I was talking to my supervisor the other day about taking a group of our constituents out to meet with some decisionmakers before defining our demands on the issue we were set on undertaking. He laughed in my face. He said it was ridiculous to meet with politicians if you didn’t have demands.
I tried to argue that it does make sense. It’s called Community Research. You do it by talking to people, even the elected people, before deciding what exactly you want. It’s a show of power in it’s own way, but it’s also an effective way to get questions answered and one your base gets something out of participating in and will participate in (generally speaking, they won’t sit and read reports or legislation with you, in my experience).
He continued to scoff. So then the Organizer made a mistake. He explained that that’s how groups like the Industrial Areas Foundation set about cutting their issues once they have decided to take a big problem on.
Well, then he just dismissed the whole notion.
So here’s one thing all old school organizers have in common: if an unfamiliar practice comes from another school-of-thought, they dismiss it out of hand. Sad but true. Organizers only trust the ways of their own, even though all of us, even the most ridiculous networks and traditions, have had our fair share of successes. It frustrates me.
Sometimes solving a problem for low-income people is as easy as getting a story in the paper. You see a problem out there, you know it sort of sucks, you find some individual who’s been hurt by it and convince them to talk.
Then, if you’re really smart, you sit on it for a little while until an opportune time to get some political stuff covered arises. Any time after major legislative bodies (such as your state legislature or your local city council) have adjourned for a few weeks is good. You just don’t want to compete with fampus-people-news, so wait till the famous-people are on break.
Then you do a press conference. Press conferences are easy. Anyone who’s got a decent media list and a little know-how can pull one off in less than a week. You don’t even need to do much turnout. Four or five people holding signs is all the more they are likely to show in the photo anyway, so why bother turning out 50?
Even easier: if it’s a great personal story, offer a reporter an “exclusive.” The harm or foul play has to have happened recently and you may lose the essential demands of your campaign in the final piece – but if it’s a crazy enough story you can use it when you go after the relevant decisionmaker. Just promise them that your campaign is the one that reporters will link to the exclusive as you keep pushing the issue and that should do it. Decisionmakers can usually write the headlines in their heads themselves and assess the likelihood of it seeing print/air time. If they can imagine a lousy headline, they’ll listen.
The problem is that it’s almost too easy. It doesn’t take much leadership for an organization to do good press. If you come to rely on press to win your campaigns for you, you may win. You may win a lot. You can probably raise some good money off of it.
But press work is ultimately staff work. You’re not really going to develop leaders out of it (maybe you’ll develop a good speaker or two), and you won’t really serve your larger organizational mission to build the sort of social capitol in low-income communities that allows them to advocate for and defend themselves
against the predations of our economy.
When you’re an Organizer, you have to be a bull about people’s time. You are teaching people to be empowered, to stand up for themselves, that’s the work. Odds are, whatever you’re doing is ultimately in their best interest, even if you’re sucking them away from TV or beer-pong time.
I say this as if it’s how I do it in real life. I don’t. Just yesterday I made what amounted to a cold call (someone I’d met randomly on the street and tried to involve) and I made the mistake of asking if they had a minute to talk.
Of course he/she didn’t. They didi’t know who I was. They had no referrent. Everything about this was weird.
You’re thinking: what does it matter? If they don’t have a minute then you ask for a time to call back. Or you ask them to call you back.
But, you see, they won’t do either. They won’t call you back. They won’t give you a time to call them back. Ever. I’ve never known anyone to ever do this, especially not someone I just met, who I just started trying to bring in.
So you can’t ask that question. Let them be empowered enough to tell you. Or just bull through their time until you get to your point and you cross that magic boundary where they sort of relax and decide you’re okay. It’s critically important that you never ask “do you have time to talk.” Don’t give them an out.
You need to believe they need you. You know you need them. So if you can manage it, don’t even rush. Don’t hurry anything. Make it conversational and light the whole way through and hopefully they will like talking to you enough to give the work a chance.
I love it when people tell me that Organizing is the tired old way of the 60s. Really. I love it. that protests and marches and general hell-raising don’t matter any more.
That’s not what people with clout think. Check out this post over at Working Life, it’s about the likelihood of a worker who is actively backing a Union losing their job. This is, of course, illegal, but very hard to prove. You can always make up some reason to fire someone. Employers can just have lots of stupid rules that they never enforce, until they need to fire an agitator.
One of the reasons why Saul Alinsky’s original round of Organizations quit growing was because they started taking government money to run programs that they had pushed for as an organization. Once you take money from someone, it gets hard to criticize them. People in power know that if you want to kill an organization, get rid of its Organizers.
Organizers are a very threatening force, but the way to beat them has always been the paycheck. In public life, the Man makes it hard to find money to pay Organizers’ salaries. In the life of Labor, they cut off pay to the people helping the Union move a cohort of workers into the better day of collective bargaining.
It’s a shame. And it’s a shame that any employer gets away with it.
