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Tag Archive for: Alliance Building

  • Photo: © iStockphoto.com/digitalskllet

My Queer Chicana Eye on My Brother’s Keeper

By Carmen Iniguez   |  April 1, 2014
Reflections | 2 Comments

Gender Justice Series. Gender is shifting in the U.S., spawning deep soul searching, fear, and backlash – as well as new opportunities for social transformation. In our Gender Justice series Let’s Talk will explore how gender is woven together with other social identities such as race and class, and how a liberative approach to gender can inform and strengthen a wide range of social movements.


I am a queer Chicana building an alliance with boys and men of color.

The connections between who I am and who I work with may not seem obvious to you or to many people, including those launching My Brother’s Keeper, President Obama’s new initiative aimed at empowering boys and young men of color. In fact, the connections weren’t even completely clear to me just three years ago.

Three years ago I was pregnant and bombarded with the question, “What do you want – a boy or a girl?”  “A healthy baby,” I would answer.

A month into my second trimester I had a vivid dream, my wise curandera Tereza rubbed my swollen belly and gave me a consejo to take care of the little girl inside of me. I woke up from that dream thinking about how I would raise this child with the least amount of pink and dolls, and with the greatest amount of spunk and spirit.

Weeks later at the ultrasound that would confirm the sex of our baby, I looked at my partner with disbelief as the technician ceremoniously announced that we were having a boy. I was incredulous. Over and over I asked the technician to check again. In the end my partner and I were sent home with an ultrasound picture with an arrow pointing to our son’s anatomy and capitalized letters that read BOY!!!

The awesome responsibility of raising a boy of color weighed on me heavily. Having grown up with two brothers in a predominantly people of color community, I am painfully and intimately familiar with the low expectations, school tracking, and racial profiling boys and men of color are subjected to. I know that youth and men of color are seen as expendable by systems that are stacked against them.

Unconsciously I decided that the best way of protecting my yet unborn child was to keep him inside of me for as long as I could. I felt that he would be safer inside of me. Because how could I possibly protect him from the outside world? I was in denial about birthing him. Fortunately for me, I was in the care of an experienced and intuitive midwife, Eva, who saw right through my fright. At our 39th week visit, Eva and my partner gently confronted me and started chipping away at my fears. I was flooded with emotion, realizing that my role was to guide this baby into, and in, this world.

My son was born on his due date, one ounce shy of nine pounds. My fears of the world around him have not disappeared but have been abated by the network of people and organizations engaged in Boys and Men of Color (BMOC) work in local communities and through statewide initiatives funded by The California Endowment.

As a queer mami of color, my faith in a better world is restored through this work as I hear, witness, and engage in challenging yet healthy struggles about the boys of color who are traditionally left out of the conversation – queer identified and transgender boys of color. It’s undeniable that outcomes for boys and men of color are dire when it comes to higher education, employment, health, and life expectancy. These issues are compounded when we talk about queer and transgender boys and men of color.

In our work with BMOC we have found that focusing on gender and sexuality is crucial for empowering men of color. For example, the experiences of youth leaders in the Young Men’s Empowerment Program (YMEP) at the Long Beach-based Khmer Girls in Action (KGA) illustrate the power of creating safe spaces to address gender identity and sexuality with young men of color. In the words of Seng So, Young Men’s Empowerment Coordinator at KGA and a leader in the Brothers Sons Selves coalition in Los Angeles County,

YMEP serves as a safe space where young Southeast Asian men share in collective knowledge, growth, and transformation…Through YMEP we are redefining the markers of manhood, reshaping masculinity and the role that we play in being allies to our sisters and young women who are fighting to dismantle patriarchy.

Seng So describes how the empowerment of young men has allowed some to come out to their friends, family, and community – serving as leaders and advocates of LGBTQ rights in the process. Through YMEP young men are developing into effective organizers in their local communities, fighting for wellness centers and restorative discipline practices in their schools.

As Seng So’s story illustrates, focusing on gender means broadening the definition of “what a man is,” how masculinity is defined, enforced in our families, cultures, and society. In statewide gatherings and curriculum for BMOC, participants explore and challenge limiting concepts of what a man looks like. This exploration goes beyond breaking down familiar stereotypes to challenging the gender binary and widening the lens to look at the intersections of gender and sexuality.

