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Tag Archive for: Big Leap Series

  • Photo: Steve Pavey, licensed under CC BY 2.0

BIG LEAP: Confessions Of A (Reluctant) Electoral Geek

By Mimi Ho   |  March 26, 2014
Reflections | 0 Comments

Big Leap Series: Movements must be big to have real impact — and they need to have depth to create lasting and significant change.  In our “Big Leap” series Let’s Talk invites movement leaders to reflect on their experiences, struggles, and questions about reaching scale through depth.


Math and science were never my favorite subjects in school, but the geeky left-brain part of me has always loved the science of organizing, even electoral organizing.

I’ve loved finding the formulas and methods to map turnout plans, to overlay electoral precinct maps with voting data, to sketch out a campaign strategy power analysis. I’ve loved the order and discovering the more predictable parts of our organizing work.

But it’s the art of organizing and electoral organizing that speaks to me. It’s what allows us to reach scale to connect and engage everyday people. The power of hope and vision for different values and a different world, the ambition for collective agency and power in the face of overwhelming crisis, money and politics, and the excitement and physicality of disciplined, forward moving momentum, is what drew me into elections.

I believe that the key to reaching scale is our ability to tap into and cultivate a vision for a different world and a yearning to be part of something bigger.

In other words, scale doesn’t compete with depth. It depends on it.

With 2014 state battles over everything from undocumented student access to college to fracking to drones, not to mention crucial local struggles on gentrification and minimum wage, the Congressional midterms, and a major school board vote in Los Angeles, we need to do what works.

I was lucky that my first substantial organizing work was with Californians for Justice (CFJ) during the initiative wars of the 1990s: Prop 187 that was trying to take away services from undocumented immigrants; Prop 209, the attack on affirmative action; Prop 21, the anti-youth initiative; Prop 22, another initiative to ban gay marriage.

I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but for the community organizing world and social justice left that I found myself in, the political project CFJ was undertaking was a level of scale, ambition, and entrance into “the system” that hadn’t been done in a while. I remember hearing whispers from some activists that electoral organizing was too “reformist” and one peer, who shall remain unnamed, who told me CFJ’s electoral work was “pink” — that is, not “red,” not left enough.

It took bold new thinking and people breaking from the pack – and an onslaught of Right wing electoral initiatives – for groups like Californians for Justice to be born. Last year, decades after its founding, CFJ was one of the key leaders in the successful fight for Local Control Funding Formula in California, making it one of the nation’s largest school funding systems to direct millions of new dollars to low income, immigrant, and foster students. Groups like California Calls, grounded in the deep neighborhood organizing work of AGENDA, took on the electoral arena with boldness and vision, and after two decades of disciplined precinct-by-precinct, alliance-by-alliance organizing, was a major leader in winning Prop 30 in 2013, infusing billions into California’s public schools.

Other groups across the country, from the New Majorities in Virginia, Florida, and New Mexico, to Oakland and San Francisco Rising in California, are also bringing together the silos of traditional grassroots organizing and electoral organizing to push the envelope on our scale and are forcing us to grapple with old assumptions and create new models.

Looking back now (both at CFJ and later as an organizer with other groups like Asian Pacific Environmental Network and the Alliance for a Just Society) I think breakthroughs in organizing paradigms and practice have happened, at least in part, whenever we stepped out of the safe realm of talking about our ideals into the messy world of actualizing them. I’ve come to believe that our romantic and confused ideas about democracy are holding us back from the scale we need.

The goal of CFJ was to build progressive infrastructure and political power for the emerging majority – people of color, low-income people, and young people. I will forever be grateful that a project at this scale was one of my first organizing experiences.

As a people person, I loved creating vehicles for people to come together to aspire towards and build something bigger than any one of us could do on our own. We built training teams to lift up the structural inequality and systemic racism behind the initiative attacks. We connected with students who were organizing amazing actions at their campuses, and channeled many of them into precinct organizing. We got hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions against Prop 209 at neighborhood grocery stores, check-cashing spots, and community events, from which we engaged 10,000 and then recruited over 3,000 volunteers for the electoral work. And this all happened before the Internet!

CFJ’s commitment to the leadership of people of color, scale, willingness to engage a broad swath of society, sharp but accessible politics, culture of heart and fun, and the melding of the best community organizing traditions with the lessons and approaches of the civil rights, women’s, and LGBTQ movements, was a level of experimentation that I did not fully appreciate until later.

