While Mike was in hospice, I asked why he thought it was so important to do one on ones - having an intentional conversations with people to understand their story and motivations. He said, “We have to know what’s most important to the person.”

He then said something I’d never heard. “We cannot put our imprint on someone, which we will do if we don’t slow down and get to know them.”

I’ve been thinking about this since. Imprints.

When we skip getting to know someone, we start filling in the blanks ourselves. We decide who they are, what they believe, what they’re capable of.

This is one of the great challenges for organizers right now. We live in a culture that has become faster and faster, including the pace at which we size people up.

Sometimes they’re people we’re actually deeply aligned with, but we’ve already placed them in a box because of their race, age, gender, or which organization they’re with. Other times they’re people we genuinely disagree with on important things, but with whom we agree on enough things that we need to figure out how to work together if we truly want to win.

Mike has me thinking about who I’ve skipped getting to know and then placed an imprint on. And how has that limited the power we could’ve built together?

At a moment where we need to get much more serious about whether we are actually building power, it’s something we should all think about.

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I was about 24, serving the last few people in line at the soup kitchen where I worked in Indiana. I was proud of my work and considering where I’d been a short time ago, still surprised to be in a position to help.

I grabbed a mop and began to clean up a leak from the dish machine that’d been plaguing us all day. I wiped the sweat from my forehead and looked into the dining hall, and it hit me. Most of the people who were in line the first time I came in three years ago were there and lots of new people too. No one had starved on our watch, but the reason people needed a soup kitchen in the first place remained.

That night, I knew I was no longer satisfied mopping up the mess. I wanted to find the leak and went from serving meals to asking questions and soon a few of us who worked, volunteered, and ate at the kitchen began to talk about this, but we didn’t know what “this” was.

We had no manual on how to create change, so we just began trying things, starting with a lot of listening. Each day a few of us would sit with patrons of the kitchen to find out what people most wanted changed. The answer was consistent: housing.

We held a meeting about housing and what could be done. People came. We held a town hall meeting to raise awareness as to how bad the housing situation was. More than a hundred people showed.

We organized a rally on the courthouse square, raising more awareness and calling for action. More people came, 150 of them. The next day, our rally was on the front page of the town paper. In a few months we’d gone from nothing to lots of people getting involved and a buzz about this new group kicking up dust on housing.

But nothing changed, and we didn’t know why. Then I was invited to a meeting in Indianapolis about tenant organizing. There was a man there who seemed to know all the things about organizing that we didn’t. He talked as if there were a set of steps, a methodology to building power and winning. His name was Michael Evans.

On the sixty-mile drive home, I kept replaying the organizing phrases he used. They captured so much wisdom in so few words. When I pulled up to our place in rural Monroe County, I walked in, grabbed Mike’s card, and called. I asked if he’d come down and explain this organizing thing to us. He didn’t hesitate. “When do you want me there?”

Two weeks later, people who were homeless, public housing and trailer court residents, and a few college students crowded into our living room. Mike — around 40, a little over six feet, with sandy brown hair and sideburns — stood at an easel and scrawled on butcher paper:

“Power concedes nothing without a demand.”

He said we would not win a single thing until we had a specific demand, identified a decision-maker who could enact it, and applied direct pressure toward that person or people.

“You’ve got to make it in their self-interest to say yes, or they never will”

Everything he shared was breathtaking in its simplicity, and revelatory in what it could open up. There were a set of steps to winning change that made perfect sense once you knew them, but few people did. As Mike unveiled these fundamentals, we could see the possibilities and were off and running.

At our next few meetings, we cut our issue, and decided to run a campaign to pressure the City to create a housing trust fund to build affordable housing. We came up with a very specific demand, got clear on who had the power to enact that demand, and then a theory on what would move them to say “yes.”

About a year later, after months of organizing and action, we forced a City Council vote. We packed the room — our strongest turnout yet — and late into the night, after much debate, the council approved the fund. Just as important, some of the poorest people in our town became leaders and began to believe we could win. For me, it was the first step in finding the leak.

None of this happens without Mike Evans. There was a point in time where I had good intentions but didn’t understand enough about organizing to turn those intentions into impact. Mike broke down the fundamentals into digestible bites, and it changed my life, and the life of others who were there for that first training.

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All over the world, well-meaning people come together to make change. Most of these groups struggle to build momentum and don’t understand why. Slowly people leave the group, discouraged and less likely to join next time around.

Mike showed us that if you’re reasonably good with people and follow a handful of steps, you will win tangible change in your community, and with each win, grow the number of believers, and have more power to take on even bigger fights.

If I had to sum up the steps Mike broke down for us, it was these:

The power of widely and deeply felt issues. Organizing is SO MUCH easier if you start with an issue that lots of people are passionate about. Turnout is easier, getting people to take risks is easier, holding the group together when the chips are down is easier.

The practice of cutting an issue. Massive, structural problems feel overwhelming. Fac­ing them, people can feel defeated before we’ve started. Build momentum by “cutting” out a discreet part of the prob­lem, turn it into a solution and identify the person or people who can deliver. Once you get good at this, you will see the potential to organize and win everywhere.

Power analysis first. If you created a strategy without having done a power analysis, you have no strategy. Our strategy lives inside our understanding of the power held by the people we need to move AND and what most motivates them. At its simplest: What do they control? Who do they answer to? What do they want — and fear?

Strategy second. Based on that analysis, what is your theory of what will move you toward victory. Organize actions that deliver on that strategy, always conscious of the reaction you are trying to spark.

Share the work. This runs through everything. Ask people to take on real roles, prepare them, and reflect with them afterwards. None of the rest matters if we’re not actively developing more people into leaders along the way.

These steps alone won’t overhaul massive systems, but as Adam Kruggel, who was also trained by Mike, once said to me, “It’s also impossible to create that level of change, if you don’t know these organizing basics.”

