My first day as an organizer my boss told me, “I don’t fire people for making mistakes. I fire people for not making mistakes.”
This book is about what de Tocqueville called “combining,” what we today call “organizing.” It is written for young people like me, who are trying to figure out what we are willing to fight for and how to be effective while maintaining our integrity.
When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2008 at the age of 47, he became the first leader of our country who started his political career as a community organizer. While Obama did not stick with grassroots organizing of the kind I am going to describe in this book (opting instead for the practice of law and then electoral politics), he used many of his organizing skills and talents to run his campaign and then assemble his government. Obama didn’t learn this stuff at Harvard. (I know; I went there.) He learned it on the street.
Most of the real knowledge any of us has comes from trying and failing. From loads of mistakes. It comes from testing our boundaries, from doing things that make us uncomfortable. At its best, this book is a primer on taking risks and learning from mistakes.
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For four years after college, I was an organizer with the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). The IAF is a network of grassroots citizen organizations across the U.S. (with sister organizations in Canada, Germany, and the U.K.). In cities like Los Angeles, San Antonio, Milwaukee, Winston-Salem, Spokane and Phoenix, people from religious congregations and other “third sector” institutions (health centers, universities, etc.) are combining to fight for common concerns and the common good. IAF organizations built 4000 affordable homes in New York, won a living wage in Baltimore, and brought universal health care to Massachusetts.
The IAF hired me to try and build one of these organizations in Chicago. With a catch. The organization would be created and led by young adults (ages 15-35), a first for the IAF. The young adult leaders named the organization Public Action for Change Today (PACT) to represent their commitment to build power together across the race, class, and faith differences that normally divided them. PACT wrote legislation that won health care for thousands of young adults, brokered relationships between youth and police, and helped win back state financial aid cuts for working-class kids. After, and largely thanks to, a lot of failures along the way, the organization was successful and I learned enough to believe I could write this book.
It is presumptuous of me to do so. I don’t have enough knowledge or experience to write the book on organizing. But I might have enough to write our book on organizing. There’s something to be said for writing about a journey which hasn’t yet ended. And maybe you’re reading this because it was written by someone like you who hasn’t got everything figured out. Someone like you who’s skeptical of the conventional wisdom that says we should hedge our bets. That we should do the safe thing, the thing that makes money – instead of doing the thing we love or fighting the things that make us angry. Conventional wisdom reasons we should wait “our turn” to run things. Maybe so. But maybe not.
I left PACT after four years to study at the London School of Economics, and to write this book, while it was still fresh in my mind and when it could be useful to my fellow “could-be radicals,” as I will refer to us here. It doesn’t really matter to me if you agree with me. (Among other things, organizing taught me that agreement is overrated.) As I keep making mistakes, I am likely to change my own mind about the ideas in this book. But I offer them here as a challenge to you and as a starting point for action.
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I am an organizer because first I was a loser. In high school in Plano, Texas, I lost four consecutive student government elections. With nothing left to unsuccessfully run for, two buddies and I got together and formed a service group at our school. We called it GSI (Getting Students Involved), and it attracted 800 students and generated thousands of dollars and volunteer hours. There was a Charity Garage Sale and a Charity Basketball Tournament, frequent visits to a local shelter, and a campus beautification day. We butted heads with the school administration because we let anybody join and rarely went through “the proper channels.” My first organizing lesson: go do what you think is right. Regardless.
I went from Plano to Cambridge (Massachusetts, that is) to do my undergraduate degree at Harvard. There I found other young people like me who wanted to make the world a better place in ways more thrilling than Charity Garage Sales. We were a loose cadre of students who believed we could learn more outside of a classroom than inside it. We built a group called “Har’d CORPS” to put on service days and fundraisers and to challenge students to make longer-term commitments to volunteerism. We started BASIC, a link for Boston campuses to initiate joint service projects. We fought for a living wage for campus service workers, better rape prevention programs at the university, global AIDS funding, and an end to Harvard’s contribution to sweatshop labor overseas. We won about half the time, which means we lost the other half.
