It’s important to function in the world as it is, not as it should be. This is an important statement with many implications.
It works on a grand level: you are never going to make change because your cause is right. You are never even going to make change because everyone would be better off if you won. You are going to make change because you mobilize power on your side.
It works on a mass media level: you will never fascinate reporters because the public needs to be educated about something useful. Reporters want conflict and drama.
It works on the level of leadership development: no one will ever learn from you because they respect your past experience and expertise. They will learn from you because you help them see things for themselves.
You must understand the world as it is. To understand the world as it is, you must keep careful track of your expectations and your outcomes. These will help you discern your faulty understanding of the world as it is and as it should be.
Here are some more examples: you want to reach out to the Unions in your city, so you think that you should go to the labor boards or the AFL body in your city and ask them to help you. They will say they will help you, only you will never hear from any other Union leaders and never see any other Union leaders. Why is that? Because the power of the local AFL is based in its ability to guard access to the members that support it. It is already asking enough of its leaders. Why should it add what you need? [This rule goes double for Councils of Churches].
Your working in coalition with a bunch of other groups. You want to do further outreach. Normal organizers would get the group together as one and brainstorm other groups to reach out to and then charge individual members of the coalition with doing that outreach. Makes sense, but none of the work will ever get done. Worse, you’ll feel like you can’t ever follow up with the people on the list because someone else said they would do it. It’s far better to call your coalition partners, brainstorm individually and then do the outreach yourself. Unless you’ve really managed to Organize someone into a reliable actor.
It’s not just that people are unreliable (though a lot of adults are really unreliable), it’s also that sometimes a person has a reason to protect someone that someone else thought of from joining the coalition. So they volunteer to do the outreach to make sure it doesn’t get done.
You want to get a bunch of volunteers in to do a bunch of kinds of work for you. So you design one flyer with really broad appeal. “Good stuff, lots to do!” You print up a billion and pass them out all over town. No one calls.
It’s far better to design fewer fliers, put more time into several designs that focus on specific needed tasks. Why? Because people don’t want to see that you need all sorts of people. Individuals want to see that you need them.
The world does not work the way it should. You need to go out and do things that you think will work, state your goal before you start the work, right it down and when you finish the work see if you accomplished what you set out to or did you accomplish something else. Or nothing at all.
By evaluating your strategy against your goals, you can discern your faulty assumptions.
And your assumptions are faulty, trust me.
A little while back, The Organizer made the rather controversial and unsettling statement that socially driven artwork is not helpful to the political campaigns they might indirectly relate to. I’m not backpedaling from that point, but I would like to extend the subtext of that post a little bit. The subtext was this: socially conscious work is only relevant as art, but art that is made as a part of and a contributor to a campaign and its actions really can help (you just have to compromise your work to an external objective if you want it to matter politically, which will inevitably make it less credible artistically).
If you want to make art (or creative work) that fits into a campaign, we could use you.
In fact, I’m going to get really real here for a minute, and I might just piss some people off. We could really use more artists who do a good job of communication to low-literacy communities.
We Organizers draw up a lot of fact sheets and text heavy fliers. It isn’t even that we lack the skills to make more visually driven fliers and handouts, necessarily. We don’t have the time for it, and it’s that simple. We all type fast so we type and we change some fonts and slap our logos on and run them to Kinko’s, you know?
Screenprinters, draughtsmen, graphics designers, comic artists — we could really use you guys in the movement. If you could help us make materials that we can give to people directly on the street that communications the issues in a less text heavy way, it could be very good.
There are good groups out there doing some nice work. The Indy Media effort is really growing by leaps and bounds. One of my favorite things that I see the Indy Media folks doing is making a lot more video. This is good in campaigns where you reach a lot of people who have breached the digital divde (and more and more folks are breaching it every day). They are making a lot of great YouTuble’able and Email’able videos.
Still, though, the best of organizing is still face to face and you don’t want to sit someone in front of computer screen during a first time housemeeting. We need more old media, 8.5″ X 11″, duplicatable media that we can just hand people. That grabs them or makes them laugh.
That’s the art that could really help the effort to organize people into larger campaigns that mean something.
It’s not that artists aren’t contributing now, but the Organizer sees most of them contributing to the political efforts with hipster cred. Efforts like the anti-war movement, vegetarianism, bicycling… all good stuff, all important stuff. I can’t remember the last time I saw an artist really getting involved in helping turn people out in a poor people’s campaign.
As an organizer of the poor and disenfranchised, the Organizer is going to argue to his friends in the arts community that we need you more here than the hipster causes do. We need you to help communicate the complex economic issues to the folks with the least education, to help them see the need to turnout and speakout against the force that degrade their neighborhoods.