Ultimately, a focus on gender means an inclusive way of looking at issues that affect all of us. How do we uplift our black and brown, young people of color without leaving out part of who they are – gender identity and sexuality? How do we raise our children to express their full humanity and all of who they are — for gender to support that expression — not be a prison, an expectation, a limitation, a target for state violence, a purveyor of unearned privilege and power.

Understanding and exploring gender is important for all men and boys as an essential part of their development and empowerment. Understanding and exploring gender is necessary for any program or initiative because otherwise we end up excluding and discriminating and traumatizing those who don’t fit into the established boxes, and reinforcing oppression for all.

My hope is that my son will grow to become a kind, thoughtful, community oriented human being: someone who believes in inclusion, who will struggle to find another way, a third way, that transcends the “either-or” options to which we’ve limited ourselves.

Let’s have this conversation as if the lives of all boys of color are on the line, because they are. Just like the lives of girls of color are on the line. Let’s find another way, a third way, to include boys of color in all of their wholeness.

—

Feature photo: © iStockphoto.com/digitalskllet

  • Photo: Moyan_Brenn, licensed under CC BY 2.0

Creating Sea Change — To Win

By Jodeen Olguín-Tayler   |  February 18, 2014
Reflections | 2 Comments

Big Leap Series:  Movements must be big to have real impact — and they need to have depth to create lasting and significant change.  This post by Caring Across Generations Director of Organizing Jodeen Olguín-Tayler is the first in our “Big Leap” series inviting movement leaders to reflect on their experiences, struggles, and questions about reaching scale through depth.


Over the course of 15 months, Caring Across Generations engaged a base of more than 1 million people. By our second year we were a leading force in the coalition that won minimum wage and overtime protections for 2.1 million workers. Many of us in the community based organizing field see this scale of engagement and impact as cutting edge for our sector. But, as innovative and exciting as they are, these indicators of scale are an entirely inadequate measure of success.

Our innovations with scale are important. But what is most hopeful about Caring Across Generations is how we situate our work within the entire terrain of social change work. We measure success by the degree to which our “wins” enhance coordination and alignment of progressive infrastructure. In the current political landscape, one goal of all our work must be to transform our scattered, isolated progressive infrastructure into a highly aligned cross-sector fleet.

“Winning” means much more than large scale concrete improvement in people’s lives. “Winning” means transformational and structural change that can be sustained and can birth opportunities for ongoing change and transformation. No social change at scale will be real lasting change if there’s not a movement behind it, demanding and creating that change.

“Winning” — really winning– requires alignment and coordination across multiple social movements in order to create a sea change with the power to reshape the political landscape. Our ability to arrive at a new political landscape — one where we have the power to govern — requires a fleet of well coordinated infrastructure to sustain, lead, and navigate that sea change.

When we launched Caring Across Generations, two catastrophic storms and two tidal waves were rapidly changing our political and social landscape:

The two (corporate sponsored) storms were:

1 Austerity —an agenda masked as an indisputable environmental reality— manifesting in the corporate control of Congress and flooding every aspect of the fiscal and legislative debates in the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, bank bailouts, and the resulting jobs crisis.

2 The surge of (finance capital-backed) nativism and the eruption of the Tea Party, bringing its manifestation of a Right-wing agenda that yanked the entire American political spectrum to the right.

The two (organic) waves were:

1 The majority minority: People of color and immigrants rising to make our country a people of color majority by 2042.

2 The maturing of the baby boomer “age wave”: In our country one person turns 65 every eight seconds—or 10,000 people every day — an aging rate with the potential to spawn a “silver tsunami.”

These were the climate conditions shaping our nation’s political landscape. Polling data from the 2010 midterm elections revealed deep polarization between two key demographic groups: the moderate to conservative (very powerful) aging white electorate and the growing Latino, Black, and youth voting blocks. The contrived alarms about the “fiscal cliff” fueled this polarization. States with the highest percentages of rapidly growing populations among the elderly and people of color became flashpoints for legislative and legal battles. The magnitude of the polarization was tearing apart our social fabric and paralyzing governance.

Sadly, our social movements and political leadership were failing to provide clear direction. One example: in a country of people desperate for jobs and needing care workers, there was no plan to create care jobs. Instead the potential workforce of caregivers and the skyrocketing population needing care were being pitted against each other.

