described that targeted Wells Fargo Bank, Amazon, and Google. The organizations have also developed new strategies and structures to tackle feckless and unresponsive politicians who are more beholden to their corporate allies than to their voters. Newer ideas about how to leverage local, state, and national politics have emerged and are being tested. We see the new statewide affiliations and strategies as a very important innovation. They cross the rural-suburban-urban divides, and bring together multiracial coalitions involving community groups, labor unions, and faith organizations. They put pressure on blue states to move ahead with progressive reforms, serving as models for other states. They use the power of the big cities to influence less friendly state legislatures. They offer national models for change and have the potential to build strong statewide electoral power. In some cases, the organizations target the local and generally more progressive city officials to legislate the changes they want, and then leverage the local changes to pressure the states. That strategy is used by the various state affiliates of PowerSwitch Action. In many other cases, the state itself is seen as the pivot point for change. This strategy was used in Minnesota by Isaiah and the Land Stewardship Project as part of Our Minnesota Future, which sought changes in gun laws, mass incarceration, housing, and community disinvestment. It was also used in New York by the organizations involved in the success of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019 passed by New York State. In still other cases, national organizations have challenged a corporation on a policy in a more liberal state and then used that victory to leverage change throughout the corporation’s national system. That is how United for Respect sought changes on paid sick leave at Walmart, first in California, and then nationally. The lesson learned from all these multiple approaches is that organizations use flexible strategies, targeting the level that has the most potential for change first, and then use that success as a lever to make change in more difficult contexts. That is the lever and fulcrum approach described by Gupta, Jacobs, Lerner, and McCartin (2020).

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Finally, social action organizations have established new organizational structures that have the potential to allow them a path around the corporate-political collusion that can be a major obstacle to change. By launching 501(c)(4) organizations and PACs, organizations can directly enter the political sphere. These structures do not allow tax deductible contributions, so they must be funded by members and allies. However, this type of funding has its own advantages, encouraging the kind of funding independence that Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa (2021) find essential. Under this tax code, the organizations can fully implement electoral strategies designed to support and run their own candidates. We have already seen some of this work succeed in elections in Georgia, Arizona, and Buffalo, New York. Many of the organizations continue to do their issue organizing under their 501(c)(3) status organizations. That tax code designation allows them to accept private philanthropy for their campaign work. Taken together, the 501(c)(3), (c)(4), and PACs offer the greatest strategic flexibility. Doran Schrantz, executive director of Isaiah in Minnesota, praises this pragmatism, telling us that “building the infrastructure is an almost party apparatus: a party apparatus that isn’t the party to do electoral work, organizing, mobilizing for protest . . . whatever works.” These innovations help organizations scale up their membership and their work, make them more resilient to meet new challenges, and most important, increase their power and their likelihood of success. These innovations may not provide all the answers, but they strengthen organizations’ abilities to contend with the very powerful forces that they are up against. CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES MOVING FORWARD

This is a particularly fraught historical moment. It is a time of seemingly deep cultural divides, a moment of basic distrust in science, and mistrust of each other. Decades of inequality continue while CEO salaries skyrocket, shareholder values increase, and GNP rises. Corporations get larger, swallowing up smaller companies and hurting small businesses, and increasing their influence over elected officials. Wealthy elites and their political allies fight harder to maintain their power and control, promulgating dangerous narratives designed to appeal to our basest instincts.

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In a time of ubiquitous virtual connections, people feel lonelier and more isolated than ever. What can social action organizations achieve in this environment? Our findings tend to align with those of Han, McKenna, and Oyakawa (2021). The organizations that we studied bring people together, and through that convening both the people and the organizations are transformed. The participation is real, deep, continuous, and long term, far from the political hobbyism that Hersh (2020) derides. Together the leaders and organizers build independent organizations composed of people committed to the organizations’ missions, issues, each other, and achieving transformational change. Their organizational innovations promote greater strategic flexibility. They have made the creative choices to engage the battle that is ahead. The evolution of organizing will continue, of course. No one thinks the path ahead will be easy. As we write, organizers, academics, consultants, and funders are already thinking about what should come next. For the kind of transformative changes needed, organizing must scale up, bringing more people into organizations and action. We end as we did in the first edition, by noting challenges and opportunities for the future and suggesting ideas for future work and study. SCALING UP: WHO SHOULD BE ORGANIZED?

Social action organizations are firmly committed to organizing people who are closest to the pain. This is the basic belief organizers hold about change—why change is so necessary and who is most likely to be committed to making it. The focus is justifiably on organizing Black Americans and other people of color, on women, on immigrants, and on the LGBTQ+ population because these communities experience the greatest inequality and are most targeted by dominant narratives. Recognition continues today that the working class—largely composed of women and people of color but including white farmers, teachers, retail, and health care workers—are also suffering, and they are also being organized. It is important to note how often these populations, especially Black Americans, immigrants, and other people of color, have been sidelined politically. We are told that these constituencies don’t vote and are uninterested in politics, so politicians pay very little attention to them. That has

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proven to be wrong. When people care about the issues, they do vote; and when their needs are not considered, they organize—both on the progressive side, to expand rights, and on the right, to limit them. Given the current state of politics in our country, we expect organizing to continue to grow. To shift the current tide, progressive multiracial organizing must be scaled up. More organizing is needed everywhere, but even the most cursory look at today’s political map or the 2020 census results would suggest that a lot more organizing should be done in red states and in rural areas. Rural communities have been devastated by the extraction of industry and capital, and people there suffer from the loss of opportunity that results in a host of social and mental health issues. Without alternatives being offered, it is easy to fall prey to expedient political messages and false narratives (Goehl, 2019). Furthermore, the 2020 census indicates that red states and rural areas are not as homogenous as they once were, nor are they as white as is portrayed in the media (Parker et al., 2018; Vespa, Medina, & Armstrong, 2020). Asian and Latinx populations have moved to smaller towns and rural areas across the country, making those communities more diverse (Tavernise & Gebeloff, 2021), and they are often working in the most dangerous industries under abusive conditions. Many of the big cities of red states (Dallas, Orlando, Austin, New Orleans) are also experiencing diversification. These migrating populations bring new identities, issues, and experiences, and the potential for building new multiracial organizations. The problems that people experience in red states and rural communities may not be vastly different from those of their peers in more suburban and urban areas. Similarities can be emphasized and used to organize. United for Respect organizes Walmart workers nationally around similar workforce issues. Organizations across the country targeted Amazon for its widespread harmful labor and community practices. The Red for Ed movement that led to victory in the West Virginia teachers’ strike of 2019 was the template for similar campaigns in Chicago and Los Angeles. Although issues are slightly different in rural states, organizers told us of similar concerns around housing, health care, and education. There are issues around toxic landfills and clean water in both rural areas and large cities. Organizers in Iowa and Minnesota told us how they reach across divides on issues of food insecurity and gardens. Brigid Flaherty, cofounder and then codirector of Down Home North Carolina, told us that “we really want

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to be involved in a community of practice for rural areas. I do think that the national networks need to catch up around focusing on building communities of practice in both urban and rural places. And then building a community of practice that creates a bridge between urban and rural organizing, so that we are really looking at the whole in terms of how to make change on a larger scale.” Such coalitions hold great promise for scaling up organizing nationally. Digital technology, especially reliable access to the internet, will help expand organizing in rural areas and close the gap between rural and urban organizing. Scaling up to confront the enormous power of the opposition may take even more than engaging the most obvious communities. Organizers always look to build the base, but who else might be recruited? Organizers in Chicago and New York talked to us about the challenge of gentrification in the neighborhoods in which they are organizing. Logan Square Neighborhood Association, Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, and Make the Road New York have fought against gentrification for many years, but because of the search for cheaper housing in those cities their communities had gotten whiter and less affordable anyway. New residents would show up at a community meeting and want the organization to focus on their issues, potentially destabilizing the leadership and disrupting the agenda. Yet these new residents also shared some of the views and problems of the original members. Nancy Aardema, then executive director of Logan Square Neighborhood Association in Chicago, describes both the problems and the potential of this trend: “Gentrification impacts every single other issue, displacing literally thousands and thousands of people all the time. That’s the challenge. I think people understand the whole idea that there are  the haves and the have nots, and the have nots are not bad people. They’re people like me. It’s no longer, ‘I don’t want to know those people’ because most of us recognize that we are ‘those people.’ So people are much more willing to come together and have conversations about these seemingly difficult to understand issues: not only difficult to live, but also difficult to understand, and we try to see if people are willing to really have these conversations about housing and how housing impacts everything else.” Similarly, young activists are interested in many of the issue areas that social action organizations are addressing. College campuses are filled with conversations about racism, immigration, mass incarceration, climate change, and gender equity. As we have seen, dialogue and self-reflection is

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important, but it must be combined with on-the-ground campaigns that work toward real change. Can student outrage be translated into social action organizing? Might popular education and leadership conversations be a way across differences between the talk of young activists and the work in the trenches of veterans of community organizing? Involving these new constituencies poses some risk. At best, the leadership will work through this class (and often racial) difference like they have worked through so many other divisions. But at worse, the arrival of white stakeholders and young activists may gentrify the organizations in the same way new residents have gentrified neighborhoods, causing conflict and derailing the work. New residents and young activists have to understand and accept that leadership must be ceded those who are “closest to the pain” and agree at times to play supportive roles as allies rather than being primary leaders They would need to align with the goals of organizing and the organization, the self-determined agendas and narratives of the most impacted communities, and respect strategic and campaign decisions that the leadership makes. Scaling up is possible if bridges can be built among leaders of community organizations and new activists, if they can seize on their commonly held issues, broker their differences, learn to hear and talk to each other, and support change that is good for all. Other alliances are also possible, particularly between professional organizations and unions that represent many women, immigrants, Black people, and others of color. Teachers unions and community organizations are already working together. We think the health care industry offers opportunities for alliances because it is increasingly composed of women and members of marginalized populations who are contending with a demanding and difficult work environment. The health science professions—nurses, social workers, physical and occupational therapists, speech and language and respiratory therapists and others—are organized into professional associations with local, state, and national chapters, making connection easier. A good example of this possibility is Recovery for All, a statewide coalition in Connecticut of 46 labor, community, and faith organizations working to expand health care in low-income and Black communities. Some of the major sponsors are SEIU, several community organizations, and the Connecticut chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, the social work professional association. Recruiting professionals will require that they agree to be governed by the organizations’ goals and principles. They

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will have to transition away from professional objectivity and jargon and advocating on behalf of others, to serving as allies in support of leadership. Make the Road New York has experimented successfully with such a model, bringing in experts to join strategy planning discussions, but leaving decisions to the organization’s leadership. This approach should be replicated elsewhere. To make these new alliances work effectively, training for allies may be necessary. A BIGGER BETTER MEGAPHONE

It has been alarming for many of us to hear the ugly rhetoric, false conspiracy theories, and misinformation that has circulated widely during the past several years. The communication is often subtly if not blatantly racist and sexist. Messages victimize and demean the poor, the marginalized, and the powerless, and far too often people are shamed by the stereotypes and blame themselves. Neoliberal messages, although less brazen and aggressive, are often shrewdly calculated to be persuasive. The work organizers do to counter and reframe these damaging societal stereotypes is essential. Their messages confer the dignity and respect absent in popular culture. VOCAL-NY, for example, works with the unhoused and substance users, and designates their committees as a users union and a homeless union. The title of union member dignifies their membership and emphasizes their collective power. Just the act of listening and taking members’ concerns seriously can be transformative. Tasha Coppinger, organizer for Hoosier Action in Indiana, is committed to a rural base and describes a contact she had: “We were out door-knocking and knocked on this one door and these two teenage girls answered. We were talking about contamination, and they said ‘Our parents aren’t home, but our mom really cares about this. Here’s her number, give her a call.’ So I called this woman up and we met for coffee, and we talked for a long time. And she had had cancer and was just incredibly concerned about environmental issues. She cried, and she said, ‘nobody listens to me. It’s so nice to be sitting here with somebody who’s actually listening to me.’ She got a chance to speak and ask the question about the environmental issues at the candidate forum that we hosted, and it was huge for her, it was this opportunity to finally get some answers. And since then she’s hosted house meetings, and she’s working on an investigation right now of a corporation that’s right next to the one that’s

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in question that we just got some interesting information about. So she’s leading an investigation around that.” Organizations are working to improve their communications. Their websites, newsletters, and communications are clear, direct, down to earth, and avoid the jargon and finger pointing that we often hear in academic and media circles. They focus on what’s wrong and why and the changes that would make things better. They strive to educate rather than divide people, and they invite people to join, think, learn, and act together. The messages are designed to be inclusive and culturally syntonic, reaching people who may not initially agree with the organization’s positions. We heard many stories about members who had started on the right of the political spectrum and through their participation in the organization were able to reflect and change their minds. The consistent and hopeful messages of the organization and the collegiality that the organizations inspire facilitate that change. Navigating this requires skill and intention; it can be extremely difficult and requires leadership and staff attention, particularly given the influence of social media. The organization’s communication plan and use of digital technology is extremely important in presenting a consistent message to members and to the public. This type of effort requires funding support, and unless it is funded it risks becoming the invisible work of organizing rather than being understood as part of the essential recruitment and relationship development of organizing. There is help for organizations to enhance their messaging. For instance, from 2017 to 2019, the Narrative Initiative helped several organizations in Minnesota develop a communications infrastructure that aligned with their theories of change, missions, and campaigns. Our Minnesota Future was one of the coalitions that participated in this work. The Narrative Initiative’s (2019) research found that the organizations’ counternarrative was more effective when it came from multiple sources who participated in the affiliation, which is an additional reason for building coalitions. We have said throughout that major media generally do not credit organizations for their victories. In part, this has to do with the decreasing number of journalists and local media outlets, but a story about a working organization is also not as accessible, easy to comprehend, or as interesting as a charismatic person or a spontaneous protest. Social action organizations must tell their stories to the public, and they are more complicated than a quick and easy headline. Consequently, we expect that social action

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organizations will continue to invent new ways to make their megaphones bigger and better. Technology has the potential to get their stories out to a wider audience, to reach people beyond their membership. We hope funders such as the Ford Foundation, which helped launch the Narrative Initiative, will continue to develop media allies who will take the time and space to report on these organizations and credit them for their work (Renkl, 2021). Organizations are already finding ways of using, or better yet establishing, their own radio, television, and print media to get out their messages, campaign stories, and victories. The public needs to hear about them, and it can only increase the loyalty and good feeling that members have about their organizational homes. We urge organizations to continue to communicate messages that are inclusive, resonate with the experiences and views of the people they are working with, and are conciliatory rather than divisive and aggressive. These messages contrast with extreme communications on both the right and the left, and they are harder to misconstrue or disagree with. Organizations should not give up on leadership education that includes a radical analysis, but we find the radical pragmatism in their narratives most promising. THE NEED FOR RESOURCES: ROLES FOR FUNDERS AND NETWORKS

