It occurred to me recently that I tend to write a lot about obstacles on here and not so much about opportunities in organizing. I do need to change that, but I just want to provide a quick note:
Much of the work of an Organizer and persons training Organizers is to get them over misguided notions about what “works” in public life. We often spin our wheels and burn energy needlessly on perceived opportunities that were never opportunities at all.
These mirages are everywhere in public life, and dispersing them is one of the first orders of business that an Organizer sets about doing. That’s part of what I’m trying to do here.
Filed under: Friends and Allies, big issues, organizing, organizing networks
Okay, so picture this: your organization has decided the city has a big problem with homelessness. You’ve got some good homeless advocates that you know and you can work with locally. You’ve met with them, and they agree, it’s time to get hostile on decisionmakers who aren’t finding new beds for the homeless population and failing to invest diddly-squat in rehabilitation and reentry into the mainstream.
But your city is broke. You make the decision to go statewide, but to do that you need to reach staff and hopefully homeless people at other shelters around the state. You need to find more good eggs, like the ones you know in your city, people willing to push a little, get a little controversial, in the cities you don’t have a base in.
So what do you do?
Well, once you get out and start talking to people, they are inevitably going to point you to some statewide or nationwide association of the sort of institution you want to reach. Odds are, you’ve never heard of the association or any of its staff.
Ostensibly, you’ll be told that the association works on the exact same issues you care about, “and if anyone can help you reach the people you want to reach, they can.”
Sounds like a goldmine, right?
In my experience: not usually.
Typically, these associations of local institutions are shaky entities at best. Their first priority in life is staying afloat and keep everyone’s paycheck coming. To that end, they usually have a lot of prominent, middle-of-the-road people on their boards. When it comes to advocacy, they show up at hearings, submit testimony, reports. They use the word “critical” a lot.
I can’t really blame them, but I have three problems with working through associations to reach the people I need at the grassroots.
- They never help Organizers connect me with anyone. These groups always guard their contacts, so I’m never actually able to talk to anyone. If an Organizer, if I can’t talk to you, it’s pretty much a given that you’re not going to get on-board. The line you get is, “Send me the information and I’ll be sure to pass it along. If anyone is interested I will let you know.” You might as well throw your fliers in a trashcan now and save everyone a step.
- Associations always play it safe. The idea of getting involved in anything controversial and really pushing the buttons of a decisionmaker always rubs these folks the wrong way. These are the types who believe in working within the system. Why? I don’t know. It never seems to accomplish much, but they persist in believing it to be the right approach.
- They exert a pacifying influence on the institutions associated with them. Institutions associated in associations can always pass the buck to their association. “Oh, we don’t get involved in political issues here. We leave those things to our association.” And if the association doesn’t take the issue up, it must not really be important to the population the local institution is serving.
I almost have what amounts to a phobia of associations when I start going out to build coalitions. It’s the call I avoid making. I follow every possible lead to find the good eggs in other towns before I ever call a permanent, statewide or national association of the good local offices I need to get into.
Filed under: Friends and Allies, actions, day-to-day, local campaigns, organizing
Okay, so you’re pissed at a local business in your town. Say, a store is going to pull up and leave or a contract is ending or you’re trying to help a union get to card check. You get a coalition together. Everyone meets. You decide that a small delegation is going to meet with the targeted decisionmaker (the CEO, the Board Chairman, whomever) and depending on how that meeting goes, you may do a public action.
Sound familiar?
If you work in community politics, it should sound very familiar.
And if this is a reactive situation, then your timeline is going to be really short. In my experience it’s a week or two. So you decide to send this delegation out. It’s a couple days after your meeting. So then what do you do?
In my experience, the coalition will decide to see what comes of that meeting and then start planning some sort of public action.
Fuck that.
Your timeline is tight. If you’ve got a meeting with the target, schedule the protest action now. Start doing turnout now. Odds are, you know what he’s going to say. You know you aren’t going to like what they tell you. That’s why we have Organizers in the first place, because Power People hardly ever just roll over.
If you wait to call the action until after you “hear what they say,” you’re going to turn out far fewer people (maybe no one) and you’ll miss your opportunity. Usually you’re up against some notable date, such as the day the thing you don’t want to close is scheduled to close. If you don’t protest till after, it’s too late.
So why wait? If this sounds really common sense to you right now, trust me. It’s never how it plays out in the actual process.
In the scenario I described, if the delegation is all set to head out and an Organizer stands up and says, “OK, fine. But let’s plan the public action now and get that ball rolling” you will always, always, always hear at least one schmuck (if not several) say, “We can’t plan an action until we know what they say.”
Of course you can. Your base comes out because you ask them to. Because you tell them that someone is the devil and they are screwing your people and you need to stop them. The base never wants a complicated story, it never wants to hear all the details and it certainly doesn’t want to hear your demands.
Figuring out an action and building it up, finding leaders, getting details in order and doing the turnout takes a lot of time. It’s hard. Calling people back and saying, “Nevermind. They rolled over. Don’t worry about it.” That’s easy.
