6

Base

Recruiting a Following You Need to Lead

The purpose of social justice teams in larger movements for change is to build a large base of people powerful and unified enough to negotiate their own freedom and well-being. Beware of the team that becomes a clique or a social club or takes whoever shows up and hopes things will work out. We don’t win because we’re right. As I’ve said throughout this book, we are up against powerful people who are usually very clear about their interests. They will give up only as much opportunity, resources, and influence as they must. And they will work every day to increase their profits and power. We get only as much justice as we can negotiate. That requires going into negotiation with leverage, which is what building a base makes possible.

If we want a company to change its environmental practices, we need a large enough base of consumers willing to participate in a boycott. If we want our employer to raise wages and benefits, we need a large enough group of workers willing to withdraw their labor by going out on strike. If we want an elected official to do the right thing, we need voters willing to throw the official out of office if he or she refuses. Our leverage comes from having enough of us willing to use our bodies, votes, and dollars to consistently disrupt injustice and discrimination. The strength of our base is what brings the powers that be to the table. Everything else is wishful thinking.

Like the first three conversations about purpose, story, and team, base building is a way of thinking about change that shifts how we act and build organizations. People will ask, “Why do we need to talk to so many people when we already know the problems?” I heard this a lot when I was organizing in Flint, Michigan, which had no shortage of problems. Going out and meeting hundreds of people on their terms to hear their stories and concerns may seem like slow work, especially when you already have a pretty good sense of what people are angry about. But listening helps us find and enroll organic leaders, people who may not be big talkers but whom others look to for guidance. Many people will tell us no when we invite them to come to a meeting. Some will say maybe but mean no. A few will say yes, but even some of those will also flake out. The true yesses are the people who believe in miracles before they happen, are willing to work (not just talk!), and are respected enough to move other people.

Once people do come together, molding individuals with different identities, ideas, and hesitations into a constituency happens in fits and starts. It’s a process full of doubt. When will things ever take off? Why so often two steps forward, one step back? Yet we put everything we’re fighting for at risk if we skip this careful work of organizing people into a base prepared to act together against opposition, especially if we are building multiracial organizations and movements, without which we face a bleak future. Seeing a group of people stand up and walk together toward freedom is glorious—even if it doesn’t happen on schedule.

This chapter has four parts. The first section explains what a base is and why it creates the leverage necessary to negotiate change. The second describes three beliefs that make base building possible. The third shares practices that you can use to build a base. The fourth focuses on how to work with a group of people to clarify their vision and goals so that they can act together with purpose.

Base Building as a Path to Freedom

A classic example of base building is the story of Exodus. When God asks Moses to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt to freedom, Moses denies God’s request four times. More than whether Pharaoh will listen (or have him killed!), Moses is afraid his own the people will reject him. He asks God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt?” (Exodus 3:11). Moses worries that the people will not believe that he was sent by God, that they will not listen to him because he is not eloquent. God answers each objection that Moses raises, explaining how to organize the elders to win over their support; showing Moses how he could use what he already had in his hand to persuade Pharaoh; and telling Moses, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall speak” (Exodus 4:12). Yet still Moses begs God to send someone else.

Moses worries that the people will not believe that he was sent by God. Even after Moses relents, he keeps returning to God to complain about his base. The first crisis comes when Moses and Aaron ask Pharaoh to let the Israelites have three days off to pray in the desert. Not only does the king of Egypt dismiss their request; he tells the slaves that since they are making trouble, they will now have to work harder. The Egyptians will no longer give them straw to make the bricks. Moses is clearly on shaky terms with his constituency. The Israelites ignore him and go directly to Pharaoh to complain. Pharaoh taunts them: “You are idle, you are idle; that is why you say, ‘Let us go and sacrifice to the Lord.’ Go now, and work, No straw will be given you, but you must still deliver the same number of bricks” (Exodus 5:17–18). The Israelite leaders blame Moses for their plight, saying to him, “You have made us stink in the sight of Pharaoh and his servants, and have put a sword in their hands to kill us” (Exodus 5:21). Moses keeps the cycle of blame going, scolding God, “O Lord, why have you done evil to this people? Why did you ever send me?” (Exodus 5:22).