If there is anything that has not changed in the evolution of organizing, it is the critical role of consistent funding and the many challenges organizations face in ensuring they have adequate resources to do their work. If social action organizing is to grow, prosper, and realize its transformative potential, all stakeholders in its success need to identify the long-term coordinated resources necessary to support, sustain, and scale up effective social action organizations. Among the most frequently cited resource needs are funders, particularly private foundations and wealthy donors, unions, as well as the various organizing networks we have mentioned throughout this book. Our study focused on organizing people, but every organizer and leader knows that winning change requires organized people and organized money. The topic of resources for organizing and the roles and responsibilities of the many other stakeholders in this work as it relates to funding is a book in and of itself. Indeed, the literature on this topic has become more

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urgent in recent years (Giridharadas, 2019; McAlevey, 2020; Villanueva, 2021). Although funding has not been our focus, its importance cannot be overstated. In nearly every interview we conducted, the impact and influence of funders on the work of organizing is a point of reference, and rarely in a positive light. Social action organizations are making use of funding from unions as organizational and campaign partners. The funding capacity of unions was not as deeply impacted as predicted by the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Janus vs. AFSCME, which ruled that unions in the public sector can no longer charge nonmembers fair share or agency fees. Make the Road New York uses government funding for service provision to help sustain its infrastructure, but Deborah Axt, then coexecutive director, says that fund-raising is their greatest challenge. “It’s just incredibly hard to resource an effort to really build power in an age where corporations are massively consolidating their power and where money has come to dominate politics in an unprecedented way . . . the super wealthy are virtually unfettered at this point under Citizens United in their ability to form new entities that in themselves become persons and have full speech rights and the ability to elevate their voices with billions and now even trillions of dollars.” There is literature to support her views (Lau, 2019). Most progressive social action organizations are still dependent on philanthropy. Overall, funding tends to be short term, erratic, responsive to current events and funder preferences rather than supportive of long-term campaigns and the interests of members. Resources that are not coordinated with campaigns that have the support of leaders and in which leaders make the strategic choices can derail rather than advance an organization’s progress. We heard about organizations turning down needed funds from private and government sources because they could see that down the line it would limit the impact of their campaigns. Philanthropy dollars are usually directed at securing issue wins rather than building power and providing infrastructure needs of the organization. This includes funding for base building, long-term staffing, access to research, assistance with communications, and training options for staff and leadership for smaller and newer organizations. Organizations are desperately in need of unrestricted funds that can support experimentation as well as needed infrastructure during and between issue campaigns. This all needs to change. Organizations need long-term, multiyear support

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funding from philanthropy. Nat Chioke Williams, executive director of the Hill-Snowdon Foundation, says that “philanthropy is a central culprit in helping to actually make organizations less effective because they’re cutting them up into these smaller and smaller, more specialized pieces when you need the whole; you don’t need less of the whole, you need more of the whole acting together.” Felicia Griffin, of PowerSwitch Action, points out that funders spend lavishly for political activity around elections and then withdraw when support for base building needs to be happening all year round. This can be the case for both the (c)(3) and (c)(4) sides of the work. “I still think that funders don’t get it, and they’re not willing to invest in long-term relationship building and building power in a way that we need to build it. We’re still building, and the way that they’re funding organizing is campaign to campaign, election cycle to election cycle. That doesn’t give us the time we need to build in a community in a geography with a deep, rich, organizing committee of people. And not enough money, of course. We’re always trying to figure out how we can repurpose money to make sure that we have enough for our organizers, and we’re always an organizer too short.” This need coincides with a wake-up call within progressive philanthropy, galvanized in the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and increased attention to racial justice. As core supporters for organizing, some funders are adapting organizing principles for their own work. We hypothesize that this may be driven by more organizers and activists moving into professional roles in philanthropy, by young people of wealth influenced by progressive political perspectives, and by many years of effort among organizers to educate, push, and partner with philanthropy. As Mark Schultz, then executive director of the Land Stewardship Project, told us, this means “not just getting the money, but changing how funders think about things.” This is a positive development, even as this type of funding remains a fraction of philanthropic dollars overall. In itself, it is inadequate at best, given the scale of what is needed to truly seize the magnitude of the crisis and the opportunity at hand. Yet it points directly to needed change. Farhad Ebrahimi (2021), founder and president of the Chorus Foundation, offers one example of the rising voices of a new generation of wealthy donors committed to social change. Chorus moved its resources to achieving a Just Transition, the frame that Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and others in our study use to win the transition

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from an extractive economy to a restorative set of policies and practices. Ebrahimi is a self-described organizer within philanthropy and asserts: “If we sketch a working definition of ‘organizing’ as the process of building collective power and developing leadership to effect structural change, then ‘funder organizing’ must focus on building power, developing leadership, and effecting structural change within the philanthropic sector itself. This work must be informed by and accountable to pre-existing organizing efforts taking place in marginalized and oppressed communities, but it must also be its own, distinct practice with its own knowledge, skills, relationships, and cultural competencies. . . . We must take the question of power seriously, not only as the lens for what we fund or for how we fund it but for how decisions get made within our own sector, including in our own organizations” (para. 8). In addition to pushing for change in philanthropy and partnering with funders who share that commitment, social action organizations have begun to develop financial resources that increase their autonomy. Usually that means self-funding through member dues and other self-generated contributions. Most of the organizations have developed a member dues structure; they find that people are willing and able to make that investment in the organizations where they lead. Deborah Axt, from Make the Road New York, says that “even small slices of unrestricted funding are gold, so an increasing amount of member control dues money is critical.” Mark Schultz, from Land Stewardship Project, says: “We made a determination 10 years ago . . . to really double down on membership and individual giving. We raised $646,000 in individual giving last fiscal year. That augments our organizing because to be out and asking people to give, you better be doing something that they care about. It’s a good test. If you can’t do that, then they’re saying [the community], ‘you’re not relevant to me.’ ” Adam Mason, former policy director at Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (Iowa CCI), stresses the importance of organizational autonomy in this story: We need our organizations to be member driven in every sense of the word and that also means in fund-raising. One of our strengths at CCI is that we are a membership organization, that means members pay dues, members invest in the work, they put their money where their mouth is, and that gives

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an organization freedom to do some of the things it needs to do. Here at CCI, we might not have taken on the Dakota Access Pipeline fight in Iowa had we not had member support to do that, because we weren’t getting a grant to fight a pipeline. It did lead to institutional support, but we had the capacity because of our member support to divert staff capacity to that. So financial resources, obviously, but I think it needs to be from the movement as well. We look at how much money the U.S. just spent in this election cycle. All that comes from people. If that was put into organizations and movement building that was year round and not just elections focused, or it was put into organizations that were doing movement politics so it does get the election outcome that you’re looking for, but then it builds organization and movement on the ground for the long haul, I think that would be helpful.

Pilot projects such as the Independent Resource Generation Hub are experimenting with ways to raise and retain sustained investments in organizing campaigns within communities rather than having financial support enter and exit communities based on funder interests (Amalgamated Foundation, 2020). Political donors may want the organization to pursue specific policies that support their state’s industry or favorite issue. Organizations are also trying to attract funders and donors who support not only the mission and issue campaigns of the organization but their theory of change as well. They are seeking a funding structure that aligns with the organization’s vision and supports the autonomy they need to act, and to avoid the distractions that funders sometimes cause. Self-funding is one strategy that promotes autonomy, but it may not be sufficient, especially in very low-income communities. When it comes to broadening the scope of impact, state-based coalitions and organizations hold great potential for increasing power. They foster the capacity to take more responsibility for leveraging state funding and bringing in national stakeholders, but they face many challenges around resourcing their work. Funders and individual donors, including political donors, can lead with their own desired outcomes rather than fund the infrastructure necessary to build a statewide coalition, and their influence can drive which states are prioritized. Even as foundation and labor funding has grown for state and local community organizing infrastructure, organizations are often caught in a complex network of intermediaries that can be in tension with their autonomy and accountability to a broad-base

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of members. National funders need to reckon with their own theory of change about the role of local and state organizing. There is also a role for government funding in support of organizing linked to service provision, such as at Make the Road New York, as well as training programs like those currently funded through AmeriCorp, which open pathways into organizing for low-income people of color. Andy Mott, of the Community Learning Partnership, brings decades of experience to this question, comparing the relatively modest programs available today to past investment of Great Society programs in the 1960s that helped to skill up a generation. In addition, campaign wins can include resources for social action organizations to implement what they have won, shaping continued organizing efforts. Government invests in collective priorities all the time, and securing such sources on the federal and state level is an area worthy of advocacy and exploration. Funding is essential to scaling up organizing, and fund-raising is an extremely time intensive task. Fund-raising requires relationship building and strategy and makes demands on the time of leaders and staff that take them away from base building and campaign work. Although the establishment of multiple organizational structures—501 (c)(3), 501(c)(4), and PACs—holds a great deal of potential, it requires staff and leaders to fund-raise for three organizations rather than one. Also, as women and people of color increasingly assume leadership, their roles include organizing money, with all of the associated challenges. Intersectional injustices described throughout this book extend to the experiences of women and people of color charged with raising money within a context that is still largely controlled by majority white boards and leadership, and patriarchal values and systems. The reality is that the long-term goals of organizing require a deep, sustained redistribution of resources and a recognition of what the true cost is of organizing for power. Although there is some minimal incremental progress, with organizers being invited onto progressive boards, more attention in needed to sustain Black-led funds, women’s funds, and participatory grant-making that engage impacted communities. We heard loud and clear from organizers and our key informants that philanthropy as a whole is missing what it costs and requires to do base building for power— and is simply not accountable to the people and fields it supports to do this work (Race to Lead, 2021).

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Farhad Ebrahimi (2021) provides an analysis that reflects what we heard from organizers about the very essence of their work: My own aspiration is to deploy family philanthropy as a tactic for reparations, with the rather large caveat that this involves explicitly challenging what words like “philanthropy” or “investment” usually mean. And I believe that the concept of reparations in its fullest sense will require rethinking aspects of our entire political economy—not just “paying off a debt” within the current system. There is no justice at scale within the confines of racial capitalism. Philanthropy as it’s conventionally understood is the product of racial capitalism. As a result, I see progressive—or even radical—private philanthropy as, at best, a transitional form. If we seek to support transformational work, then we ourselves must be open to transformation. I like to think of this as a “just transition” for the philanthropic sector: we must directly challenge the conditions that produced the wealth inequality that allowed for private philanthropy in the first place. (para. 22–23)

We have only minimally addressed the challenges of fund-raising here, but we hope that this book illuminates and encourages the difficult strategic and affirming work of organizing people at a time when the stakes have never been higher. Implicit in that intention is that going forward others will take up the clarion call to action for philanthropic responsiveness, making unrestricted dollars easily available on the ground to those who need it and know how to spend it for building power and achieving impact. THE ROLE OF NETWORKS

Organizing networks play a central role in organizing in the United States, and their role has evolved over time. Maria Mottola, then executive director of New York Foundation, which funds much of the organizing in New York, captured some of this evolution. Many years ago, if you got a room full of organizers together, most of them would have been doing housing work and organizing work and then there might have been a smattering of people that were working on other things.

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But that’s where the resources were, at that time anyway, and I feel like that’s different. It started to get different in the 1990s, and then into the 2000s where you could get a room full of organizers around the city together and people might be working on environmental justice, on workers’ rights, on immigrant rights, on public health issues. . . . Most of the organizing groups either fell into ACORN groups or IAF groups, and some were community development organizations. But if you then looked at our grant making in the late 1990s and into the 2000s, it starts to be groups that are unaffiliated. Groups have broken away from the networks for a variety of reasons. It just seemed richer and that there were more varieties of organizations. There were direct service groups also doing organizing, so they didn’t neatly fit into those categories anymore. What has been essential throughout is the emphasis on choosing issues that are meaningful to the people you’re working with, not coming in with an issue and saying, “we should all be doing something about this.”

Today there are many national organizing networks, and we interviewed organizers from some of them and their affiliates as key informants. By their very nature, organizing networks represent both organized people and organized money. And that equals power in the organizing landscape. The role of networks today is complex and consequential. Networks are essentially intermediaries. As such, there are often conflicting demands of affiliation, funding distribution, and partners who are accountable to different sets of stakeholders. At a basic level, organizers told us that organizing networks continue to provide similar things: training for leaders and organizers, sponsorship for new organizations, help with funding support, connections to consultants for research and communications, and access often to national issues and campaigns. The networks also hold conventions that enable leaders to interact across issue areas and locations. They lift morale by demonstrating to local leaders, many of whom rarely leave their hometowns or neighborhoods, that they are part of a greater movement. In the best case scenarios, the organizations can choose what help they want and who they want to get it from. On the more challenging side, the power of networks to redistribute resources can shape the field. Earlier in this chapter, we touched on this complicated subject.

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The role of networks in scaling up the work and redistributing funding resources has evolved over time, going beyond their early role of establishing ideological training grounds. Negotiating access to funding and power relationships can be contentious. Relationships among networks have long been marked by competition for allegiance and resources (Schutz, 2015c). In terms of allegiance, that seems to be shifting, as locally based organizations choose to affiliate with multiple networks, or none at all, and as they collaborate with one another in new and innovative formations to gain the same benefits of funding, training, and campaign scale that they once sought primarily from networks. We have cited initiatives such as Our Minnesota Future (Land Stewardship Project, 2017), Build the Bench (n.d.), and Athena For All (n.d.). Organizing in rural areas, using election strategies alongside issue organizing, and statewide organizing models also offer examples that deserve to be replicated in other parts of the country. Mark Schultz, then executive director of the Land Stewardship Project in Minnesota, has exactly that model in mind: “I actually don’t think anything any of us care about can happen without organizing in rural communities and building powerful bases. I think that’s been one of the lessons of our time. I’m hopeful because in Minnesota that’s recognized and there’s an organization doing it. There’s a couple of other organizations that are emphasizing more of what they’re doing in Greater Minnesota. But on the national level, I think it’s got to be built state by state and then we’ll take back the rest.” Networks can be helpful in exchanging information, disseminating effective practices and models, and realizing the state-bystate expansion that Mark Schultz describes. This topic is, in and of itself, worthy of extensive documentation, study, and analysis. Organizing networks still raise strong feelings and opinions on all sides. This subject is beyond the scope of this study, but we hope others take up this charge. HOPEFULNESS AND THE EVOLUTION OF ORGANIZING

The years 2020 and 2021 were challenging times for organizers as they were for many of us. Leadership was in even greater crisis than usual during the COVID-19 pandemic. The organizations lost members and staff to the disease, others were evicted, lost their jobs, or risked their lives working through the pandemic in dangerous settings. Staff members were suddenly

