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Organizing Strategy and Practice

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Best of The Forge: 2020

"Be as big as the moment"

James Burch of the Anti Police-Terror Project talks about organizing during the uprisings and the “need to be bold and principled” in this moment

Keirten Nivol Zaina Alsous Danni Adams

“It’s a crime to be poor”

Organizers from the Dream Defenders on why we must defund the police and abolish prisons if we want to dismantle racial capitalism.

Photo by Larry Farr

Money, Power, Respect

Money making money is a third pillar of racial capitalism. In this audio article, we talk about the racialized financial systems that have given us “socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for the poor."

Photo by BP Miller

Dave Kamper

We Don't Know What We're Doing

Two new books on how to strengthen the labor movement end up showing something very different — that we don’t know why or how unions succeed or fail, and we don’t have any clear sense of how to do better.

Richard Healey Sandra Hinson

Bringing Back Ideology

Two of the architects of the narrative turn in organizing talk about the changes in community organizing that they’ve helped to spark over the past thirty years. Now that organizers have embraced narrative work and begun analyzing political and economic systems, they argue, it’s time to talk about ideology.

Ricardo Levins Morales

Charles Khan

Organizing During the Apocalypse

Through all of the darkness that this year has brought, we are closer than ever to achieving justice.

Courtesy of Charles Khan

Madeline Talbott

The Origins of Fight for 15 in Chicago

This is the story of the workers and organizers in Chicago — most of them women — whose efforts to build an organization of downtown workers helped to spark the national and global Fight for 15 movement.

Marco A. Fernandez

Progressives Should Be Targeting Rural America

Elections can be won at the margins; progressive movements and campaigns would do well to invest in rural America.

Deepak Pateriya

Winning an election is good. Building the power to run the place is better.

We won, but we still have a lot of work to do to build the breadth and depth of electoral power our movements need to durably govern.

Read the issue

Latest Stories

Cris Doby

An Invitation to Organize

A review of Arnie Graf’s Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing

Arnie Graf

A Divide on the Commons

An excerpt from Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing

Michael Michaelson

Hiring Great Organizers

Who we hire matters. When we take big, strategic bets on new organizers, we don’t just expand our talent pool; we decide who has a voice in the political process and who doesn’t.

Erin Kanzig Alex Riccio

Is There a Path to Power in Higher Ed?

Forming “one big union” is the way to meet the challenges posed by the neoliberal university.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

What the Teacher Strikes Taught Us — And What We Still...

Mass teacher strikes took the nation by surprise in 2018 and 2019. What can we learn from the teacher strikes for the future of public schools and the labor movement in the post-pandemic world?

Brooke Anderson

Claire Haas

Lessons from Organizing Slowly with Siblings of People...

I’m learning that when I take up space — authentically bringing all of who I am to my organizing work — something else is possible. I’m not concealing my own power.

Nathan Susman

Let’s Make the Township and Ward Organizations More...

The Democratic Party must abandon the transactional model of organizing and create relationships that last beyond one campaign. That work should start at the township and ward level.

Jay Carmona

Ask A Digital Organizer | How do I engage new members?

Trying to up your digital game during COVID? Our columnists are here to help with all your digital dilemmas.

Emiliano Bar

Ben Chin

Hot Off the Press | White Feminism Promotes Mass Incarceration

A review of Aya Graber’s The Feminist War on Crime

Ben Chin

Inside the Organizers Corner | What is Power?

Ben Chin talks with Nelini Stamp, James Haslam, Arleen Vargas, and Kendall Mackey about how their understanding of power has changed since they started organizing and what shifted their perspective.

Ben Chin

Inside the Organizers Corner | Keeping Bottom-Up Democracy Strong

Ben Chin talks with Nelini Stamp, James Haslam, Arleen Vargas, and Kendall Mackey about how they're keeping bottom-up democracy strong as their organizations grow in size and power.

Ben Chin

Inside the Organizers Corner | The Ups and Downs of New Voices in the Movement

Ben Chin talks with Nelini Stamp, James Haslam, Arleen Vargas, and Kendall Mackey about the influx of white, upwardly-mobile activists in the movement during the Trump years.

Photo by Gabriel Benois

Alan Rosenblatt Craig Johnson

Organizing in the Age of Coronavirus | In the Time of COVID, Digital Organizing is a Must

Digital and social media are not new to campaigns, but in the time of COVID, they are more important than ever.

David Duhalde

Winning Primaries: Coalition, Confrontation, or Both?

A recent essay lays out a framework for assessing two leftist strategies: coalition and confrontation. The liberal-left Winning Primaries alliance shows that this is an unnecessary choice — confrontation is necessary to win and coalition is necessary to effectively govern.

Photo courtesy of the author

Dennis M. Hogan

Building Electoral Power in the Rhode Island Primaries

Even a young organization can quickly become a meaningful political player if it chooses its fights wisely.

Photo by Max Bender

Jeff Ordower

For Those of Us With Privilege: It's Time to Use...

Dismantling the old and building the new requires courage and determination. But if we all put it on the line, we can break through to the world in which we want to live.

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