If you’ve been involved in a political group for a long time, you may have noticed a pattern: the group always attacks problems the exact same way. Maybe it always does press conferences. Maybe it always does rallies. Maybe it always goes and meets with the politician it’s closest to. Or maybe it’s good at getting in the paper, so that’s what it always does.
Are you frustrated by that? You should be. That’s just sort of how groups work. Groups are naturally conservative — that is, groups don’t like change. When a group gets comfortable with an approach, that’s what it does.
So if you’re frustrated, you’re just going to get more frustrated if you go to meetings of the group and suggest change their. During meetings, people don’t function as individuals, they function as members of a group. They will be guarded about saying things that others will disagree with. They will tend to think in terms of B.T.W.W.H.A.D. (BUT THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE). In fact, it’s better to say “it will tend to think” because at meetings, most people function as members of a group mind.
So if you want to get your group to do something different, you need to plan ahead.
The next time you know you’re group is likely to take action on some issue and you don’t want to see it do the same old thing, I recommend the following action steps:
- 1. Brainstorm the course of action you’d like to take and why.
- 2. Make a list of members of the group that tend to listen to you or that others listen to.
- 3. Pick several of them to talk to before the meeting, then call them up. Try to talk to them face-to-face if possible, but over the phone can work, too.
- 4. Tell them you foresee the need for the group to tackle some issue, and you wanted to brainstorm about solutions with them ahead of time.
- 5. Try to guide them to come up with your new strategy, but try to be open-minded about ideas he or she comes up with, too. You may find that when you speak to others individually that they will have ideas for new tactics as well. Their idea might be better than yours. If so, buy in and affirm their idea. Encourage them to speak up about it.
- 6. Try to get the other person to broach the idea first, and decide on an appropriate time in the meeting for them to bring it up.
- 6.5 Try to have the same conversation with other people and lead them to roughly the same conclusion.
- 7. When they bring up the new tactic in the meeting, chime in your support.
- 8. If your allies don’t bring it up, then you should.
- 9. Guide the conversation to logistics ASAP, so that people start taking on tasks. Follow up with those people to help them get their tasks done. It will be harder this time because your group has not done it this way before!
- 2. Make a list of members of the group that tend to listen to you or that others listen to.
I can’t promise it will work, but I can promise it will get you further than springing all new approaches on a group in a meeting. Eventually, you’ll get thought of as a sort of loose cannon, or at least someone who has “wacky ideas.”
Generally speaking, different problems do call for different tactics. And, at the very least, groups learn from trying out different approaches, so it’s worth doing anyway. The question is, how do you bring the group around.
The important thing to remember is that people don’t really follow ideas. They follow people, but until you convince them to follow you they are going to futz about with ideas. In order to get them to follow you, you have to give them room to grow and think. That’s why when you launch a coalition, you have to keep it loose.
I’ve worked in coalitions in towns across America. I’ve seen them work. I’ve seen them fail. I’ve seen very powerful people convene them and go nowhere. I’ve seen near nobodies eventually win everyone to their table and rock the house. A big difference is whether or not they keep it loose.
You can’t control coalitions entirely. They are ungainly monsters who don’t stay on message or consistent or follow perfectly. To win them over and win their trust, you have to keep it loose. You have to permit members to follow courses you are unsure about, you have to let multiple things happen at once, you have to let people argue. As long as it all stays civil and loose and you keep reaching out, it will grow.
You don’t often see business leaders joining progressive coalitions, even when it’s in their interest. I think it’s because on some level they can’t stand the loosey goosey nature. You know, in the business world, when something needs doing, you tell someone to do it and it’s done. In the coalition world, if something needs doing and no one volunteers, you’re sort of out of luck (of course, that’s sort of your fault, as the leader, for not anticipating it and asking someone quietly to consider doing it before the meeting).
There’s a lot of talk in the political world about being on message, staying tight, clear tactics and a well-honed agenda. I see a lot of young people try to bring these ideas to the table when they launch coalitions. It’s bogus. If you’re going to work with a bunch of people who don’t have to be there with you, then you have to keep it loose, open and flexible or you lose them.
It’s easy to get lazy when you’re working among the underclass. The thing is, so many of the people and groups you interact with have so little power that you don’t ever expect any of them to really be against you. After all, everyone is trying to carve out there little piece of good in this modest world of advocacy/organizing/activism — what’s to fight over?