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shifting from the face-to-face work that drives and sustains the hard work of organizing to working remotely, often while navigating their own traumatic experiences such as illness or family job loss. The fragility of their members’ existence, and oftentimes their own, and the extreme inequality of American society was laid bare. It is never easy to organize, but this tested and stretched organizations at every level. Almost a third of the organizers we interviewed left their jobs in those two years. Some long-term organizers retired, some went on to new organizations. The People’s Climate Movement, which was an affiliation of climate groups, closed its doors. But the organizing went on. Young organizers stepped into executive director positions, increasing staff diversity. The organizations increased their services to members, helping them to negotiate the systems for vaccines, stimulus payments, and eviction moratoriums. They joined together to protest George Floyd’s and Breonna Taylor’s murders and increased their work on police reform. They strengthened their electoral work. They continued to evolve, coming up with creative ways to fight inequality. They sustained their belief that collectively, social action organizations are capable of making transformational change in the American political and economic system. Most of all, they remained both hopeful and determined to realize their vision. As we have done throughout this book, their continuing commitment is described in their own words. Mark Schultz is hopeful about the potential for change in rural Minnesota: “What I see is that Land Stewardship Project can continue to build a permanent progressive base in rural communities for change. . . . and in so doing, build the elements of a more egalitarian economy where the land is held by many, not just a few, and a healthier land where the water is not contaminated and the soil is healthy and we’re not destroying the planet through climate change. You can see it, we can do those things.” The organizers understand the odds they are working against, but they are not intimidated by them. They remain both pragmatic and positive. Adam Mason, from Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, expressed great optimism: “We’re seeing unprecedented attacks, the resurgence of white nationalism, and much more public hateful rhetoric that at this point is beyond rhetoric and hurts people and can lead to people dying. It just reinforces the importance of this work because it is rooted in change that takes place in people, and I believe that if we keep at it, we’ll make life better for more people. I think at the end of the day, we want people to feel like

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they did what they can do. We know that if we put our all into it, that we will make progress, and in a year from now, 10 years from now, 40 years from now, we’ll be closer to the promised land than we were today. That’s not to say that there’s not going to be setbacks, obviously there will be. But sometimes those setbacks are just better opportunities.” The organizers continue to make plans to confront the challenges. They constantly have new ideas about what to try, whether it be electoral activism or moving from local to statewide to national campaigns. Bobby King, former director of policy and organizing for the Land Stewardship Project, explained that “when I came into organizing, and probably this is true of a lot of younger organizers, you’re on the outside looking in, you want to shake it up and push those in power to bend them to your will and get them to do the right thing. But we have more and more realized a goal has to be actually to get governing power; is to put people like us, our members, into places of power within government at the township level, county level, state level, that we need government itself working in partnership with us. Government will never be enough. You’ll always need to mobilize people to move government and to support government and push it, but we also want to have the governing power.” Lauren Jacobs, executive director of PowerSwitch Action, explains her vision going forward: I think our major contribution to the broader movement can be to contribute, and in some cases lead, a municipal-ist, Metropolitan-ist movement here in the U.S. where the bulk of people live in the country and where we’d know that we have a better chance governing, and we don’t see that only as elected roles, but running civic institutions too. We really get serious about not just tinkering and doing harm reduction, although we see those as obviously important, but that we get serious about transformational governance and transforming the economy. We have been very inspired and want to learn more about the work that’s happening in Europe. We’ll be taking a trip to Barcelona this year. We’re seeing Berlin is going to vote on making public 200,000 units of housing and whether they’re going to ban large landlords from the center of the city. I think we have to be ambitious here. Every housing activist knows there’s no way we can build our way out of the housing crisis. It’s really going to have to be a lot of different strategies so that real estate or capital more broadly cannot function the way that they are anymore.

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Their hope is born out of the commitment and energy of their members and leaders. They have faith in what people working together will do. Kate Hess Pace, executive director of Hoosier Action, told us that “we’re pretty transparent with our membership, and they’re pretty aware this is a decades long struggle that we’re in. And that’s where the community building really matters. It’s this act of being in this organization fulfills multiple needs for people, and isn’t just a transactional political act. We lost everything in the election; we’re a (c)(4) so we did endorse in our congressional race. And we are part of the country that went backward, if I’m speaking in a partisan way. And it was my members that said ‘what do we do now?’ They didn’t say, ‘I’m done.’ They said ‘what’s next?’ They’re really clear that this was going to take a long time, and they’re eager to do the work that needs to get done.” Mary Hooks, then codirector of Southerners on New Ground (SONG), agrees: “I think there’s a lot of inspiration that folks are seeing from other movements that are happening globally that could really shift the climate and the temperature. We see the hostility that’s coming from the right from this current [Trump] administration, etc. And I think that we can meet that hostility, not necessarily with the same level of rage, but I think at SONG we talk about organizing from a place of desire, of longing, and not just anger. And so I think there’s an opportunity to evoke that in others, and that’s how we mobilize from that place and be able to move people from a place of vision.” CONCLUSION

We, too, believe in the resourcefulness of these organizations, that they will continue to experiment, to generate alternative approaches, evolve, and effectively contend for power. We believe that they are working to ensure that “We the People,” especially Black Americans and others who have long been sidelined, have a very active voice in government and that their concerns are heard and acted on by the democratic institutions that are designed to serve the people’s needs. We leave you with the words of Felicia Griffin, deputy director of PowerSwitch Action, who is calmly committed to doing the work needed to keep American democracy vital: “I think that many of us in the sector believe we’ve got to have an ideology shift and create our new North Star, a new

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American dream to bring communities together. It’s only going to take the action of our communities, when enough is enough, and that we must demand our democracy back. We’re going to have to fight for it. I think we understand that that’s the people, and that we’ve done everything else. We’ve done the data, we’ve done everything else, and if those things still aren’t working, what else is there to do but organize?”

POSTSCRIPT Reckoning and Resolve If we are to live up to our own time, then victory Won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promised glade, The hill we climb, if only we dare it: Because being American is more than a pride we inherit— It’s the past we step into, and how we repair it. AMANDA GORMAN, THE HILL WE CLIMB

We felt the need for a new edition of our textbook about organizing for power following the presidential election in 2016, and we wrote with a sense of urgency. It soon became clear that we were capturing the evolution of organizing during a period in history that would shape our world. Today the United States is reckoning with its long history of racism, a crisis of democracy, a health crisis, an economic crisis, and a climate crisis. The Trump election was a numbing political moment, followed by a reckoning with how we got there that initiated a series of historic demonstrations in the streets. Social action organizers and leaders began to reexamine their approaches and tactics—shaken but emboldened to fight back. Some people believed this election outcome was an aberration that democracy in action would fix, but nothing about this time points to a deviation swiftly and easily addressed. Soon after we completed our interviews, three well-documented shockwaves rocked the United States. First, the COVID-19 pandemic locked down much of the country in March 2020, setting off a devastating, fearful, and wearying time of loss, grief, and social isolation. Organizing continued to evolve amid waves of illness and death. No area of work, life, or politics was untouched. The pandemic affected everyone—but not equally—and it both reflected and has come to define our political divides. Second, the unprovoked killings of Black Americans—including Breonna Taylor,

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Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd—galvanized collective sorrow and rage, and historic numbers of protests filled the streets in the spring and summer of 2020. Third, voter suppression and overt attacks on voting rights both marked and followed the November 2020 election of President Joe Biden. Trump’s false narrative that the election was stolen from him culminated in a deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. And throughout this time, climate disasters were occurring with frightening regularity: wildfires burned across the West, a polar vortex froze Texas, temperatures reached record highs in Alaska, and tornadoes appeared in places that had never before experienced them. The organizers we interviewed were speaking to us before the onset of the pandemic, and our analysis began before the crises we’ve named, even if long in the making, came to dominate every aspect of American life. We have integrated some perspectives that grew out of the pandemic experience, but we could not provide a definitive overview of what changed or stayed the same as the ground shifted under our collective feet. We cannot even provide that level of careful analysis in this brief postscript. Here we offer some examples and our own observations about what this time could mean for social action organizing. OLD DISPARITIES, NEW ISSUES FOR ORGANIZING

As the pandemic surged, the nature of intersectional injustice was clearly exposed. The intensification of racial and economic disparities and the plight of vulnerable people in our systems confirmed long-standing issues for organizing. It also pointed to new opportunities for social action organizations to address the underlying causes and to change the narrative. A disease that demanded we be separated to be safe highlighted some commonly held fundamental human needs for attachment and social relationships. Among the many realities exposed by the pandemic was a need for a public sector response when our systems are pushed to the breaking point. One area of the economy that came into focus was the experience of workers—particularly undocumented people of color—who were doing what was acknowledged to be “essential work.” When the world shut down, these workers went out to warehouses, grocery stores, taxis, farm fields, food processing plants, and medical facilities to maintain the flow of food, goods, and care. They could not retreat into their homes and work online.

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Many of these low-wage workers had no economic choice. They went to their jobs and were often not adequately protected there. Many became ill and a disproportionate number of them lost their lives. We heard heartwrenching reports from organizations included in our research that lost an unthinkable number of members and leaders. The very policies social action organizations had long been fighting to enact—paid sick leave, health care, safe working conditions—were not there to protect their members. In what became known as the “great resignation,” workers across all sectors of the economy began to rebel, dropping out of an inherently untenable culture and practice of work in the United States. Consequently, there are timely opportunities for social action organizing to take on issues of work at a more targeted mass scale. These issues include access to fair wages, the ways in which health care is linked to work, the need for balance in work and life and for childcare, and how job opportunities are linked to race and gender. The victory and successful implementation of the Excluded Workers Fund in New York State is one example of this trend. As the federal government moved massive amounts of stimulus funds into the economy by increasing and expanding unemployment insurance and depositing cash into people’s bank accounts, many families were saved. But hundreds of thousands of low-wage workers without immigration status were left out of that cash relief. In 2021, after statewide organizing that included the leadership of a coalition in which Make the Road New York and New York Communities for Change were a galvanizing force, New York State established the first in the nation Excluded Workers Fund. It resulted in a designated $2.1 billion for cash payments to individual undocumented workers. Coalition members were then engaged in ensuring that workers could access these funds. This example points to the radical pragmatism we’ve described. Direct relief payments of up to $15,600 to undocumented workers would have been considered an impossible dream a year earlier. But organizers picked up on how this issue directly addressed a concrete need, and they constructed an affirming narrative at a time when many workers were relying on the government to support their recovery. At the same time, it was radical in its demand. A community-labor coalition influenced government using disruptive tactics such as closing down bridges and holding a 23-day hunger strike. The victory occurred in the same country that had

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elected Donald Trump on a promise to build a border wall to keep Latinx people out of the United States. Seizing the opportunity of the moment, there are ongoing efforts to expand this fund to other states and to make it permanent. Other issues call for the same level of vision, focus, and tenacity. The voting rights protections achieved in the civil rights movement decades ago are being contested anew. It is a chilling wake-up call to the country that organizers have long had in their sights, and this issue is now in full view. The Trump election marked a time of inescapable exposure to our gaping racial, economic, and gender-based divides. Organizers on the right are exploiting those divides, and they drive the agenda of corporate power that we have pointed out in nearly every chapter of this book. The calculated right-wing agenda of gerrymandering, politicization of the courts, hyper-local organizing to control election outcomes, and the threat of violence at the polls is a reality. It underscores the adage of the labor movement that hardly feels like hyperbole at this time—we must “organize or die.” Social action organizations have embraced the strategy of having distinct political arms for their work and are not relying on the activities of a  501(c)(3) nonprofit structure to achieve their goals. New 501(c)(4) and PAC organizations are running candidates who look like their constituents and are accountable to the community, fighting to overturn a wave of voter suppression measures, and demanding funding for organizing all year round to educate and activate voters. This trend is essential and will need our support. In light of the armed insurrection on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, it is important to note that tactics used by progressive social action organizations must be peaceful. Some groups are using aggressive or disruptive tactics. For example, protesters shut down traffic relatively briefly, but deeply symbolically, by marching en masse across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge to support the Excluded Workers Fund. In contrast to right-wing organizations, progressive social action organizations use tactics that are peaceful, are symbolic of the problem, and are designed to show their power to the target while garnering public support. Tactics that are intrusive and embarrassing to the target are considered legitimate protest. They are not morally equivalent to violence.

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As organizations do this work, they are up against the unfettered resources of corporate wealth and an agenda dedicated to silencing the majority voice. Voting rights are the quintessential example of victories that must be won on many levels, over and over again. In the United States, voting rights have been exposed for their vulnerability, and the attacks designed to limit these rights demonstrate why social action organizing is foundational to democracy itself. The fight is on. TRUSTED SPACES: A CALL TO ACTION

Social action organizing—long sustained by relationships and the core imperative to build across race, class, and gender—has evolved to fill the gaps left by a range of insulated and often declining community institutions. This is one reason social action organizations had to ramp up their response to immediate needs as the pandemic took hold. People turned to their trusted organizations as sources of relief and information. As organizations shut down their physical spaces, they distributed whatever food, diapers, medicine, cleaning supplies, or other essentials they could muster. They used technology to stay connected and to raise funds to distribute cash and goods to members’ households. As they did so, they kept their focus on their core goal of functioning as vehicles to move people to action for long-term systems change. We expect that the role of social action organizations as centers of trust, both intentional and proactive in their political and policy agendas and responsive in the face of disasters— whether related to public health, climate, or democracy—will only strengthen the evolution of this work. The obstacles, however, are as blatant as the needs. The right has stoked resistance to efforts to curb the pandemic as a breach of individual freedom rather than necessary public health protections. Social action organizations face the challenges of keeping their members safe and healthy, and uniting them around a new issue. Disinformation has spread as fast as the disease itself. Organizers will continue to bring people together in multiracial organizations and build relationships of depth, trust, and power in a changed logistical landscape. Central to this is that organizing led by Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian Pacific Islander, and other people of color is a fundamental necessity. Working for racial equity is a core

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imperative. New literature illuminates the challenges and opportunities, and we have talked about some of the ways organizations are meeting these challenges. Two additional areas are being developed by organizers. One is the role of unifying narratives based on facts and solidarity that offer hope. The other is the role of technology: videoconferencing, work from home, and virtual communities. In the realm of technology, tracking and digital outreach are already expanding, with tools like AI and apps more widely accessed. Having a strong digital program has long been crucial, and we expect it will be viewed as absolutely essential going forward. Virtual options for meetings, fund-raising, and collaboration will continue to develop and are likely to expand. As organizing evolves, the essential need to maintain and deepen human connection as the primary work of building power for justice will not change. In the arena of narrative, messages of belonging and identifying commonly held needs and aspirations could not be more important. It is a narrative that contrasts with right-wing organizing that stokes fear and division as the country moves to a population that is majority people of color. In voting rights, we see the power of inclusive messaging. Successful efforts in Florida in 2018, led by Desmond Meade and the Florida Restoration Rights Coalition, returned the vote to those who had long been discriminated against and disenfranchised due to convictions. This Black-led and constituent-led multifaceted organizing campaign over many years relied on messages of restoring human dignity. All along the way, and following a win at the ballot box, it met with a fever pitch of racist, fear-inflamed resistance that continues. In 2020, voters from marginalized communities stood up to suppression tactics in many parts of the country, lining up for hours to cast their ballots. Voting is a fundamental right in a democracy, and the commitments that the majority of Americans have demonstrated to fight for the right for everyone to cast their vote shows the importance of a narrative of shared values. Organizations will continue to create and find venues for expressing their messages. We face vicious, divisive, strategic power blocks and limitless resources of capitalist interests. In this time of fissures, fear, information overload, and extremism on all sides, organizing across divisions with messages in which we see our shared humanity is our only hope. The pictures organizers for justice paint, how people see themselves in those

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pictures, the commonalities that can resonate through shared needs and experiences—and the stories they frame—will be defining. In the areas of narrative shift and technology, new generations of organizers and leaders will bring forward their vision and forge exciting innovations to build the work. They are the leaders of the present and the future. The time to invest in their success is now. The need for human connection and for organizations to serve as trusted political homes and vehicles for change will only intensify. Our hope is that they flourish and grow and are able to replicate their successes. The landscape requires social action organizations as well as statewide and community-union partnerships in red states as well as blue, in more industries and workplaces, and in urban, rural, and suburban communities. We all know the stakes. This is a call to action for funders, donors, government programs, academics and their institutions, advocates, helping professions, and other stakeholders. We must all be fervent participants and allies, committed to the success of organizing on a massive scale, led by those closest to the pain and, increasingly, to the fire. What we’re experiencing and bearing witness to is the result of deep structural inequity propagated by generations of choices our country has made and continues to make. In this time of reckoning, the choices we make now in our own resolve and in our communities, our states, and our country will shape the world we will live in into the future. Fear and oppression do not support a vision for multiracial working-class feminist politics. Our lives are intertwined in the desire and right to be seen, heard, supported, valued—equitably and unequivocally. Organizing for power includes the right to be alive, joyful, and free. No one can know the road ahead. We suspect that it will be a long road, not a moment or even a series of moments but a transformative era. If people rise to the challenge in this period of crisis and a time of sustainable solidarity and justice prevail, it will be because “we the people” organized for the power to make it so.

