Hopeful Stories of Communities Organizing
The question is how to organize isolated people
Local organizing is key to national change. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott and three peers called for a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls in the winter of 1848, more than 200 women rallied. Delegates came, not as isolated individuals, but as representatives of a web of local movements—temperance groups, abolitionists and moral reformers.
The Seneca Falls Convention lit the spark that grew into the suffrage movement made up of hundreds of thousands of women, organizing for more than a decade. They eventually secured the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and made history by guaranteeing all women the right to vote.
This moment reminds us of a truth too often forgotten: the victories that have defined this country—women's suffrage, civil rights, labor protections—weren't handed down from Washington. They were won by ordinary people who knew how to organize their communities. This is the organizing model we must revive today, not just for securing policy wins, but for restoring the practice of democracy and our role as citizens.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. framed this challenge: "Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that the government cannot elude our demands. We must develop from strength a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent to collaborate with us. It would be the height of naïveté to wait passively until the administration had somehow been infused with such blessings of goodwill that it implored us for our programs. The first course is grounded in mature realism. The other is childish fantasy."
The good news is that, despite deep partisan divides, many Americans across the political spectrum agree on the core issues: rising inequality, disappearing jobs and the power of Wall Street. This shared frustration demonstrates a massive potential for organizing. Evidence for the truth behind this statement can be seen in the record-breaking crowds that Bernie Sanders and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez have drawn to their "Fighting the Oligarchy" tour across liberal and conservative states.
Given the shared anger, the choice to re-elect a billionaire who cuts taxes for the rich and guts services for everyone else makes one observation crystal clear: there is confusion about who and which policies are culpable for the decline in many Americans' quality of life in recent decades. As Washington Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal says: "Trans kids didn't hike your rent. Billionaires did. Immigrants didn't make your groceries more expensive. Billionaires did. Federal workers didn't take away your healthcare. Billionaires did."
Given the widespread misdirected anger and confusion, the vital question is: how do we organize all the isolated individuals whose outrage stems from common issues to be a force that ensures those in power are held accountable to work for the public good, not their private interests.
In the words of the late labor leader Jane McAlevey: "To win big, we have to follow the methods of spending very little time engaging with people who already agree and devote most of our time to the harder work of helping people who do not agree come to understand who is really to blame for the pain in their lives."
This is the key to effective organizing.
In sum, if we want to have a fighting chance at reviving our democracy, we must once again organize a broad base of people to work together in units of power.
Cameron Conner – Columnist