It was a classic “crisitunity.” Without a campaign and organizing plan, the age wave would create a crisis — a tsunami — that would feed and exacerbate the political storms and demographic divisions within our country. Or, with strategic intervention, the momentum of the age wave could become an opportunity to align diverse leadership into a convoy. Instead of drowning, getting hit by, or fighting the wave, a new convoy of leadership could engage the currents and tides shaping the wave, positioning to get in front of the wave. We could ride at its helm to guide the direction and impact. This strategic opportunity to create an alliance between two powerful voting blocks would require not just highlighting intersecting self-interests, but leading our organizing with values that allow people to recognize their interdependence.

Right now, with 50 years of well-coordinated storms beating down on us, we are in disarray. Our infrastructure — barges, sailboats, aircraft carriers, motorboats, submarines, rowboats — are damaged and isolated. Our institutions and organizations are at different levels of functionality. And, we aren’t aligned. We aren’t moving towards a shared vision, nor creating synergy across our demands. We are not sufficiently coordinating efforts to sustain ourselves or engage the potential of the social movements swelling and brewing in the ocean beneath us.

What we need is a fleet of highly coordinated infrastructure that can lead us out of the storms to a new political landscape.

How do we create that fleet? How do we not just “win” some battles, weather the storms, and keep from drowning — but instead create alignment and vision to lead us to an entirely new landscape? How do we really start to align our different issues and the bases of support we are accountable to?

Caring Across Generations engages previously siloed organizations and sectors by using multi-issue values-based campaigns to catalyze alignment and operationalize new strategic partnerships across sectors. The “age wave” coming towards us impacts care workers, seniors, family caregivers, in different ways. We hadn’t aligned our ships before, but we’ve built a campaign that is helping us to do that now. Values-driven campaigns can transform disorganized ships into a strategically aligned convoy moving towards a shared vision. The most significant contribution of Caring Across Generations isn’t what we’ve won so far. Our biggest contribution is cohering this newly aligned political force: a convoy of ships that consists of diverse state partners, national organizations and networks, progressive foundations, and policy shops from various sectors. It is this alignment and coordinated action brought about through our strategic partnerships that made our scale of engagement and impact possible — and transformed conditions and progressive infrastructure.  Many organizations have been at the lead of our convoy at different moments. It is strategic for us to be in constant assessment about which organization should be most visibly leading at any moment, while always traveling in a formation where every ship is leading a lane.

Cross-sector multi-issue campaigns are catalysts. They set into motion convoys of ships with the potential to cohere and align with other ships across sectors. These convoys can coordinate to animate an entire fleet moving in strategic formation. That fleet is the infrastructure we need to lead and sustain a diverse progressive movement.

We need to ask ourselves to measure success not just by mobilization or policy change victories, but also by how our campaigns turn the disarray of the progressive ships into a fleet.

We need to know where we are going, not just what we are guarding against. We need inspiring vision to steer towards, to get us out of the storms. Vision needs to be articulated into proactive demands and agendas. For Caring Across Generations, our national and state policy agenda demands a comprehensive transformation of our care system so seniors, workers, people with disabilities, immigrants, and our families have access to quality care that allows us to work and age with dignity. We demand economic and policy incentives to compensate reproductive labor and value care as a social good and responsibility. More simply, we envision: creating 2 million quality care jobs (for a workforce dominated by women, immigrants, and people of color) with a pathway to citizenship in order to provide quality care for seniors and people with disabilities. It’s a vision of a care system that values the full human dignity of both care workers and care consumers.

That’s just one small piece of the vision we need. Each convoy must expand the horizon, giving us more clarity to steer towards.

Let’s be honest about the ships we need to get us there. Some of our ships have massive structural damage. Others have outdated navigation. Some move so fast that others don’t even know they are with us. Some need lifeboats and emergency repair. Some need to transform. Others we will need to let sink.

As we repair ships and learn to navigate towards shared vision, we need to support our deckhands and captains to embrace new technologies and replace rusting tools and out-of-date maps.

In fact, this time we won’t be following a map.

We’ll be using innovation tools to iterate and improve as we grow. The trust we build across ships will be crucial. Trust is what allows us to stay in strategic formation, to lead in our own lanes. Trust is what supports innovation and creates conditions where we can be willing, and supported…to jump ship.

A fleet that can effectively navigate out of storms still won’t reach its vision if it’s always moving against the tide. We also need real scale to propel us. We need to be so much more than our ships. We need to count on the movement of water, waves, and currents to power us.

Ready to get into the water?