So you get lazy. And sometimes you can really get broadsided by a group you’d assume to be an ally going after you like you were the worst possible enemy.
Your friendly neighborhood Organizer has been working on a nice local campaign, and doing it to some degree alongside some neighborhood groups around the city. These local groups address these campaigns all the time, we just deal with it on occassion. On the other hand, we bring more historical clout to the table, a larger base and more strategic thinking. The groups were sharing a problem that we saw as a problem, too, and asked us to be part of the solution.
And we were. In fact, it’s fair to say that in about six weeks we had the problem solved. A little event, a little media attention, some well placed phone calls and it was done.
We had more we wanted to do, and when one of the local groups I hadn’t dealt with much before invited me to come out and talk about what we were up to, I just sort of assumed it would be another supportive audience. This group was so much like all the others I’d met with in the past and they had all been so excited to be part of the effort – why should this be any different?
Wow, was it different.
I was waylaid. In fact, I was told that if we won the campaign that we were waging we risked actually losing it. The campaign was to support a series of institutions in the city – we’ll say they were rec centers. There is a certain number of these rec centers and we wanted to increase all of their services by a certain percent. This group I met with told me that we could win the increase in services, but see a corresponding closure of rec centers to make up for the cost.
What?
It was an objection so far out in left field, especially coming from an ally, that I had no preparation for it. It’s like someone telling you that pedestrians are actually safer walking down the middle of boulevards than they are on the sidewalk: it’s such nonsense that there is not a logical way to discuss it.
And, of course, I’d come in with the wrong attitude from the start. I assumed I was coming to see supporters. Instead, I’d been invited to a kangaroo court.
So the lesson here is this: always make sure you know who’s in the room before you go. Even if the room is filled with other powerless people, just like the ones you organize day-by-day. There’s a good chance someone is against you. Or, at the very least, someone who doesn’t like what you’re doing has gotten to the people you are trying to organize first.
It’s not a rule I’m great at following. I tend to be an Organizer who functions on instinct. In fact, as a general rule, I won’t meet with groups unless I already know they are on my side. Groups are conservative and hard to convince. Individuals are not. Usually, I will only meet with a board or organization if I already have a number of allies among its members. In this case, I’d gotten lazy because I’d met with so much previous success.
In this case, it felt very unpleasant and wasted nearly half-a-day, a week-and-a-half out from a major rally. I should have looked into it all better. It looks as though one of my opponents on the issue got to this group before and me, and I was out-organized. At least that means that the campaign is going well enough that someone feels threatened. Bully for the home-team.
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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.
Coalitions are the catch-word of liberals. We all ought to be together and helping each other out all the time. Right?
The Organizer’s take: maybe.
The Organizer works in a long-standing organization with a nice track-record of coalition work. The Organizers he works with run very nice coalitions that stick together and bring some pretty serious customers to the table, and the coalitions win.
Winning has its price, though. If you are always working side-by-side with unions, lobbyists and other educated people with a long political track record, it might not be great for your base’s sense of involvement, ownership and leadership development. Of course, I guess it depends on who your base is on some level. Even the most educated constituencies, though, usually aren’t as sophisticated at political professionals. I’ve met some Ph.D.’s in Political Science who had serious misconceptions about how business got done in cities.
So here’s the problem with coalitions: you’ve got normal folks with day-jobs (or unemployed or very low-income folks) trying to keep up with people who live and breathe political life. They can’t keep up. No one should expect them to. This is a side effort for them, something they believe in but not a career. More importantly, they won’t try to. In my experience, when the pros are there, they let the pros lead (and/or they drop out, feeling unneeded or uninterested).
Sure, a good organizer can bring people along and inculcate enough sophistication in some of his or her leaders that they can keep up with pros, but it takes a long time.
I personally believe that leadership development can only be done well in isolation from political professionals from other organizations. In other words, your organization needs to run some campaigns without help from outsiders so that your people can make mistakes and magic on their own, reflect on it on their own and grow on their own. I’ve seen lots of normal folks just go along and get along when they have to work side by side with pros all the time – they might win, but they don’t get much out of it beyond some fleeting sense of victory.
No, if you want to accomplish real Leadership Development in your organization, you might need to take a pass on involving your big allies in some campaigns so your folks can get the experience they need. Sure, this could result in losing on some issues you might have otherwise won on, but this work is not just about winning. It’s about building communities that can take care of themselves.
