5

Team

Finding a Home Base in a Movement for Change

After college, I lived in a shared house with three other people. One of them was a slug. He didn’t clean up, shop, or do any of the other work necessary for four people to live together. For a while, the rest of us tried to compensate. But eventually, we fell into a small-group death spiral. We retreated to our rooms and waited for the lease to end. I know people who’ve had the opposite experience, who are still best friends with their old housemates. Why do some teams soar, while others crash and burn? And what makes it possible to consistently build social justice teams that bring out the best in their members and are able to drive change in the world?

Having people whom you trust to walk with is indispensable to a life of social justice. All the important changes we make in the world are made alongside other people. Yet finding (or building) a good team of people to conspire with is never easy. The challenge of forming teams—and holding them together—is what organizers spend the most time wrestling with. And it’s the Achilles’ heel of an American social justice movement in which most so-called members have never met one another—let alone participated in the kind of face-to-face organizing that’s been the lifeblood of every social movement in history.

This chapter on building and sustaining social justice teams is organized into three sections. The first looks at the value of small groups—for us as individuals, as well as for organizations and larger movements. The second shares four practices that set teams up for success: trust, shared purpose, clear roles, and a learning culture. The final section offers an example of how large numbers of interconnected small groups that combine personal growth and social action can change history.

Why Small Face-to-Face Groups Are Indispensable for Social Change

Saddleback Church, in Orange County, California, is a large institution built on a foundation of small groups. Led by Rev. Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?, the church has regular Sunday attendance of over twenty thousand people, making it one of the largest religious congregations in the United States. One key to its growth has been the creation of thousands of small groups that provide a home base for its members. Steve Gladen, the leader of Saddleback’s Small Group Ministries, writes that the church has “more people in small groups than attend our weekend services.”¹ Through the groups, people pray together, share problems, study, and engage in service and outreach. The church has a structure that provides training and support to group leaders and connects groups to the larger mission and activities of the institution. Gladen says, “We look at the people who are serving as hosts and identify the ones who are natural shepherds. Then we begin to raise these people up through a ‘Small Group Leadership Pathway’ that helps them understand the ministry, recognize God’s call in their lives, and then trains them in head and heart fundamentals so they can be effective in the ministry. We take hosts and turn them into leaders!”²

Many of the organizing and leadership-development practices that make Saddleback successful also apply to purposedriven social change. Small groups give people space to breathe, think, find support, and grow. The larger the institution or movement, the greater the need for small spaces in which people can connect. None of us comes to social justice work fully formed. Becoming a public person who can act with confidence against injustice is hard. We need to be around people who can keep us from retreating back into our comfort zones. We need places where we can test our voices, connect with partners who complement our talents, and find a sense of belonging.

A burning issue might bring us to a first meeting, but what keeps us coming back are the relationships we build. There’s a point that successful groups pass—similar to a runner’s high—after which people don’t need to be persuaded to come to meetings. At that point, the relationships, not the agenda, hold people together and make the work seem easier.

A burning issue might bring us to a first meeting, but what keeps us coming back are the relationships we build.

Being on a team also gives people the ability to negotiate their interests within a larger institution or movement. Even in organizations working in a single city, people without teams can end up becoming cogs in a larger system. If we’re not actively engaged with others in making decisions about the social change work we’re doing, we can end up being hands, not heads—being given small discrete tasks, such as signing petitions or attending rallies. To be agents of our own destiny rather than objects of other people’s plans, we need teammates.

That’s why face-to-face chapters, small groups, and teams are the building blocks of mass social movements. An early example in US history is the antislavery movement. Until the 1820s, the primary organizations working to end slavery in the United States were a small number of societies, led mostly by prominent Quakers. These associations “advocated [for the] gradual abolition of slavery” using “tactics of voluntary manumissions, legal aid for blacks, and petitions to state governments.”³ Their tactics and membership were limited. Many other people—including many free Blacks—had energy for more direct and rebellious opposition to slavery, but these potential participants lacked the organizational structures to express that resistance.