Filed under: Uncategorized
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One thing I’ve found is that a base likes tradition and it will go along with things its used to. If you’ve built a culture of getting together to learn, your people will get together to learn.
I’ve worked for Organizations that don’t hardly ever do workshops or have issue discussions and organizations that ask their base to give up whole weekends to do workshops around the clock and do tough, challenging workshops on organizing.
It’s better to be involved in the latter world.
I’ve found it hard to get new efforts going around doing good retreat time where your base and you go through leadership development. Your base may resist it at first, but it needs it.
Here’s my encouraging note. If you can get it into your base’s calendar one or two times, they’ll start expecting it down the road and they will quit grousing and ask when to expect the next one. Expectations are one of your most powerful tools to work with as an Organizer. Morever, I’ve always found that a base always resists or hesitates about doing anything, but it’s members are almost always glad they did it once it’s done (of course, they resist the next thing, too, but no one ever said this wold be easy).
Do a workshop once – it’s a pain. Do it twice – it’s tradition.
It’s a worthwhile struggle to have with your people. They’ll thank you for it later and they may even use what they learn against you. Which is really exciting! (mostly)
I was looking at searches that got people onto this blog, and I found a few different versions of this question. It just so happens, I know the answer. How much do you make as an Organizer for ACORN?
You’ll start at $25,000 a year these days with ACORN. That’s for pretty much everyone. It might have gone up a little bit, but it will be right around there. That’s for 54 hours of work per week, minimum. It’s in their employee manual. Ten hours per day and four on Saturdays. No overtime, no comp-time to speak of unless you’re really working over an amount that’s truly above and beyond the call.
If you’ve got a lot of experience in the organizing world, it can go up from that a little if you argue it from the very beginning. They have a policy that you can take all your years of organizing experience, remove a quarter of it, and they’ll start you off at that level of seniority on the pay scale. The pay scale is all seniority based. So if you had been an Organizer for 12 years, you’d come in as if you’d be an organizer for 9 (that is, if the person hiring you wants you badly enough to run this by their board – I’ve only met one person it ever happened for and I’ve met other Organizers with them that didn’t know about the policy). It won’t hike your pay up all that much, as the annual salary increases are pretty pathetic.
You could work there 30 years and you won’t crack a $60K salary.
They do periodically move the whole payscale up. You’ll get a raise for every year of seniority (usually it’s like $750 per year, though it varies. Some years are better). You also get a little responsibility boost, so when you start managing other Organizers you get an extra grand (I think – something like that), on your salary. No performance based boosts. No bonuses.
Here’s what you won’t get:
A normal amount of vacation. You start off at a week per year and maybe a couple flex days. I don’t know any other organization that starts at less than two weeks.
A decent health plan. Their health plan is totally brand X. Your doctor will look perplexedly at your insurance card.
You’ll travel all over the country for really pointless meetings that waste you’re time. You’ll work even more while you are out for those, and they won’t pay for your food. How ridiculous is that? You travel at their behest and you’ve got to go around dropping $6-$15 per meal to eat out when you could be eating at $2 per meal at home. Fair? No. Also not normal. Other organizations pick up your meal tab when you leave town for organizational work. You’ll also probably sleep on the floor of some other Organizer when you travel.
If you need something, you buy it yourself and ACORN reimburses you. Someday. Don’t expect the check to come any time soon.
So, there, that’s what you have to look forward to if you decide to work for ACORN. Hope that helps.
I had a discussion recently about working to build up a phonebank. We were working with one of those databases that let’s you share contact data in all kinds of cool ways so that you can kind of make sure that no two people are calling the same person.
Anyway, the question arose of whether or not we should give people we called to come in and phonebank with us the option of making some calls from home.
The Organizer strongly opposes offering for people to make phone calls from home.
When I had this discussion, my basic point was this: no one is going to make the calls if you let them do it from home, so there’s no reason to go to the trouble to feed them the numbers.
The response: if we don’t let them do it from home then they are just going to say “no” to doing anything for us.
My coup de grace to this rejoinder is two-fold.
- A) They are already saying “no” to us, they are just doing it without saying it. They are saying that they will do something in an unsupervised situation so they will never actually be seen not doing it.
- B) It’s worse than that, though, because if we train our volunteers to give that option, then they will. They will give it readily. They won’t push people to come in and make calls. Then people who might have been convinced to come in (people will if you push them a little), will, instead, retreat to doing calls at home. And they won’t do it.
I also have one more, softer, gentler reason why I’m against making calls from home: phonebanks are great for organization building.
Set up a big circle of tables where your phonebankers can all see each other. Fill it up. Get a lot of people saying basically the same thing at the same time. It’s great. Folks will meet each other, they will talk, they will enjoy being together. Do a couple of short breaks so that people can give progress reports, get questions answered and tell about a couple of funny calls they had. It’s a great way to build a community of your volunteers.
Organizing is a shared endeavor. That’s what it’s all about. It works best when people can feel that it’s a shared endeavor, and that works best by actually seeing other people doing the same work that you are doing.