It’s okay. Let’s take a deep breath and allow ourselves to really internalize that the ships we are familiar with, the organizations and institutions we’ve spent our entire lives building, are important, but totally insufficient. It’s okay. We can admit that our ships will never be enough to hold the entire ocean. They don’t need to be.

Currents and waves are the power scale at a whole other level. Harnessing that power requires trusting movement without trying to control it. We can dive in to create surges and swells by learning to do the pop culture, celebrity engagement, public art, and cognitive research and communications work to shape values-based narratives. In our first experiment with this scope of work, Caring Across Generations engaged over 13 million people. That’s just the start of the kind of scale we need.

Learning to build the scale we need requires broadening who we are willing to recognize as part of the movement. It means dropping some of our worst movement habits, like jealously guarding territory, casting nets to capture resources, or overly depending on membership models focused on trying to haul everyone and everything aboard our ships.

Let’s learn to lose our fear, try new things, and to be okay with — even celebrate — what we learn from failed experiments.

We can start trusting in the vast sea of people and conditions in motion, the waves, the swells, and tides as collective resources that can power all of us, sustainably. We can learn to navigate out of the storms by moving towards clear, powerful values-based vision. We can catalyze moving into the alignment we need by mobilizing convoys of cross-sector multi-issue campaigns that put us in new and deeper practices of partnership. We can learn to recognize, and cultivate, interdependence. We can build our fleet. We can win — really win.

I’m ready for a new political landscape — one with coordinated progressive leadership, fueled by our movement of movements. We’re going to need the fleet to get us there, and our campaigns will have to work together to align the fleet.

Are you with me?

—

Feature photo: Moyan_Brenn, licensed under CC BY 2.0

  • Meia Lua de Frente. Photo: Alonzo Gonzalez

Three Ways Capoeira Upped My Organizing Game

By Jeremy Lahoud   |  November 18, 2013
Reflections | 6 Comments

“Capoeira é defesa, ataque, a ginga de corpo, e a malandragem.”
“Capoeira is defense, attack, the sway of the body, and deception.”
—Traditional capoeira song

Every organizer knows that awful moment, that slow stomach-churning realization that your campaign is about to hit a dead end.

I had that moment recently in my work with a coalition of local youth organizations fighting for Restorative Justice in public schools.  Unlike harsh and ineffective “zero tolerance” policies, Restorative Justice programs create a way for those who have committed harm to dialogue with those who have been harmed, to understand what happened, agree on a remedy, and build relationships that reduce the possibility of future harm.  Deep in our bones we wanted Restorative Justice and an end to the disciplinary policies that push out large numbers of African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander students every year.

Our formula seemed strong: expose incriminating school district data in a forum that would also feature students and parents giving powerful testimony from their personal experience.  But pretty quickly we discovered that we had no leverage. None of the school board members were willing to come to the forum. The Superintendent boldly asserted that the issue of discipline reform and our campaign proposals were “dead on arrival.”

We had to make a choice: stick with the moves we knew and escalate our current strategy (e.g., march on the school district headquarters) – or bust out some brand new moves.

We went for the new moves, and won a victory that – multiplied in communities across the country – could deal a serious blow to the school-to-prison pipeline.

The funny thing is, the moves we made weren’t new at all. They were moves that any capoeirista would recognize, moves that echoed the powerful liberatory cultural practice that grew out of the struggles of enslaved Africans and African descendants in Brazil.

Moves that I’ve been learning for eight years now.

Let me start from the beginning: I’ve been a consistent student of the Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira since 2005, when I joined the Omulu Capoeira group in search of a sense of community after moving from Chicago to the often isolating, urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles. As the only known martial art to emerge from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the European conquest of the Western Hemisphere, capoeira is now a global phenomenon. Capoeira is a cultural expression of survival and resistance with deep African roots grounded in a holistic conception of body, mind, and spirit – one much less fragmented than dominant Western concepts of the three as separate elements.

As a “total body workout,” capoeira demands rigorous training and uses movements that stretch the boundaries of human physicality. The improvised game of capoeira – played in a circle known as the roda in Portuguese – demands swift thinking and a strategy akin to chess, but moving at “100 miles per hour.” The songs and rhythms that serve as the heartbeat and energy for capoeira give the art form a distinctly spiritual foundation.

So what does capoeira have to do with social justice organizing?

While eight years is a relatively short time to practice capoeira, I’m starting to glean broader life lessons from the art.