In his book I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle, Charles Payne tells a similar story about the fight for voting rights in the most violent and segregated counties in the Deep South. He describes a moment in Greenville, Mississippi, when the local power structure made a strategic “miscalculation” that boosted the movement to organize the town. Young organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had done months of slow base building through one-on-one conversations, house meetings, and door-to-door canvassing. Their work was met with beatings and shootings. Most Black people in Greenville were still watching from the sidelines. But some were beginning to quietly provide financial and material support. An increasing number were going to the courthouse to try to register to vote. The county board of supervisors began to see a movement afoot. So they retaliated by “halt[ing] most distribution of surplus commodities from the federal government [which for] 27,000 people in the county, most of them Black . . . were the main source of sustenance during the winter months.”¹

This collective punishment was akin to Pharaoh’s forcing the slaves to make bricks without straw or the violence meted out against Black Memphis in response to the sanitation strike. It made some people wish that the waters had not been troubled. But on the whole, it helped fuse the community together. As Charles Payne says, “It put some people in a position where they no longer had anything to lose by trying to register. It made plain a point [that civil rights] workers always want to put across, that there was a connection between exclusion from the political process and poverty.”² Many people from Greenville and allies around the country rallied to create a community food distribution program through the churches. This brought to the fore people who hadn’t attended citizenship schools or tried to register, who might not have seen themselves as political. And it began to touch thousands of people directly in their day-to-day lives. Bob Moses, the architect of the Mississippi push, described how “people were standing in line in front of the church waiting for food while their plantation owner was riding by . . . telling them to go back to the plantations . . . and they [the plantation workers] were telling them that they were going to stand there and get their food because their children were hungry.”³

SNCC’s first effort to organize Mississippi in the small city of McComb had failed when the Black community reached a point where they could not take any more of the violent reaction from the White power structure. Community leaders asked the organizers to leave. But in Greenville—as in the story of Exodus—the organizers and the community made it over the bridge. The oppression they faced strengthened them, rather than crushed them. Ultimately, they succeeded in making Greenville an “organized town.” That meant that local leaders had built enough of an organized base to continue to fight and win organizing battles long after SNCC had left and the national fervor around the civil rights movement faded. This is akin to what Jane McAlevey describes in her book No Short Cuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age as the muscle that unionized workers develop through repeated strikes showing employers that they have no choice but to negotiate with their employees.⁴

A paradox of Exodus is that if God had decided to liberate the Hebrew people from slavery, why not free them directly? Why choose to work through Moses and an extended confrontation with Pharaoh? What are the lessons of the story not only about the ethics of slavery but about how change takes place and the role that faith plays? First, faith is not always (re)built overnight—it comes from lived experience—from directly seeing justice happen in the world. Second, people need to become ready for their own liberation. They need to build the fortitude to take the risks needed to break free from oppression. And third, liberation is a collective experience that happens in the context of confrontation. Freedom cannot be granted; it must be taken—together.

And just as the base is being tested, so are the leaders. The self-doubt that Moses feels is no different from what anyone faces who is building a constituency for change under uncertain conditions. At times, God tells Moses to stop overthinking things and just lead. Other times, God says to share power with others. God tells Moses to gather seventy elders and says, “I will take some of the Spirit that is on you and put it on them, and they shall bear the burden of the people with you, so that you may not bear it yourself alone” (Numbers 11:17). This is good organizing advice, but the extended and conflict-filled relationship between Moses and God makes it clear that Moses is struggling with something deeper than organizing mechanics. He cannot build a constituency that he can lead to freedom until he figures out whether he believes in himself and in others.

Three Beliefs That Make Base Building Possible

Before we can get to the practical steps of building a base, we need to bring an understanding about people and power to the table. The first belief that we need to have—or act like we have, despite our doubts—is that enough willing people are out there, waiting to be invited into a movement for freedom and justice. Charles Payne says of Fannie Lou Hamer, who became one of the most important figures in the civil rights movement, that “[l]ike so many of the others, it wasn’t so much that she was found by the movement as that she had been searching for it.”⁵ Hamer had been a sharecropper for years and was working as the timekeeper on a plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, when she heard from her pastor and a friend about a voting rights meeting. She’d already been involved in the NAACP and other political activities. After she attended the mass meeting organized by SNCC, she attempted to register to vote. Her boss told her that she had to either withdraw her application or lose her job at the plantation. She decided that standing up for her right to vote was worth losing her job. She left the plantation and hid for a while. She went on to teach citizenship classes and become a field secretary with SNCC. Later, as the vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, she spoke at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, leading the effort to break the back of formal racial segregation in American politics.