Defeatism is one of the biggest barriers we face. Since that first training with Mike, I’ve found it hard to be cynical. No matter the conditions, I can see a path — a set of steps toward change. It’s not an easy path, but I can see one. That’s a gift I’m forever grateful for (thank you, Mike!), and one I hope we can share with many more people.

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For those new to this column, a couple years ago, we put out a pamphlet called the Fundamentals of Community Organizing. It’s a fast read at 48 pages and spells out 37 organizing fundamentals, including a few I first learned from Mike in that country house back in Indiana.

In our last conversations he had two concerns, spreading the fundamentals of organizing to more people, and ensuring his beloved wife had the financial support needed to make it through some unexpected costs without his paycheck.

Mike was the classic itinerant organizer. He moved from place to place to organize people who wanted to fight. He organized workers in the Midwest, tenants in Seattle, working-class neighbors in Indianapolis, congregations in Louisville, and homeless people in Kalamazoo.

Three years ago, he joined the team of organizers I work with. At age seventy, he knocked on doors four nights a week, and by day and on weekends could be found doing one on ones across Southwest Michigan - reporting back with an intoxicating enthusiasm.

In his 71st year, he organized, against great resistance, to win an EPA consent decree to replace lead pipes in Three Rivers, Michigan, fifteen miles from the farm he grew up on.

When I arrived at hospice for what would be our last visit, Mike asked for something to write with, and a caregiver returned with a handheld dry erase board and marker. He was much weaker than the day before and struggled to keep food down, unable to sit up for more than a minute.

Still, he gathered himself, motioned for the dry erase board and slowly wrote, “Power Over” and “Power With.” And with little energy, in a voice so thin I hardly recognized it, he said, “George, we have to help people understand this. If people only think of power in the way they experience it now - as abusive and pushing them around – we’ll never win. But, if people get a taste of power with, then we have a shot.”

Four days later, Mike died.

I likely would not have become an organizer if not for Mike. There were few resources on organizing in Southern Indiana and while a few of us were succeeding at getting low-income people organized to speak out, we were not winning and didn’t know why. Then I heard Mike speak at a meeting in Indianapolis, and he seemed to know how to organize, so I asked if he would come down and explain it to us. He didn’t hesitate. And when he broke down the basics, it made so much sense. Beautifully simple and revelatory all at once. Thank you Mike!

Mike organized at a time when the pay was ridiculously low, there were few to no benefits, and more than once he had to forgo pay altogether because the funding was not there. In between organizing jobs, he worked as a day laborer or at Speedway gas stations to keep some money coming in, but always with an eye toward getting back to organizing, to building “power with.”

A few of us are trying to honor his last wishes. That starts by raising some money to help his wife cover some big and unexpected bills. No pressure at all, but if you feel moved, please contribute to honor this organizer with a big heart, who was organizing, and teaching, until the very end. A few bucks here and there will go a long way.

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In the coming weeks, I’ll post a couple of pieces with lessons from Mike’s life, organizing, and teachings. I look forward to sharing those.

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It was an overdue shift, and as happens in such shifts, some good things got lost in the shuffle, including tried and true organizing fundamentals. But the promise has always been the capacity of community organizing to develop leaders, build bonds between people, and run winning issue campaigns, combined with power in the electoral arena to open up more space for what we can achieve.

My friend Tomás Garduño has completed a guidebook designed to help organizers do just that. It’s called Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing and it’s available for purchase here.

The book is filled with hard-earned wisdom from decades of working at the crossroads of community and electoral organizing. In it you’ll find insight and inspiration from sources ranging from Tomás’ father and former Albuquerque City Councilman Reymundo, the World Trade Organization protests, Fred Hampton, The Byrds, and the Chicano and American Indian Movements.

Reading the book feels like sitting down for coffee with someone who has done this for 25 years as they break that experience into bite-sized chunks that make it all feel manageable.

Tomás did not come into electoral organizing full of enthusiasm. In fact, his skepticism of politicians made the mentor who first proposed that Tomás take on the organization’s electoral work certain he would always keep the members and their agenda at the center.

He points out that while there are many differences between issue organizing and electoral organizing, done well, these steps remain the same: identify your supporters, build leaders, make demands, move people to action and win.

Here are a few of my favorite passages from the book:

“Think of electoral strategy as a part of a broader integrated organizing strategy, not as separate from or above or beyond community organizing.”

“Candidates don’t come first. Our long-term political agenda comes first, then our strategy for building power, which leads us to our target districts, which then leaves us with what leaders we have in those districts that are good prospective candidates.”

“Just like in effective community organizing, the goal is not just about a housing campaign or a rate-payer fight. It’s about how each effort builds on the last to create something greater: working-class power!”

You will put the book down (it’s a quick read at 60 pages) knowing what it takes to win, your role as an organizer or campaign manager in delivering that win, what legal structures to choose to move the work, how to write a plan, and what to look for as you recruit working class candidates to run for office and enact the organization’s agenda. All of this while staying true to the principles of good community organizing.

As we head into an election with so much at stake, get your copy of the Fundamentals of Electoral Organizing here.

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When I started organizing, we were expected to knock on 50 doors a night. Maybe 10 people would answer, and in those conversations, we’d uncover the most pressing issues for people in the neighborhood and, hopefully, connect with 3-4 people who could be potential leaders.

I would do this six days a week for weeks, then circle back to those potential leaders to go deeper. It was 100 percent face to face organizing and when it came to building a working class membership of people not inclined to get involved, I found that it always worked.

When the notion of “online organizing” first became a thing, refusing to adapt was not an option, but I didn’t have a clue how to do it. So, I used the internet to tell the story of the organizing we were doing.

Before that was an option, the morning after a public meeting with a city official, we’d be out with members flyering the neighborhood so everyone got word of the win.

Running my first national campaign focused on moving HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo, I’d fax out a one-pager of actions - big and small - taken by neighborhood groups to advance the fight. It gave people a sense of being a part of something bigger and inspired some to step things up a notch.