APPENDIX Study Methods

This appendix briefly describes the methods used to design and implement the study of social action organizing that underlies the discussion in this book. The discussion of progressive social action organizing is grounded in the data and analysis from our study of 40 organizers in 20 organizations. The aims of the study were to secure detailed respondent-generated descriptions of progressive social action organizing—the perspectives and values, assessments and opinions, and the activities—and make comparisons across organizations and validate or rebut what past and current literature tells us about organizing. We generated our initial set of study questions based on the series of questions we pursued in the 1994 research of organizer attributes (e.g., values, knowledge, backgrounds and experiences, interaction skills) and typical areas of concern in the organizing process (e.g., base building, member recruitment, leadership development, issues, strategy, campaigns, and organizational development). We then developed additional research questions based on conversations with 13 key informants, including funders of organizing, executive directors of organizing networks, academics with expertise in organizing, people with labor and community organizing experience, and center directors. Key informants were interviewed using an open-ended question format that delved into areas of organizing they thought were new and important today.

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Newer areas included developing research questions about social media and the use of digital technologies; theory of change; racism, misogyny, and homophobia; and organizational structures. The key informant interviews were videotaped and reviewed by both authors to identify generalized and new content we used to formulate additional research questions. With advances in technology, we were able to both further specify and broaden our sample of organizations. We decided early on to focus our sample on organizations that in 1994 were called grassroots organizations; i.e., they organized their base from people closest to the pain (then usually in neighborhoods) and engaged an active membership and leadership in building disciplined organizations that were seen as the major source of power. We were curious to learn more about what the organizations did to consistently pursue the development, broad participation, and leadership of members. This decision allowed us to conduct a deeper analysis into how the organizations build power by expanding their base of members and leaders. Using technology we expanded our sample to include organizations from a larger geographic area including the Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. We drew on a variety of resources, using our personal knowledge of existing organizations, as well as suggestions from funders of organizing and our key informants to generate a list of more than 50 organizations that met our criteria. Our study results could not be generalized to all progressive social action organizations because the term “organizing” does not have a specific narrow meaning. Organizations are not easy to categorize; some groups come into existence and then disappear rather quickly, and some organizations do organizing work only intermittently while also focusing on advocacy or service. Instead, we chose to focus our study on a qualitative understanding of organizing. We used the following screening criteria to select organizations: (1) a formal organization existed; (2) there were at least two paid staff people, one of whom had responsibility for organizing; (3) the organizations had expressed goals to build membership and develop leadership as a means of building power; and (4) two staff members agreed to complete our survey and to participate in a videotaped interview. We intentionally selected organizations that reflected geographic diversity; were organizing in rural, suburban, and urban areas; and were working at different levels including

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neighborhood groups, statewide organizations, multistate organizations, and national networks. We also selected groups representing diverse populations and issue areas such as housing and land use, gentrification, LGBTQ+ rights, racial justice, immigration, workers rights, environmental justice, and mass incarceration. Our findings cannot be generalized to all social action organizations because we excluded conservative and rightwing organizations and our sample size of progressive organizations is limited. However, we believe that our study contributes to a deeper understanding of progressive social action organizations today. Forty-three groups met our screening criteria, and we set a goal of N = 20 organizations. We administered an organizational survey prior to conducting videotaped interviews with two staff members from each group. The questionnaire was completed by all of the organizations, securing information on organizational history, goals, and campaigns; experience of the executive director and organizer; organizational structure, size, and composition of staff; activities and campaigns; funding sources and budget; and size and composition of constituency, membership, and leadership. Items on the survey related to structure, tax status, membership, and budget were easy to quantify, leaving about 10 percent of the items that needed to be placed in qualitative categories. Our design included two respondents from each organization: the organization’s executive director and a staff member responsible for organizing and campaign work. The executive director was asked to recommend the appropriate organizer to interview because organizations staff their organizing efforts differently. One organization asked that three staff members be included in the interviews, and one organization asked that only the executive director, who had also led the organization’s major campaign, be interviewed. For the executive directors, we designed a 27-question interview requiring about 60 minutes to complete. The interview probed general questions about the organization and questions about organizing in general. The staff member interview included a 36-question interview requiring about 90 minutes to complete. This interview probed content about the organizer’s role in the organization, membership and leadership, issues, strategy, and campaigns. Both interviews probed content on race, gender, and economic inequality. All questions were open-ended, allowing the interviewees to direct the conversation and expand the questions as they desired.

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All interviews were conducted between 2018 and 2019 with at least two members of the research team present—one asked the questions and the other ensured that all content was covered. The interviews were recorded using Zoom technology. Participants confirmed that they consented to be interviewed and to be recorded. An important element in field research is engaging respondent interest and cooperation. We emphasized during the interviews the respondents’ expertise and our role as learners, that no answer was right or wrong, and we used a conversational approach, asking open-ended questions and probing for details and clarification when necessary. The 40 interviews (and the 13 key informant interviews) were transcribed using Otter software. To enhance trustworthiness and credibility, member checking or respondent validation techniques enabled respondents to reflect on and interpret the data that was provided. Correcting the transcripts was done by a student assistant and reviewed by a member of the research team. Along with the questionnaire answers, these transcriptions constituted the data of the study. To conduct a thematic analysis of the 40 interviews, we used the qualitative software (NVivo) to analyze the transcripts for major themes, using the six-step thematic analysis approach outlined by Braun and Clarke (2006). After reading each transcript several times in its entirety to familiarize ourselves with the data, a team member inductively initially coded the interviews. The researchers reviewed the coding, eliminating redundancies and fine tuning the meaning of some codes. These are the six coding areas: 1. Codes related to the organizers: Attributes of organizers Pathways into organizing Motivation to continue organizing Theory of change of organizers 2. Codes related to the general state of organizing: Theory of change of organizing Power Challenges of organizing Opportunities for organizing Changes still needed in organizing Goals of organizing

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3. Codes related to characteristics of the organizations: Role of formal organizations History of the organization Funding Geographic domain for organizing Goals of the organization Organizational decision-making Sustaining an organization Networks and affiliations 4. Codes related to membership and leadership: Membership Member dues Relationships among members Base building Staff and leader roles Training and leadership development Political education Culture 5. Codes related to the process of organizing: Issues Connecting local to national issues Connections among issues Strategy and tactics Campaigns Evaluating outcomes Short-term wins Victories Celebration Level of change Long-term change Impact of change Political climate Narratives, messages, and frames Social media Technology Tracking participation

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6. Codes related to race, gender, and economic inequality: Race, gender, and economic inequality Intersectionality Economic injustice LGBTQ+

In the Level 2 review, we examined the themes in relation to all the data to ensure that we had captured the entirety and that the themes made sense. We also identified and coded these subthemes: 1. Race, Gender, and Economic Inequality: careful analysis of content on corporatization, racial capitalism, and women in leadership 2. Service Activity: added to the organizational coding

We discussed the themes and their meaning in weekly meetings. To ensure that we accurately understood respondents’ intent, we implemented a member-checking process in which each respondent received a copy of the full transcript and the quotes that we had identified as examples of a particular code. Respondents were asked to verify and clarify the points they were making. Some respondents suggested corrections in the transcription or requested that we exclude names mentioned in the interview, but most respondents offered no changes at all. We then developed our findings about a segment of content using the coding as a guide.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is not our duty to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it. RABBI TARFON, PIRKE AVOT 2:21

The organizers quoted in this book are incredibly inventive, compassionate, and thoughtful. They are also strong, analytical, and determined. Most of all, they are courageous and committed to the long hard slog toward transformational economic and social change. And they are incredibly busy, working long hours each day, designing and working on campaigns, working with leaders, and keeping the organizations afloat. Our deepest gratitude goes to them for spending their time with us and sharing their vision, knowledge, and ideas. This book would not have been possible without their willingness to share their ideas with us: Nancy Aardema, Afua Atta-Mensah, Deborah Axt, Lucas Benitez, Pabitra Benjamin, Jade Brooks, Alex Caputo-Pearl, Narbada Chhetri, Tasha Coopinger, Andrea Dehlendorf, Christian Diaz, Hugh Espey, Brigid Flaherty, Paul Getsos, Felicia Griffin, Fletcher Harper, Mary Hooks, Vivian Yi Huang, Lauren Jacobs, Bobby King, Zachary Lerner, Sandra Lobo, Angela Lopez, Jose Lopez, Adam Mason, Marley Monacello, Catalina Morales, Zach Norris, Kate Hess Pace, Crystal Reyes, Jeremy Saunders, Doran Schrantz, Mark Schultz, Vince Steele, Gabe Strachota, Roberto Tijerina, Jawanza Williams, Jonathan Westin, Chelsea White, and Miya Yoshitani. To all of you, we hope we have done justice to your work. We also want to thank our friends and colleagues who shared their views and offered advice. That includes first and foremost our 13 key informants:

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Holly Delany Cole, Grace Davies, Marshall Ganz, George Goehl, Hahrie Han, Jennifer Epps-Addison, Stephen Lerner, Andy Mott, Maria Mottola, Mary Ohmer, Marilyn Sneiderman, Maurice BP-Weeks, and Nat Chioke Williams. Their views and encouragement were essential to our research and writing. A number of people read segments of the work along the way and made helpful suggestions, including Neil McGuffin and George Leibowitz. Both Scott Wilson, coauthor of the first edition, and John Krinsky, professor of political science at the City College of New York, were involved during the early stages of the research, and their contributions were invaluable. Scott did an analysis of the major findings of the first edition and some of the foundational literature search. John worked on both the methods and the coding and joined us in some of the early interviews. We thank our student research assistants: Sandra Cuccia, who did most of the transcription work, and Esther Lenderman, who completed an extensive literature review. We are especially grateful for the services of Emily Dragone who not only led our coding effort and helped manage the manuscript but added a fresh perspective to much of the writing, and to Shelley Horwitz who read parts of the work and then did thorough and helpful copyediting. We thank our editor, Stephen Wesley, for keeping us on track during a long and painful pandemic delay. And finally, we are deeply indebted to our families—Jake McGuffin, Frank Haberle, Alin Haberle, Mariel Haberle, and Eirnan Shane Haberle—for their patience and support over this very long haul.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

This list provides information about the organizations in our study and mentions additional resources for continued study, training, and teaching. In this dynamic work, organizations, websites, and resources change. We offer this brief sample of what was available at the time of publication. ORGANIZATIONS INTERVIEWED FOR OUR STUDY 1.

Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice (https://adhikaar.org) Mission Statement: “Adhikaar, meaning rights, is a New York-based nonprofit organizing the Nepali-speaking community to promote human rights and social justice for all. To achieve our mission: 1. We facilitate access to information and resources on immigration, health, workers’ rights, and other issues; 2. We organize the community to collectively advocate against social injustices and human rights abuses; 3. We conduct participatory action research and policy advocacy on issues affecting our community; 4. We build the leadership of members, with the focus on marginalized groups within the Nepali-speaking community.”

2. Asian Pacific Environmental Network (https://apen4ej.org) Mission Statement: “All people have a right to a clean and healthy environment in which their communities can live, work, learn, play and thrive. Toward

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this vision, APEN brings together a collective voice to develop an alternative agenda for environmental, social and economic justice. Through building an organized movement, we strive to bring fundamental changes to economic and social institutions that will prioritize public good over profits and promote the right of every person to a decent, safe, affordable quality of life, and the right to participate in decisions affecting our lives. APEN holds this vision of environmental justice for all people. Our work focuses on Asian immigrant and refugee communities.” 3. Coalition of Immokalee Workers (https://ciw-online.org) Mission Statement: “The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) is a workerbased human rights organization internationally recognized for its achievements in fighting human trafficking and gender-based violence at work. The CIW is also recognized for pioneering the design and development of the Worker-Driven Social Responsibility paradigm, a worker-led, market-enforced approach to the protection of human rights in corporate supply chains. Built on a foundation of farmworker community organizing starting in 1993, and reinforced with the creation of a national consumer network since 2000, CIW’s work has steadily grown over more than twenty years to encompass three broad and overlapping spheres: Fair Food Program, Anti-Slavery Campaign, Campaign for Fair Food.” 4. Community Voices Heard (https://www.cvhaction.org) Mission Statement: “Community Voices Heard (CVH) is a member-led, multiracial organization principally composed of women of color and low-income families in New York State. CVH tackles tough issues and builds power to secure racial, social and economic justice for all New Yorkers. Through grassroots organizing, leadership development, policy changes, and creating new models of direct democracy, CVH is creating a truly equitable New York State.” 5. Down Home North Carolina (https://downhomenc.org) Mission Statement: “Down Home North Carolina is a new organizing project led by the working people of North Carolina’s small towns and rural communities. Together, we are taking action to increase democracy, grow the good in our communities, and pass a healthy and just home down to our grandbabies.”

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6. Ella Baker Center for Human Rights (https://www.ellabakercenter.org) About Statement: “We are named after Ella Baker, a brilliant, Black hero of the civil rights movement. Following in her footsteps, we organize with Black, Brown, and low-income people to shift resources away from prisons and punishment, and toward opportunities that make our communities safe, healthy, and strong.” 7.

Hoosier Action (https://www.hoosieraction.org) Mission Statement: “Hoosier Action is a homegrown, independent community organization based in rural and small-town Southern Indiana with members across the state. We believe in an Indiana where all Hoosiers, Black, white, and brown, are able to shape the decisions which affect our lives.”

8. Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (https://www.iowacci.org) About Statement: “Iowa CCI members create change through grassroots organizing, educating, and mobilizing on issues that impact our communities the most. Together, we work to put people and planet first by stopping factory farms, ending racist policing and anti-immigrant legislation, and winning bold action on climate change, healthcare, and clean water for everyone. No matter where we come from, where we live, or what we look like, we need policies and an economy that serve the public good, not corporations and the wealthy few who rig the rules in their favor.” 9. Isaiah (https://isaiahmn.org) Mission Statement: “ISAIAH is a vehicle for congregations, clergy, and people of faith to act collectively and powerfully toward racial and economic equity in the state of Minnesota. By uniting local congregations in a large regional organization, ISAIAH strengthens the ability of people of faith to address both local and regional community issues, including mass incarceration, immigration, health care, and racial inequity.” 10. Land Stewardship Project (https://landstewardshipproject.org) Mission Statement: “The Land Stewardship Project (LSP) is a private, nonprofit organization founded in 1982 to foster an ethic of stewardship for farmland, to promote sustainable agriculture, and to develop healthy communities. LSP is dedicated to creating transformational change in our food and farming

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system. LSP’s work has a broad and deep impact, from new farmer training and local organizing, to federal policy and community based food systems development. At the core of all our work are the values of stewardship, justice, and democracy. The Land Stewardship Project’s mission is to foster an ethic of stewardship for farmland, to promote sustainable agriculture, and to develop healthy communities.” 11. Logan Square Neighborhood Association (https://www.lsna.net) Mission Statement: “Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA) is a community-based organization advancing diversity, leader development, and models for engagement as the catalysts for social justice.” 12. Make the Road New York (https://maketheroadny.org) Our Model: “Our model integrates four core strategies for concrete change: 1. Legal and Survival Services to tackle discrimination, abuse and poverty; 2. Transformative Education to develop community members’ abilities to lead our organization, our movement, and society; 3. Community Organizing to transform the systems and power structures impacting our communities; and 4. Policy Innovation to rewrite unjust rules and make our democracy truly accountable to all of us. Staff and members repeat a common refrain: ‘Make the Road is my second home.’ Regardless of immigration status, race, or gender identity, all find safety, support, and solidarity here. Everyone who comes with an individual story of abuse and exploitation finds that they are not alone—that in collectivizing our experiences and voices, we can build the power to change not just one case, but entire systems.” 13. New York Communities for Change (https://www.nycommunities.org) Mission Statement: “We FIGHT economic power at its core. NYCC and its members lead the fight against economic oppression by building campaigns from the ground up that challenge capital and oppressive economic systems. We RESIST fascist and racist policies that affect our most vulnerable communities. NYCC leads know your rights trainings and a rapid response program to protect our communities against deportations, police brutality and evictions. We BUILD power and transform our communities. NYCC organizes in lowincome and middle income neighborhoods to build a strong people’s movement that can bring tangible change to our communities. Our aim is to eliminate the ways capital has starved our communities of wealth for centuries.”

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14. Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition (https://www.northwest bronx.org) Mission Statement: “Founded in 1974, the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCCC) unites diverse peoples and institutions to fight for racial and economic justice through community organizing to transform the Bronx and beyond.” 15. PowerSwitch Action (https://www.forworkingfamilies.org) About Statement: “PowerSwitch Action, formerly the Partnership for Working Families, with our 20 affiliate organizations, is driving a progressive agenda to harness the power of cities and influence billions of dollars in public and private investment. Our network is building powerful, governing coalitions with a grassroots base of leaders to advance a vision of just, sustainable, and democratic cities by: 1. Restructuring our economy to advance policies rooted in economic, racial and gender justice, 2. Reshaping our built environment to create healthier communities and slow climate change, and 3. Remaking our democracy by building power through civic engagement and leadership development.” 16. People’s Climate Movement (https://peoplesclimate.org) Organizational Statement: “Although on hiatus, we still believe that the only way to build the future we want for climate, jobs, and justice is to build power from the ground up.” 17. Southerners on New Ground (https://southernersonnewground.org) Mission Statement: “SONG is a home for LGBTQ liberation across all lines of race, class, abilities, age, culture, gender, and sexuality in the South. We build, sustain, and connect a southern regional base of LGBTQ people in order to transform the region through strategic projects and campaigns developed in response to the current conditions in our communities. SONG builds this movement through leadership development, intersectional analysis, and organizing.” 18. United for Respect (https://united4respect.org) About Statement: “United for Respect (UFR) is a multiracial national nonprofit organization fighting for big and bold policy change that improve the lives of people who work in retail. UFR is advancing a movement for an economy where corporations respect working people and support a democracy that allows Americans to live and work in dignity.”

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19. United Teachers of Los Angeles (https://www.utla.net) About Statement: “United Teachers Los Angeles is a union of more than 33,000 educators employed by LAUSD. Making schools a better place to educate, work and learn. Representing: Teachers, Counselors & School Nurses in LA. We are the 2nd largest Educators’ Union in the U.S.” 20. Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (https://www.vocal-ny.org) Mission Statement: “Voices of Community Activists & Leaders (VOCAL-NY) is a statewide grassroots membership organization that builds power among low-income people affected by HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness in order to create healthy and just communities. We accomplish this through community organizing, leadership development, advocacy, direct services, participatory research and direct action.”

NATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS WITH LOCAL AFFILIATES AND PARTNERS • People’s Action /People’s Action Institute (https://peoplesaction.org): A national network of affiliated partners within their (c)(3) and (c)(4), which work in collaboration. • Center for Popular Democracy (https://populardemocracy.org): A national network of affiliated partners. • Community Change (https://communitychange.org): A national organization building the power of low-income individuals, with a sister (c)(4), Community Change Action. • Faith in Action (https://faithinaction.org): A faith-based, national network. • Gamaliel (https://gamaliel.org): A faith-based, national network. • Jobs with Justice (https://www.jwj.org): A national worker justice network. • National Domestic Workers Association (https://www.domesticworkers.org): National organization with affiliates working on winning rights for care workers.

RESOURCES THAT TEACH ABOUT ORGANIZING Action Center on Race and the Economy (https://acrecampaigns.org): ACRE is a hub that partners with local organizations that are working on racial, economic, environmental, and educational justice campaigns. It helps them connect the

371 ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

dots between their issues and Wall Street so that each of the local efforts feeds into a broad national movement to hold the financial sector accountable. They approach the work through an explicit racial lens, believing that race and class are linked and that it is not possible to fix the structural problems in our economy in a race-neutral way. Bargaining for the Common Good (https://www.bargainingforthecommongood. org): This network is made up of unions, community groups, racial justice organizations, and student organizations that work together as equal partners to win bigger and broader demands at the bargaining table and in the streets. Building Movement Project (https://buildingmovement.org): Provides research, reports, tools, and guidance to groups working in areas of social change. They head initiatives such as Race to Lead, Detroit People’s Platform, Tools to Engage, and Solidarity Is. Color of Change (https://colorofchange.org): The nation’s largest online racial justice organization with opportunities to connect with online campaigns. Grassroots Policy Project (https://grassrootspolicy.org): Research, framing, and narrative shifting. History of Domestic Work and Worker Organizing (https://www.domestic workers.org): The National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) worked with activist scholars from 2018 to 2021 to develop multimedia tools to educate domestic workers and the public on the history of domestic worker organizing. Their site has a variety of resources including timeline, curriculum, and toolkits. Little Sis (https://littlesis.org): Database showing the connection between powerful people and organizations—cited by organizers as a useful campaign research tool. Marshall Ganz (https://marshallganz.com): Marshall Ganz teaches organizing at Harvard. His website includes a range of curriculum tools. Research for Organizing Toolkit (https://www.researchfororganizing.org): A how-to guide to Participatory Action Research, developed by TakeRoot Justice. Run for Something (https://runforsomething.net): A national organization that helps candidates run for elected office. The Forge (https://forgeorganizing.org): Center for Popular Democracy’s news site with articles about and by organizers. To See Each Other (https://peoplesaction.org/to-see-each-other): A documentary podcast that focuses on how small town communities are working together in fights for everything from clean water and racial justice to immigrant rights and climate change.

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INDEX

Aardema, Nancy. See Logan Square Neighborhood Association abolition, 15, 190, 220–21 Abrams, Stacey, 4 ACA. See Affordable Care Act ACCE. See Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment accountability: of leadership, 148, 179–80; of coalitions, 340 ACORN. See Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now Action Center for Community Empowerment, 148, 263; BP-Weeks, Maurice, 76–77, 97, 148 activism. See social activism Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice, 16; anti-immigrant policies and, 175; Benjamin, Pabitra, 16, 98, 127, 175, 108, 135, 207, 297, 302, 305–6, 119; Chhetri, Narbada, 16, 108, 114; COVID-19 response plan, 136; ESL services, 135 advocacy, xiv–xv, 7, 14, 170; organizations, 248–49, 251 affiliations. See alliances Affordable Care Act (ACA) 61, 231 agitation, 179–82

AI. See artificial intelligence ALEC. See American Legislative Exchange Council Alexander, Michelle, 41, 158 Aliadxs, 303 Alinsky, Saul, 39, 74, 181, 261; organizers influenced by, 317 Alinsky tradition, 111, 181, 210–11; base building, 161; class and race, 75–76; evolution of, 317, 319; Industrial Areas Foundation, 261; leadership in, 96, 182–84; meeting people, 126–27; neighborhoods, 130, 221; organizations, 130, 145, 268; organizer as outsider, 191–92; self-interest, 181, 210; social class, 39, 66, 317; strategy, 204, 237–38, 249–50; targets, 210; winnable issues, 210 Alliance for Fair Food, 298 Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), 269 alliances, ix, 19, 20,43, 69, 208, 301, 328, 331; for base building, 270; campaigns, community groups, 366–68; continuum of, 259–60; against corporate power, 66–70; for health care, 333; multiracial, 83–92;

388 INDEX

alliances (continued) organization’s identity of, 263–64; of organizations, 33–34; potential alliances, 332–34; for power, 269–70; of social action organizations, 260–61, 327–28; strategic relationships, 327–28, urban-rural, 265, 331–32. See also coalitions, community-labor coalitions Amazon, ix, 19, 20, 43, 69, 208, 264, 275–79, 301, 328, 331 American Economic Liberties Project, 46 American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), 46 AmericaVotes, 263 Annie E. Casey foundation, 309 anti-immigrant policies, 60, 158, 175, 301 antitrust activity, 43–44 anti-Black bias, 64–65 APEN. See Asian Pacific Environmental Network Appalachian women, 114–15 Arab Spring, 285, 287–88 Arao, B., 158 Arbery, Ahmaud, 349. See also Black Americans, killing of artificial intelligence (AI), 310 Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) 16, 50, 103, 262, 338; climate change, 15–16; Huang, Vivian Yi, 16, 50, 160, 182, 191; Just Transition, 220; racial justice fight, 98; Yoshitani, Miya, 16, 98, 103, 108, 149, 270–71, 149. 202–3 Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), 75, 154, 301, 343 Athena Coalition, 69–70 Atta-Mensah, Afua. See Community Voices Heard Audit the Sheriff Campaign, 241 Axt, Deborah. See Make the Road New York Bail Out Black Mothers for Mother’s Day, 33, 122, 244 Baker, Ella, 102 Banks, N., 114

Bargaining for the Common Good, 70, 234–35, 264, 267, 275 base building: alliances for 270; basebuilding tornado, 165, 251; contrasted to mobilization, 287–88; definition, xv, 161; digital, 309–12; empowerment, 142; leadership, 164–67; membership, 172; messages of love, 142, multiracial, 77, 144; of organizations, 23; of people power, 105; for power building, 63, 161–65, 258; process of, 171–73, 175; purpose of 160–65; rural, 144–45; through services, 134–35; theory of change, 22–23, 63, 164–67; urban, 262 Benitez, Lucas. See Coalition of Immokalee Workers Benjamin, Pabitra. See Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice Bezos, Jeff, 301 Biden, Joe, 350 Black Americans, killing of, 349–50; Arbery, Ahmaud, 349; Burke, Tarana, 2; Brown, Michael, ix, 76; Floyd, George, 77, 291, 316, 345, 350; Garner, Eric, ix; Martin, Trayvon, viii, 234. See also police violence Black Lives Matter, ix, 2, 4, 74, 152, 193; Black queer women leading, 122, 23; Garza, 74, 317; police accountability and, 82, 98; protest of, 316, sister circles, 97 Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity (BOLD), 97 Black people: as farmer, 84; inequality for, 72; othering of, 65 Black women, ix; intersectional injustice, 31; Community Voices Heard, 97; community work, 114; incarceration of, 122, 244; wage gap, 104 Blackstone, A. 106 Bobo, K., 168, 199–200, 259 BOLD. See Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity both/and, 34, 318; brave and safe space, 156; campaign strategies, 251; class and race and gender, 73–74, 78, 94; farmers, 84–86; issues, 213; online and

389 INDEX

offline, 287, 312–14; short term/long term 213 BP-Weeks, Maurice, 76–77, 97, 148 Britton-Purdy, J. 43 Brooks, Jade. See Southerners on New Ground (SONG) Brown, Michael, xi, 76. See also Black Americans, killing of budgets, of corporations, 324; of organizations, 10–13 Build the Bench, 107, 344 Burke, Tarana, 2 California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, 87 campaign finance reform, 100 campaign research, 52, 59–60; intersectional injustice, 77, 99, 122, 150, 204, 244; on corporations, 52, 59–62, 69, 235, 275; with member 63–64; narrative, 309; national networks, 232, 263; power analysis, 153, 238; on targets, 59–60; research organizations, 150, 263; in rural areas, 255–56 campaign strategy: Amazon, 274–79; Audit the Sheriff, 241; bail out Black mothers for Mother’s Day, 33, 122, 244; Corporate Backers of Hate, 60, 64; blending approaches, 250–53, 258; coalitions, 260; communitylabor, 265–69; corporate targets, 50, 61, 235, 272–79; credit for winning, 283–84; Duke Power, 273;electoral, 254–58; definition, 237; decarceration, 33; Duke Power, 273; escalation, 238, 240–42; evaluating success, 279–80, 283–84; fighting forward 246–47; Free From Fear campaign, 20; goals of 239; Google, 51–52; intersectional injustice, 271–72; implementation 281–83; living wage, 228–29; long term, 245; Melt Ice, 244; member engagement, 239–40; narratives, 241–44; national networks, 261–65; No More Youth Jails, 196; Not One More Deportation

Campaign, 225–26; organizers role, 189–90; planning team, 201–2; power analysis, 60, 235, 275; pretrial detention campaign, 122, 125–26, 244; Reclaim Our Schools, 267; Recovery for All, 333; Respect the Bump, 117; silos, 248–58, 318; single issue, 248–49; short term 245; statewide, 265; Unshelter campaign, 230; We Make the City, 62; Wise Up, 195–96. See also campaign research; campaign targets campaign targets: common, 264–5; corporate, 35–36, 50–53, 61–62, 69; definition, 4; elected officials, 323–24; local officials, 225–27, 236–37, 239–40 capital gains, 43 capitalism, 438–49; corporate, 55–56, 207; expansion of, 37; people of color impact, 81; race and 80–83, 210, 342; racial justice and, 56–57, 80–83 Caputo-Pearl, Alex. See also United Teachers of Los Angeles UTLA carceral system, 15, 33, 144, 220–21, 244 career paths of organizers, 192–98; for women, 105–10 caregivers,105, 108 Carruthers, C., 25, 113, 129–31 Case, K. A., 77–78 Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), 87, 221, 258, 261–62, 263, 264 Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO) 76, 97 CEO compensation, 44 Certificate of No Harassment, 246, 280 Chatterjee, Oona, 195, 212 Chauvin, Derek, 77, 316. See also police violence Chhetri, Narbada. See Adhikaar for Human Rights and Social Justice Chorus Foundation, 338 church congregations. See faith-based organizing Citizens United, 45 civic engagement, xvi, 14, 270–71 Civil disobedience, viii, 8, 69, 327. See also protest