Then something changed. Abolitionists decided to adopt a different organizing strategy and structure in the early 1830s. They were inspired by slave rebellions, such as the 1831 uprising in Virginia led by Nat Turner, and by the Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that spread a spirit of moral reform in the country. In 1832, leading abolitionists launched the American Antislavery Society—a new organization with a nationwide membership that included Blacks as well as Whites. They chose a “federated structure comprising nested local, state, and national chapters [which] enabled a franchise like expansion . . . providing a template for organizing and a way to link local groups to a nationwide effort.”⁴

In their article, “Antislavery in America: The Press, the Pulpit, and the Rise of Antislavery Societies,” Marissa King and Heather Haveman show how this change in organizational structure and philosophy made abolition the first large-scale American social movement. “The American Antislavery Society initiated a popular grass-roots campaign to promote immediate abolition. Rather than having prominent citizens sign petitions or bring lawsuits, the [society] sought to build widespread support among the citizenry to end slavery through a moral transformation that would turn the entire populace into abolitionists.”⁵

The fervor of the new structure is captured in the organization’s 1838 constitution:

We shall organize Antislavery Societies, if possible, in every city, town, and village in our land. We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, of warning, of entreaty, and rebuke. We shall circulate unsparingly and extensively antislavery tracts. . . . We shall enlist the pulpit and the press in the cause. . . . We shall aim at the purification of the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery.⁶

Membership exploded. At its height, the American Antislavery Society had more than sixteen hundred local chapters. It engaged tens of thousands of people in face-to-face organizing against slavery. The greatest participation was in states with the largest free Black populations. In 1835 alone, the society distributed more than one million pamphlets and slave narratives. Many participants in local antislavery societies went on to become conductors on the Underground Railroad. The core components of the abolition movement—mass multiracial membership, local societies or chapters, traveling agents, direct action, and an ethic of moral resistance to injustice—shaped every subsequent social movement in US history, from women’s suffrage to ending child labor to the civil rights movement.

In her book Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life, Theda Skocpol explains that, like the abolition movement, the largest and most successful social organizations in the United States have been organized along federated lines, with national, state, and local structures.⁷ This approach to building organizations and movements has been powerful precisely because it creates spaces for large numbers of people to be directly involved in face-to-face teams, while connecting them together and coordinating their work across great distances.

Organizations that reach deep into local communities and can bring large-scale pressure on the federal government are especially important in the United States because of the size of the country and how our government was designed to block change. The thirty-nine men who wrote the US Constitution (eleven of whom owned or managed slave plantations) made it extraordinarily difficult to pass policies to rein in elites, eradicate slavery, or benefit working people. From the design of the Senate—where one senator can stop an entire piece of legislation from moving forward—to the separation of powers between the president, Congress, and Supreme Court, they structured the rules of government to protect the status quo and to slow change. We play politics on a tilted field. The deep frustration that Americans feel about the inability of Congress to address the issues that matter most in our lives is extreme today. But the cry against do-nothing politicians is not new nor an accident. It’s the product of how a small number of wealthy White men designed the federal government, as well as many of our state governments.

Unfortunately, since the 1970s, social justice organizations that reach deep into communities have been eclipsed by what Skocpol refers to as “staff-led, mailing-list associations, without local or state group affiliates.”⁸ “If a new cause arises, people think of opening a national office, raising funds through direct mail, and hiring a media consultant.”⁹ In contrast, the Christian Coalition and other conservative organizations have continued to rely on structures that create space for people to take meaningful local action in their communities, connected to larger moral and political issues. But progressive and especially environmental organizations largely relate to members as individual donors or online activists. In 2000, Robert Putnam wrote, “Virtually all the major American environmental groups (as well as thousands of smaller organizations) are addicted to direct mail as a tool of mobilization and membership retention.”¹⁰ Today, national organizations fill our in-boxes with e-mail and claim us as members solely on the basis of our donating a few dollars or signing an online petition.

The inherent weakness of mailing-list organizations can be seen in the spectacular failure of the nation’s environmental organizations to secure climate change legislation during the first Obama term. Skocpol shows how “Big Green” organizations went into the fight with hundreds of millions of dollars—from direct-mail donations—to spend on lobbying and large lists of “members.” But they lacked a deep, mobilized base of people necessary to create moral and political pressure for action on climate change. This made it possible for the fossil fuel industry to use influential lobbyists, hundreds of millions in campaign contributions, and Senate rules to block action on cap and trade legislation.

