What is an Organizer? Self Interest
You can't force people to care about the "right" things
This is the second post of a series: What is an Organizer? Where I will seek define what makes a real community organizer, and what are the traits necessary for someone to become one.
We often find that our institutions, up to and including the most powerful offices in the land, are indifferent to our wants, needs, and desires. Does your local government care about you or your family? Does your governor? Congress?? Joe Biden??? Obviously not. What about your employer? Maybe, maybe not. How about the largest company in the town where you live? How about Amazon? As we confront the formidable disinterest of the most powerful institutions we interact with, we are forced to also confront our own powerlessness. At some point you may find yourself or someone you love refusing to continue this way. You may, should, must, choose to build power. But how?
When we feel powerless, the temptation is to slide into apathy and despair. Of course, this is exactly what the people who already have power want. The inoculation against despair is community, other people. You gotta get out there. As we know, power comes from two sources, people and money. We can only build power together, It cannot be done alone. And the way we must organize ourselves and others is through self interest.
This is organizer 101 stuff, but, like a lot of organizer 101 stuff, it bears repeating these days. There are a lot of bad ways to organize people: guilt, force, bribery. But there is only one good, sustainable way: self-interest. People build strong, power based relationships for the long term when those relationships are rooted in what they care about in their own lives and the lives of people they love.
What do you care about most deeply? What are your hopes? Your fears? Maybe you want a better job, with better pay or more time off. Maybe you can’t afford a decent place to live. Maybe the roads and infrastructure in your town are crumbling, or the schools are underfunded. Maybe you just want to be able to walk around your neighborhood without worrying about being shot. Maybe, like me, you have someone you love that can’t afford health insurance. Maybe, like me, you worry that your children will grow up in a world that is plagued by pointless wars or a country run by a handful of corrupt oligarchs with the rest of us relegated to serfdom. This is the real shit. This is the shit that keeps you up at night, and also gets you out of bed in the morning.
People can come together around these hopes and fears. In fact, they do all the time, all over the place. But we have to have the courage to talk about them. And more importantly, the courage to ASK about them. If you see yourself as an organizer, whether amateur or professional, this is your job: to facilitate peoples discovery of their own self interest, and shared self interest they may have with others. By talking to them. By asking them.
This point about shared self interest is worth extrapolating on. While the people who have direct experience with our issues must always be at the center of our work, leading us, there is more than one way to have self interest related to an issue. Let’s take an issue I work on often, housing, as an example. In our organizing, we make a point to not only include people who have direct issues with housing, but to facilitate their growth in to leaders. For example, we may have a young adult who is still living at home because they can’t afford rent lead a housing action. Or a person who has been in and out of homelessness. Or someone who was recently evicted or foreclosed on. But there are also people who are securely housed themselves who have a strong self interest in affordable housing. Those whos’ family members are insecurely housed, or those whos’ neighborhoods have been transformed through gentrification into something they no longer understand. Or those who have been moved by their faith into relationship with the homeless or insecurely housed, and who have a firm commitment to the principle that everyone should have a roof over their head. The organizer brings these people together and points them toward a shared enemy, a pressure point that can transform the housing system for the better.
Here’s what an organizer is not: a salesperson. It is not our job to tell people what to care about, or to convince them of what issue is most important. Too often these days I see organizers forgetting this, or perhaps never being taught it. You have the case of the “issue organizer”, a contradiction in terms. This is someone who works for a single issue organization, who calls themselves an organizer but spends their time convincing people to care about the same issue they do. It involves a lot of petitions. Perhaps the issue is climate change for example, and they find themselves attempting to organize in a inner city neighborhood beset by senseless violence, where the residents are more worried about safety than pollution. This individual will find themselves jumping through all sorts of logical hoops to connect climate change to gun violence and sell the neighborhood residents on this connection. If you find yourself doing something like this I regret to inform you that you are not a true organizer. There is no such thing as a “climate change organizer”. There are simply organizers and paid activists.
