Filed under: leadership
Leadership development is one of those tricky areas that separate good organizers from really good ones. If you’re an Organizer who can consistently turnout out a lot of people to actions, go you. That’s enough to make you a value to the movement from here on out.
But it can go further.
Sometimes you’ll here some of the take-it-slow Organizers, such as the ones who do Congregation Based Organizing, talk about something called “depth.” I describe depth like this. If one organizer can turn out ten people, then you’ve got one layer.
If 3 of those ten people can also turn out five people each on their own (for fifteen more people), then you’ve got an organization with two layers.
If a few of those fifteen additional people can turnout 2 or 3 people themselves, you could potentially add as many more as 45 more people at any action, and a third level of depth.
You get depth when an Organizer works to help his people become leaders. A leader is a person who has followers. Even if it’s only one or two. A follower is a person who will do something because someone else asks them to. So if you’ve got a person who has a small number of friends and family and neighbors that he can consistently turnout, you’ve got a leader.
An Organizer develops leadership by sitting down with people and talking to them about asking other people to do things. He coaches them on how to do it. He also challenges them to do it, because everyone is reluctant to do it (especially around political activity). One of the most important things he does is works with a person to make a list of people he knows, talks through those people with the person and then helps them decide which ones he’ll ask to come out and how.
Once a person is able to turn people out, you try to work with that person to learn how to train people in his network to turn other people out. That’s how depth gets built. That’s how Organizers create leaders.
Like I said, it’s one of the most important things an Organizer can do, and if he makes a commitment to doing it, on a consistent basis, over time (that is, years), he can build a really big, really strong organization with lots and lots of people who act as leaders on the Organization’s behalf.
It’s beautiful when it works.
Filed under: general
If you didn’t hear Green Day and U2 at the Superdome tonight, you need to go out and find a recording of it on-line somewhere. I heard it on the radio tonight. Really stunning stuff. Both the performance and the roar of the grateful crowd surrounding them.
That said, it drove home a point that I’ve tried to make for years. Socially conscious stars should use their cachet to strengthen turnout at political actions and campaigns. That they raise money for them is good. I could care less about their efforts to “raise awareness.”
But what we really need are big, big actions that hold leaders and decisionmakers accountable to the people.
When I heard the crowd roar just to hear Green Day and U2, it drove it home for me again. It was a great pre-game show, but they could use their powers for an even greater good.
Black Democrats convened in Detroit this weekend to talk about Black voter turnout and Black candidates. It’s great that so many Black people are running, but my favorite line was the part about advancing the Democratic vision for America.
What vision?
Voters aren’t irrational. They often don’t vote because they say it doesn’t do any good. Politicians and activists decry this stance, saying that if you don’t vote you can’t complain. They should listen, though. Voters realize that there is no real, credible alternative to the GOP, which has a very clear vision for itself. Why invest the time and energy into voting when you’ve got nothing to vote for?
The article never articulates any sort of vision, but it does end breathlessly excited about the prospect of some very powerful Black legislators gaining a lot of power for the Black Caucus if the Democrats retake the House.
Bully for them, but what are they going to do with that power? Do they know?
Today’s Chicago Tribune is saying that economics is an election issue, once again. I haven’t heard a candidate willing to address the real problem, though. It’s diminishing buying power among working people. Our economic indicators have failed to keep up with the times, because once upon a time expanding economies realized expanding wages and expanding buying power.
Now wages are flat and buying power is dropping.
It’s going to take a willingness to go after the very rich. It’s their fault. They’ve managed to roll back laws from the first President Roosevelt such that the Trusts are back and the richer are getting better and better at accumulating wealth.
Wealth is finite. Anywhere it accumulates means someone else is getting less. The poor obviously are not doing better, but now the midde class is suffering too.
The problem is, how do you organize them? With people working more and more in order to keep up or hold onto their job, how do they find time to organize and vote meaningfully?
The Unions are trying a few different approaches, all of which are laudable (America Votes, Working America, Communities United), but I don’t think anyone has hit quite the right proverbial lick on the guitar of civic action just yet.
I was tooling around the WordPress blogs today and I found a rhapsodic post for people to join this website, ColorOfChange.org. I’d give you a link to the post, but, bizarrely, this afternoon the person took their whole blog down, and it looked like it had been going for a while.
Anyway, ColorOfChange.org purports to stand up for black folks who haven’t had anyone to stand up for them before. It’s a website that arose in response to the Katrina disaster in New Orleans and all over the Gulf Coast. On the web-site, you’ll find petition campaigns on all sorts of issues around racism and and the voting franchise for black people.
It’s all well and good, but the fundamental sentiment rubs me the wrong way.