Lawrence Goodwyn captures the bind we face today in his book The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. Populism, which began in the 1870s, was the largest democratic movement in American history and a precursor to our current struggle to restrain corporate power. Goodwyn writes, “[H]istory does not support the notion that mass protest movements develop because of hard times. Depressed economies or exploitive arrangements of power and privilege may produce lean years and even lean lifetimes for millions of people, but . . . they do not produce mass political insurgency.”¹¹ The crises we face in our own time are hollowing out the middle class and making more people poor. But neither this hardship nor widespread awareness of the corrupt influence of moneyed interests is enough to create a social revolution. Rather, as Goodwyn writes, “Democratic movements are initiated by people who have individually managed to attain a high level of personal political self-respect. They are not resigned; they are not intimidated. . . . Their sense of autonomy permits them to dare to try to change things by seeking to influence others.”¹²

Like the abolitionists after 1832, the populists sought to fundamentally change the way Americans saw their society. They fielded forty thousand lecturers who, like the antislavery agents, traveled the country speaking to groups of farmers and urban workers. Participants weren’t just showing up for speeches; they were directly engaged in day-to-day organizing against the economic structures that were impoverishing their families. They had spent many years “talk[ing] to each other about their troubles. They had read books on economics in an effort to discover what had gone wrong” and had formed local cooperative organizations that they controlled. Goodwyn says that this “cooperative struggle . . . engendered within millions of people what Martin Luther King would later call a ‘sense of somebodiness.’” This is what gave people the ability to stand up to the proverbial pharaohs of their times. “Thus armed, the Populists attempted to insulate themselves against being intimidated by the enormous political, economic, and social pressures that accompanied the emergence of corporate America.”¹³

Much has changed in our times, from the Internet to globalization. But the forces we’re up against are only more entrenched. And people’s sense of resignation and intimidation is pervasive. Like the populists and the abolitionists, we need a movement that can wake Americans up, that can reach into every town and city. To get there, we need face-to-face structures that connect us to one another and to a larger movement. The spaces where we can become somebody and test the limits set by conventional wisdom are just as indispensable today. That is what makes building powerful, purposeful, interconnected teams so vital. And we know a lot about how to do this well.

Creating Teams and Setting Them Up for Success

Teams are more than just a structure or technique. Like all the conversations in Stand Up!, they are a way of thinking about how people create meaning and solve problems together. Seeing social change through the lens of purposeful teams changes how we design our organizations and movements. It shifts the choices we make in facilitating groups and crafting strategy. It’s not enough to schedule a meeting and hope people will show up or be happy that the room is full. As a facilitator, I may try to focus people on their purpose, expose the forces we’re up against, or ask people to share their stories. But the main question going through my mind is whether people are already organized into small groups. If not, I’m thinking about how I can make that happen as soon as possible. I want to get people into groups, energize those groups, and set them up for success so they can bring more people to the table.

This section focuses on four elements—trust, shared purpose, clear roles, and a learning culture—that help social change teams thrive and make it possible for large numbers of people to work together to advance justice in an uncertain world. When the stakes are high, these four elements can make or break teams and ultimately social movements.

Trust

Social trust is the starting place for successful teams—all the more so for groups that have the audacity to take on the status quo in a society polarized by race, class, gender, and religion. People need to know that they have each other’s backs. This doesn’t just mean being confident that if you fall backward your friends will catch you or that if you lose your job trying to organize a union your coworkers will look out for you. It means being willing to be vulnerable. In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, Patrick Lencioni defines this kind of trust as “the confidence among team members that their peers’ intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group.”¹⁴ To make teams work, we need to open our hearts and expect the same of others. When teams aren’t emotionally truthful places, people skate on the surface. They don’t hold one another accountable. One or two people can take the group off the rails. The whole isn’t greater than the sum of the parts, defeating the purpose of being a team.

People must learn to be honest about how they experience race and gender differently. We need to fight the tendency to replicate society’s oppressive and hierarchical patterns in our own groups and organizations. Everyone needs to be conscious about whose voices dominate discussions in meetings and how someone’s race and gender influence how his or her ideas are received. To function effectively in a multiracial movement, we need to master a knowledge base—discussed in chapter 2—about White privilege, racial anxiety and the way societies are structured around false hierarchies of human value. We need to be able to talk about racism and patriarchy explicitly and recognize how they shape our individual behavior, interpersonal relationships, and group dynamics. The capacity to both tell the truth as we experience it and hear things about ourselves that we may not know—without flinching—makes us emotionally intelligent and racially conscious. And if taken as a primary responsibility, not an add-on, these skills can help a team forge itself into a tool for dismantling racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination.

Of course, it’s easier to aspire to emotional intelligence and self-awareness than practice them, especially when you believe your personal efforts can change the world. One truism about politics is that you can get almost anything done if you’re willing not to take credit for it. When I was working on a campaign to get abandoned cars off Philadelphia’s streets, our organization got all the local and state officials involved to agree on a solution. But it took another six months to iron out who would get to announce that they’d solved the problem. Most of us want desperately to make a difference. And we also want to get some credit. A necessary conceit of social change is that each of us feels that we added the straw that broke the camel’s back. The belief that our contribution matters is part of what keeps us from sitting back and letting others do the work. But there is always tension between what my ego needs to be happy and what I must do as one of many to support a healthy group that can get things done.