Email was a helpful upgrade. Organizing in the aftermath of an immigration raid where 360 workers were detained and deported, I sent out a nightly email dispatch to organizers across the country to spread word of the fight and to add fuel to the larger struggle to stop the raids.

This was communication to build momentum and till the soil for organizing, but it was not organizing new people.

Later, I was part of campaigns where we built big email lists and asked people to take action online. One success was getting thousands of people to weigh-in during a public comment period on a proposed payday lending regulatory change. It would have been incredibly hard to generate that number of comments through offline organizing alone.

Maybe one of the best on to offline actions was finding volunteers to join a distributed deep canvass program during the 2020 election. This led to hundreds of people taking thousands of shifts to have persuasion conversations with undecided voters.

All of this was well and good, but it still fell far short of the potential of online organizing.

For the last three years I’ve been part of launching a series of new working-class organizing projects from scratch that have helped me, finally, begin to get it.

My first big lesson was through the work of my fellow organizer Brigid Flaherty. Brigid believed she could start new organizing by using Reddit. She tried a number of things, but it was a post about the challenges of being a mom that struck a nerve and launched a very popular mom’s sub-thread.

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Soon, thousands of moms with a shared identity and shared interests were in one place. Then Brigid did the same thing I would do when knocking on doors in the neighborhood; she looked for potential leaders, in this case, by noticing how moms showed up in what they posted in the thread. Who was being supportive of others? Generative in what they were posting? Pushing the group toward action? She would then direct-message (DM) those moms to begin a back and forth conversation. If that went well, Brigid would ask them if they’d be up for jumping on the phone to talk about how they might move to action. A surprising number of people (at least to me) said yes.

Brigid was doing all of this as a mother of newborns. “During the three weeks it took me to get the first group of moms organized, I would schedule the 1:1s during nap times in the afternoon and after bedtimes,” Brigid recalls. “I knew I needed to make the calls happen to make the good back and forth on DMs real, so I found time to do it even with the babies.”

If those phone conversations went well, Brigid asked the moms to commit to joining the next meeting or action. Today, the organization has members in all 50 states and is able to pull off significant actions across the country with a staff of three.

As someone who started organizing before the internet was much of a thing, here are two lessons I’ve taken from Brigid’s organizing.

First, Brigid and her team create “neighborhoods” online from which to organize.

We organize physical neighborhoods for a reason. Neighborhoods are a place in which people are already organized. It’s a place where people spend time - in their homes, on their stoop, at the park. And people in the neighborhood have shared interests. That could be the cost of living, the health of the neighborhood, or the quality of the schools.

Brigid built a “neighborhood” in a place where people spend time (in this case Reddit) and built it around a group of people’s shared interests (being a mom).

Next, while yes, she and her team are starting online, they practice the fundamentals of organizing at every step. Looking for potential leaders, building connections between members, listening for people’s motivations, finding the widely and deeply felt issues, building campaigns, and asking people to show up to the next thing and take on work. The only difference is using the internet to find people.

“Every day we work our lists,” Brigid reports. “There isn’t a day goes by without calling lists. It’s our culture.” It’s true, there are times of the day if I call Brigid, she’s like, “Dude, it’s call time. Can we talk later?”

Online organizing is hardly new, and many people and organizations are great a it, so what made Brigid’s work clarify things for me? I’ve thought about this a lot and I think it’s the full embrace of the internet as a way to identify or create communities through which to organize, paired with a hardcore application of the fundamentals of organizing at every step. My sense is we’ve often had the online piece or the fundamentals piece be really strong, but only here and there have we done both really well. A more consistent melding of the two has me hopeful about the future of the craft.

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This is very different than the kind of organizing I come from, where we start with listening for the concerns that are most widely and deeply felt, pull people together to develop solutions to those concerns, and through much back and forth, collectively develop demands, strategy, and a plan.

But as we listen for what people want right now, we’re finding that for many it is a clear call to action. In May, we set out to test this instinct and were pleasantly surprised when 2300 people showed up for a video meeting about how to challenge the proposed budget reconciliation package, Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”

While the turnout was promising, we also knew that a couple thousand folks attending a video call was a far cry from new volunteers organizing big and impactful events in three weeks time, which was our hope. Our plan could easily fail.

On the video call we laid out what was at stake in the budget fight and then put a call to action on the table: Hold a town hall meeting in your district to build opposition to the budget reconciliation package. It was simple enough, except for one catch, the call to action was made to people who had never met each other and had never organized such an event before.

Two days later video meetings were held by Congressional District. We figured the meetings would be attended by the diehard community leaders who show up in moments like this. In every community there is a group of people that can be counted on to take up the call to push-back against the latest injustice. But it quickly became clear that these were not those people. The people who attended did not know each other and, with a few exceptions, were not involved in local or national organizing groups. They felt moved to do something and showed up because someone told them they would be given a clear action to take.

Now, these groups of strangers, organized by Congressional District, had to decide if they could in fact pull off a town hall meeting in their district during the June Congressional Recess, which was three weeks away.

They were truly starting from scratch. In the first meeting, the first agenda item was to decide who would run the rest of the meeting. It would have been easier for our organizers to do it, but if there was a second idea we wanted to advance it was that volunteers could organize the highest quality of events with coaching and training. We knew we could not make that happen if we jump-started a culture of the organizer being the leader. So, organizers took on the role of “organizing coaches,” and the newly engaged volunteers stepped up to become the organizers themselves.

Because most people in the group had not been part of organizing public events, they had no easy lead on a place to hold their town hall, so the first order of business was to find potential spots. When a new group got stuck finding a place (because the venue required insurance, was all booked up, or felt the event was too political) the organizing coaches did not bail the group out, saying, “I may know someone in your district who could help, I’ll put in some calls.” They were there to provide counsel and insight, while guarding against sending the messages that, in the end, a professional organizer would solve the problem.