All evidence shows that if you have enough conversations with enough people, knock on enough doors, make enough phone calls, ask enough people for referrals, and open enough doors for people to walk through, you’ll find enough people willing to get involved and speak out. You’ll build a base of people who will go on to build their own bases. The question, like the one Moses wrestled with, is whether you have the courage to face the rejection, ill humor, and sometimes violence that come along the way.

The second belief that we need is that people are brilliant. They have the skills and talent to build organizations and lead change. People are the precious resources out of which social movements are built. Charles Payne argues that much of the lasting social and political impact of the civil rights movement flowed from Ella Baker and Septima Clark, who taught the importance of leadership development and organizing “spade work” over flashy events. Baker mentored and challenged at one point or another all the best-known civil rights icons, including Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Moses. Clark founded and spread citizenship schools that taught political and organizing skills to thousands of African American working people. Payne writes about the two women: “Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.”⁶

When I was organizing with parents at public schools in Philadelphia, a woman named Dolores Shaw started to show up at parent meetings at an elementary school that had a student population that was about 40 percent African American and 60 percent Latino. At the beginning, most of the other parents saw Dolores as disruptive. She would egg people on about how Latino kids needed to stop speaking Spanish and learn English. Other parents pushed back on Dolores. But she kept coming to meetings. Over time, she built relationships with Latino parents. People came to rely on her fierceness and self-confidence, the traits that initially drove everyone crazy. At one point, the group demanded that the school hire more teachers who spoke Spanish. Dolores surprised everyone by speaking out in support of the proposal at a public meeting, more strongly than anyone else in the room. By that point, relationships had shifted her understanding of the world and her place in it.

Dolores ended up playing an important role in a series of high-profile campaigns in Philadelphia, including cochairing the negotiating team that reached an agreement with First Union Bank to keep open eleven inner-city bank branches, and make hundreds of millions of dollars in loans available in her and other neighborhoods, as part of the largest bank merger in Philadelphia history. I remember being in her kitchen as she cooked dinner for her family while she was also talking on the phone to a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter. When the call was over, she looked at me and said, “Who in the world would have imagined that a news reporter would be calling me up about my opinion about anything?” The truth is that the call made perfect sense. If you strip away the prejudices that conflate where people live, their formal education, and their race with civic virtue and a right to be heard—which is what organizing does—you get Dolores Shaw and Fannie Lou Hamer. And that makes a movement possible—but only if we believe in each other.

The third belief that makes the difference is that our power in the world to create a good life for ourselves and for those we love flows from the relationships we have with other people. What gives us power is having a constituency. Without a base, we have no choice but to rely on good intentions and on systems being fair, neither of which we can count on in times of crisis. Some people appear to be leaders but are not accountable to the people on whose behalf they say they speak. Those are phantom leaders whose power turns on the fickleness of the media and other elites. The ticket to true leadership and power in a world on fire is a following, which is what a base comes down to. Here’s how to build one.

Without a base, we have no choice but to rely on good intentions and on systems being fair.

How to Build a Base Powerful Enough to Negotiate Change

Once we embrace base building as necessary for social change, some useful practices can help us organize a large constituency. These practices boil down to careful analysis of our own networks and resources combined with a willingness to go out and patiently listen to and build relationships with lots of people.