Organizers like to quote Rabbi Hillel, who asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”¹⁵ In real life, it isn’t easy to figure out how to be for yourself and also be for others. Strong teams live at the point where these three questions meet. Strong teams are places where people can be emotionally honest about what they need from the group and the group can be crystal clear about what it needs from each person.

To help groups that we’re part of or we coach go deeper, we need to return to the discussion in chapter 3 about using our emotional state to signal gratitude and abundance and to build purpose-driven organizations. People need to know one another’s stories and motivations. They need to feel that they belong and matter. They need to hear the group tell them why they’re valued. In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Lencioni pushes further. He outlines a team effectiveness exercise that “requires team members to identify the single most important contribution that each of their peers makes to the team, as well as the one area that they must either improve upon or eliminate for the good of the team.”¹⁶ Lencioni is speaking to workplace teams, but the underlying idea that honesty creates trust, and trust generates the capacity to think and act together, applies even more so to social justice teams facing off against powerful opponents.

Shared Purpose

Team members need to work together to achieve an important shared goal that they all understand and own. This seems obvious, but this understanding is often missing from both small groups and large organizations. In a small group, it’s good to ask the following questions: If you took each member of the team into a room separately and asked what the team was trying to accomplish, would you get the same clear response from everyone? When you look at how the members of the team spend their time outside meetings, can you see evidence that they are actively working together to achieve the same goal?

When a team has a shared purpose, its members are consumed with trying to accomplish a single important result. They’re not just connected by a set of values, an outlook on the world, work that is closely related, or a regular meeting time. They’re able to describe clearly what would be different if and when the team is successful. They know what success would mean for their lives, rather than being able to simply give a laundry list of activities that the group is engaged in. All team members can explain not only what they are doing to make the outcome a reality but also the roles that other team members are playing and why each is important to the result.

For electoral campaigns, union organizing drives, or efforts to pass ballot measures, where there are hard deadlines and win/lose outcomes, the shared purpose can often seem clear. But even in these situations, teams must be organized around goals, not tasks. People need to understand clearly how their team’s goals are related to the larger campaign’s success.

This focus on team goals was a key principle used by the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. The campaign relied on volunteer teams to drive their field program and meet voter registration, persuasion, and turnout goals that most campaigns leave to paid staff. Each volunteer team had meaningful goals that helped people feel ownership over their team’s piece of the puzzle and understand what they needed to do and why. As Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han explain in Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America, the goals shifted as the campaign progressed. Metrics changed from recruiting volunteers and creating new teams in the early stages to contacting voters closer to Election Day. But the underlying idea that teams needed to have autonomy and agency remained constant—reflected in the campaign’s mantra, “Respect, empower, include.”¹⁷

When there isn’t a hard Election Day deadline or when teams have a broader mission, focusing everyone on a single measure of success takes more work. The group needs to both define the goal and figure out how to achieve it. When a team is part of a larger movement, it needs to negotiate its own goals with other teams. As with the Obama campaign teams, it’s important to define the job in as big a chunk as possible and then shift the responsibility for figuring out how to be successful to each team.

For example, a team working to put a proposition on the state ballot to raise the minimum wage might be responsible for collecting the specific number of valid signatures needed from their county to qualify the measure as part of a larger statewide signature-collection goal. This is different from saying to the group, “Here are the days on which we want you to gather signatures at these locations.” The former instills purpose. The latter is about how to execute. The team should figure out the best way to achieve the goal, adjust its strategy, and see the goal to the finish. They need to take into account that some signatures will be tossed out. So the mission is to reach the goal of valid signatures and to go back out onto the streets if the goal isn’t met.