390 INDEX

Civil rights organizing, 4, 75–76, 100, 102, 317, 319. See also identity organizing CIW. See Coalition of Immokalee Workers claiming credit, 283–84 Clean Water Act, 223 click activism, 287, 311 climate change. See environmental justice Clinton, Bill, 44 Cloward, R. A. 130, 238, 248 coalitions: community-labor, 70, 235, 265–70, 351–52; challenges of, 259, forms of 259–61; housing, 264; multiracial, 328; statewide, 265 Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW), 16, 155, 159; Benitez, Lucas, 16, 27, 106, 161–62, 190–91, 192, 199, 274–75, 296; code of conduct, 282; Fair Food program, 26; Human Rights Defender Card, 307; Monacello, Marley, 16, 27, 34, 119, 213, 274, 281–83, 298; sexual harassment, 106, 213–14; worker protections, 274, 282 coding areas, 360–62 collaborations, types of, 260 Collazo, Denise, 89, 96 communications: awareness raised by, 300–301; digital and in-person, multiplatform messaging apps for, 288; public opinion, 302, 309; organizations improvement of 335; strategies for, 287, 305; technology for 292–97. See also frames, narratives communities: benefits agreement for, 51–52; bilingual 135, 302–3; Black women, 114; building, 347; coalition of labor and 265–70; of color, 206; democracy through action from, 347–48; intersectional injustice impacting, 100–101; LGBTQ+ 134, 142, 157; low income, 99; needs of 135; organizations of, 13, 184; isolation in, 134, 295–96; rural, 55, 134; social media, 295–96. See also neighborhood organizations Communities Organized for Public Service (COPS), 76

community-labor coalitions, 70, 234–36; affordable housing, 235–36; health care, 333; excluded workers fund, 351–52; service industry unions and, 266; strategy, 70; teachers, 265–69, 351 Community Land Trust, 246 Community Reinvestment Act, 39 Community Service Organization (CSO), 75 Community Voices Heard (CVH), 17, 28, 82, 135, 179; Atta-Mensah, Afua, 17, 99–100; Follow Black Women Project, 97; sister circles, 97; Strachota, Gabe, 17, 28, 82, 150, 167–69, 179–80, 180–81, 211, 245, 295; welfare reform campaign, 28 Congregation-based work. See faith-based organizing Congress, lobbying, xv, 52, 254 Coopinger, Tasha. See Hoosier Action Corin, Jacqlyn, 3 Corporate Backers of Hate, 60, 64 corporate control, 29, 35–36 corporate power, campaigns against, 58–63; coalitions against, 68–69; democracy and reining in, 40–41; elected officials, 60–62; influence, 36, 46, 52, 227; leveraging of 63–64; multiracial organizing against, 66–67; organizations aligned against, 66–70; racism and, 56–67; social action organizations fighting, 58–65; in theory of change, 57 corporate targets, 323; capitalism and, 273; organizations alignment on, 275; of social action organizations, 272–79; research on 59–60; in rural areas, 66–73, 273 corporations, capitalism of, 55–56, 207; CEO compensation of, 44; data collection by, 59, decline of antitrust enforcement, 43; executives, 324; expansion of, 54–55; government controlled by, 254; inequity and, 40–41, 323; issues impacted by, 208; mergers and acquisitions by, 43;

391 INDEX

money of 207–8; political influence by, 45–46, 227; political collusion with, 49–54, 60–61, 65; politics influenced by, 45–46; power of, 48–50; tax cuts for, 42–43; political influence, 45–46, 227; resources of, 36; rural areas, 54–55 corporatization, 37, 54–55, 204, 275; collusion with political system, 49–54; financialization, issues, 207–210; impact on psyche, 54–55; organizing responses to, 207–10; racism and, 56–57; in rural areas, 54–55. See also financialization COVID-19 pandemic, 55, 80, 314, 344; impact of organizing, 135–37; intersectional injustice and, 32; working women and, 103 CPD. See Center for Popular Democracy Crenshaw, K., 31, 204 Cress, D., 242 CSO. See Community Service Organization CTWO. See Center for Third World Organizing Cuomo, Andrew, 276 CVH. See Community Voices Heard DACA. See Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Dakota Access Pipeline Protest, 2, 340 Dantas, Luisa, 304 dark money, 45, 209 Davis, Jim 185 Davis, Sheri, 107 de Blasio, Bill, 276 debt crisis, 50 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 225, 315 Dehlendorf, Andrea. See United for Respect Delany-Cole, Holly, 86 Delgado, Gary, 76 Della Porta, D., 149, 249 Democracy, viii, 80, 244; community action for, 347–48; corporate power and restoring, 40–41; economic, 82,

215; financialization changing, 59; policies for inclusive, 99–100; for racial justice, 99–100; social activism for, xiii–xiv, in U.S., xiii, voting rights in, 354. See also government Democratic Party, 2 Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 278 Demographic shifts, 99; in rural areas, 331 Demonstrations. See protest DiAngelo, Robin, 92 Diaz, Christian. See Logan Square Neighborhood Association Diani, M., 149, 249 digital technology: consistent message with, 335–36; contrasted to in-person communication, 291; global virtual commons, 285; organizing skills influenced by, 290. See also information and communication technologies, social media Dimon, Jamie, 60 discrimination: anti-Black bias, 64–65; against marginalized populations, xiv; issues of, 34; pregnancy, 117. See also racism domestic violence, 115–116 Domestic Workers Union dominant narratives. See narratives door knocking, 174, 294–96, 291, 296, 313 Down Home North Carolina, 185; as 501 (c)4 organization, Flaherty, Brigid, 17, 79–80, 93, 134, 115–16, 142, 144–45, 205, 262–64, 273, 295, 331; Duke Power campaign, 273–74; human dignity focus of, 142, listening survey of, 93; membership recruitment of, 169–70; White, Chelsea, 17, 67, 93–94 114, 155, 169–70, 184–85, 228–29, 296–99 Dream Act, 87 drug crisis, 219 DSA. See Democratic Socialists of America Duke Power campaign, 273

392 INDEX

Ebrahimi, Farhad, 338–39, 342 economic justice, 47–48, 105, 218–20, 244, 271. See also inequality Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981), 42 economy, 42–45 elections: campaigns in, 145, electoral activity in, 70–71; electoral engagement in, 255–57; of 2016, ix, 2, 8, 151–52; of 2020, 7, 4, 264, 336; overturning results of, 316, 350; racism and, 99; voter turnout in, 55; voting rights in, 281 electoral activity, 38, 70–71, 165, 224, 247–58, 293–94, Latinx populations, 88, 111; running candidates in, 254–57 electronic databases, 288, 306–9 Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, 17, 230, 369; Audit the Sheriff, 241, 233–34; Norris, Zach; 17, 233–34, 309; Steele, Vince, 17, 73, 162, 176–77, 230; Martin vs Boise, 230, Night Out for Safety and Liberation, 234; No More Youth Jails, 196; Unshelter campaign, 230 empowerment, anger, 181–82; of farmworkers, 27, 274–75; leadership and, 145, 222, overcoming dominant narratives, 62, 180, 218, 241–42, 321, 325; personal transformation, 110–11; power and, xiii, 6; relevancy of term, xi–xiii, 200, 321; social action organizations and, 181, 321 engagement: civic, 270–71; digital 287, 289, in elections, 255–57; for leadership, 171–73; of membership, 239–40; one-on-one meetings, 168; organizer narratives for, 219–20; peerto-peer, 295; through process of, 170–71; social action organizations, xv–xvi; viral, ix; surveys, 273, 287, 293, 294, 310, 313. See also recruitment Engler, B. 130, 161, 249, 280 Engler, M. 130, 161, 249, 280 environmental justice, 3, 14, 218, 316, 334–35, 350; just transition, 260, 338, 342 Epps-Addison, Jennifer, 87, 258 Equal Rights Amendment, 119

Espey, Hugh. See Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement Excluded Workers Fund, 351, 352 Facebook, 172, 189, 287, 291, 299, 303, 305–6 face-to-face interaction,130, 289–90, 312–13, 325, 344–45; one-on-one meetings, 168, 291 factory farms, 25, 71, 174, 223–24 Fair Food Program 26–27, 274 Fair Work Week policy, 240 faith-based organizing, 145, 147, 157, 219, 232–33, 250, 259–60, 271, 328, 333 Faith in Action, 232–33, 261, 263 Faith in Minnesota, 252, 294 Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA), 105 Farm Beginnings program, 206 farmers, 206, 213, 216, Black farmers, 84, factory farms and 28, 44, 70–71, 174, 218, 223, 256–57 farmworkers, 216, code of conduct by, 282; empowerment of 274–75, 174, 223–24 Farmworkers Union, 75–76; sexual harassment of 106, 213–14 Federal Election Commission, 45 feminist activism, 120, frames, 118–19, issues, 117–22; patriarchy, 31, 113, radical pragmatism, 120; theory of change, 31. See also women Fight for $15, 2, 218 fighting forward, 245–47 financialization, 43–44, 59 501(c)(3), 318, 329, 352; 501(c)(4), 145, 254, 57, 329, 352; funding sources of, 10, 10–13, 83, 337, 42; funding of, 10–11, 42, 336–43; fundraising in, 10–13, 83, 304, 340, 337–42, 342–43, geography of, 9; goals of, i, xii–viii, 5; government level targeted by, 13, 224–25, 227–28; grassroots model of, 4; ICT use by, 288–92, 314; implementation follow up, 279–83; intersectionality of injustice, 29–35; issues of, 14, 14–16; issues identification in, 199–203, labor and community, 75, 318;

393 INDEX

relationships in, 355; infrastructure of, 130, intersectional injustice and, 322; leadership of, 5–6, 13–14, 168; leadership development in, 176, 258; levels of 13–14, 168; local level, 222–23; longevity, 9, 9; media coverage for, membership in, 11, 38, 165; power of, xv-xvi; mobilizing movements and, xv, 130, 149–52, 249; multiracial, 66–67, 70, 81, 83–97, 353–54; national networks of, 261–65; national partnerships of, 221–22; organizing networks for, 342–44; power building in, xv–xvi, 4–6, 147–48, 250–51, 319; political arm of, 352, as political homes, 153–56; race and, 96–97; racial justice in, rural, 144–45; as safe space, 156–59; screening criteria for research, 358–59; services in, 136; social activism of, ix–x; scaling up, 331–34; shared experiences in, social activism of, ix–x; social media in, 287–88; social science literature, 149; staff in, 5, 187; strategies of 77–78, 237–38; structure, 249, study participants, 16–20; tax exempt status of, 10, 328–29, theory of change, 21–29, 77, 200–201, 153–55, 320–21; transformational change, 164, 190, 210–11; unrestricted funds, 337–38; value based, 152; as vehicles for change, 143–46; winnable issues, 210; women in, 102–28 Flaherty, Brigid. See Down Home North Carolina Florida Restoration of Voting Rights Coalition, 281, 354 Floridi, L., xii Floyd, George, 77, 291, 316, 345, 350. See also police violence FMLA. See Family and Medical Leave Act Follow Black Women Project, 97 Food Stamp Program, 41–42 foundations. See philanthropy Ford Foundation, 217, 336 Frames, 220–21, 242, 244, abolition, 220–21; frame theory, 15; gender, 118–19, just transition, 260, 338, 342

Free From Fear campaign, 20 Friedman, Andrew, 212 fundraising: campaigns, 304; digital, 304; networks, 344; for organizations, 83, 341; organization sources for, 10–13, 83, 337–42; resources from, 342–43; self-funding, 340; of social action organizations, 337–42 Gamaliel Foundation Network, 75, 261–63 Gamson, W., 252 Ganz, Marshall, 11, 150, 152, 158, 166, 178–79, 203, 217 Garner, Eric, ix. See also police violence Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act (1982), 42 Garrett, S., 144 Garza, Alicia, xiii, 6, 74, 83–84, 89–90, 96, 286 Geddes, Patrick, 213 gender, 322; inclusivity, 123; intersectionality of race and 32, 82; issues of feminism and 117–22; male organizers and, 113–14; nonconforming, 126; organizers and, 37, 128; social class issues and, 128; wage gap based on, 104–5; women and 37 geography of organizations, 9 Getsos, Paul, 22, 28, 130, 155, 161, 166, 168, 186, 200, 238, 260, 279, 320. See also Peoples Climate Movement Gianaris, Mike, 277 Gillion, D., 269, 281 Giuliani, Rudolph, 28 Goehl, George, 156 Goffman, E., 15 Gonzalez, Emma, 3 Google, 43, 51–52, 59, 328 Gorman, Amanda, 349 government: city level issues, 227–28; corporate control of, 254; national level issues, 232–34; organizations targeting, 224–25, 227–28; preemption, 53–54; state level issues, 230–31, 235–36, state trifectas, 53

394 INDEX

grassroots models, 4 Grassroots Policy Project, 250 Great resignation, 351 Green, Girshriela, 116 GreenFaith, 271–89 Grewal, D. S., 43 Griffin, Felicia. See PowerShift Action gun violence, 3, 265. See also March For Our Lives Gupta, S., 328 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 102 Hamilton, D., 44 Han, Hahrie, ix, xi, xv, 176, 185, 248, 251, 319, 330 Hands Across Colfax, 268 Harper, Fletcher. See Peoples Climate Movement hateful rhetoric, 142, 345–46 Healey, R., 250–52 health care, 61–63, 62–63, 144; alliances for, 333; community-labor coalition, 333; Medicaid and, 224, 229; profits out of, 218–19, 224 Hersh, Eitan, 165, 286, 330 Hestres, L. E., 286 Hinson, S., 250, 251–52 homelessness, 139–40, 157, 211, 230 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, 39 Hooks, Mary. See Southerners on New Ground (SONG) Hoosier Action, 17, 178; communications strategy, 287; community building, 347; Coopinger, Tasha, 17, 112, 334; leadership development approach, 172–73; Pace, Kate Hess, 17, 54, 55, 67–68, 113, 129, 132, 172–73, 178, 219, 293, 287, 347; urban-rural, 67–68; women leadership, 113 Hope Community, 206 housing: affordable, 88–89; coalitions, 264; crisis, 209, 235 Housing stability and Tenant Protection Act, 328 Huang, Vivian Yi. See Asian Pacific Environmental Network Huerta, Dolores, 102

human rights, 199, 220 Human Rights Defenders Card, 307 Hustle texting program, 293, 313 ICE. See Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICTs. See information and communication technologies identity organizing, 36, 75–78, 206–7, 210, 261, 338, 320, 322 immigration, 330, anti-immigrant policies and, 175; debate on, 209; deportation after 60, 64; rights of, 212; marginalized populations and, 157; Not One More Deportation Campaign and, 225–26; racism, 94; reform issues of, 225; sentiments against, 158–59; women’s campaigns on, 121–22 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 220–21, 226, 311 implementation of change, 281–83 income inequality; 41–42. See also economic justice Independent Resource Generation Hub, 340 Indian Removal Act, 41 Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), 261 individualism, xii inequality, 30–31, 321, 329; for Black people, 72; corporations and, 40–41, 323; causes of, 90; economic, 56; income, 41–42; issue of 151; politics producing, 48; racism and, 77; regime, 47; structural, 355; in US, 41–42; wealth, 41–43, 46–48 information and communication technologies (ICTs) 38, 286, APPs, 309–11; base building, 291; bilingual communities, 302–3, 305–6; data in, 8–9, 59, 167, 288, 306–9; electronic data bases, 306–9 fundraising, 304; geographic distance and, 313; influence 301–2; messaging with, 326; mobile communities, 296; online to offline,