Mapping Power Relationships

The first work is to find people who can help us map power relationships. We need to do careful work to understand the power of the people who run the place. But we also need to map out the power of our constituency so that we maximize its influence. One of the most interesting parts of the story that Charles Payne tells in I’ve Got the Light of Freedom is the relationship between Robert Moses and Amzie Moore. Moses was the visionary leader of SNCC. He came south from Harlem with a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard. Moore was the president of the Cleveland, Mississippi, NAACP and a longtime civic leader in the state. Moore grew up on a plantation and had lost his mother at a young age. In the 1930s, Moore was involved in the Black and Tan Party, an organization of Black Republicans. Like many other African American men of the time, he’d come back from WWII motivated both to build a more prosperous life for his family and to take on segregation. Moore knew everyone. “Moore gave Moses an oral history of the state and a political map, analyzing and laying out the whole cast of characters across the state, bringing [him] in on who were the players, how to work with them, what to expect from this one, what this one’s orientation was.”⁷ Together they sketched out what would become the “Mississippi movement of the sixties.” Moses, Ella Baker, and other SNCC staff taught this same political curiosity to organizers before they began work in any town or county. SNCC was unique in hiring a staff from different backgrounds, but most of those who worked as organizers grew up in working-class families in the Deep South. Part of SNCC’s strength was its ability to surface young people who could organize their own towns, paid or unpaid, and build strong trust relationships with elders like Amzie Moore.

Given time and the right conversations, the social networks and power dynamics that shape life in a community can be made visible. Often the most powerful relationships are hidden, just as the best-networked people are usually the hardest to catch up with. But nothing is impossible with time and curiosity. To reorganize a community, we need to understand its economic base: who owns the capital and the land, who employs the labor and how that is changing. We need to “follow the money” to understand the economic interests that stand behind the politicians.

As we put a community under an x-ray, we’re looking for people with both formal and informal authority. Make a list of fifteen to twenty of the most powerful people in your environment (your community, city, or state). Be rigorous. Identify people who have influence over others—because of their formal positions as employers or government officials, through their control of money or institutions, or because people respect and trust them. We need to get close to people who run things—our mayors, councilpeople, and business owners. We don’t have to agree with people about everything, or even much at all, to create relationships with them. We give people in positions of authority too much power over us when we don’t hold them close enough to know their ins and outs. Your list should also include people who lead civic and religious institutions (visiting these people often gives us useful information and also communicates that what we are building is meant to be open and collaborative to existing organizations and institutions). But don’t stop there. Identify more informal leaders, those who don’t hold positions but whom people look to when they have problems or questions. Every town and city has young people like those who took to the streets in Ferguson and woke up the nation. They also need to be part of your power map.

Every town and city has young people like those who took to the streets in Ferguson and woke up the nation.

Start with People Closest to the Pain

As we map power relationships and begin to build a base, the most urgent listening we need to do is with people who are closest to the pain of injustice, who’ve been most pushed around. This includes people who are formerly incarcerated, undocumented, low-wage workers, public school parents, bus riders, and public-housing tenants. They’ve experienced the trauma of systems out of whack. They know how things work. In Faith in Action, we focus on the combustion that is possible when you bring people who have the most on the line together with religious institutions and people of faith, who can frame issues in moral terms (they’re often the same people).

For example, IndyCAN, a faith-based organization affiliated with Faith in Action in Indiana, partnered with the local chamber of commerce to win more than $1 billion in financing for an equitable public transit system for their region. As part of this campaign, grassroots leaders from IndyCAN went to bus stops to listen to the concerns of bus riders. They’d invite people they talked with to participate in organizing meetings, lobby days, and public events in support of mass transit. The combination of bus riders, business leaders, and the faith community successfully lobbied the Republican-controlled Indiana legislature and Governor Mike Pence to approve legislation to enable a regional ballot measure to raise taxes to fund a public transit system. Combining a base of people who are directly impacted by policy decisions with a moral message and influential institutions is a powerful recipe for changing unjust systems.

The Fight for $15 is another example of a breakthrough in organizing people who have been most marginalized by society. Contrary to the stereotypes of kids working part-time jobs, fast-food workers are often parents working multiple jobs to sustain their families. They not only receive low wages but also face dangerous working conditions and unpredictable hours. There has been a long history of neighborhood organizers finding low-wage workers who could tell their stories in support of city and state campaigns to raise the minimum wage. But the organizers whose work led to the Fight for $15 wanted to go beyond recruiting spokespeople and build an active base of workers. With support from Service Employees International Union (SEIU), organizers in New York City began to experiment with new strategies for reaching out to fast-food workers directly at their workplaces. They developed “raps” (short scripts) that helped organizers go into restaurants and talk to workers about working conditions. Organizers used Facebook ads to create lists of workers who wanted to make changes in their workplaces. These techniques enabled the Fight for $15 to identify thousands of fast-food workers willing to walk off the job for better wages and a union.⁸