Or let’s say we’re trying to pass an ordinance to require employers in our city to provide paid sick time to their employees. Ideally, we have teams that take responsibility for delivering the vote of the councilperson who represents their district. One way to approach the campaign would be to say, “Let’s hold a public meeting in each council district to build support for the ordinance.” Then the job of each team would be to organize that event. Nothing is wrong with that approach. But what if we had all the teams meet together and say, “Okay, we’re each committing to deliver a specific outcome from our councilperson.” (Depending on where the councilperson starts out in his or her support, the options might be to cosponsor the bill, vote yes, abstain, or in the worst case, be less vocally opposed.) Each team is responsible for achieving a concrete measurable outcome. How groups meet their commitments will vary. Some might decide to hold a big public meeting with their councilperson. Others might organize a prayer vigil outside the councilperson’s office or a meeting with small-business people who support the campaign. Now the discussion in the team has gone from figuring out how to plan a good meeting to how to deliver a yes vote (or neutralize an opponent). This shift might seem subtle, but for a team to have agency, it has to own the strategy. A plan informed by people closest to the problem is likely to be better. And collectively wrestling with how to win is how teams grow and gain confidence. By inspiring teams and then trusting them to figure things out, we help people find their purpose together.

Of course, group purpose can change. People bring different perspectives and interests to the table, and what matters most to them shifts over time. When our parent organization was fighting to protect the autism program in our school district, we started with a very clear goal to stop $171,000 in cuts in the final school district budget. However, once we began to negotiate with the school board, parents on our team reacted differently to offers of a compromise. We hadn’t done enough work to talk through together what success would look like. This became even clearer when a parent whose school did not have an autism program, but needed it, began to take leadership in the group. Were we fighting to protect one program or to make this effective approach available to all students in the school district? We had to take a step back to hammer out exactly what Concerned Parents of Arlington Students with Autism was trying to achieve—and how we would know if we were successful. That conversation ended up inspiring us because we realized that we had a larger purpose.

Clear goals owned by the whole team need to come with a sense of urgency. The best teams meet weekly, talk daily, and text and e-mail constantly. There is no magic recipe, and many successful teams meet less often. But as money floods our political system, we have to raise the bar on what we expect from one another. When I was organizing with parents in Philadelphia, we worked with a sister organization called Youth United for Change (still one of the most successful youth organizing groups in the United States) that organized students in the same high schools where we were organizing parents. The students met weekly, and that rhythm—combined with being inside the school—gave them energy and enabled them to organize circles around the parents, who met only every few weeks. Of course, many of us have complicated lives, between work and family commitments. But sometimes the events that happen every week, like clockwork, are easier to build into our lives. Even if meetings are short, the more regularly we meet, the more intense heat we can generate.

During the financial crisis, a group of people from Contra Costa County, California (one of the areas of the United States hardest hit by mass foreclosures), cornered Adam Kruggel, a talented organizer with whom they were working. They pressed him to help them charter a bus to drive across the country, to Washington, DC, to raise awareness about the need to keep families in their homes. The result was the Recovery Express, which carried families facing foreclosure from California to Capitol Hill. They stopped for rallies in eight cities, spending two weeks on the road telling their stories and learning together. Their message reached millions of Americans through national media coverage. Their commitment—like the dedication shown by those who fasted for weeks to support immigration reform in 2013 or the Ferguson activists, who marched all night long for Michael Brown—show the kind of change that small groups of people can bring about if they share a consuming purpose. We need to try to match this intensity in all the teams we’re building if we expect to keep pace with the forces we’re up against.

Clear Roles

Having a shared purpose and a sense of urgency doesn’t mean that we all have to do the same work. The third key to successful groups is that they differentiate roles, based on talents and interests. And they’re rigorous about making sure that people are in the right roles. This is also an area where we can learn from the 2008 Obama campaign. The core unit of the campaign’s field program was the Neighborhood Team. Each team (sometimes referred to as a Snowflake) had a Neighborhood Team leader—a volunteer who was responsible for coordinating the activities of the group. Paid field organizers would typically be responsible for coaching the volunteer team leaders from three to five Neighborhood Teams. Each member of the Neighborhood Team had a specific role (e.g., phone bank captain or canvas captain) with defined goals (e.g., talking to X number of voters). The key was that everyone had both a role and clear goals and there were straightforward measures to figure out if the role was right for that person. This commitment to roles and goals led volunteers to take their responsibilities seriously and allowed people to rely on one another. Ultimately, it made it possible to coordinate the work of 2.2 million volunteers, through ten thousand teams, led by thirty thousand leaders.¹⁸

When I was first taught organizing, I was warned to beware that some people would take positions of authority because they spoke well or had dominant personalities—but end up not doing the work. To avoid this pitfall, I was told to build organizations based on “relational” rather than “positional” power. Under this thinking, the people who lead should be the ones who’ve demonstrated the willingness to do the work. This often meant putting off the question of who would fill which roles, such as chairperson or team captain. Instead, people would take on specific tasks. Besides being crucial for each person’s own development, this gave everyone a sense of who was really willing to work. But people’s roles on the team were undifferentiated—each person’s role was to show up for meetings when possible.