Filed under: coalitions, electoral politics, national, organizing, organizing networks
There is some buzz in the Community Organizing world around the Movement Vision Project coming out of the Center for Community Change [CCC]. When CCC has an idea, people listen, mainly because they’ve got some cash to throw around thanks – in part – to the big Mott Foundation hook-up. The project aims to bring a bunch of organizations with a base around the country together to try to coordinate their agenda so that progressives can team-up in a big way over the next few years.
It sounds so nice to you, I bet.
CCC is saying that we are in the midst of a giant opportunity, that opportunity being, namely, everyone hates President Bush. So let’s all put our heads together and fight a lot of crime. Go, team.
It all sounds nice, but we here at The Organizer aren’t too crazy about working with national organizations or getting “coordinated” by them. Team Organizer has a fair amount of experience working with D.C. organizations – we may or may not have been a part of one at some point (though we intend to keep working hard to maintain our anonymity so maybe we just had some really good friends who did and we feel like we were there. Will you ever know?). We are especially unexcited about working with a national organization that isn’t “us.”
I mean, if I were the Organizer for a local chapter of ACT-UP, say, I would probably be much more inclined to get some direction from the national organization or even other ACT-UP’s in my region than I would be to work with some big organization that wants to network with every organizer under the sun. That’s sort of the CCC approach.
Here’s one example of organizing work I’ll give you. I’ve served on coalitions with People For the American Way. I mean, who hasn’t? They are one of the most profoundly annoying groups to work with that you are ever likely to come across. By annoying, I mean they completely throttle the spirit of good organizing. They come into coalitions that they learn about that form around issues in which PFAW shares an interest (i.e., anything that might help a Democrat get elected President). They instantly start pushing people around and shoving whatever line their obnoxious press staff is shoving down the junior staff’s throats that week.
Organizing works when people come together, build on each other’s ideas and move forward on the stuff they agree on. People find disagreement frustrating and disagreement tends to undermine liberal coalitions. That’s why it’s best for liberals to keep their coalitions simple, with finite goals. There are two situations in which local groups don’t mind national groups shoving a gameplan down their throats.
- When it’s something that such huge news and it’s so simple that it’s easy for tons of folks to glom on. Like the spontaneous protests around Bush’s first election by the Supreme Court.
- When the national organization has lots of money to throw around. The Immigration Protests last summer? Bought and paid for by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Thank God they did it, but let’s not pretend that they were really evidence of a movement.
Otherwise, what happens is that the pushy national organization slowly drives others away who become frustrated by the way the national organization undermines their ideas and plans, and then whatever they are involved in fizzles out.
I have no doubt that the staff at CCC have a very clear idea of what they want the local groups around the country to do, when they want them to do it and what it should look like. I hope they have a lot of money to throw around because the conversation is only going to last so long and then local people are going to get annoyed because they’ll realize that they don’t want to completely rewrite their gameplan for the year because some suit in D.C. called them up and asked them to on a conference call.
Which brings us to one of the real weaknesses of liberals: we accept everyone and give everyone a chance. When we want to work together, it would all work so much better if we turned each other away from time to time. It doesn’t make sense to have some people involved in certain groups. Great example: when it’s protest planning time – the lawyers need to leave. Sure, they might be able to answer some questions, but you can also write those down and ask them together. If you try to make an organizing plan with lawyers in the room then you’re going to spend the whole meeting arguing about what you want and never get to what you’ll do.
When a national organization asks you to skip a day and go to their meeting: you probably shouldn’t. Don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. They wasted your time before, they’ll waste it again.
If you want to work with other organizations like yours around your state or region or country, do it the way we do it when we want to make it happen around our city: pick up the phone and call them. If they’re into it, ask them if they’ll call a few people.
If you end up reaching a critical mass, organize you’re own damn conference call. FreeConference.com will host it for you for free. And you’re an Organizer, my son, you don’t need some Inside-the-Beltway schmuck to write an agenda for you.
Filed under: tools-of-the-trade
It’s a small thing, a very small thing, but I’ve seen every kind of Organizer make this mistake. It’s always embarassing. Always frustrating. It always makes your base question your leadership abilities.
Audio-visual equipment. Whether it’s speakers for a rally or a TV/VCR at a meeting or a data-projector up on the wall – it never works right if you don’t test it thoroughly ahead of time. You have to get everything set up in advance and try it before the actual event. Or it won’t work. At least not for a while. I promise.
Especially when you consider that so many of our events are put together with borrowed equipment, it’s amazing to me how often Organizers fail to try things out in advance. The mistake we often have is that we’ve used a lot A/V equipment in the past, we’re tech-savvy, it always works fine, so what’s the problem? The problem is that it never works when people are watching.
So it’s a small point, a very small point. It’s so small it’s silly. Except you look silly if you don’t take it to heart: so please always test your equipment before you go out and use it. Set it up in the space where you plan to use it and get it running long before your people show. You will be glad you did.
Final note: when you’re running video, don’t forget to have a sound plan as well.