A Constituency Is Not Abstract

You need to be precise about the specific people you’re organizing into a constituency. SEIU’s membership base includes many low-wage workers, who’ve won better wages and benefits through collective bargaining. But low-wage workers are not really a constituency. It’s a label we give to people who do many different jobs in different places under different circumstances. In the 1980s, SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign organized women and men who clean large office buildings. SEIU organizers had to figure out what workers they were organizing, at what buildings, in what cities. The same is true for Fight for $15 (which needed to identify what restaurant chains in what cities) or any other successful organizing drive. Until we can make a list of the people we intend to organize and describe them specifically enough to find them in the flesh, we’re just organizing ideas, not people.

Until we can make a list of the people we intend to organize and describe them specifically enough to find them in the flesh, we’re just organizing ideas, not people.

The Power of Listening

The process of building a base is as simple as going out and talking to people about what they care about, what they want to see changed, what makes them angry. When W. W. Law returned home from fighting in WWII, he became a leader in the Savannah, Georgia, branch of the NAACP and found work as a postman. He told me that delivering mail accomplished two goals: it gave him a salary that didn’t depend on the local power structure, and it put him out on the streets talking to people every day. As Law walked the streets delivering the mail, he built a political base. Through thousands of conversations over many years, he developed a large and loyal constituency that was willing to follow him and the NAACP into battle. That base sustained sit-ins and weekly mass meetings. It showed the Savannah power structure that it was up against a unified community. Law’s ability to represent people whom he was in regular conversation with was his ticket to credible leadership and influence.

Base building works because we’re social beings. Over time, if you talk to enough people and then bring some of them together, you’ll shift the power dynamic in a community. Take ten people in a community who share common views but don’t know one another. Now bring them together to get to know one another. Research shows that they will each become more influential and persuasive in their community.⁹

Similarly, the main factor determining whether people vote is whether their friends, family members, coworkers, and neighbors are voting. People give many reasons for why they voted or not, but these are after-the-fact rationalizations. Research shows that what actually leads people to vote is social pressure from the people around them.¹⁰ This is one reason why door-to-door canvassing, especially by people from the same neighborhood, increases voter turnout.¹¹ If organizing and base building reach a high enough intensity, you can wake up any community. You can create a culture in which political participation is the expected norm.

Hard Asks

The primary skill that drives base building forward is the ability to make hard asks that challenge people to step up and take leadership. We don’t do people favors when we talk to them but fail to propose a compelling next step. Giving someone a thoughtful proposition is a gift. Asking is an art form. Propositions should be big enough to be somewhat surprising but not so big that they overwhelm. We’re aiming for small steps that are significant. Make the ask and then stop talking. Wait for the answer. Don’t step on your ask.

However, the most powerful propositions are not requests for someone to do a piece of work. They’re to become a new person. Turning yourself into a public person with the power to shape the world is not easy. Like the Hebrew slaves, we inevitably face harsh opposition that tells us to get back into our passive places in society. We’re dismissed as having nothing to offer. We’re just making trouble. It’s easy to conclude that the struggle to find our voices and our freedom isn’t worth the pain. If you’re working to build power—whether you’re a grassroots community leader working as a volunteer or a paid organizer—your job is to motivate people to keep moving forward despite the resistance they face.

Make Listening a Campaign

Unfortunately, listening and base building often take a backseat to seemingly more exciting organizing activities like protests and rallies. One way to counter that tendency is to treat the work of bringing new people to the table and developing their leadership skills as campaigns, with specific numeric goals, deadlines, a communications plan, and a distribution of roles.

The United Farm Workers used “house meetings” to build their movement. They propositioned people to invite their coworkers, friends, and neighbors to their homes for an hour or hour-and-a-half conversation. At a typical house meeting, the host starts by explaining his or her personal motivation and the goals of the organization that he or she is helping build. People are asked to share their stories and concerns. At the end, participants are propositioned to organize their own meetings. House meetings create a concrete test for hosts, whose leadership potential is demonstrated by their ability to gather people. The meetings surface ideas and potential new leaders. And the people who attend can decide to keep meeting and develop into an organizing team. Thousands of organizations have used house-meeting campaigns to build their memberships and find new leaders. House meetings were a major component of the 2008 Obama campaign’s process for recruiting volunteers and organizing neighborhood teams to contact voters.