395 INDEX

312–14; organizations using, 288–92; platform integration, 310; potential and challenges, 285–87; for protest, 292–95; rural communities, 296–97; targeting audiences, 300–301; texting, 292–97, tracking, 306–9; WorkIt app, 146–47, 311. See also digital technology, social media Instagram, 43, 294, 299, 305–6, 310 insurrection, 352 intersectional identity, 31–32, 73 intersectional injustice, 73–74, 78; communities impacted by, 100–101; COVID-19 pandemic and, 32; definition, 32; issues, 97–100, 203–7; messages, 205; opposition to, 204; social action organizations, 29–35, 322; theory of change, 317 interviews, 8–9, 349, 357–60 Iowa CCI Action Fund, 256 Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, 17–18, 39, 62–63; electoral activism, 255–57; Espey, Hugh, 18, 27, 36, 49, 61–63, 142, 164, 207–8, 218, 255; factory farms, 223–24; health care fight, 61–63, Medicaid expansion, 223–24; Mason, Adam, 18, 28, 86, 174, 223–24, 251, 255–57, 300–301, 339–40, 345–46; membership dues, 339 Isaiah, 15, 18; congregation-based work, 219; Faith in Action, 232–33; Morales, Catalina, 18, 87–88, 95, 110, 111, 115, 181–82, 187–88, 232–33, 294; multistrategy approach, 252–53; Muslims, 99, 243; platform integration, 310; strategies, 252; Schrantz, Doran, 18, 26, 99, 108, 143, 147–48, 192, 203, 219, 224–25, 242–43, 252–53, 302, 307–8, 309, 310, 319 isolation, 134, 295–96, LGBTQ+, 134; 157; political homes, 131–33; rural, 55, 134; social media, 295–96 issues: community-labor, 234–36; corporatization, 208–10; criteria for, 202; definition, 202; dominant narratives on 218, 241–42;

environmental, 218, 334–35; feminist and gender, 119–22, 128; fighting forward, 215, 246–47; frames for, 220–21; homelessness, 139–40, 211; identifying, 199–203; immigration reform, 225; of inequality, 151; intersectional injustice and, 97–100, 203–7; knowledge of, 192; leadership development on, 208–9, linking, 201–2; local, 221–22; multi-level, 222–26; multiple, 201; narratives for, 217–21, 220; national, 232–34; people of color, 98, 205; race, 206–7; red state, 228–229; rural, 228–29, 230–31; single issue, 248–49; statewide, 227–28, 230–31; victories, 110–11; winnable, 210–12; women, 323 Jacobs, Lauren. See PowerShift Action Janus vs. AFSCME, 337 Jayaraman, Saru, 2 Jim Crow laws, 41 job protections, 105–6 JP Morgan Chase, 64, 209 Justice for Janitors, 58, 107 Just Transition, 220, 260, 338, 342 Kapczynski, A., 43 Kasky, Cameron, 3 Kendall, J., 22, 199 Kendi, I. X., 81, 100 King, Bobby. See Land Stewardship Project King, Martin Luther, 4, 49 Knibbs, K., 286 Know Your Rights sessions, 212 LAANE. See Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy labor unions: 12, 70, 75, 236, 318, 324; community-labor coalitions, 70, 234–36, 235–36, 265–69; 333, 351–52; funding from, 10, 12; organizers, 12, 91, 107, organizing, 318; service industry unions and, 266; unions, 12, 70, 324; women’s rights in 120–21, 133

396 INDEX

Land Stewardship Project, 18, 231, 265, 305, 344; agriculture and, 71; health care, 231; Hope Community, 206, King, Bobby, 18, 68, 70–71;165, 166, 171–72, 188, 346; multiracial work of, 84; Mark Schultz, 18, 39, 84, 85–86, 113, 205–6, 213, 216, 223, 231, 265, 338–39, 344 language access, 95–96, 305 Laster Pirtle, Whitney N., 80 Latinx populations, 30, 46, 75–76, 87, 88, 90, 136, 240, 262, 294, digital, 294–95; electoral, 226; leadership, 89, 111; mobilizing, 271; rural, 85–86; voting, 87–88; women, 110, 113 LAUSD. See Los Angeles Unified School District leadership: base building and, 134–35, 164–67; co leadership, 325; closest to the pain, 333; collective 190–91; databases for tracking development of, 307–8; definition of, 5; development of leadership 165–67; distinguished from mobilizing, 165; empowerment and, 222; engagement approaches for 168–74; issue education, 208–9; ladders of engagement, 169–74; Latinx roles, 89; of organizations, 5–6, 13–14, 168; LGBTQ+, 122–25; multiple leadership, 190; organization’s development of, 93; people of color, 91–92; power building, 26; racial justice, 97; recruitment, 168–74; in social action organizations, 23, 320; steps in development, 163; training of 4, 82, 93, 97, 113–21, 124, 127, 142, 153, 155, 170, 201, 210, 205, 253, 255–57, 261, 320; in rural organizing, 205; transition into staff roles, 30; women in, 103, 113–17, 122–23 Leaders Trust, 86 legislative solutions, 28, 61–62, 107, 147, 216 Lerner, Stephen, 58, 292, 328 Lerner, Zachary. See New York Communities for Change LGBTQ+, 122–28, 134, 296, 299, abuse, 123; communities, 134, 142, 157;

leadership, 122–25, organizers 122–23; political home, 157–58 queerness, 127, social isolation, 157, 296, social media, 296, 299,Trans Rights Immigrant Project (TrIP), 125; rural, 194, 296; inclusiveness in training, 124, 127; youth organizing, 124–25 listening skills, 176–78 Live streaming, 303 living wage, 228–29 lobbying groups, xv, 15, 52, 254 Lobo, Sandra. See Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition local-level organizations, 222–23, 278–79, 358 Logan Square Neighborhood Association, 18, 233; Aardema, Nancy, 18, 51, 79, 96, 108, 112, 141, 148, 154–55, 298; Diaz, Christian, 18, 78, 90, 101, 111–13, 154, 187, 197–98, 285; gentrification, 79; intersectional injustice, 79, 96, 101, 154; Native Americans, 79; schools, 197, 233, 298; 233, women, 111–13 longevity: of organizations 9; women organizers, 108 Lopez, Angela. See United for Respect Lopez, Jose. See Make the Road New York Lorde, Audre, 32, 201 Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (LAANE), 269 Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), 267 love, in organizing, 141–43, 147 March For Our Lives, 3, 292 Make the Road New York, 12, 94–96, 341; Axt, Deborah, 12, 18, 57, 60, 65, 81, 132–33, 201–2, 212, 216–17, 237, 280, 302–3, 337, 339; immigrant rights, 212; legislative solutions of, 216; LGBTQ organizing, 125; Lopez, Jose, 18, 94–96, 136–39, 160, 188–89, 194–95, 208–9, 264, 325; national coalition on housing, 264; New York Dream Act, 18; service model of, 136–39 Maldonado, Maria Elva, 107 marginalized populations, xiv, 19, 75, 88, 90–99; discrimination against, xiv;

397 INDEX

immigrants as, 157; oppression of 73–74; people of color, 330–31; power building, 320; power imbalances, 214; and social action organizations, viii; women, 114 Marom, Yotam, 151, 249 Martin, Trayvon, viii, 234. See also Black Americans, killing of Martin v. Boise, 230 Mason, Adam. See Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement mass incarceration, 7, 14, 15, 33, 75, 126, 241 Max, S., 168,199–200, 259 McAdam, D. 9,149, 238 McAlevey, J. 248–49 McCartin, J., 70, 328 McGhee, Heather, 62, 64–65 McKenna, E., 185, 251, 319, 330 McLaughlin, H., 106 Meade, Desmond, 3, 354 media coverage, 233, 302; in campaigns, 275; frames and narratives, 220; influence of 134, 156; local media, 297; media representation, 190, 242, 283; messaging, 242–44 Medicaid, 219, 223–24, 229 Medicare, 41–42, 224 Melt ICE campaign, 244 member-checking process, 362 membership, 5; base building, 172; contrasted to leaders, 163; definition, 5; dues, 10, 11, 258, 339; engagement of, 239–40; in organizations, 11, 38, 165; recruitment, 168–74; in social action organizations, 258, 180 mergers and acquisitions, 43 meritocracy, 47 messages. See narratives Meyers, D., xi, 283 microblogging, 292 Mijente, 262 Miller, Mike, 149, 237, 319 Minieri, J. 22, 28, 130, 155, 161, 166, 168, 186, 200, 238, 260, 279, 320 minimum wage, 2, 229 Mirkay, N. A., 46

mobilization, 7, 14–15, 130, 248–49, 329 mobilizing, contrasted to organizing, 161, 248–50, 280, 318; organizations, xv; as tactics, 150, 165, 179, 247, 249–50, 252; race, 271–72; in social psychology literature, 249; social media, 288–89, 292; victory, 300 Monacello, Marley. See Coalition of Immokalee Workers Mondros, J. B. viii, xi, 4, 21, 75, 108, 157, 161, 167, 168, 182, 186, 191, 199, 238, 245, 248, 299, 300, 320 Morales, Catalina. See Isaiah Morley, J., xii Moses, Bob, 146 Mott, Andy, 222–23, 341 Mottola, Maria, 91, 155, 291, 342–43 movements: institutionalized power and, 147–52; online, 286; organizations, 249; protest, 238; 31 multiplatform messaging apps, 288 multiracial organizing, 74, 91, 205–6; base building in, 67–70, 75–76, 77–80; building, 83–87; community-labor coalitions, 70, 89–90, 98; fighting corporate power, 66; intersectional injustice and, 87–97, 328; leadership in, 143–44; listening survey, 93; multiracial coalitions, 328; popular education in, 82, 93, 97, 201; in red states, 257; in rural areas, 78, 84–86, 93, 144 Muslims organizing, 99, 243–44 narratives, 220, 237, 326, audiences for, 283, 286, 300; anti-government, 47; anti-racist, 93, 99, 322; blaming narratives, 12, 55; campaigns, 242–47, 250–52; collective efficacy, 11; corporatization, 62–63; and culture, 242–43; dominant, 62, 180, 218, 241–42, 321, 325; effective, 326; empowerment, 321; issues, 217–20; love, 141–43; racialized, 47, 65, rural, 67; social media, 301, 304, storytelling, 170; testing, 309 Narrative Initiative, 335–36 National Bailout Collective, 261–62

398 INDEX

national organizing networks, 260, 261; funding resources from, as political homes, 155–56; sites of, 297–98, 304. See also Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, Center for Popular Democracy, Faith in Action, Gamaliel Foundation, Industrial Areas Foundation, Midwest Academy, People’s Action New York City Homeless Union (NYCHU), 24–25, 140, 298 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), 82, 136, 295 New York Communities for Change, 19; Amazon campaign, 275–79; issue selection, 201; online to offline, 313–14; Lerner, Zachary, 19, 50, 126, 153, 182, 201, 230–31, 275–79, 291, 313–14; rent reform campaign, 230–31; Westin, Jonathan, 19, 153–54 New York Dream Act, 18 Night Out for Safety and Liberation, 234 No More Youth Jails, 196 Norris, Zach. See Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition, 19; affordable housing, 88–89; All Tea no Sugar, 304; dues, 11; fighting forward, 246–47; Lobo, Sandra, 11, 19, 82–84, 88–89, 191, 214–15, 222–23, 246–47, 278–79, 358; Reyes, Crystal, 19, 89, 108, 189, 215, 325; Sistas and Brothas United, 84, 89; youth organizing, 247 Norton, 64 Not One More Deportation Campaign, 225–26 NVivo (Qualitative Software), 9, 360 NYCHA. See New York City Housing Authority NYCHU. See New York City Homeless Union Obama, Barack, 2, 60, 225 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 276, 278 Occupy Wall Street, viii, 2, 151–52, 249, 285–87

Ohmer, M. L., xii one-on-one meetings, 168, 291 online to offline approach, 313–14 Open Door policy, of Walmart, 109, 143 Open Society Foundations, 217 oppression, 134, 321; of marginalized populations, 73–74; organizers fighting, 110–11; of women, 118; of women of color, 115 organizations: See advocacy organizations, mobilizing organizations, social action organizations organizers: Alinsky influence, 317; alignment with, 155; attributes of, 187; career paths of, 194–98; definition, 5; face-to-face work, 344–45; gender, 113–14; leader identification, 179–80; leadership pathway for, 30, 108, 191–98; LGBTQ+, 122–23; motivations of, 180–81; racial diversity, 30; recruitment by, 166; role distinction from leaders, 5; skills and responsibilities of, 186–91; team work for, 189; women, 37, 107–13; 111–13, 116–17 organizing: activities, 310; campaigns, definition of 7; evolution of, x; empowerment, foundational principles of, 319–21; follow-up, 279–83; gender issues, 37, 128; innovations in, 324–29; ICT impacting, 325; labor, 318; LGBTQ+, 125; love as a force, 141–43; narratives in, 283, 286, 300, 326; national level issues for, 232–34; recruitment,130, 163, 167–76; resources needed by, 336–42; rural, 331–32; social class and identity, 184–85; with social media, 310; state level, 230, 235–36; transformational, xi–xiii, 5; victories, 110–11; youth, 247, 332–33 Our Minnesota Future, 68, 71, 265, 327, 335 Overstreet, N. M., 77–78 Oyakawa, M. 185, 251, 319, 330 PAC. See political action committee PACB. See Public Authorities Control Board