The coaching approach created leadership moments that would not have happened otherwise. In one Congressional District, it looked like the group would bail on their town hall because they couldn’t land a location. Just as they were about to accept defeat, a leader emerged. A working-class woman with no history of organizing or activism made an emotional pitch, saying there was too much at stake to give up and that they should keep trying. She later shared that she had extreme public speaking anxiety and had never been on a video meeting before. You would have never known it from the leadership she showed in fighting to keep their town hall alive.

Volunteers from that original video call of 2300 people went on to organize town hall meetings in ten congressional districts during the June Recess. They ranged from 78 people in union hall in Doylestown, PA to 230 in Auburn, CA. These were all organized by volunteers who did not know each other when this process started and in almost every case had never done anything like this before. And still the town halls were truly top shelf.

What do I mean by top shelf? They were all full, with no empty seats to be found. The testimonies were a strong mix of personal stories and hard facts. They were welcoming to people with a wide range of views and were designed to bring new people into the fight. They ran on time, the materials were excellent, and most importantly they felt powerful to the people who attended and those who organized them. The volunteer leaders left with a new confidence in themselves and their community and the people who participated left with a clear call to action.

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In one of the districts where I served as an organizing coach, the group that emerged was clear early on that after organizing the town hall, they would disband. They wanted to show up in this moment, were glad to have a clear call to action put in front of them, but had no intention of starting a new organizing group. Then, they organized a town hall that was so damn good and so energizing that they quickly ditched their plans of disbanding and have continued to organize.

We followed the town hall project with a video call that attracted 2700 people. The call to action was to do Senate office visits in five states and to pull those off with eight days notice. People signed up for teams organized by state and began to meet on video the next day. Once again, nobody knew each other, and still people decided that they could organize Senate office visits in their state a week later and they made it happen. Those actions ranged from ten people in Augusta, Maine to 150 people in Austin, Texas.

Since that first mass call in May, this project has produced 15 town halls, with attendance ranging from 78 people to 280 people, actions at a dozen Senate offices, and launched canvass programs across 10 of those Congressional districts. This organizing has been anchored by a team of three professional organizers.

This work continues, but here are my takeaways so far:

Right now, many people want to know what to do and how to do it. Sure, there are also many people who want to be deeply involved in developing the demands, the strategy, and more. But in a period as overwhelming as this one, lots of people who might not engage otherwise, will move to action if we are clear, direct, and specific about what is needed from them. The massive turnout at the No Kings events on October 18^th is all the evidence you need that millions of people want to know what to do and when and how to do it.

A small number of professional organizers can organize a lot of people if they trust and prepare volunteers to take on the role of organizer. In this project, the decision to have the organizers operate as coaches was key. The coaches created an excellent toolkit (I was surprised how much people valued the toolkit), held trainings, and we attended many but not all of the regular calls held by the new local groups. But, we did not lead those calls and we didn’t take on work that people in the community could do themselves. We were there to provide counsel and insight from our many years of organizing and otherwise tried to stay out of the way so people could lead themselves.

Train people to do very specific things in the here and now. These were not trainings in theory or about how to organize in some theoretical moment in the future. (To be clear, I believe there is a place for this kind of training, but this was not that.) People were being trained to become organizers through the organizing and execution of a very specific thing. What they learned through the training, they put into practice immediately. They now know the difference between an activist and an organizer, how to run high quality planning meetings, and how to land firm commitments from others to take on work or show up to an event. And, they know how to organize top quality town halls and because they did the thing they were trained in, the concepts and skills became embodied, and this is now something they can teach others to do.

I’m pretty sure we’ve only scratched the surface on this work. I’ll share more as this organizing evolves. Meanwhile, I’d encourage all of us to look for where our organizations can be more direct in putting a call to action on the table and setting more volunteers up to become organizers.

If you have an idea to bring the power of organizing to more working-class people, an idea that’s been nagging at you and you just can’t let it go, this is your chance to scratch that itch. Today we are launching a search for great organizers with big ideas. You can throw your hat into the mix by completing this form.

To date, we have launched projects to organize working class moms, smalltown seniors, working-class visionaries, video gamers, Catholic women, and most recently a project to train working-class volunteers to become organizers in the fight to defend democracy.

Yours could be an idea to reach a specific group of people or a kind of place, or it could be a new way of reaching people that you've been thinking on. We want organizers who have ideas, a track record, and are ready to do the work of organizing.

These projects can be online, offline, and everything in between, as long as they reach and move new working-class people into the fight. We’ve got mad respect for the fundamentals of organizing and believe there are many ways to apply them.

The people we hire to lead new projects come onto a team of organizers who have run big campaigns and built new working-class organizations from scratch. You would get support, mentoring, and insight from these fellow organizers.

Here's what a project lead gets:

-Full-time salary and benefits.

-A modest start-up budget to cover travel, digital ads, meeting costs, etc.

-Support from seasoned organizers.

-Some built-in storytelling and operations capacity.

If your organizing takes off, and we think it’s a good use of funds, we then budget additional dollars to cover the costs needed to reach more people.

If the idea doesn't take, that’s ok, we’re here to try new things.

If you are interested in taking the first step, fill out this form.

Here are a few tips on the kinds of projects most likely to be chosen.

First, the project must reach working-class people. Next up, the project needs to have the potential to expand to reach significant numbers of people. One way people have done this is by focusing on an identity or interest: Moms, rural seniors, video gamers. Another has been through a type of geography, like unorganized rural areas or working-class suburbs. It could be focusing on a specific type of consumer, a sector of the economy, or the workforce.

If proposing a very local project, we’d want to know how that project could be recreated in lots of places or another reason it could have an outsized impact in the lives of working-class people.

It’s high time for a new wave of organizing. If you have a gut feeling about an idea, throw your hat in the ring. If you know someone who has been hankering to build something new, please share this with them. Chances like this only come around every so often.