First of all, what do you mean by “finally someone will stand up for poor black folks?” People have been standing up for black folks and black folks have been standing up for themselves for years. It hasn’t been enough to prevent them from continuing to get the shaft, but it has made a big difference.
The point here is that when there have been decades of good work by black and largely black organizations to stand up on issues that matter (groups like The Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), the NAACP, the Rainbow Coalition, ACORN, the Black Panthers and countless black labor organizations and local groups), where do a couple of schmoes get off starting a website and acting like it’s all going to change because they get some new petitions going on the Internet?
It smacks of opportunism and ego. Look, as far as I’m concerned, the world doesn’t need any more organizations. We’ve got too many organizations – especially not more with a nationwide agenda – with too many redundant missions already. Funders and leaders need to start pitching in with existing organizations and, when they see a niche that isn’t getting filled, fill it but do it under and existing rubric. Complement an existing network of power that supports the underclass, don’t undercut it!
Organizations compete with each other for money and people, the two pillars of whatever power they are able to bring to bear.
When I hear about people starting new organizations, it always smacks of ego to me. Why couldn’t these two guys who started this thing have used their talents and abilities to build a similar effort within the NAACP, for example, a group well equipped to get a lot of name recognition behind the cause.
In fact, if I’m not mistaken, the latter guy, Van Jones, really ought to know better. I think he used to organize for the IAF in New Orleans and in Ft. Worth. He knows how organizing really works and he knows how much organizations compete with each other. He also knows full well that there was some very good organizing going on in New Orleans when Katrina hit, and it wasn’t for lack of organization that black folks got hit so badly by the storm.
The former guy, though, explains it all. James Rucker used to work for MoveOn.org. Need we say more? I’m always surprised these days by the number of people who don’t remember how MoveOn got started. MoveOn started as web-petition to end the Clinton impeachment proceedings following the Lewinsky fiasco. I’m not sure MoveOn proved anything else, but it did prove the power of the Internet to exploit opportunism around a big scandal.
Look, if you want to help black folks post-Katrina, then give your money to and sign up with any of the many organizations along the Gulf Coast that had sense enough to start organizing there before the storm.
You don’t hear a lot of stories of Wal-Mart getting beaten, but here is one. That’s what we like to see.
The TV news story quotes a woman saying that it brought the town together.
Okay, so now what are they going to do with that new closeness? They stopped something, now they could build something.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I found this when I was poking around on-line looking for other blogs by Organizers. It’s a PDF document about the electoral approach of an organization in Missouri.
I’ve been in this line long enough to know that rhetoric and reality often don’t mesh, but the rhetoric on this page sounds a little different. I hope it’s real.
Too often – especially in electoral work – people worry about the short-term so
The Industrial Areas Foundation has taken to holding meetings with candidates where they run the candidate up against their slate of priorities and see what they say. Earlier this month, an affiliate, COPS, the one that made Ernesto Cortes into a MacArthur Genius Fellow, ran the gubernatorial candidates (that they could convince to show) through their issues wringer.
The best grassroots groups really don’t have much money, and since the rules about endorsements and spending are IRS rules, they primarily care about money. Many grassroots organizations are starting to do things that look more and more like an endorsement all the time (in fact, to us non-hustler, non-lawyer types, they are endorsements). I think this is all to the good – it’s a risk worth taking.
That said, if the way the IAF is going to do it is to let a politician come, make a speech and nod happily when she says she’ll put the education of children first, well, I don’t really know what they are accomplishing.
Of course, I wasn’t there, and judging by a media account is not tremendously helpful, they gloss over so much. On the other hand, the whole point of the meeting was to get their take on candidates into the press anyway (I’m sure). So my feelings about this are mixed.
Did the electoral effort stop with this forum? Probably so.
I was thinking today about when I was organizing on a nationwide basis. I worked with this organization that had local groups around the country.
At one point, the President came out with this really awful plan that would have changed the way services were delivered to poor people nationwide. We thought it was awful. It ran against everything we stood for. Probably the single greatest threat to our mission ever.
But we were a pretty small organization without a ton of groups. What did we do? We rallied the troops hard and convinced about ten different local volunteer groups to do forums about the issue.
Now, we were just one little piece of the fight. Lots and lots of people hated the idea. Lots of other people loved it, though.
It’s always hard to know what works when very powerful people push something and it passes or it doesn’t. What was the proverbial straw on the camel’s back, right? All I know, though, is that every little bit helps and sometimes a few events really can add to the negative buzz (or positive, if you like what a high-powered politician is doing) in an important way.
I like to think that events, even silly little forums, when they coincide with large media buzz, somehow make the print and talking heads words more real and magnify their impact.
Anyway, the President’s evil scheme pretty much failed. My organization can’t take the credit for it, but we sure as hell didn’t do it any good.