Also, with so many young people of color in leadership at CFJ, many of us just took for granted our 1995 mantra of “people of color are the emerging majority” and strategy of disciplined organizing of the occasional and infrequent voters (read “poor people of color”). We didn’t know how unconventional our electoral strategies were, nor could we have guessed that these strategies would only be fully recognized 13 years later in the Obama election.

Like most of us trained in organizing, I was taught that we need MORE people and that one of the main measures of success was how many people we could turn out. Of course in many situations and campaigns, larger turnout helps you get noticed, decision makers take note, and others see momentum and want to join. That is all true.

But, big turnout does not necessarily translate into deep, broad, or long lasting change. When turnout is based in transactional or situational relationships, it doesn’t build the momentum or energy needed for strategic change. Big change also depends on a quality and depth of relationship and the momentum and energy generated from that.

I am not saying that people should throw organizing out the window and just rely on the expert lobbyist. Nor am I saying to stay comfortable with the five leaders who are the spokespersons at every event.

But as organizers, we have to push ourselves to articulate the impact we are trying to make over the long term and in specific situations. If we are clear about our core values and the impact we’re trying to make, we will have more clarity about the strategies and tactics we need to emphasize in specific situations.

In some situations we have to be nimble and allow ourselves to go with “grasstops” strategies that allow Mrs. Jones, the influential charismatic community resident, to do her thing at the City Council meeting if it actually gets a strong message across. In other situations, we make sure that we do the long and deep work of engaging community residents, door to door, kitchen table by kitchen table.

Division of labor is also critical to reaching scale, especially if we want to do so with the time urgency of the crises we face. We need some of us to go inside so we can shift the political terrain and even the rules of the game so that outside pressure has leverage points. Or better yet, we can avoid certain fights and strategically deploy our fights to different fronts. Sometimes we may need to lead with communications to reach a broader audience or to shift narrative and culture.

The key to that division of labor is a politically clear and inviting vision, adaptive long-term strategy, and deep trust and real relationships of the actual human beings involved.

The point is that a vision and ambition for change that is big enough will require many different parallel strategies, roles, tactics, and people to get there. We need to employ all of them, artfully, in relationship to each other. We also have to be serious enough, and courageous enough, to think about what it would mean to truly lead from this vision, to be willing to let go of our attachments to confused notions about who our movements should be.

Our problem of “self-marginalization” and “thinking small” recently came up in the Ear to the Ground interviews with 150 people working in social justice. Veteran political strategist Bob Wing touched on this in his writing about social justice electoral strategy. “We must have a governance strategy, not a strategy just of ‘influence’ or ‘impacting public policy and debate’ and certainly not a strategy of staying on the fringe,” writes Wing.

“The people and the country need us,” concludes Wing, “but only if we take ourselves seriously enough to prepare to govern.”

So, how do we “take ourselves seriously”?

Building at scale requires us to pivot from marginalization to leading all of society, including building with unlikely allies, those who we perceive as our opposition, or those difficult friends. Leadership from communities of color and the working class – and seeing ourselves as leading the WHOLE of society and the “others” – allows us to reach the scale of the impact but also profoundly change who we are and how we relate to ourselves and others.

Rather than a stance of marginalization, building at scale requires a new stance — of community and the generative power and perspective it can unleash.

Instead of saying, “We’re not big enough” for the task at hand we need to ask, “What can we achieve with this set of people?”

Instead of critiquing all the ways that we are not complete enough, let’s align and move with those who are ready and share the core values of working with the most marginalized.

Instead of stopping with what separates us, let’s see what we fundamentally have at stake with each other.

Let’s take a stance that allows us to take action that builds momentum, creates critical mass, without waiting for the whole to be ready to move.

In the end, democracy and organizing are not just about converting X number of people to Y platform or simply winning elections, though that is absolutely necessary too. They are about unleashing the power of ideas and possibility in the broadest possible circle, and letting our creativity and leadership flourish. They are about engaging everyone in building and regenerating our society.

In the face of intense global crises, I’m deeply hopeful because our movements are reaching across our issue silos and geographies to come up with impactful solutions and break out of our habits. I see and hear it in all the people around me and in the bold new ways our movements are moving. There’s a readiness in the air to experiment with solutions that reach the scope and scale of the challenges we face.

—

Feature photo: Steve Pavey, licensed under CC BY 2.0

  • 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

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