In order to sustainably organize around self interest, we must build multi-issue organizations. Multi-issue organizations allow for people to pursue action that aligns with their own self interest, and they allow momentum to continue to build. When the inevitable peaks and valleys of a single issue campaign occur, there may be action on a different issue. This is common sense stuff, but what people seem to forget is the fact that multi-issue organization allow for stronger relationships to form through reciprocity. If the issue I care deeply about is housing, and the issue you care deeply about is violent crime, and we are members of the same organization, I may learn from you about the crime problem. You may learn from me about housing. Maybe we sit together over a slice of pizza in a church basement at an organizing meeting and talk about our issues. A couple weeks later, maybe I show up at an action you are organizing to stop crime in the neighborhood. You owe me one after that, so you show up for my action on housing. This is the stuff that sparks strong relationships, and allows us to build power across the divides of race, creed, and geography.
Even in multi issue organizations like my own however, I have seen a recent trend away from a model of organizing that trusts ordinary peoples self interest. This is a trend for the worse, and frankly I think it began when organizing networks started hiring too many highly educated people from upper class backgrounds. You can be a good organizer and come from this sort of background, but I find that often it is hard for them to trust ordinary people. We are at point now where any organizers see “educating the people” as the most important part of their job.
In summer of 2020, as I sat in ridiculous zoom meeting after ridiculous zoom meeting I noticed a sharp rise in organizers who described the core of their work as “confronting white supremacy”. Surely a noble goal, but where did it come from? And how does one, as an organizer, “confront white supremacy”? From what I could tell, it involved a lot of trainings over zoom. Because I organize in rural areas, people often attempted to rope me into this sort of thing (lord knows no one that lives in city or suburb could possibly be racist!). It soon became clear that “organizing around white supremacy” was basically a sales job, to both white people and black people. To white people the pitch was something like: “you have this deep flaw in your soul called white supremacy. You may think the biggest issues in your community are the schools, jobs, or housing, but none of them can be fixed until you confront this flaw in your soul”. To black people the pitch was: “there is a deep flaw in America called white supremacy. You may think the biggest issues in your community are schools, jobs, or housing, but none of them can be fixed until we address this flaw in our country”. And the way we address the flaw was apparently by inviting more people to zoom training.
There is a deep flaw in America called white supremacy. And we must work to fix it. But the sudden explosion in these trainings didn’t come from any deep listening to a broad base of people. I’ve done thousands of 1-1’s in my life with people of all races and never has anyone described their self interest to me as “confronting white supremacy”. This sudden explosion was the result of funder priorities shifting, probably because funders are largely rich and white and felt guilty after the George Floyd murder. The tail was wagging the dog.
As organizers we must resist this sort of top down approach. We must choose our issues based on listening for peoples self-interest, and then find funding for them, not the other way around. To my mind, this line of thinking on white supremacy was completely backward. What we should have done, what we should always be doing, is organizing around peoples concrete self interest (make my neighborhood safer, fix the roads in my town), allow that work to bring people together across race, and then, when our people recognize they have shared issues, shared self interest, address the big philosophical problems with our society, such as white supremacy. Starting from a place of shared self interest allows the conversation to be honest. And anyway, what good is a deep understanding of the historical underpinnings of America’s original sin if you can’t get a decent job, or find a place to live, or walk down the street without worrying for your safety?
I often argue that there is no particular ideological screen to become a community organizer. Many people think it is a lefty project (because Obama was briefly an organizer), but you can absolutely be a conservative organizer (or a libertarian, or an anarchist, or whatever). The funding sources might be different, that’s all But there is a necessary set of beliefs that exist outside of partisan politics that are a prerequisite, at least in my mind. Chief among them is a deep faith in humanity.
I believe strongly that most people, of all backgrounds, want the same things: a future for their kids, a roof over their head, food on the table, some free time for family and friends, and a sense of belonging to a community. And more importantly, I trust people to come to those conclusions if I talk with them, or if they talk with each other. This trust is a necessity to be an organizer. Since self interest is the only sustainable way to organize, we must trust that people’s self interest a) overlaps with others and b) will eventually lead to a more moral and just society. Too often, self-described organizers are afraid to trust ordinary people. But this is a result of too much time in the office. They would trust ordinary people if they spent enough time with them. Over more than a decade of organizing I’ve grown to believe in ordinary people more, not less.
Self interest is the best and only way to organize for the long term. When ordinary people have the power to determine how our society is run, our society will be better off. I strongly believe this, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be an organizer. If you see your job as educating the people more than learning from them, don’t be an organizer, be a teacher. There’s a shortage and they get summers off.
Paid subscriptions will be treated as donations to my organizing work with Michigan Faith in Action. If you would like to donate to my work outside of that avenue you can click here for my year end fundraiser. Donations go a long way.