The living wage campaign at Harvard is a good snapshot of the highs and lows I faced as a student activist. We held dozens of rallies, teach-ins, and worker appreciation days, and eventually, we took over the administration building for 21 days. We won a base wage of $11.35/hour plus benefits for all campus workers, but the University never agreed to the principle of a living wage—leaving them wiggle room to cut wages down the road. We were long on energy but often short on smarts. We talked about the importance of human dignity but didn’t always take care of one another, letting each other burn out. We had some good leaders but paid little more than lip service to the development and training of a next generation of activists. We had the opportunity to build a lasting relationship between campus workers and students. But in this most important endeavor, we ran out of steam and know-how.
Our shortcomings were glaring: weak strategy, not much leadership development, no long-term vision. In our world, you had to be an “activist” to do activism. Too often we fostered a culture that made it difficult for students (or workers) who were not as ideological or “committed” as we thought we were to join us. We took pride in not being the mainstream. To our detriment, we failed to learn from those who swam there every day.
So-called “service work” frustrated me just as much. I spent my summers as the children’s program coordinator for Family Gateway, a transitional shelter in Dallas. There I tried to emulate the deep passion and soulfulness of my mentor, an underappreciated and remarkable woman named Dot Brown. Despite all I learned from her, it still made me angry how little we were able to change the circumstances that led to homelessness.
In both student activism and direct service, one thing was constant: Power flowed from the top down. Privileged students or white service board members were running programs or campaigns for poor folks. I remember thinking: How can we really change the world if we were not all equals in the fight?
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After graduation from Harvard, I received a grant and took my jumble of frustration to Botswana, a small, landlocked, African country just north of South Africa. (Botswanna is the locale for "The Number One Ladies' Detective Agency" books and PBS-TV series.) My goal was to learn how a different culture was fighting the highest rate of AIDS infection in the world. The U.N. claimed that 20-30 percent of Botswana’s adults were infected with the virus, but this was a rough estimate. Most people in Botswana who were infected didn’t know it. And they weren’t trying to find out because: 1) there is such a stigma attached to the disease, 2) there were not enough drugs available to help anyway, 3) they did not trust the services provided by their government, 4) they did not know the doctors, and 5) the programs are “parachuted in” from overseas. I went to Botswana to learn how another culture approached social change; instead, I saw another version of the problems I had experienced in the States.
The results of the anti-AIDS efforts in Botswana scared me. Smart, passionate people with resources—experts from across the globe—were trying very hard to stop the spread of the virus and treat those already infected. As with our cadre at Harvard, they made strides, but they fought a losing battle. The infection rate was not going down; the drug programs were not catching on. Botswana taught me that social change is not so much about figuring out the right solutions as it is about who wages the fight. As much as they tried, talented foreigners could not solve the AIDS problem in Botswana. In many ways, our presence stunted the emergence of local leadership, which was the worst possible outcome I could imagine.
The strange thing is that, looking back, Botswana taught me more about what was right with the world than what was wrong. Watching a village spend three days grieving the death of one of its members taught me about solidarity. Living in a culture that values friendship and leisure a little more (and work a little less) taught me about the importance of joy. Working with folks who saw service organizations more like uncles than government programs taught me about family and the limits of state-provided social and health services. Yet while I was there, with all those lessons to learn, none of the expatriates, including me, ever really spoke about what we could learn from Botswana. Only what was wrong with the country and its people.
The four months I spent in Botswana, I wrote grants for education and prevention organizations. I served as the event manager for the government’s World AIDS Day commemoration, which sought to educate people about services they could seek. I spent an afternoon each week at a day care for the children of young mothers. I teamed up with activists to win youth representation in national AIDS advocacy organizations. But I was in over my head. The most lasting lesson from my time there was that the appearance of doing good work is not the same thing as making the world a better place.
I realized there was much more I needed to learn. I wanted to learn how to agitate and organize people to fight for their own interests, to build power for themselves rather than just accept projects started and “owned” by others. And I felt I needed to do something in my own country before I could tell anyone else what to do in theirs.