It started in the back seat of my family’s Jeep Cherokee, the one with the broken AC and vinyl seats that stuck to my thighs in the late summer heat.

After school we would wait, all the doors flung open, for my dad to get off work. My mother reading in the front seat, her book propped up on her knees; my brother stretched across the bench seat trying to put his dirty socks on my back. I am doing my homework on the floorboard, sweeping pencil shavings and dog hair out onto the gravel, the sound of hammering and table saws whirring in the distance.

Then my dad would come, plaid shirt and jeans, his head sweaty from his hard hat. He’d take the keys from my mom and steer the Jeep out to the highway. As we picked up speed, the humid Virginia air would rush into the car off the hot asphalt, catching a scent of my dad, sawdust, and blueprint ammonia, and send it back to me.

This is my love letter to the working class.

This is my love letter to the construction workers, the chippies and pavers, mudders and tapers, dancing high on their stilts, the Eagles and Juan Gabriel playing on the bright yellow Dewalt radio; my love letter to the painter who smiles and slaps the new guy on the back, laughing “looks good from my house!”

This is my love letter to the waitresses, to the cooks wearing no-slip shoes, and the dishwashers who learn all the lyrics to Outta My Mind while slinging plates in the pit with their headphones on. It’s to order tickets and tipped wage, running dishes, and stocking the low boy; to the milk crate holding the door for a smoke break.

It’s a love letter to the daycare workers, affixing bandaids and distributing apple slices, rhymes, and clean-up songs, who lock up the center after dark, put the garbage in the dumpster, and make their way across the city to tuck their own children into bed.

It’s a love letter to the orderlies hauling canvass bags of linens out to the truck bay, the officer workers sitting at gray laminate desks doing coding and billing, the grandparents who pin photos up in their cubical from that treasured weekend on the Enchantment of the Seas, the nurses who drink Diet Coke through the night, the CNAs who bring romance novels to their homebound clients.

This is a love letter to the small-town bartenders who listen to our stories and tell us when it’s time to head home; to my friend the tattoo artist who drives Uber at night waiting for his band to get big; to my son’s teacher working the register at World Market during the Christmas holiday; to my neighbor stocking the Food Lion shelves as a second job to pay for his mother’s prescriptions. It's to the teachers rewriting the lesson plan, the landscaper rewatering the lawn, the cook reheating the duchess potatoes, parsley on the side.

This is a love letter to you, as you are because politicians will claim you, songwriters will herald you, and pundits will devour you whole, but you rarely see yourself. A love letter to you because you are scapegoated, blamed for the backwardness of policy, for ten thousand years of history; or you because you “vote against your own interests,” because they say you are uneducated, because they call you a redneck, an illegal, a baby mama because you promised me that you are saving up for a little break, maybe a few days at the shore, someday.

So, this is a love letter to the nail techs and hairdressers, the fabricators and upholsterers, the machinists and gear jammers, those driving over the road trying to get home to see the kids. It’s to the pickers and shippers packing skids, to the scuds and pacers, to the mom working the front desk at the Corpus Christi Microtell who puts her homework away when she runs my credit card and gets me a key.

It’s a love letter against all odds. A love letter written despite back rent due, broken washers, waiting on payday. A love letter composed with the sweet memories of hand-me-downs and potlucks, a day off at the lake, a church fish fry, checking in on the neighbor’s kids on a snow day. It’s a love letter made tender by the barista who shares her tips, by the store clerk who knows your brand of cigarettes, by the woman who sells pupusas and gives you extra curtido because she knows your mama, and by the big trampoline put together by all your uncles so every kid in the neighborhood can play.

It’s a love letter to bus routes and subway lines, to the access roads and drainage ditches, to the punch clock and piss tests, to the Dodge Dakotas and Chevy Colbalts that are “hardly broken in,” to work gloves and all hands inside them.

You can find more of Gwen’s working class storytelling here.

Here are some reviews from the April and May sessions.

“Best organizing training i have been to, bar none.”

“Short, sweet and to the point and invaluable for community AND labor organizers.”

“It's a revolutionary way to think about organizing and I think all organizers should take this training.”

It's the best training I've ever attended. Trainers who REALLY knew and lived what they were training and had really transformative answers for every question. You don't know what you don't know until you take this training.

“I love the no-frills approach. And the organizers are very good at modifying on the fly.”

“Every new organizer should take the training.”

“Highly recommend! Really approachable first exposure to organizing and working class campaigns. The facilitators break a daunting topic down into manageable, strategic, and achievable bite sized tasks. I feel empowered!”

"Whether you're an organizer who's looking to recenter your work, or new to this and passionate about making a difference, Working Class Campaigns is a no BS training focused on giving you the tools to identify issues and find ways to win on them. If you've been perplexed by an issue facing your community for years, I guarantee you'll walk out thinking about new ways to be able to make progress on it."

The five-part series includes:

• Issues That Have Heat. Nothing beats organizing a campaign on issues that people in the community chose themselves. We show you how to find the ones that will inspire lots of new people to join the fight.

• Cutting An Issue to Win: A secret sauce of organizing is building campaigns to win as a way to defeat cynicism and build confidence in organizing. We show you how to rack up wins along the way to taking on larger and more structural fights.

• Down & Dirty Power Analysis: Your strategy is never better than your power analysis. We’ll teach you how to run one and do it with members of your organization, including a unique wrinkle you are unlikely to find anywhere else.

• Simplified Campaign Strategy: Campaign plans don’t have to be complicated, but you do need one. We provide a simple framework for developing campaign strategy, and turning that strategy into a plan to win.

• Building a Base, Developing Leaders: One of the most essential of the soft arts is helping people develop into leaders. Everyone says “go develop leaders,” but we are rarely taught how. This session helps you figure out where you are stuck and what you can shift in your organizing to help people develop into leaders.

As a reminder, this training was designed for organizers who have some organizing experience. We will soon announce trainings for volunteers who are organizing in their community. If you are unsure if you’re a fit, but interested, complete the application and we’ll help you sort it out. Onward.