Take the key campaign moment I mentioned, when the Superintendent of Schools had basically decided to boycott our long-planned community forum.  Our gut reaction was to escalate our tactics and organize a large rally outside the school board meeting.

Instead, we took some time to develop a more nuanced response, inspired, in part, by my experience with capoeira. We knew the school district practices a “top-down / bottom-up” approach to policy and administration. The Superintendent and Board set broad policies and give individual principals and schools lots of leeway in how to implement them.  We also knew several mid-level district administrators were open to the idea of Restorative Justice and concerned with the overuse of suspensions. Over the summer, our youth leaders and adult organizers met with these administrators to begin to develop a relationship, share students’ stories, and open a dialogue about common concerns. One meeting included an ally teacher who shared very positive experiences with the Restorative Justice pilot program at her school. We reviewed the School Board’s current policy on student discipline and shared our ideas for revisions.  Our campaign leaders worked with the teachers’ union and principals to promote Restorative Justice. Supportive City Council members helped us to draft a city resolution urging the district to support alternatives to suspension.

Looking back through a capoeira lens, I can name three key ways that we shifted our approach – three shifts that lay at the heart of our 2013 campaign win.

1 Turn Reaction Into Response

When I first began practicing capoeira, I would often react to attacks with an unthinking reflex, rather than respond to them. I would often flinch and barely escape a kick flying towards my head. As I’ve progressed in my capoeira skills, I now try to be much more responsive to attacks during games in the roda.  My responses are quick but thoughtful defensive or evasive moves that set me up for counterattack.  Responding in capoeira requires an immediate synthesis of thought and physical action.

In our original campaign plans we were set to throw aggressive, straight kicks – such as the martelo or “hammer” kick – at the head of a much larger, more experienced opponent.  Of course, we could have played the game that way, but it wouldn’t have been very wise. In the roda, this approach would have left us with hurt pride or hurt bodies or both.  Instead we regrouped and figured out a response to our target’s stubbornness.

2 Make Flexible Moves

Capoeira requires a great deal of physical and mental flexibility.  The best capoeiristas have an inspiring ability to change movements in mid-course all while maintaining a beautiful “flow” to their game. They almost instinctively choose from the capoeira “toolbox” of many different physical movements to lead or respond to the flow of the game in the roda. This flexibility connects to another concept of capoeira practice and philosophy: the ability to “fake out” your opponent and make him or her react to a move that you’re not actually going to use.

Flexibility is critically important in social justice organizing, as the landscape of power and policies is constantly shifting. Organizers and leaders must exercise a flexible strategy in order to take advantage of emerging policy opportunities or changing relationships between our institutional targets, opposition, and allies.

The shift in our campaign strategy demonstrated this flexibility. Taking the time to build relationships with district folks on the “ground level” and to surface shared values was akin to a capoeira game played on the “floor” that builds a good “flow” with your opponent. These weren’t the moves of surrender, but rather evasive and defensive moves that set us up for more proactive tactics. They were similar to the capoeira-like takedown moves and sweeps that allow a smaller or less physically strong capoeirista to bring down an opponent from the floor. While we didn’t actually use the famous capoeira tesoura – the scissors move you do with your hands down and legs up — building relationships with mid-level managers, the teachers’ union, and principals played to the district’s “top-down / bottom-up” approach.

3 Analyze With Cunning

Perhaps the most important shift in strategy was our attempt to understand the self-interest and motivation of the Superintendent and the district. One of the preeminent figures in capoeira lore is the malandro, which roughly translates to “trickster” or “street hustler.”  Similar to the malandro described in Nestor Capoeira’s book, Capoeira: Roots of the Dance-Fight-Game, we capitalized on our “ability to analyze people and situations with…cunning.”

The ability to feign physical movements, to put on an attitude or expression that will draw your opponent into a set-up for an attack or takedown is a quintessential skill of high-level capoeiristas and mestres (masters). As a relative novice in the decades-long trajectory of capoeira training, this skill is the hardest for me to grasp. But it has probably influenced my thinking about social justice organizing campaign strategy more than any other.

The Brazilian-Portuguese word malandragem, best describes this skill. Malandragem doesn’t easily translate into English. In his book, Nestor Capoeira offers this explanation:

…malandragem is one of the basic tenets in the philosophy of capoeira and is similar to the cunning of the Hunter (Oxóssi)… Closer to guerrilla warfare than the way of fighting of the traditional army. Closer to the way someone who is oppressed fights than do those in power… The Malandro works through his [or her] intelligence, seduction, charm, and a deep intuitive knowledge of life and human psychology.