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So back in the United States, I linked up with the Foundation for Civic Leadership and spent six months creating a Summer Institute for twenty-five student activists from around the country. I used the opportunity to attempt to understand and then teach the lessons I had learned from my own confused experiences. But I was still going a hundred miles an hour. There were a few victories, and some good training took place, but I still had more questions than answers. The program was temporary, national, intellectual, and for privileged college kids. This was not the long haul, cross-class, multi-cultural transformation I sought.
Around that same time, I realized that not one of the things I had helped start – GSI in high school, BASIC and the Living Wage Campaign in college, a little activist coalition in Botswana – was still thriving. This made me sick to my stomach.
While preparing for the Summer Institute, a friend invited me to a ten-day training session organized by the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). I had been to many conferences before, and I did not expect much.
At the IAF training, however, I met a group of people much like myself. They weren’t all young adults; many had started working for justice before I was born. More than anything, what struck me was this: I had never seen so many people from different race and class backgrounds actually treating one another as equals. These were parents and teachers and pastors and laypeople who were sticking up for their families and communities. They preached that relationships (not principles or ideas) come before action; and they practiced what they preached. Hours each day during the training were set-aside for face-to-face, one-to-one meetings between the participants. No one was doing anything for anybody else. We were all in this together - listening to one another’s stories.
I learned that, at least for the IAF, “combining” happens one conversation at a time. But was it only conversation?
It wasn’t. During another part of the training, we all went to a nearby convention hall. A local IAF organization had approached their state’s governor to address particular problems. The governor agreed to most of the organization’s (notably specific) requests – on issues ranging from education to immigrant labor to health centers. The meeting was obviously planned from gavel to gavel, but it wasn’t paid organizers or staff people who were running the “action,” as they called it. It was volunteer leaders from the organization’s member institutions. The audience, 1200 strong on a Sunday afternoon, represented every neighborhood and religious tradition in the area. The speakers addressed issues that affected them personally, in prepared and practical public statements. What blew my mind was the discipline. Everyone kept to the agenda and the timetable, including the governor. This was not the kind of four-hour marathon meeting I was used to running or attending. The event succeeded because it was owned and led by the hundreds of local people who were there with their families. It occurred to me that that’s what happens when relationships come before action.
My notes from the training are filled with bold-print epiphanies: PEOPLE BEFORE IDEAS…BE CURIOUS…TAKE RISKS. Towards the end of the ten-day training, Ed Chambers (the IAF national director) spoke about the IAF’s history. At the end of his remarks, he said he was looking for someone who could build an experimental organization based in Chicago focusing on young adults. That turned out to be PACT, and I turned out to be its initial organizer.
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What drew me to Chambers at first was that he seemed wholly allergic to bullshit. At his request, I had written an evaluation of the ten-day training and sent it to him. When I walked into his Chicago office two months later to interview for the job, I had nearly forgotten about my initial remarks. Chambers had not. There was no “hello,” no “thanks for making the trip out from Boston,” no “how were your holidays?” He took out my evaluation, dumped it in front of me, pointed to the first thing I had written, and said, “You got this all wrong.”
I worked with Chambers for about four years. He was the first person who really cared enough about me to agitate and mentor me. I owe him a lot, which is why this book is dedicated to him.
Chambers taught me that real radicals exist in between the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-could-be. In a group of ideologues and optimists, the radical is a pragmatist. In a group of skeptics and pessimists, the radical is the visionary. Or as Saul Alinsky wrote in 1946, a radical “believes intensely in the possibilities of man and hopes fervently for the future” while “[recognizing] that constant dissension and conflict is and has been the fire under the boiler of democracy.” A radical is a true agent of change. I’ll use the term could-be radicals for those of us who want to organize at a grassroots level but are still learning our way.
This book is for us could-be radicals—young adults, like me, who seek the world-as-it-could-be and who are willing to make some mistakes in the world-as-it-is in order to get there.
(Author's note: the above excerpt is taken from an earlier draft of the book.)