Listening campaigns can be structured in other ways as well. “Listening Sabbaths” can bring people together after religious services to share their stories and concerns. When I was organizing in schools in Philadelphia, we learned that you could reach more parents through grade meetings—short listening sessions for parents from each grade. More parents would attend a grade meeting than a schoolwide meeting, presumably because the invitation for all third-grade parents is more personal and relevant. That’s an example of the power of small groups. “What matters is not that there was a general invitation that I heard about but that a specific person communicated to me that I was wanted at this gathering.” That’s the key to listening campaigns that reach thousands of people and begin to unlock the social networks within a community.

“ What matters is not that there was a general invitation that I heard about but that a specific person communicated to me that I was wanted at this gathering.”

Imagining a Nationwide Listening Process

In Spain, Podemos (Spanish for “we can”) is a populist political party that grew out of the country’s antiausterity social movement of indignados (“the outraged”). After the party was launched, it held a two-month public discussion process to debate its ethical, political, and organizational structure. More than one hundred thousand people participated. Podemos leaders were trying to build a political party accountable to an organized base of people, unlike any other party in Spain. They were influenced by Latin American indigenous movements, which made nationwide listening processes a key component of their political strategy.

The rapid growth of Podemos flowed from thousands of circulos (volunteer groups)—some organized at a neighborhood level, others among people in the same professions—that both debated party decisions and took direct action, such as stopping evictions. In 2014, the Podemos two-month listening campaign culminated in a national congress attended by eleven thousand people. The party membership debated key decisions in public in front of the country. Podemos has also used social networking tools to grow its base. It used crowdfunding to finance its operations and campaigns and two specific social networking tools (Agora Voting and Appgree) to solicit party member preferences on candidates and poll members on policy proposals. It also used Reddit to support discussion within and across circulos.¹² This listening and base building has not been easy to sustain over time, but it has helped lead to a shared vision and agenda that fused people together into a movement and has made Podemos the second largest political party in Spain.

Clarifying Vision and Goals

Because each of us is unique, getting people on the same page and moving forward together can be hard. For one thing, there is the “free-rider” problem, the tendency for some people to sit back and get the benefits of the larger group’s work without contributing themselves. Luckily, only a small fraction of any community, state, or country is needed to create a social revolution. Theda Skocpol defines organizations with membership density as those representing at least 1 percent of the target population.¹³ For example, Maine People’s Alliance has 32,000 dues-paying members from 170 towns and every county in the state.¹⁴ That’s about 2.5 percent of Maine’s population, which means that decision makers in the state need to take the alliance’s agenda seriously.

But even with a small slice of the population, it’s still hard to harmonize people’s needs and dreams and reach agreement on how to best advance change. Many of us come into organizations with a foggy understanding of how structures shape our lives and which people are profiting from the problems we see around us. Moving a group to clarity about what to do together, and how to do it, takes work and patience. Businesses know their bottom line. That helps them figure out pretty quickly whether they should work together collectively and what demands they should make. But groups of individuals have many different bottom lines that need to be negotiated together through what can feel like endless meetings.

The last thing we want is a base either without a live demand or with a live demand that has no clear strategy for victory.

Getting to a big shared demand and the political strategy to win is a key part of building and sustaining a base. The last thing we want is a base either without a live demand or with a live demand that has no clear strategy for victory. The other common tendency to avoid is that of fragmenting your base by splitting its efforts and focus across simultaneous campaigns. It’s better to spend enough time hashing out strategy and building solidarity so people can sequence demands, rather than breaking into committees and running off in several different directions at once.

The next chapter looks closely at political strategy and policy demands. At this point, I want to focus on how we align people around a vision and specific goals. Let’s say that we’ve listened to the concerns and ideas of fifteen hundred people through house meetings and other listening sessions. We’ve done research actions with public officials and other people who can help us think through the issues people have raised. We know the biggest pain points in the community and have identified some possible opportunities for action. We want to take everything we’ve heard and seen and use it to set priorities. We want an agenda and strategy that can unite people and begin to put us on a path toward structural changes.