One downside of this approach was that the organizer (the paid staff person who initially built relationships with people and brought them together) would often remain at the center of the team rather than fading back. In the absence of elected leaders, and without people having clear roles, the organizer became the de facto chairperson. The organizer might be doing important work in helping create trust on the team and keeping work moving ahead. But this came at the expense of leaders owning their team and driving its work forward. At worst, people would wait for the organizer to give them their assignments or tell them the date of the next meeting. When organizers were honest, they’d admit that they continued to attend the meetings of their strongest teams because that was where the action was, not because they needed to be there. And when organizers spent time with existing teams, they had less time to build new ones.

The team-role-goal approach is an important corrective that brings organizers and grassroots volunteer leaders back to their original mission of developing people’s leadership skills. The job of the person setting up a team, whether a paid organizer or volunteer leader, is not to chair the team or even to attend most meetings. It’s to have a coaching relationship with the team’s coordinator or chairperson. The role of the person leading the team is to make sure that all members have the right role and are clear about what goals they’re trying to achieve and how they fit into the team’s larger purpose. This isn’t always easy. It takes figuring out what people are good at, making big asks of people, and regularly assessing whether people are delivering in the role they’ve taken on.

Trusting teams to get the work done requires investing in more systematic training and development for people who take on roles. Organizations that have shifted to this approach have been able to build more teams and organize more people. But to do this, they’ve had to change how their organizers spend their time (more coaching, challenging, and training of team leads; less hands-on facilitating of meetings). They’ve blurred the line between paid organizers and volunteer leaders—making it everyone’s business to wake people up and organize them into teams. And they’ve created more structured and predictable training programs so people don’t have to wait for a paid organizer to tell them what comes next. Faith in New York—a grassroots organizing group in New York City—has held ten-week leadership schools in each borough in the city. During the two and a half months that people are “in school,” they’re expected to build teams at their congregations. Some teams may crash and burn. Some people may take on roles that aren’t a good fit and then not let go. Other teams won’t have enough internal trust for people to hold each other accountable. But not all teams need to succeed if we have enough of them to build a movement.

A Learning Culture

Teams bond through action. But to grow and thrive, they also need to set aside time to learn together and reflect on what they’re doing. Teams need to be places where people feel that their development matters as much as any other task. Creating a learning culture is the fourth key to setting up teams for success. What made the antislavery movement societies and populist cooperatives powerful was that they created conditions for people to develop an independent analysis of what was happening in the world and what it would take to bring about change. Engaging successfully in social change requires stripping away myths we’re taught about how society and politics work. Small groups are an ideal place for this kind of learning because they give people a chance to test out new ideas and try on new roles.

Teams need to be places where people feel that their development matters as much as any other task.

You can foster a learning culture on a team by getting people to regularly reflect on powerful experiences, including what’s happened to them in the past and what they’ve done together as a team. People learn best from experiences that bring forth strong emotions. We remember what we feel. Through our hearts, we rethink our values, connect the dots between stories that seem unrelated, see our lives in a new light, and reimagine what’s possible. This is especially true for adults, whose minds are already wired by everything they’ve gone through. Without setting aside time for intentional reflection, people can engage in a lot of activity without learning much or keep powerful experiences buried. As with building trust, promoting an orientation to learning and personal development on teams can be done by engaging in regular practices of reflection—for example, by asking each person to share how he or she felt after significant activities undertaken by the group. These practices set an expectation that participation will lead people to greater wisdom.

If your team is anchored in an institution—like a school or religious congregation—dedicated to people’s spiritual and emotional development, you may have a head start in creating a learning culture. People may arrive primed to expect that their personal growth is valued. If you don’t have an organizational culture to draw on, the risk is higher that a small group will fall into a string of unprocessed tasks and activities. You can correct for this by being more rigorous about setting group norms upfront and by incorporating reflection into the life of the team. You have to take the time to intentionally create the team’s culture—for example, by starting every meeting with a discussion of a reading and how it relates to people’s lives or by asking people to share the norms they want the group to abide by. The less well people know one another, the more untethered a group is from a larger structure, or the greater the crisis, the more structured activity you should build into the agenda. Practices that ask people to go around a circle responding to a question may seem awkward at first, but they signal that everyone’s voice matters and that the work is both about making changes in the world and about developing the skills and thinking of the participants.