It probably won’t come up very often, believe me, but too often I see organizations and coalitions fail to move on campaigns because they are waiting for some answer to some question that really isn’t material to the larger, harder work of getting a bunch of people at the same place at the same time.
The time to start that work is always the same: the sooner the better.
Rage Against the Machine was a great band.
I’m not sure that they ever really did much to help organizers.
It’s interesting, but there is no question that once upon a time art was a powerful tool for helping organizing people. Especially folk music. I’m not really clear why we don’t have any Woody Guthrie’s today. “Charlie on the MTA” helped organize a major effort against a fare increase in Massachusetts.
That kind of thing doesn’t happen anymore. I think it has something to do with the technology of music these days and musician’s insistence on putting the music first. If you put the music first, then it’s going to take you twenty minutes to set up the stage so that the prima-donnas can play. That doesn’t really work with most actions that us Organizers put together. Hell, our stages are usually not exactly ideal for a band to play on.
When Woody played, I get the impression he just stood up with his gee-tar and did the best he could with whatever sort of sound system the situation presented him with. I also don’t get the impression that he worried much about getting paid for performing. He just followed the movement.
Meanwhile, it always seemed like R.A.T.M.’s priority mainly focused on ‘raising consciousness’ around issues that appealed to them. We here at The Organizer have no use for consciousness raising. All the consciousness in the world can be raised, but if it isn’t mobilized in some way then there is not reason for people-in-power to care.
Artists can be helpful in generating turnout, if they make posters and sing songs that not only discuss current issues but also direct people to actions that real organizations are taking. If they don’t do that, though, there work isn’t good for anything but Art. Not that Art isn’t, in itself, good enough. That’s not what I’m saying.
I just want to disabuse all artists of the notion that if their work is not specifically linked to a campaign (not just a cause), it isn’t helping anything politically.
For example, political cartoonists make me laugh all the time. I enjoy them endlessly. That said, I don’t consider them members of the political team. They are artists. Good for them. I know that they generally avoid getting involved with specific campaigns. Contemporary political artists feel like if they get involved with campaigns (rather than issues) they will be seen as aligned with organizations and special interests and will therefore lose their credibility.
That’s probably right.
So, if that’s their priority, then they should stay away from organization’s like the one I work for. I’m not going to criticize them for not getting involved in campaigns. If they want to preserve their credbibility above all things, then that is their choice and it is a smart one for their careers.
That said, if you ever read an interview with one of these folks or other political artists (like R.A.T.M.), you always here this refrain: “I’m never really sure if my work does any good for the larger causes that inspires my art.”
Let’s settle this question once and for all. As a person who is actually working on the real campaigns that make a difference on the issues you artists make art about, my answer is this: no, you aren’t helping. Until you help plug people into real campaigns, all you’re doing is serving your own muse and amusing/intriguing your audience. The latter is a fine and good goal. but you aren’t helping the cause.
There. That’s settled. I just saved a lot of interviewers an obligatory question. They can move on to other topics now.
Like, when is R.A.T.M. going to get over this “we should have been Soundgarden” shit and get back together with Zack de la Rocha?
Filed under: day-to-day
Here’s a hot topic that’s sure to bring the hit rates up on this blog: parliamentary procedure. Or, colloquially, ‘parli pro.’
Kurt Vonnegut once had a character who called Parliamentary Procedure one of the great civilizing forces of mankind, alongside AA’s 12-Step Recovery Program. The trouble with parli-pro is you have to learn it.
I’ve definitely been in lots of groups of people who dismiss parli-pro. I’ve heard a lot of mumbo-jumbo about how it doesn’t work for communities of color or its found to restrictive or different groups don’t need it.
The other day, though, I was typing up the minutes for a coalition meeting. I had volunteered to do it. I had so much stuff in my minutes. I had written so much junk down. The conversation just sprawled all over the place and the chair kept struggling to bring it back to the initial point (and to remember what that point had been).
By the end of the meeting, it was hard to discern if any real progress had been made or if folks just agreed to the next steps because they were sick of being in the meeting. That’s honestly how a lot of decisions get made in left-leaning coalitions these days. The conversation rambles all over the place, then the meeting runs over and the chair shouts out a ‘consensus’ that pretty much reflects his position and unless people radically disagree everyone nods. That doesn’t necessarily mean they buy-in, though, and if they don’t buy-in they don’t do anything.
At this meeting, the final decisions definitely reflected what the chair wanted. There had definitely been disagreement in the room and it all got shut down. Notably, the chair kvetched a fair amount about a previous incarnation of the coalition in which a lot of constituent groups did not follow through on work they’d said they would do. Well, maybe that had something to do with a poor process for generating buy-in.
Parli-pro has a lot of detractors. It is a system you have to learn, though once you get the hang of it you realize that parli-pro is governed by a real common sense logic. The fundamental logic of parli-pro is “one-thing-at-a-time.”
