The Organizer Recommends: The ODB.
The Organizers’ Collaborative has been around for several years, and the creation they are best known for is the completely free Organizers’ Database. The Organizers’ Database is a great little platform for keeping track of your people, your contacts with them, money they give you and what they care about.
The interface is a little weird. For example, I used it for quite a while before someone showed me that I could keep track of conversations and events by enabling the “notes” function.
You’ll get used to it, though, and it’s definitely the best software of its kind out there. Unless you’re a complete whiz kid, it’s also better and more stable than any weird Access database you might build for yourself (having some experience here in ones I have built and ones that others have built that I used, I’m speaking from experience).
Here’s that link to the program’s website again: go get it.
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: Friends and Allies, electoral politics, general, leadership, local campaigns, organizing, politicians, schools-of-thought
It’s Election Time! Do-or-die days for a lot of Organizers out there. In fact, this is the only time that some political professionals actually do any organizing. Though in my opinion, electoral organizing is some of the lowest grade, lowest skill development organizing out there. At least, as it exists today. Back in the days of real machine politics, a person could find a meaningful place doing meaningful work in candidate campaigns, but these days no one trusts the average joe to do anything but grunt work, and the staffs don’t care about anything but news media and ad buys.
It’s not unusual for me to bemoan the fact that elections are the time of the greatest civic action among the citizens of the country. I think it’s a little irrational. You can put your energy into trying to get some man or woman elected, and you never know what you’re going to get. A candidate is a complicated mess. You can end up with a Bill Clinton, who surprises everyone by taking away welfare as an entitlement program. Or you can end up with a George Bush, Senior, who pushes the biggest tax increase anyone remembers.
Still, though, people think it’s do or die, and people who never participate in politics and never volunteer for causes get out there and work for candidates.
Not to criticize them, I think it illustrates something about organizing.
The smart Organizer knows that if you want to turn people out, if you want to build a base, you don’t do it with a good issue that people care about. I mean, you can turn out a lot of people that way, from time-to-time, but if you want to build something lasting you try to build leaders, instead. You do this, because you know that people will consistently do something that someone they view as a leader asks them to do. Leaders are consistent people. People follow people they see as consistent, that they can count on.
People don’t trust issues. They don’t know what they are going to get out of an issue. They don’t know if there is fine print somewhere, or if someone is pushing an issue for ulterior motives.
A lot of times, they don’t understand issues. They find them confusing. They see loopholes. Or they fear the loopholes they don’t see.
But people understand other people, and they will follow other people. They want to do the things people they have come to count on advise them to do.
That’s why I think it makes sense that people get more excited about elections (which may or may not have some sort of direct payoff to people down the road) than they do in issue campaigns (which often have very clear payoffs to certain communities, if they succeed). Elections are for candidates and candidates are people and that just works in better with folks at a gut level.
People make more sense to other people than issues. That’s why the average person who may or may not get involved in politics is more likely to contribute some time to a campaign effort than to issue activism.
It may not be ideal, but it does correspond with human nature. As Organizers, we are interested in dealing with people as they are, not as we wish they were or – worse yet – as we believe they ought to be.
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.
I don’t want to make this into a sequential blog, a book I slowly write on-line. I want this to be something that reacts dynamically to the larger organizing world, my latest thoughts on organizing, issues, campaigns, candidates and some of what I’m doing in my own life as an Organizer.
One of the great thing about working as an Organizer or in political life in general is that you meet a lot of people. That’s sort of the nature of the job. If you aren’t out and circulating then you are a lousy Organizer. You both need to meet a lot of people who can be part of your Organization, but you also need to meet people who will help out and support your Organization.
The trouble is, there are a lot of people out there who will be on your side, but they aren’t necessarily useful. In fact, if there is one dirty secret that I see Organizers refuse to deal with all the time (like a drunk who won’t admit he has a drinking problem or a woman who won’t admit she’s in an abusive relationship), it is this: just because someone is not an enemy, that doesn’t mean they aren’t an obstacle.
Lots and lots of Organizers work in churches, synagogues and mosques. Congregation Based Organizing is a very vibrant and rich form of organizing in the United States today. An Organizer has to worm his way into a congregation and then convince the folks into it that their congregation should officially join his organization, usually with a significant outlay of money and people time. It’s not a small thing to ask for.
One of the strategies that this sort of Organizer uses for working like this is ingratiating himself, in various ways, to important people within the congregation. Well, if you want to ingratiate yourself with an older male, asking them for advice is always an effective strategy. Older men love to be asked for advice.
Here’s the problem, though, if you ask an older person for advice, and if that person is of any importance at all, you’ll find you probably need to take it. And other people give Organizers very bad advice. For example, if you’re trying to break into a church, an older scion of the church will almost certainly tell you that you should take your case to the church’s board (or whatever they call their governing body).
This is a horrible idea. You might as well forget about the church if you try it. The correct strategy for winning over a governing body is to win over individual members of that governing body one at a time. Sometimes its easier than that if there is one member that all the other members vote with. If you can win him over, you win.
If you go to a Board directly and this is the first they have ever seen you, I can almost guarantee that they’ll say “no” to joining your organization. What’s worse, once the Board has said “no” to your organization, it’s almost impossible for you to continue poking around, because if you do members of that Board will wonder what you’re trying to do. After all, haven’t they already turned you down. Where before they might not have thought much about an Organizer talking to people, now they will actively oppose you.
That’s why I am saying that someone who is on your side can still be an obstacle. I’ve been in lots of coalitions over time, and there is always that one person, usually from some small, meaningless organization with no base, who talks endlessly and constantly pushes a ridiculous or flaccid strategy.
So be careful who you go to or who you try to get on your side. The wrong allies can be more trouble than tough enemies.