Using this psychological “hustle,” we knew the Superintendent and district were interested in being leaders among urban school districts, especially in the areas of accountability, closing the achievement gap, and equity. We worked with the State Assembly’s Select Committee on the Status of Boys and Men of Color to plan a policy hearing about California’s new school accountability standards. One of these standards requires districts to address discipline issues, including the disproportionate suspension of student subgroups. In order to build a bridge with the Superintendent, we invited him to be a keynote speaker at the hearing. It provided an opportunity for him to highlight the ways the district is playing a leading role in new accountability measures and improving outcomes for students in need, especially boys and young men of color.

The Superintendent accepted the invitation, which allowed us to meet with him to review the agenda and plans for the hearing. In reality, our “hustle” wasn’t mean-spirited at all. Collaborating with the Superintendent opened up new opportunities for dialogue and relationship building.  Paying attention to the Superintendent’s perspective allowed us to “see” him in a different light, an awareness that’s critical to the call-and-response of great capoeira games.

To our surprise, at the end of a recent delegation meeting, the Superintendent informed us that the district would introduce a resolution on discipline policies and practices at the School Board meeting the following week. Poised to respond to the Superintendent’s move, the coalition mobilized 200 youth, parents, and community members for an energetic and positive rally outside the School Board. More than fifty campaign members attended the Board meeting inside to support the passage of the resolution.  A slew of student and parent speakers shared their perspectives and support during public comment.

Our capoeira-inspired strategy paid off.  The Board voted to unanimously pass a resolution that “urges careful monitoring… to prevent… a disproportionate share of suspensions from occurring at a given campus or within demographic subgroups of students” and “urges schools to build upon existing efforts to provide alternatives to suspension or expulsion, using multiple strategies…” including restorative practices.  While the resolution is not everything the campaign wanted to see, it provides a strong basis for students and parents to advance alternatives to suspension and Restorative Justice on campuses across the district.

Our win was certainly helped by the “top-down” pressure of new state and federal accountability requirements to address discipline and suspensions.  And our bottom-up pressure as a youth-led campaign was key, turning reaction into response, being flexible in our moves, and practicing our own strategy of malandragem.

Now if I could just get my own capoeira skills to progress that quickly!

—

Feature photo: Meia Lua de Frente – Photo by Alonzo Gonzalez

  • Stuck

Don’t Get Stuck in the Muck! Six Common Pitfalls of Emerging Alliances

By Jidan Koon   |  September 28, 2013
Reflections | 3 Comments

Close your eyes and imagine the worst collaborative meeting ever.

You know, the one that feels like a big dysfunctional family?  The one where everyone’s worried because funding’s on the line, where the organizers and services people don’t trust each other, where the small scrappy groups feel the well established organizations are getting all the shine, where no one actually believes anything collaborative is going to get done?

You’ve been at this meeting and so have I.  Have you been the facilitator of that meeting?  Me too.

Now here’s the kicker:  Have you been at that meeting when it’s turned around? Where somehow the vibe changed and people actually started working together in a real way; where an alliance emerged with real potential to make change?

If you have, I know you learned something.  You had some important “ah ha’s” about when alliances get stuck in the muck and what works to break through.

I’ve been there, and so has my friend Kimi (that’s Kimi Lee, director of the United Workers Congress). That’s why Kimi and I started working on a report and tool kit all about culture and structure in multi-group collaborative efforts.

The alliance culture and structure report will include a section where we try to name some common places that emerging alliances get “stuck in the muck”.   By giving name to these pitfalls, we hope we can all step back and laugh and gather the wisdom we need to make our collaborations work.

Here’s what we’ve come up with.   Let us know what you think – and of course, please help us name any pitfalls we’re missing!

Common Pitfalls – And How to Avoid Them

1 “Who decides on who’s deciding?”

You may be stuck in the chicken or egg dilemma during the birth of an alliance. At this very early stage, it can be unclear who has the decision-making authority to actually move the work and make decisions. Who elects the steering committee? Wait, who gets to decide on the steering committee election process?

Avoid this common pitfall by establishing an interim process with a clear task and ending point. Someone has to step up and get the ball rolling. And, pay special attention to getting input, navigating relationships, and communicating to the larger group in this period.