When I was keeping the minutes for this particular meeting, I had no clue what I should and shouldn’t right down. Usually, I only wrote down comments pertinent to what’s “on the table,” but nothing was really on the table. You could say that the topic of the whole meeting was alternately the mission statement and when we would meet next. Seriously.
So I just wrote it all down, and as I typed it up later I thought how much easier it would have been if people had to make motions, discuss the motion and the chair could rule anything not germaine to the motion out-of-order.
Parli-pro is a systematic way to move through conversation. It feels slow at first, but all it takes is to sit through several hours of wide open, ‘consensus style’ meetings before you realize how much time is burnt in meetings that meander endlessly.
My next point is going to be very subtle, so hang in there. I may not say it well.
Parli-pro is a system for managing discussion when people don’t agree. When everyone agrees, you don’t really need them. If everyone agreed, though, why meet? Just move forward.
See, I think most liberal allies would say, “we all agree on everything, we just have to work out details.” I contend that this both is not really true and that most of them can’t discern disagreement when they see it anyway.
I think there is a lot more disagreement in coalitions than people realize. I think these disagreements are often not vocalized or vocalized weakly. People express their disagreement by never taking ownership, flaking or contributing little.
Maybe parli-pro isn’t the solution, but everyone agrees that the Left’s failure to focus is a problem on the Macro level. I contend that it’s a reflection of the comparable lack of focus you see every time liberals get together to work on anything.
We need to focus. We need to take issues and questions one at a time, stick with them, work through them and then move on.
In many ways, parli-pro feels restrictive, but it’s really more democratic than the consensus model. When the consensus model, in fact, works as a means of permitting chairs or the most powerful people in the room just to steamroll through whatever decision that they want, it’s really an autocratic style of organization.
Parli-pro, of course, favors the people who bother to learn it. That said, simple parli-pro doesn’t take much time to learn and all learning takes is a little bit of work.
Tomorrow is Election Day in our fair nation of the United States, and this brings up the perennial armchair quarterbacking of American politics. We here at The Organizer bemoan the fact that America has such bad voter turnout and it deeply disconcerts us. That said, we here at The Organizer also completely disagree with all the quick fixes people like to propose to increase voter turnout.
Our least favorite proposal for increasing turnout is moving the Election Day to the weekend or making it a national holiday. We adamantly oppose either “solution.” The (perhaps) well-meaning folks at Why Tuesday have proposed moving Election Day to one that has fewer people working, like Saturday.
It’s a very slick website, so The Organizer is suspicious. Could this actually be created by conservatives who want voter turnout to go down? Who think they could control the government more easily that way? People who’ve actually watched the research and know that every time we make voting easier, paradoxically, fewer people vote?
The Organizer knows this. The voting experts at the Center for the Study of the American Electorate know this. So why is it that every Election Day, good people, even smart people, start talking about moving it to a non-work day?
The Organizer knows.
The first thing you realize as an Organizer, once you start to get it, is that most of our instincts about what moves and motivates people is wrong.
You think people take part in issues because they care about the issue. You learn this isn’t usually true. It’s because of who and how they were invited to take part.
You think that people follow others because they are well-spoken and articulate. You learn that’s not true, that those folks just do well on TV, but that people honestly listen to people that, for some ineffable reason, they trust – and they don’t usually trust the slick ones.
You think that politicians will pay attention to you if you have your facts straight and make a strong case. You learn this isn’t true. That they pay attention when you build power and shove it in their face, and at that point it doesn’t really matter if you’re right or wrong.
You also learn that coddling people and babying people into participation drives them away. That, in fact, challenging them, pushing them and giving them a chance to fail is what really generates buy-in, growth and participation.
So The Organizer isn’t surprised that all of our efforts to massage people into the polls isn’t working. The Organizer understands that the easier you make voting, the less important it seems.
The Organizer also understands people’s lives. The Organizer understands that it is middle class people who want the vote on Saturday, because they all have Saturday off. The Organizer knows low-income people, and he knows that the ones who have jobs work on Saturday all the time. Their day off is Tuesday or Thursday. Maybe they only have one day off a week. It could as easily be Wednesday.
The Organizer also understands that people are more likely to figure out a way to finnagle out of work a bit if they want to vote than they are to finnagle out of their kids’ soccer games or a chance to spend a weekend at a friends lodge. The Organizer knows people leave town on the Weekend or get caught up on all the other stuff they have to do.
The Organizer knows how little free time we have here in the states, and he doesn’t want to put voting up against free time when it can be put up against work time.
The Organizer understands the facts, and gets a little arrogant when writing about the facts. If only the people who support groups like Why Tuesday would pay attention to the facts rather than their own ill-formed opinions. The facts show it: making voting easier does not increase the vote. The Motor Voter failed. Let’s not throw good energy after bad.
Keep Election Day on Tuesday. It’s going to take good, old-fashioned work – Organizer work – to increase voter turnout. People have to care to vote, and if they care they will.