One popular framework that teams can use to structure reflection comes from Catholic social teaching in Latin America. It has four steps—see, judge, act, and revise—that can serve as the agenda for a single meeting or the elements of a cycle of work unfolding over months.

See refers to people talking about the pain and pressure they experience in their lives. The goal is to develop a shared understanding of the social reality that the group is trying to change. This is the principle of beginning with people’s lived experience and emotion, rather than running directly into issues and tasks. This step can be as simple as asking people what pressures they are facing or problems in their lives they are trying to solve. These are also good questions that a team can use when it’s building a larger base in the community, which is discussed in the next chapter.

The next step, judge, is not about judging people but about comparing the current reality to our values. This step can involve reading a text or watching a video and then talking about the gap between the world as it is and as it should be and about who is benefiting from the gap. It’s meant to build the group’s social and political analysis so people understand clearly the forces they’re up against and the significance of their work.

Act means taking action to bring about concrete changes in people’s lives. Teams aren’t just study groups. A group’s energy and growth come from acting together (such as meeting with a mayor or bank president to talk about evictions, holding a vigil at an immigration detention center, or walking fast-food workers back to their jobs after a strike). The action a group takes can involve both reaching out to other people (chapter 6) and directly engaging the powers that be (chapter 7). This external work is the oxygen that keeps groups healthy. It’s especially powerful when the team designs and leads action directly, rather than just participating in events organized by others. Acting together not only builds trust but also gives people shared experiences to reflect on.

Revise is the point at which people reflect on what was learned from acting together. Reflection and evaluation go hand in hand and are both essential, but they’re slightly different activities that shouldn’t be confused. Good debriefs begin with reflection, which is about how people feel. This is the emotional stuff people need to say and hear from others. It cannot be argued with: I feel what I feel. Next comes evaluation, which is about comparing what the group set out to do with what was accomplished: what worked, where people fell short, and what lessons were learned. A sign of good organizing is that people know instinctively to circle up after whatever they did together, rather than dribble off—which is the usual tendency—and that before rushing into what mistakes were made, everyone has a chance to say how he or she felt about the experience.

The see-judge-act-revise process is one of many that teams can use to develop their members into leaders. Regardless of what processes and activities you choose, the starting place for creating a culture of learning is to convey to people that they are ends, not means—that their experiences, emotions, learning, and growth matter to the group’s success. And then set aside enough time to stop and think, to hash out all the different ways in which people make sense of the world, to learn together. The payoff for an organizing team comes when it turns its collective experiences fighting for justice into powerful new stories that can be recounted over and over and that provide people with confidence and clarity to take on bigger fights.

Ultimately, for small, self-directed teams to thrive and serve as the fuel cells for social movements, they need to be connected to one another and supported by larger systems and structures. People on teams need training and coaching to carry out their roles successfully. They need ways to communicate with one another and coordinate their work to achieve bigger goals. Without support and coordination, teams can float off, wither, or simply become tools for getting people to do things. If we’re serious about acting through many distributed teams, we need to make their health and well-being a primary focus of our organizations. The American Antislavery Society and the populists grew so large because they had agents, lecturers, and organizers who traveled around the country knitting face-to-face groups into a larger movement. A similar dynamic energized the Brazilian Base Communities discussed in the next section.

Pulling the Pieces Together into a Movement

Sometimes, we might feel like we have to choose between small groups that are inwardly focused on the needs of their members and groups that are externally focused on changing the world. But this doesn’t need to be an either/or choice. Teams can combine the burning purpose of an antislavery society with the commitment to mutual support and growth that is a hallmark of small-group ministries at churches like Saddleback. And by integrating personal and social transformation, small groups can be more attractive to people and easier to spread.

One example of the contagiousness of groups that nourish souls while acting politically comes from Brazil. In the early 1960s, Catholic priests and nuns in Brazil began to experiment with small informal groups that brought together laypeople—mostly in poor rural and urban areas—to read the Bible and reflect on its relevance to their lives. The groups typically had fifteen to twenty-five people. Many used the see-judge-act-revise process discussed in the previous section. They would gather weekly for meetings that included prayer, discussion of the political and social dimensions of Christian faith, and sharing of concrete problems faced by members. Often these discussions would lead the group to take action together to resolve a community issue or join larger organizing efforts in their area. Group members saw this participation in the community as “every bit as religious as prayer.”¹⁹

Over time, these groups came to be known as Basic Ecclesial Communities, or Base Communities. People in countries across Latin America were forming Base Communities during the 1960s and ’70s, but the Brazilian Catholic Church was unique in the degree to which church leadership embraced this new model of religious action as a primary strategy for growing their institution. While each Base Community was selfgoverning and led by its members, “pastoral agents” (mostly priests and nuns) would visit on a regular basis. Catholic dioceses developed materials and brought members of Base Communities together for larger regional, and ultimately national, gatherings. Brazil’s most prominent theologians wrote extensively about Base Communities.²⁰ They viewed the ways in which the groups linked popular prayer and social action as God’s will at work in the world.