The vegans and the bike couriers all have a copy of “The Beat Reader” in their shoulder bags, you know? Those efforts just don’t need your skills as badly as we do.
Find us. Help us communicate. If you come to the cause and plug your art directly into the campaign, you can help. You really can.
The most frequently searched entry on this site is the one I headed “Anti-Union Propaganda.” So let’s help the people looking for that garbage find this post.
The Organizer worries about the general perception of Unions in the country right now. We believe that Unions are the best thing to happen to the common man since the Church. True, both institutions have been corrupted from time to time. That said, they have both been very good.
Let’s summarize their essential good: both Labor and Faith organize people into permanent institutions that provide for both material and ephemeral needs.
When I speak to my fellow young members of the middle class, I sense a real ambivalence about Labor. It’s past ties to Organized Crime and its various moments of gross expressions of self-interest sully it’s name to them. Among young, idealistic people, things that are good should be pure. They should have no blemishes. That’s the nice thing about untried ideas, concepts and nascent organizations: they haven’t had an opportunity to sully their own history yet with negative confrontations with reality.
What saddens the Organizer, though, is that I meet young people who think Unions are good for “people who need it.” They see Unions as purely oppositional to bosses. If you have a bad boss, then you need a Union. If you don’t have a bad boss, then you don’t “need” a Union.
Everyone needs a Union.
We are better off when we are organized. The business world understands this. They are organized money. Organized money is less visible than organized people (Labor, the Church), but it’s just as powerful. Why should we, normal people, go without Organization when the people we work for don’t?
Moreover, membership in a Union is good because it builds community, fosters political involvement, gives people a means by which they can participate not just in their workplace but in their city and state. Of course, everyone can just join some other organization but Unions are a more meaningful way to participate because: a) they are linked to your workplace, which means they have a real role in your life and b) because Unions have a great track record of getting people involved who never would have gotten involved on their own.
We all should be in Unions. We owe Unions for moving this country forward. We owe Unions for creating the American Middle Class.
What young yuppies really need to know about Unions: the Middle Class of our grandparents and even our parents was not like the Middle Class of today. They were workers in factories and mines and on farms and job sites. They were Union members who worked with their hands.
Today’s Middle Class is all knowlege workers and service workers. People who do manual work should be in the middle class, too, and the money is their to make sure they join it. Our country would be far better off if we had a larger Middle Class.
It’s no accident that the Middle Class has declined as Labor has declined.
We all need a Union.
I recently met a guy who’d won a seat on the board of his neighborhood’s civic association. I don’t know much about his neighborhood, but my impression was that it was pretty affluent and the civic association had a fair amount of power in local comings and goings.
Apparently, the board had long been dominated by a group of residents who liked to run things a certain way and always had. This guy had objections. I don’t know what they were. He’s a wealthy guy, so they probably aren’t the kind of things that would interest me much, but he did want to buck the system he found himself in. We here at The Organizer are always interested in that.
He’d volunteered a little on a big campaign that had a local office, and learned simple organizing techniques like doorknocking, turnout calls and reminder calls. Good stuff, but nothing out of the advanced textbook of organizing.
It turned out that anyone in the neighborhood could vote for board members and anyone who lived there could run. So he ran, and he spent a little time knocking on doors and telling people why he was running. Usually, no one voted on the civic association board election.
So he turned out his own constituency and sailed to an easy victory.
What’s the lesson here? Sometimes there are people with power that are so fat and happy that they neglect to watch their own backs or power base. Any organizing at all takes them by complete surprise, and people, like this guy, can sail to an easy victory just by doing a little old fashioned legwork.
If you’re an Organizer, most of the people you deal with give you their time freely and voluntarily. Many of them will probably try to hustle money out of your organization, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t contribute for free. For some of us, we have a base for whome hustling is a way of life.
That said, when you work with people who are volunteering their time or thier presence to you, you have to let go. Many Organizers, even good Organizers, disagree with me on this point. That’s fine. This blog fits my philosophy and my approach, but it’s my belief that you can’t be a control freak when you are Organizing.
When you have a base of volunteers, there will be screw-ups, tardiness and chaos. You must accept this. As the base grows, so, too, does the chaos. Accept this as well.
Over time, if your base is consistent and you are oriented toward Leadership Development, you’ll have leaders within your base that can help maintain order while also making sure people feel their participation is welcomed and valued.