The first set of questions to ask are about vision. If we release ourselves from constraints for a moment, what is our dream for how the world would look? Describe your promised land as concretely as possible. What would our city, state, or country look like if it reflected your values? How similar are our visions? Then let’s discuss our political analysis of the situation we’re in: What is our power? How prepared is our base to take action together? Will we hold together against resistance, or will we fold? Whom are we up against? What are their strengths and vulnerabilities? How hard do we think it will be to get them to negotiate? Who are allies who will stand with us? Who’s on the fence? This kind of shared analysis helps people begin to consolidate into a base. And it lays the groundwork for people making hard decisions about their priorities.

That leads to the next question: Given our vision and our analysis, what are some concrete goals that we could achieve together? Good organizing goals are strategic:¹⁵ they not only deliver real benefits to our base but also shift power in our direction or set us up for success in future struggles. The SNCC push on voting rights was strategic. It addressed one of the key contradictions keeping Blacks in poverty in the South—a lack of political power to compel investment in education and economic development in Black communities—while forcing the hand of the federal government to pass a national Voting Rights Act.

We also want our goals to be measurable. That way, we know if we succeeded or failed and can learn from the experience. A good way to make goals measurable is to ask people to describe what exactly would be different for themselves and people they know if we were successful. In other words, what does success look like? A lot of times when we talk about the changes we want to bring about, we refer to abstract or lofty ideas, such as our children would get a better education or immigrant families would not feel fear of deportation. These fit into the vision discussion. With measurable goals, we want to push into the realm of things that, if we came back from the future, we could legitimately say we won or lost. If it’s not possible to say “Yes we won that” or “No we fell short,” then we haven’t identified a useful measure of success. Say, for example, that the state you live in (Pennsylvania, in this case) is one of three without any standard education funding formula. Instead, politicians decide each year how much money goes to which school districts. Poor urban and rural school systems are underfunded, and the higher the Black enrollment, the worse the disparity. In this case, our measurable success goal could be a funding formula that eliminates the racial disparities immediately and puts us on a five-year path to equalize funding, with extra weights in the funding formula for students with disabilities, English as a second language, and other special needs.

If demands are too small, people lose interest and won’t see the necessary effort as worth it. If demands are too large or not chunked into pieces, people cannot reach the next step. In 2006, organizations in the PICO network decided to work together and with other organizations toward the goal of covering all children in the United States with health insurance. Some of our labor and community organizing allies felt that starting with children was “low-hanging fruit” that might take pressure off the urgency for broader health reform. But from a base-building perspective, we felt that state fights over expanding health coverage, and a national children’s health fight, were good steps toward creating a broader, people-led movement to guarantee health coverage for everyone. Ultimately, winning the campaign to expand children’s coverage was harder and took longer than people expected. But it helped build a bigger organized constituency for national health reform. That contributed to the successful push for passage of the Affordable Care Act, after more than one hundred years of failed attempts to provide near universal health coverage in the United States (a victory despite ongoing efforts to repeal and undermine the law).

Some measurable goals might take years to achieve. Still, the goals need to be very clear and well understood. And there needs to be a plausible strategy for winning, with steps along the way or else the goals are just words on paper. The key is that you can say with a straight face, “We’ll be back in six months or two years in this room. Let’s see if we can get to a point where we could all agree that this goal was met or not.” Of course, the greater the goals, the larger and stronger the base we need to win.

In our fight to protect my son’s autism program, one of the most difficult moments was when we realized that our base was too small to win. We’d engaged many of the parents who had children in the program, but that was too few people to influence the school board. So we made a decision to begin reaching out to other families without children in special education. For some of us, that meant talking to people for the first time about our children having autism. We weren’t sure what to expect. But hundreds of parents signed our petition, and many came out to board meetings to support us. That response kept us going. I was touched by some of the people I hadn’t expected to step forward. And also by those who shared their own stories of struggling with getting the needs of their children met in school. It was a good reminder to not think too small about your constituency. People saw our children as their children. They understood that a web of interdependence tied us together. We don’t always see it, yet what we can achieve in the world is tied to our ability to turn that web into a living, breathing movement of people able to confront and negotiate change with those in power.