The priests and nuns who first experimented with Base Communities were deeply influenced by liberation theology. They viewed the poor and their struggle for justice as being at the center of history and Christianity. Like Pope Francis today, they made personal encounters with people in poverty a cornerstone of their ministries. Hundreds of men and women—both clergy and laypeople—moved into rural and urban areas to work with people who were most excluded from the Brazilian economy and society. They created organizing structures—small groups grounded in faith, engaged in the world, led by laypeople. These groups spread because they met people’s spiritual hunger and material needs and gave them tools to be agents in transforming their communities and, ultimately, Brazilian society. By the 1980s, there were an estimated one hundred thousand Base Communities in Brazil alone, with approximately two million members.²¹

While the leaders of the Brazilian Catholic Church did not create the Base Community strategy, they embraced the structure and ethic. This institutional support helped the groups grow in the poorest areas of the country. The relationship was symbiotic. Support from the bishops fueled the growth of the Base Communities, making them one of the most dynamic social forces in Brazilian society. At the same time, the Base Communities reinvigorated Catholicism in Brazil. They brought people back to the church. They also gave church leaders a clearer focus on the structural causes of poverty and inequality—at a time when many Catholic churches in Latin America and globally were moving in a more conservative direction.

The rapid growth of Base Communities in Brazil coincided with a brutal military dictatorship, which ruled the country for two decades, from 1964 to 1985. With training and support from the United States and Great Britain, the Brazilian military wiped out peasant and urban social organizations, as well as left-wing political groups. The regime killed and disappeared hundreds of people and tortured more than thirty thousand. Its economic policies halted land reform and undermined labor organizing. The dictatorship made life immensely more difficult for the rural and urban poor.

Base Communities were one of the few spaces in Brazilian society where people could resist the generals and the economic interests that stood behind them. Some historians say that by repressing social action, the military dictatorship unintentionally increased the focus of Base Communities on the political education of their members. At the same time, the Catholic Church was one of the only institutions with enough independent power to stand up to the generals. Ultimately, this made it possible for both the Base Communities and the bishops to play a critical role in the gradual process of ending military rule in the 1980s.

Once Brazil began its long transition to elected government, the Base Communities provided the foundation for Brazil’s most important political movements. This included the Workers’ Party and the Landless Workers Movement, as well as a host of other grassroots organizations. Many social movement leaders began their organizing lives as members of Base Communities. In many areas, Base Communities constituted a large part of the membership of nominally secular social justice organizations. And the democratic ethic and participatory practices of Base Communities shaped the culture of Brazilian social movements, making them some of the most dynamic and democratic in the world.

In 2003, the Workers’ Party went from being a broad-based social movement to being elected to lead Brazil. Over the next thirteen years, the party disappointed many in its base by adopting economic policies that were viewed as too pro-business. It doubled down on oil and gas extraction. And then it became ensnared in a series of corruption scandals. At the same time, the party led one of the world’s most successful efforts to reduce poverty and economic inequality. The Workers’ Party implemented a conditional cash transfer program, called Bolsa Familia, which provides money to families that meet certain conditions, such as school attendance for children. As a result of this and other government initiatives, the poverty rate in Brazil fell from 22 percent in 2003—when the Workers’ Party was elected to lead the country—to 7 percent in 2011. This moved thirty-five million Brazilians into the working class and made the country a global model for efforts to eliminate poverty. Tina Rosenberg described Bolsa Familia as “likely the most important government anti-poverty program the world has ever seen.”²²

The relationship between the Catholic Church, Base Communities, social movements, and the Workers’ Party is a long and complex story that merits its own book. For our purposes though, the history of the Brazilian Base Communities provides a window into how teams that nurture spiritual and social development can become mass movements able to transform the lives of millions of people, religious institutions, and society. They show that it’s possible to take the nurturing elements of small-group ministries and fuse them with a passion to change structures that perpetuate racism and poverty. That spirit makes it possible for people who’ve been excluded from decision making to build big enough constituencies to negotiate their interests—the focus of the next chapter on base building.