2 “Let’s be everything to everybody!”

When an alliance emerges, there is excitement around common vision but the specific purpose or role of the alliance is often fuzzy and broad. In this period, people project their own desires onto the alliance which leads to misconceptions and competing priorities.  However, we often hesitate to sharpen the purpose and role for fear of losing membership or engagement. Rather, groups try to fit in all the desired purposes — but then end up with serious disagreements when charting out specific goals and work plans. In the end, the alliance moves in a way that feels like one step forward, two steps back – constantly having to deal with fundamentally differing ideas of what the alliance is set up to do.

Avoid this common pitfall by helping everyone understand that as the purpose and strategy of the alliance are sharpened, those initially at the table will become re-arranged in the alliance’s universe.  For example, start with the idea that the “final” strategy and form of the alliance might not resonate equally with all at the initial table: create an intentional opt-in opportunity when the purpose and strategy are sufficiently finalized. Some who started off very engaged may see that the purpose or strategy of alliance does not need to be as strongly aligned with their organizational mission as they first thought. They may opt to become supporters rather than core members. Some who were not at the initial table may emerge as natural leaders of the new effort. This re-arranging is not a “falling out” – it is a natural process of organizations positioning themselves in relationship to the alliance’s strategy and their respective organizational interests and strengths.

3 “What did we say we were doing again?”

Sometimes each meeting feels like re-inventing the wheel. In an emerging alliance, the work between meetings to solidify ideas generated or follow through on plans of action may not happen.   People come to the next meeting no further along than the last one, so they get stuck re-hashing the same topics until people begin to disengage.

Avoid this common pitfall by exploring why the work is not happening between meetings. Is it?

  • Lack of staff time and capacity?  Then plan for how a minimum level of capacity can be generated in the short term to ensure follow through; prioritize the most critical elements to move the process along.
  • Lack of clarity – or different interpretations of – what has been decided on? Then clarify decision making process and summarize outcomes at the end of each meeting.
  • People hesitating to move forward because there is some fundamental difference that has not been addressed or resolved? Then use your intuition to figure out what will be effective: Do you need to set aside time to address issues up front? Or do people need to start working together in some concrete, pragmatic process – and then come back to ideological questions? There are myriad other reasons; uncover and address them.

4 “Lets set up an advisory board, 17 work groups, and bi-weekly calls!”

We often have the impulse to build an entire vehicle right after people have decided that there is work to do together.  This leads to an over-emphasis on process and structure which takes away from energy spent on clarifying purpose and strategy.  It can also get people attached to structures that may need to be changed once the strategy is fully developed. Not every initiative should be an alliance.  And, for those that end up being alliances, we can’t really know the form needed until the purpose and strategy are developed.

To avoid this pitfall, refrain from making “final” or more complex decisions on structure until the alliance strategy is fully fleshed out. Rather, lay in as much structure is needed (an interim form or skeletal form) until the strategy is fleshed out enough to reveal what kinds of structures are needed.

5 “We need to have everyone at the table!”

Some efforts peter out in the process of trying to get everyone represented before starting to move. Remember: it’s actually pretty rare that all the right people are present at the founding of an alliance. On top of that add demographic, geographic, and other kinds of considerations and you could spend years trying to get the perfect mix.

Avoid this pitfall by being explicit and agreeing at the outset on the principle of readiness. Whoever is ready at the moment to move together should do so, with appropriate due diligence in engaging key players.   By freeing those who are ready to move, they create momentum that can carry and draw others in.  It really is a service to the whole, as long as the initial group follows up with real efforts at engaging people who were not or could not be engaged in the beginning.  It’s time to start breaking our bad movement habit that we need to be the originator of something in order to be invested.  We all have limited energy and capacity – if we only engage in things that we start, we will be severely handicapped!

6 “Who was supposed to do that? Why didn’t you finish the project?”

When alliances are getting started there are usually lots of ideas suggested and put onto “to-do” lists – with no one is assigned to do the work. Or everyone assumes that the one and only alliance staff person will magically catch all the tasks and finish them by the next meeting. Or even worse – the task gets assigned to someone who isn’t there! As more and more unfinished tasks pile on, frustration and disappointment set in. Tempers may flare as people who do many tasks begin to resent those who don’t.  Motivation can take a nose dive.