We will also be running this same training again in May and June, and if you want to get in the queue for one of those weeks, you can apply using the same link below. The training is 90 minutes a day, over five days, so 7.5 hours total, and on Zoom.

SIGN UP FOR TRAINING!

In my thirties, I was a new member of a team of organizers that would meet in a tiny, smoke-filled storefront each Monday to report on what we had each done the previous week. We were each zigzagging the country, sparking and supporting new organizing.

We would each share what we had done the previous week: a training on power in Buffalo, leveled-up the campaign strategy in Indianapolis, got folks in Cleveland to commit to an action the following week. At the end, the most senior organizer in the group, Shel Trapp, gave his report. His stories were better than ours.

He would arrive in a city in the early afternoon, meet with a local group in the early evening, and find them coming up with lots of reasons to not take action. “We need a little more information” or “we should send one more letter first.” They were stuck and afraid.

He asked who was responsible for the issue creating so much pain in the community: A payday lender, a redlining banker, the Mayor, a slumlord?

Trapp asked, “How long have you been meeting about this?”

The local group responded, “Six months.”

Trapp again, “How many actions have you done?”

The group, “None, we’re still deciding the best strategy.”

He then said, look, you have a choice, you can meet for another six months, more people will get screwed over, and you’ll live with the fact that you did nothing. Or, we could look up this guys address, load the church bus out back and go to his house right now and deliver your demands. Sure, we might make a mistake tonight, but not near as big as coming up with more excuses to protect a guy who is shitting on the community.

More often than not, people got up, marched out to the parking lot, loaded the bus and were soon outside the house of a payday lender, slumlord, or whoever, delivering their message.

Sometimes the guy was home, and sometimes he agreed to meet with the group, but just as often he didn’t. That was not the point. The point was moving from fear and perfectionism to action. Now, at their next meeting, they could develop strategy knowing they were not a group than wrung their hands and wondered what to do. They were a group that took action and felt a hell of a lot better because of it.

See, Trapp believed the biggest barrier to change was not a lack of information or even better strategy. It was that all across the world there were well-meaning groups of people who craved change, but would not confront people who abuse power, and until we overcame that problem the abuse would keep coming.

We came to think of Trapp’s style of organizing as “go, ready, set.” Meaning that sometimes we’ve gotta get out of the “ready, ready, set” stance, and just “go.”

To be clear, this is not a call to be cavalier about the context we are organizing in or reckless in our actions. We must be thoughtful about what risks we are asking people to take, and where our actions might spur backlash that puts us on defense. But we should all scan for where we are stuck for fear of making a mistake.

When you decide to act, you will make mistakes, and you will see things you could’ve done better. You’ll have regrets. That is the cost of taking action. More often than not, those consequences pale in comparison to the cost of inaction. Inaction emboldens bullies to expand who and how they punish. We speak loudly through action and, in moments like this, just as loudly through inaction. The choice as to how we pump up the volume is ours.

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The five-part series includes:

• Issues That Have Heat. Nothing beats organizing a campaign on issues that people in the community chose themselves. We show you how to find the ones that will inspire lots of new people to join the fight.

• Cutting An Issue to Win: A secret sauce of organizing is building campaigns to win as a way to defeat cynicism and build confidence in organizing. We show you how to rack up wins along the way to taking on larger and more structural fights.

• Down & Dirty Power Analysis: Your strategy is never better than your power analysis. We’ll teach you how to run one and do it with members of your organization, including a unique wrinkle you are unlikely to find anywhere else.

• Simplified Campaign Strategy: Campaign plans don’t have to be complicated, but you do need one. We provide a simple framework for developing campaign strategy, and turning that strategy into a plan to win.

• Building a Base, Developing Leaders: One of the most essential of the soft arts is helping people develop into leaders. Everyone says “go develop leaders,” but we are rarely taught how. This session helps you figure out where you are stuck and what you can shift in your organizing to help people develop into leaders.

This training was designed for full-time organizers who have some organizing experience. We will soon announce trainings for volunteers who are organizing in their community. If you are unsure if you’re a fit, but interested, complete the application and we’ll help you sort it out.

This time around we’re adding an “in this moment” section at the end of each session, digging in on how any of this applies in the absolute dumpster fire we are organizing in now.

We are running this training three different times between now and the end of June. The options and the link to apply are below. Blessed be the organizers!

APPLY HERE!

Overreach will define the years ahead, but not all missteps will be equal. Some create cracks; others floodgates a mile wide. The power lies in knowing which moments to seize and how to use them to grow who’s with us.

Our responses can either shrink who is in or engage an entire new group of people. In 2017 and 2018, two pivotal moments were responded to in ways that broadened the ranks: the fight to save the Affordable Care Act and the pushback against the separation of children from their families at the border.

When the ACA was on the chopping block, organizers sparked working-class people across partisanship to flood into Congressional townhalls demanding, “get your hands off my health insurance.” Their defiance saved the ACA, and made the policy more popular than ever.

When children were separated from their parents at the border, it sparked outrage that went beyond political divides. Americans who had never envisioned themselves at an immigrant rights event drew the line at children being ripped from their parents and joined in. On one day in June of 2018, over 750 Families Belong Together rallies took place across the country. Half of these events were held in politically-red counties, including towns as small as Antler North Dakota, population 17. It was one moment in the last decade when new hearts and minds were won over in the fight for a more humane immigration system.

These reactions to bullying worked because organizers moved to action and framed those actions in a common-sense way that lots of people could relate to. They were designed to grow the ranks.

When the 2018 midterms came, the bullies paid a price. Many Members of Congress who supported repeal of the ACA were sent packing and publicly funded health care was declared the winner in that election. Overreach was the catalyst, but it was choices by organizers that turned being under attack into being on offense.