But if you’re in the middle of a big crazy effort, like an election campaign, and folks are coming in and out, you’re going to have to let go in order to welcome volunteers. Some of them will rise up and take on leadership roles. Welcome that. If they want to be in charge of the sign-in sheet or the phones, let them. They will do things you wouldn’t do. Let it go. Let it go. Unless it’s egregious, let it go. Welcome the involvement and let it go.
If you take a bunch of people lobbying officials, they won’t follow your script. Let it go. They will say the wrong thing. Let it go.
This is the price you pay with volunteers. It won’t be tight. It won’t be efficient. Let it go.
People get the funniest about things written on paper. This is where the control freak in everyone sets in. I will say this once: you know that your volunteers are starting to take ownership when they do writing work for your organization.
They will not write what you would have written. Fix the egregious spelling errors. Work with them on it. But keep the spirit in place. It’s worth it in the long run.
That’s what Leadership Development is, after all. Other people are in charge. It’s not all you.
Let it go.
It’s better this way.
My approach to Organizing involves a lot of accepting the idiosyncracies of my base because I know that, over time, I’d rather have them with their idiosyncrasies than lose them. You can’t control everything.
If you want to say “hello” and “welcome,” then you need to learn to let it go.
Here comes some big news from the “Who cares” files. The percentage of the vote represented by single women is slightly lower than their percentage of the population; the reverse is true of married women.
Wow. Stop the presses.
If you read this article, it gives statistics on the percentage of the population single women and married women represent and then how likely they are to vote. If I’m not mistaken, the difference is within a standard deviation on both counts. So, again, I say: who cares?
This is not meaningful information. Moreover, it only underscores the non-issue of the issue. It only shows that whether a woman is single or not is not a meaninful determinant of her likelihood to vote.
Is the issue of being a single woman really worth organizing around? It’s fair to say that a good number of them don’t intend to remain single, and temporary identities are always bad ones to organize around. I’ll write more about this soon.
On another note from the end of the above article, The Organizer continues to yawn in the face of all people arguing to make voting easier – in this instance, by moving Election Day to the weekend. You’re not paying attention if you believe this to be true – you’re just going with your misguided instincts.
Voter participation has dropped the easier voting has become. We took away poll taxes, we offered registration forms at the DMV, we’ve extended the franchise and voter participation has fallen, fallen, fallen.
I’m not arguing that all of those things weren’t good, but anyone who thinks that you’re more likely to see people vote if Election Day were moved to Saturday or Sunday is dead wrong.
In fact, The Organizer believes that the move is inevitable, as the clamor around this silly idea grows, and The Organizer predicts here and now that if Election Day gets moved to a Saturday then within four years the voter turnout will drop by at least 20%.
Why? People leave town and cut the lawn on weekends. That’s why.
And because the ease of voting is not now and never has been the issue. The issue is whether or not voters care.
Government runs on hearings. I can’t ever tell if they actually accomplish anything. It’s a tenet of open government that before decisions are made, hearings should occur. It almost always seems like everyone has already made their decision.
Still I go. I go because the obvious often needs to be said. I go because I want to believe that some decisionmakers are listening. I go because I vagely believe “the record” means something. I also go because every now and then, when something really hot comes up, hearings can be a focal point for group action, outrage, dissent or whatever else might move something or stop something.
I wish I knew more of this story. National People’s Action Blog reports on an award for an organization that fought a local drug dealing operation. Impressive.
The reason I say that I wish I knew more is this: it could not have been an easy organizing job. People are really afraid of drug dealers. Understandably. I’ve heard the story again and again, about people in neighborhoods who want to organize to get drug dealers out, but don’t know how to do it because they are afraid they are going to get shot.
It’s a legitimate fear.
You can be afraid of organizing against City Hall because you are worried you’ll lose or someone close to you will get fired – but they don’t assassinate people (very often – some Black Panthers would understandably disagree). Drug dealers will kill you.
That’s why you have to do a lot of very quiet organizing and get a lot of people on board before a community feels like they can take drug dealers on. It’s true that numbers can beat down a politician and numbers can beat down drug dealers. If there are one or two people calling out criminals for selling poison to children, they are easy marks. If it feels like everyone in the whole neighborhood is watching you, what are you going to do? Who are you going to shoot? Kill too many people and no one will come and buy your product. Might as well pack it in and leave.
Plus, people find courage from each other. It’s easy once you have a lot of people brought in, but what I want to know is this: how did the Organizers at Syracuse United Neighbors make that difficult transition from one or two very courageous people banding together to lots and lots and lots of people watching the dealers? What strategies did they use? How did they approach people? How did they keep it quiet? When did they decide to be more open?
I only ask because others should replicate their work. Kudos to them. It’s very impressive proof of the power of watching your neighbors’ backs and moving forward together.
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.
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.