Avoid this pitfall by making sure there is a real agreement and decisions made around next steps. At the end of each meeting, list out all the decisions and make sure to assign each task to someone who is present for the meeting. and give them a deadline to complete the task. All meeting notes should have a summary of decisions and next steps. At the following meeting, the same list can be used for a report back. It is important to hold each other accountable and also to be clear what you are expecting of each other.

(For the full report, please contact comms at movementstrategy dot org.)

  • Union members and climate justice activists march together in Richmond, CA. Photo:  Brooke Anderson.

What Do We Want? Synchronicity! When Do We Want It? Now!

By Taj James   |  September 28, 2013
Reflections | 1 Comment

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently unrelated, yet are experienced as occurring together in a meaningful manner  —Wikipedia

Twenty years ago I was sitting at the Alex Haley farm with an amazing groups of young activists and veteran organizers from this country’s past freedom struggles.  We were learning about how the conservative movement had organized and built a web of infrastructure to turn back the victories of the movements of the 60’s and 70’s and infuse fear — and their values – into  our governing institutions from every local school board to the Supreme Court.  Theirs was a vision and strategy for a movement united across issues, with the power to “turn back the clock.”

I left that meeting clear that the only way to defeat a unified conservative movement was to build a unified progressive movement with the leadership of those most impacted and marginalized in our society at the center and at the forefront.

I left the meeting to return to my work as a regional organizer for the Black Student Leadership Network and did what everyone else did:

I went back to my job.

Like most of us, my job was not to build a progressive movement. My job was to train and organize young African American and Latino organizers working for justice in our communities. Was my job a piece of the puzzle? Yes. But it was only a piece. Who, I wondered, was helping to connect the pieces together?

This year, in the strongest way since I started asking that question, I feel I am seeing movement unity becoming a reality. In the past year I’ve seen:

  • The U.S. women’s movement organizing to defend and advance the rights of new Americans and migrants for whom this country is home.
  • The AFL-CIO moving to affiliate with civil rights, economic justice, and environmental organizations in ways that make clear there can be no workers rights without racial justice and immigrant rights – and no viable economy without balance with the natural word. If brought to life in local communities, the agenda laid out at the recent national convention would be a huge step in weaving together the strongest strands of our progressive fabric.
  • Growing synergy and collaboration between the food movement and the immigrant rights movement, with groups like the U.S. Food Sovereignty Alliance putting forth a bold and historic position that “the principles of food sovereignty would be served by policies that honor the humanity of all workers, including the unconditional right to migrate as enshrined in the International Declaration of Human Rights, the right to organize, and the right to defend and implement economic policies that allow for people to prosper and stay in their home communities, including a democratic and sovereign control of local agricultural and food markets and local agricultural policies.”

Perhaps most exciting for me personally has been the growing relationship between the climate justice movement and the new economy movement.  While there have been “blue green alliances” and talk about a “green economy” before, things feels like they’re really getting serious now.

As I’ve learned from my friends in the Climate Justice Alliance, our democracy and our ecology are totally linked: there can be no solution to the economic crisis without a solution to the environmental crisis. And neither can be solved without expanding and advancing real democracy and human rights. In fact, expanding democracy is the engine of the economic and ecological change the climate justice movement is calling for.

Exciting conversations are happening between the climate justice movement and the new economy movement trying to build living and vibrant alternatives to our tired and dysfunctional economy.

Just this past month climate justice history was made when over 60 climate and new labor groups sent an open letter to the AFL-CIO at their national convention, applauding traditional labor for taking important steps toward climate justice — and laying out steps that need to be taken to turn those steps into action that produces results for workers and the environment. Among the groups signing on to the letter were: Labor Network for Sustainability, Union of Commercial Oystermen of Texas, Southwest Workers Union, and Vermont Workers Center.

Historic convergences are happening, as well as a push to go even further.

Maybe what we’re seeing can even go beyond unity, to something like synchronicity, a big word that tries to capture convergence that’s deeper and more meaningful than we’ve ever imagined

I am not the only one feeling it or seeing it. MSC family member Billy Wimsat calls it a “super movement.” Our friends N’tanya and Steve who wrote the Ear to the Ground report documenting conversations with hundreds of activists around the country are seeing the emergence of “a movement of movements.”

Whatever we call it, I can feel the beat and the rhythm getting stronger as we shake the world and begin to remake it.

—

Feature photo: Union members and climate justice activists march together in Richmond, CA. Photo: Brooke Anderson.

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