Bullying is on the rise and it’s not going away anytime soon. We will need to respond to some overreach whether it creates openings or not, but we should always ask, “Who are the new people we are bringing into this fight?” and “How does our response inspire people beyond our current networks to join us? ” Having answers to these questions is not extra credit. In some ways, it’s the whole point. Otherwise, the bullying will never stop.

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These projects can be online, offline, and everything in between, as long as they reach and move new people. We’ve got mad respect for the fundamentals of organizing and believe there are many ways to apply them.

The people leading new projects would come onto a senior team of organizers who have built organizations from scratch and run big campaigns, and get support, inspiration, and insight from these fellow organizers.

New projects can focus on an often overlooked constituency or geography. It could be a class of people - for example, people saddled with bad loans or those likely to be impacted by cuts to programs by the incoming administration. It could be testing out a model or theory on how to reach more new people.

Here’s a quick skinny on the first three projects the organizers I work with have launched from scratch. The first started organizing working-class moms across partisanship off of Reddit and then moved members to offline organizing. They are now organizing in more than a dozen states. One project employed a fast online to offline model to organize in strategic and often overlooked parts of the country, and another organizes small-town seniors in the Midwest including a hot fight on the privatization of long-term care.

Here's what a project lead gets:

-Full-time salary and benefits.

-A start-up budget to cover anything from travel, digital ads, etc.

-Support from seasoned organizers.

-Some built-in storytelling and operations capacity.

In the first year the organizer is not expected to do any fundraising. We want you focused on doing the work and fleshing out the model.

If the idea takes hold, and we thinks it’s a good use of funds, we then budget additional dollars to cover costs essential to reaching more people.

These projects can spin out or stay in house. If they don’t take, that’s alright. We’re here to try new things. We only ask that you gather the lessons from the work.

If you are interested in launching a new organizing project, fill out this form and we’ll get you all you need to throw your hat in the mix.

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Seniors face all kinds of challenges, living off of less, issues of mobility, the costs of long-term care, and more. They also have a lot to give - experience, time, and wisdom. I believe a movement of working-class people that does not include lots of seniors is missing the mark by a country mile. Here are some thoughts on that in this In These Times piece.

You can listen to the conversation here or wherever you listen to podcasts.

The Mashup Americans are the producers of our To See Each Other podcast and the Fundamentals of Organizing podcast.

Onward!

They easily could have said, well, her office doesn’t have jurisdiction in this fight, and it’s only a week’s notice. It will be a mad rush to get a hall, fill the room, develop an agenda, get media there, and so much more, all for someone who can’t say yes to our demands.

They decided to do it anyway. Here’s a look at some of what they got out of that decision.

They scrambled to get 93 people to show up for a meeting in a 12,000 town. Of the 93 people who came, about half were new. They’ve had that many people together before. The new folks probably came because of Lina Khan.

The leadership team got the invaluable experience of pulling together a high stakes meeting on short notice, and the leaders who had public roles, have now taken on roles on a larger stage.

As far as advancing their campaign, though the FTC had no direct role in the matter, Lina Khan’s presence brought the media, including statewide media that local organizers had not yet been able to get. The best hit was from Wisconsin Public Radio (it’s worth reading!), and this piece put pressure on the the buyers - as they and their dismal track record were brought into the open and on the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, who has the power to not approve the transfer of the nursing home license because the buyer has a poor track record.

Oftentimes the choice to act is better than doing nothing, and in this case a local group decided to act because they were clear on how the presence of a leader of a federal agency would leverage attention to their issues in ways they had not been able to do alone. That’s good organizing.

Today we released the third episode of To See Each Other, where we follow these incredible small-town seniors in Wisconsin, fighting off privatization of their 5-star county-owned nursing homes, and for a better future for us all. You can listen on ITunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, including YouTube.

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Nikki Marín Baena of Siembra NC once said that organizing is a conspiracy to convince people that they can be powerful together. The new organization, With Many Hands, leans into this in a big way.

Tomás Garduño, a New Mexico Native, started With Many Hands in a part of the State that is so much more conservative than the rest that it’s called Little Texas. Donald Trump won 71 percent of the vote here. In the four largely rural counties that make up this part of Southeast New Mexico – Otero, Chaves, Lea, and Eddy – 40 percent of the population lives on under $50,000 a year.

Tomás started by posting snarky memes about the cost of living, and engaging people who liked or shared those memes. A direct message turned into a phone call, a phone call into a one-on-one, and hundreds of one-on-ones into a real on-the-ground membership with hundreds of working-class people who are willing to act together to make their communities better.

For those of us who come out of a strict door-knocking or one on one model, think of the meme as the door knock, the direct message as the initial conversation on the doors, and the phone call as the actual one on one. It’s all organizing, but with different tools.

Two local leaders, Courtney McCary-Squyres and Jeneva Martinez, in Alamogordo and Roswell, took on big bodies of work, were coached by Tomás and have become organizers.

With Many Hands runs deep in the fundamentals. They meet people where they’re at– working on issues identified by the members themselves, never selling an issue chosen by staff or philanthropy. The issues that the members chose were food, land, and housing and the organizing has been more effective because these were the most widely and deeply felt issues.

They don’t insist that people agree with them on all things before contributing their leadership, or move people through ideologically focused workshops, but instead the political development happens through the fights they are in. They learn who’s on their side when their demands are met, or aren’t. 

Doing one on ones runs deep in their culture, and they consistently ask the question and act on the answer of “how are we bringing in new people?” Because Tomás is a fervent believer in never doing for a leader or organizer what they could do for themselves, their leadership is accustomed to carrying a lot of work and recruiting new potential members themselves.

The result is that With Many Hands has hundreds of volunteers and people who attend their events. The majority of the people involved aren’t necessarily interested in politics, nor have they historically looked to the government to solve their problems.

While With Many Hands practices the fundamentals, they are not fundamentalist. Much of their outreach is online first, but quickly moves offline. They unabashedly use mutual aid to help meet people’s immediate needs. In Roswell they helped start the Gonzales Hope Warming Center so people who had limited options could go there, get warm and eat in the winter.