399 INDEX

Pace, Kate Hess. See Hoosier Action Parks, Rosa, 102 patriarchy, 31, 113. See also feminist activism participation tracking, 308–9 PCM. See Peoples Climate Movement peer-to peer texting, 293–95 people of color, 33, 324; active voices for 347–48; capitalism and, 81; ethnicity and, 305; issues confronting, 98, 205; language access and, 95–96; leadership by 91–92; LGBTQ+, 123; as marginalized populations, 330–31; police violence against, vii; racial justice for 98–99; racism narratives about, 76; in rural areas; social class of, 78. See also Black people; Latinx populations People’s Action, 82, 156, 221, 232, 261, 262, 263, 309 Peoples Climate Movement (PCM) 19–20, 289, 345; as coalition, 259; digital technology, 288, 290, 311–12; Getsos, Paul 20, 22, 28, 161, 168, 186, 200, 260, 288, 290, 293 311–12; Green Faith, 271; Harper, Fletcher 20, 152, 227, 259–71, 288–89; intersectional injustice in 271; mass mobilizations by, 152 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), 44 philanthropy, 10–11, 336–42, 343 Piketty, Thomas, 47, 56, 59 Pittsburgh United, 52–53 Piven, F. F., 130, 238, 248 police violence, vii–ix, 14, 76, 77, 98, 291, 315, 316, 345. See also Black Americans, killing of political action committee (PAC), 144–45, 165, 254–51, 262–263, 328–29, 341, 352 political consciousness, 24–25, 110 political hobbyism, 286 political home,129–31, 355; COVID-19 response, 135–36; definition, 25, 133. 143–44, 157; for LGBTQ+ 157–58;

networks and, 155–56; organizations as, 153–56; in rural communities, 131–32; safe and brave spaces, 132–33, 158–59; and services, 136–40 political parties, 53 politics: abolitionist, 220–21; corporations collusion with, 49–54, 60–61, 65; corporations influence on, 45–46; dark money in, 45; inequality produced by, 48; national 227; right wing, 142; social action organizations in 35s; U.S. extremism in, vii–viii; wealth inequality influenced by, 41–43 Poo, Ai-jen, 2 popular education on corporate power, 205, 235; homelessness, 24–25; political analysis, 139, 320; on gender, 118; on race, 77, 317, 322. See also leadership development poverty, 44–45, 55, 134, 282 power: alliances for, 269–70; analysis of in campaign strategy, 60; challenging, 163; corporate power, 48–50; definition, 6; and empowerment, xiii, 6; fighting forward approach, 246–47; forms of, 160; importance of base building to, 63, 105, 161–65, 258, 358 institutionalized 147–52; marginalized populations and, 214; organization building, 130–31; skills confronting, 178–86, theory of change, 143–47 POWER Philadelphia, 53 PowerSwitch Action, 12, 19, 52, 153–54; community benefits agreement, 51–52 Griffin, Felicia, 19, 40, 90–91; 102, 105, 153–54; 298, 310, 338, 347–48; Jacobs, Lauren, 19, 35, 51–52, 53–54, 62, 81, 118, 150–51, 170–71, 175–76, 201, 214–15, 227–28, 241–42, 245–46, 266, 304, 328, 346; Metropolitan-ist movement, 346; pre-emption, 53–54; Pittsburgh United, 52–53; POWER Philadelphia, 53; We Make the City campaign, 62 pregnancy discrimination, 117 pretrial detention campaign, 122, 125–26, 244 private equity firms, 235

400 INDEX

Progressive Technology Project, 307 protest, definition, ix, 238, 269, 291, 316, 318 Public Authorities Control Board (PACB), 277 public housing, 82, 136, 211, 232, 245, 295 Puerto Rico debt crisis, 50 Putnam, R., 144 qualitative software (NVivo), 9 queerness. See LBGTQ+ race: capitalism and 37, 80–83, 210, 342; cultural awareness and, 79; economic justice, 78–79; intersectionality of gender, 32, 82; issues of 206–7; leadership and, 87–97; social action organizing and, 96–97; in theory of change, 78; wage gap by, 104; wealth inequality, 41–43, 46–48. See also intersectional injustice racial justice, 85–86; capitalism and, 56–57; 80–83; democracy for 99–100; leadership for, 97; for people of color, 98–99; in theory of change, 74–80 racial stereotypes, 93 racism, 30–31, 42, 322; corporate power and 56–57; gender’s intersection with, 32; in immigration 94; inequality and, 77; narratives of people of color, 76; social status and, 65; white fragility, 92. See also intersectional injustice radical pragmatism, 35–36, 84, 120, 128, 193–94, 336, 351 Rajendra, Dania, 118 Ransby, B., 2, 31, 75, 77, 102, 103, 123, 152, 287 Rayburn, Sam, 245 Reagan, Ronald, 42 Reclaim Our Schools LA, 267 Recovery for All, 333 recruitment, 163; digital, 287, 289; door knocking, 174, 294–96, 291, 296, 313; engagement, 130, 167–76; membership, 169–70; person to person, 130; process of, 174; rural, 169–70; training and, 170; use of

surveys, 273, 287, 293, 294, 310, 313. See also engagement Red for Ed movement, 3, 120, 331 red state, 44, 257, 262–63, 351 rent reform campaign, 230–31 Republican Party, 53, 243 research organizations, 263 research, 8–9; 357–362. See also campaign research Restaurant Opportunities Center, 2 Respect the Bump, 117 Reyes, Crystal. See Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition Right to Counsel, 246–47, 280 right wing, 68, 134, 242, 246, 352, 354 Robinson, 80 Rosenthal, L., 77–78 Ross, Fred, 75 rural organizing, 34, 54, 62, 257, 331–32; corporate targets in, 273; digital technology, 296–98, 301, 305, 332; isolation, 134; issues, 351; LGBTQ+ community, 134, 296; race, 78, 84–86, 93, 144; network resources, 262; recruitment, 174; rural-urban coalitions, 67–68, 205–6, 231 safety net, 44–45 safe space, 136–39; brave, 132–33 Sanders, Bernie, 61 sandwich generation, 105 Saunders, Jeremy. See VOCAL NY screening criteria for sample, 358–59 Schrantz, Doran. See Isaiah segregation, 89–90 self-efficacy, xii. See also empowerment Sen, R., 7, 21–23, 31, 73, 201, 206, 254, 239, 260 sexual harassment, 2, 106, 213–14 Shenker-Osorio, Anat, 304 Schultz, Mark. See Land Stewardship Project single-issue campaigns, 248–49 Sistas and Brothas United, 84, 89 sister circles, 97 slavery, 57, 81 small dollar donations, 258

401 INDEX

Smiley, E. 70 Sneiderman, Marilyn, 58, 69, 70, 77, 117, 149, 210, 235, 249, 275 Snow, D., 242 social action organizations, accountability, 148; alliances of, 260–61; Alinsky influence on, 317; attributes of, 21–23; base building in, 129–30, 160–61; characteristics of, 5; closest to pain and, 22–23; communication, 335; of communities, 13, 184; corporate power, 66–70; corporate targets, 275; charitable, 254; commitment of, 25–26; complexity of, 158; consciousness of, 24; corporate power fights of, 58–65; corporate targets of, 35–36, 50–53, 61–62, 69; credit claimed by, 283–84; databases of, 306–9; discipline of, 26; dues, 10, 11, 258, 339; empowerment in, 181, 321; engagement, xv–xvi, 170–73; evaluations by, 309; evolution of 38, 317, 324–29; faith based, 145, 147, 157, 219, 232–33, 250, 259–60, 271, 328, 333 social activism, 165, in democracy, xiii–xiv; Black, history of, 1; Latinx, of organizations, ix–x; progressive, 2; right wing, 68, 262, 354; women of color in, 30–31 social class, 40–42, 74, 76, 128; class and race, 34, 318; organizing and, 37, 75, 128; race, 78–79, 81; rural, 93, 144, 184–85; women, 104, 107, 117, 128 social media, 38, 190, 242–43; assets of, 285–286, 288, audiences reached by 297–98, 305–6; disadvantages, 286, 290; isolations countered with, 295–96; message control with, 301; online to offline, 312–14; organizing activities on, 310; positive aspects of, 291–92; protests, 291; rural areas, 296–97. See also Facebook; Information Technologies (ICTs), Instagram; Twitter social movements, 7, 149–51, 238; and organizing 98, 130, 148, 151, 249; social media, 301

social networking sites, 297–98, 304 Social Security, 61 Southerners on New Ground (SONG), alliances of, 261–62; bail out Black mothers for Mother’s Day, 33, 122, 124; Brooks, Jade, 20, 123, 157, 165, 190, 198, 295–96; Free From Fear campaign, 20; Hooks, Mary, 1, 7, 20, 24, 33, 34, 56–57, 97–98; 122, 124, 125–26, 134, 143–44, 157, 174, 220–21, 225–26, 244, 308–9, 347; Melt ICE campaign, 244; as political home for LGBTQ+, 143–44, 157–58; Spokescouncil, 239; state politics, 53; theory of change, 23–24; Tijerina, Roberto, 13, 20, 124, women, 107–11 Spokescouncil, 239 Squires, Bob, 75 Staff. See organizers statewide organizing, campaigns, 264–265; coalitions, issues, 227–31, 255–256, 328; organizations, 13, 262; for power, 13–14, 99; rural-urban strategy, 68, 327 Steeg, Marian, 201 Steele, Vince. See Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Stewart-Cousins, Andrea, 277 Strand, P. J., 46 Strachota, Gabe. See Community Voices Heard Streep, Meryl, 2 Substance abuse, 139, 157 Szakos, J., 22 Szakos, K, 22 targets 4, 35–36, 50, 61, 239–40, coalitions, corporate, elected officials, 323–24. See also campaign strategy tax cuts, 42–43, 90 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (2017), 43 tax-exempt status, 10 Tax Reform Act (1986), 43 Taylor, Breonna, 316, 349. See also Black Americans, killing of teachers strikes, 3, 204–5 teacher unions, 333

402 INDEX

technology: communication, 296–97; democratizing power of 284; human connections influenced by, 289–90; mobilization from, 7, 150; virtual options from, 354. See also digital technology; information and communication technologies, social media Temporary Protected Status (TPS) 119, 297, 302 texting: for communications, 292–97; Hustle program for, 293, 313; with ICTTs, 297, 97, peer to peer, 293–95 theory of change, 30–31, base building, 164–67, components of 49, corporate power in 57, definition of, 23–24; intersectional injustice and 317, of organizations, 21–29, 153, 320–21; organizer alignment, 153–55; power building in, 143–47; race, 78; racial justice in 74–80; radical pragmatism in 35; as social action organizations 77, 200–201; trusted spaces, 132–41 Third Way study, 242 Thunberg, Greta, 3 Tijerina, Roberto. See Southerners on New Ground Tilly, C., 281 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 1 TPS. See Temporary Protected Status Tracking participation, 306–8 training, 24, 142, 153, 170, 253, 320, electoral, 255–57; on feminism, 113–21; on LGBTQ+ inclusiveness, 124, 127; by national networks, 155, 261; in rural organizing, 205; on racism, 82, 93, 97, 201. See also popular education Transformation change, 190, 210–11 transformational organizing, xi–xiii, 5 Trans Rights Immigrant Project (TrIP), 125 trickle-down economics, 42 TrIP. See Trans Rights Immigrant Project Trump, Donald, 225, 233, 243, 252, 315, 352 trusted space, 132–41, 156–59, 178, 133, 178, 353–55. See also political home

Twitter, 279, 285, 299–302, 310 TWO. See Woodlawn Organization, The (TWO) 287G, 225–26 Uggen, C., 106 undocumented workers, 110, 197, 225–26, 307, 350–51 union organizing. See labor unions UNITE, 2, 183 United for Respect, 20, 146–47, 326; Dehlendorf, Andrea, 20, 46, 48, 66–67, 91, 104, 116–17, 121, 146, 158–59, 172–73, 182–84, 240, 272, 304, 308, 311, 312–13, 315; Lopez, Angela, 20, 92, 108, 109, 143, 177; multiracial, 66–67. 92; women in organizing, 104, 115–16; WorkIt app, 31 United States (U.S.) active citizenship in, x–xi; Constitution of, 1–2; crises in, 316, 329–30, 349; democracy in, xiii; inequality in, 41–42; political extremism in, vii–viii; wealth gap in, 47; working women in, 103–4 United Teach Los Angeles (UTLA), 20, 32, 266, 269; bargaining agreement, community-labor coalition, 267–69; Caputo-Pearl, Alex, 20, 32–34, 120–21, 204–5, 266, 267–69; Common Good Proposals, 266; Hands Across Colfax, 268; teacher strike, 204–5, women issues, 120–21 Unshelter Campaign, 230 urban-rural organizing, 106, 164; both/ and 156, 285; networks, 332; statewide, 328 U.S. See United States UTLA. See United Teach Los Angeles value-based organizations, 152 vehicles for change, 143–146 video pilot project, 304 VOCAL-NY, 12, 20, 300, 334; action committees of, 25; Homeless Union LGBTQ+ youth, 124–25; love and compassion from, 141; radical pragmatism, 193–94; Saunders,

403 INDEX

Jeremy, 20, 55, 141; social media, 192–93, substance abuse, 139; tracking information, 307; Users Union, 334; Williams, Jawanza, 20, 24, 77, 124–25, 136, 139–40, 176–77, 192–93, 211, 298–300 von Hoffman, Nicholas, 75, 160, 317 Voter Activation Network, 295 voter turnout, 55 voting rights, 316; in democracy, 354; in elections, 281; restoring, 3 Voting Rights Act, 245 wage gap, 104–5 Walmart, 104, 109, 116–17, 121, 143, 240, 326, 331 wealth inequality, 41–43, 46–48 Wells Fargo Bank, 68–69, 264–65, 275 We Make the City campaign, 62 WEP. See Work Experience Program Westin, Jonathan. See New York Communities for Change “We the People,” 1, 4, 347 White, Chelsea. See Down Home North Carolina white fragility, 92 white males, as organizers, 29, unions, 107 white nationalism, 253, 345–46 white supremacy, 65, 77, 79–80, 93–94, 205 wildfires, 350 Wilds, Sam, 185 Williams, Jawanza. See VOCAL NY Williams, Nat Chioke, 141, 164, 338 Wilson, S. M., viii, xi, 4, 21, 75, 108, 157, 161, 167, 168, 182, 186, 191, 199, 238, 245, 248, 299, 300, 320 Wind, Alex, 3 Wise Up, 195–96 Women: Appalachian, 114–15; Black, ix, 31, 133; as breadwinners 104–5; as caregivers, career paths, 105–10;

challenges in organizing, 112–13; COVID-19 pandemic and, 103; cultural values as barriers, 114; domestic violence against, 115–16; economic status of, 105; Equal Rights Amendment for, 119; farmworkers 214; feminist activism by, 120; immigration campaigns, 121–22; issues 119–22, 323; job protections for 103–6; labor rights of, 120–21; in leadership, 113–17; leadership barriers of, 116–117; marginalization of, 114; oppression of, 118; organizers, 37, 111–13, 116–17; queer women, 122–23; sexual harassment of, 2, 106, 213–14; sister circles, 97; in social action movements, 30–31, 102–7, 128; staff pathways for, 106–11; staff roles of, 107–13; wage gap of, 104; in workforce, 103–4; women of color in leadership, 103, 122–23; as working class, 128 Women’s March, 315 Woodlawn Organization, The (TWO), 75 worker protections, 274, 282 workers’ rights, 277 Work Experience Program (WEP), 28 working class, vii, 41, 128, 272 women as, 104 Working Partnerships USA, 51 WorkIt app, 146–47, 311 World Trade Organization protests, 198 xenophobic policies, 152 Yoshitani, Miya. See Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) youth organizing, 124–25, 247, 332–33 Youth Power Project, 195 YouTube channel, 304 Young Lords, 75, 195 Zimmerman, George, 234