With Many Hands Volunteers found that much of the dilapidated housing in their neighborhoods was owned by working class property owners who didn’t have enough money to repair them. The housing stock being out of circulation also meant that fewer units were available to rent, driving up the price of housing.

They won a $500,000 grant from the New Mexico Mortgage Finance Authority to create a program to address this need, but did it in an unusual way. They put up some of their own funding to show that this could work, rehabbing two properties themselves, and then took that evidence to the state, and won this half million dollar grant.  

With Many Hands members in Alamogordo organized to get elected officials to allow publicly-owned land to be used for community gardens. They have turned 4 empty lots into community gardens to grow food in food-insecure areas. These gardens provide healthy, free food to people in the area. One garden is next to a community center with a commercial kitchen. With Many Hands is organizing classes, which use food from the garden to teach people how to can, prepare food and start micro-businesses that can supplement their incomes.

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These mutual aid efforts and campaigns on the exact issues that people were most energized by resulted in a bunch of people now believing that when they organize they can create and win the things they need. They’ve also run into the barriers that can only be addressed by engaging in elections.  Now, a group of people from With Many Hands is getting involved in elections that could have big consequences in New Mexico and beyond.

New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District is rated by Cook Political Report as one of the two dozen US House races that will determine which party controls the US Congress. The newly organized people in the district will have something to say about the outcome.

On September 7th, they hosted a food and housing summit, with over 200 people on hand. Most of the people who showed up do not traditionally engage in organizing or politics, but because the issues were chosen by them, they are getting engaged.  

They invited both Congressional candidates and sitting Congressman Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat, came and connected with the crowd. His Republican challenger, Yvette Herrell, did not attend. Also on hand were candidates for statehouse races.

Out of this event, they began their get out the vote campaign in earnest. Courtney and Jeneva have brought on a group of their most dedicated leaders as organizing fellows. They are receiving organizing training and will run voter mobilization campaigns, starting with their own circles of people who tend to sit out elections, and building out from there.

Along the way, they’ll play a role in determining who represents them in Congress, and maybe who controls Congress. And it all started with applying the fundamentals, but not being rigid in their application.  

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Fundamentals of Organizing we still have some. You can get one here.

From the Fundamentals of Community Organizing pamphlet…

Tell the Story

The organization’s members have little time and more choices than ever on how to spend it. You want them to decide the organization and its campaigns are a priority. One way we do that is by telling the story of the fight. Our story needs to become binge-worthy.

People love a story. A strong campaign has all the elements of a good one. We have a protagonist. That’s us. An antagonist. The bad guy. We have the initial action. The bad stuff the bad guy did to start the whole thing. We then have conflict, the people fighting back. Finally, hanging in the balance, is the question of how it all will end.

Having all the elements of a good story doesn’t mean much if we aren’t telling it. Telling our story is especially important when we win. People are hunting for hope, and every win, even a step toward that win, is a chance to help them find it. Tell your story early and often. 

When I was doing street organizing, the morning after the big meeting, we’d be at a copy shop making fliers. And that night a group of members would flier the neighborhood making sure everyone knew about what happened the night before. It wasn’t extra credit, the work of the big meeting wasn’t done until the story was told.

Nowadays, we have more ways than ever to tell our story, including podcasts. Today we posted the first episode of season two of To See Each Other, where a group of small-town seniors have banded together to fight off privatization of their beloved county-owned nursing home. I’ve always loved telling good story, but this is the first time trying it in serial fashion, following the blow by blow of one fight, and because the fight is still on, no one knows how it will end.

If you want to listen, here’s the first episode.

Here are a few of the protagonists you’ll meet. These women have lived incredible lives, are all fighters, and they’re not done yet, organizing their community to preserve county ownership of Pine Crest, a 5-star nursing home that has been part of the community for a generation.

Judy Woller was born and raised in Lincoln County, grew up on a farm, and because of personal experience, founded HAVEN, the Household Abuse Victims Emergency Network. She has been in this fight from day one.

Dora Gorski is a retired social worker and was a volunteer EMT with the rural fire department for 15 years. Her husband Ken, a martial arts instructor and also a volunteer EMT, was a resident of Pine Crest.

Marge Roggenbuck, center, was born and raised on a Lincoln County dairy farm. Both of her parents received great care and lived the end of their lives at Pine Crest. She worked for 19 years at the Fox Point Factory in Merrill, WI and 18 years at Church Mutual Insurance.

You can listen to To See Each Other wherever you listen to podcasts (Spotify, ITunes, and YouTube). I hope you do. And I hope that you tell the story of the campaigns you are organizing early and often and do all you can to make those stories too damn good to resist.

In Season Two of our podcast, To See Each Other, we take you along for the ride on one of those fights. Wisconsin has a history of county-owned nursing homes. These are beloved institutions and often five-star rated.

But, they are under attack - a concerted push by conservative county boards to privatize them and sell them off, in some cases to shady buyers, and often for a song. 

A mighty band of older residents are not having it. They are cramming into county board meetings, marching in local parades, and giving county leaders hell, some with their last breath. 

In Season One of To See Each Other, while I was at People’s Action, we traveled to five states to learn about some of the most compelling rural organizing happening in the lead up to the 2020 election. 

This Season we go to one state, Wisconsin, where small town seniors are fighting tooth and nail to save their county-owned nursing homes and taking that energy straight through the election.

For seven straight Presidential elections, Wisconsin went blue, until in 2016, when Donald Trump won the Badger State by just under 23,000 votes. There’s a good chance whoever wins Wisconsin in November will win the Presidency. 

Here’s the trailer for this season. The first episode comes out on September 24. 

I hope you’ll join in and get to know the tough and soulful seniors leading this fight. You can subscribe here (ITunes), here (Spotify), or wherever you listen to podcasts.