Future Currents’ report Forging Through the Fire outlines the biggest challenges we are facing as a field, and more importantly, offers interventions, ideas for innovation and evolution, and experiments for us to pursue together.
This is the question that Future Current’s Strengthening Organizing Project asked ourselves and our organizing colleagues across the field two years ago as we set out to better understand how we could improve organizing tools and practices. Not just for the sake of better organizing as the end goal, but to better harness our organizing into power building — to, ultimately, build the just and joyful future we all deserve.
In particular, we seek to catalyze a strategic shift in organizing toward leveling up familiar practices and designing new approaches that will be more effective in our current and coming conditions. This includes change on the organizational level, field-wide interventions, and different types of support in philanthropy.
Forging Through the Fire: A Report with Recommendations from the Strengthening Organizing Project lays out the biggest challenges we currently face as an organizing field and offers interventions, ideas for innovation and evolution, and experiments for us to embark on together. This report is informed by hundreds of conversations with organizers and experts across the field, as well as insights from several hands-on convenings of strategists who honestly explored our shared strengths, exposed our collective shortcomings, and tackled what needs to change. It continues the path that we reported on in Fighting Shape: An Assessment of U.S. Organizing, which focused on diagnosing what ails our organizing practices. Overall, that work revealed that, as a field, we lack strategy that is equal to the conflagration before us, including an analysis of the conditions, an assessment of our combined power, and a plan to win. We are also missing some of the knowledge, skills, and attitude to devise and implement that strategy. In other words, we lack the leadership and seasoned organizers we need. Even if we want to get out of the loop, because we know it’s not working, we are socially and materially incentivized to keep running in place. As a result, organizational leaders, organizers, and volunteer members are being burned by the fire of our time instead of forged by it.
With those learnings, we are now looking at what we need to build and how we can do that.
As you’ll see in this report, we found that organizers surfaced three braided areas for strengthening.
First: organizers identified a need for better power analysis tools to more fully understand the role of economic and cultural power in relation to national and global political shifts. And, they need these tools to look at power in fresh ways, not just the current default of building the size of their membership to win legislative and electoral campaigns through established political channels.
Second: they said that trainings would more effectively build our skills and bench if they were better integrated with the daily work of organizing and organization-building, so that when organizers return from a training they have the opportunity to interpret and apply their learnings at home. And, even better would be the space and support to reflect on those learnings with a mentor or be supported in thinking through how to put those new learnings into actual practice.
Third: in our gatherings, organizers agreed that we need to be better organized in responding to and maximizing movement moments to build power. We need a theory of how to maximize upsurges’ impact — translating new cultural energy into real political and economic power — and a matrix of different roles our organizations can play.
The organizers, strategists, researchers, and funders we engaged through the Strengthening Organizing Project offered sharp and incisive recommendations for real change that we can make together.
A few of the recommendations organizers identified are:
- Update our strategies for nondemocratic conditions. Though there is a long practice of powerful organizing in authoritarian parts of the country, most of us have never organized in a national context of federal nondemocracy where the pretense of egalitarianism has been cast aside altogether. In addition to training more people (including staff) on familiar tools, like cutting an issue or power mapping a target, organizers also recognized that some of our existing tools may be incongruent with the conditions of a nondemocracy.
Organizations must approach strategy with a spirit of rigorous and disciplined experimentation. At the onset of a campaign, begin by explaining how it builds on or departs from the previous campaign’s lessons. What hypotheses or assumptions are we testing in this next campaign? How do our methods correspond to our theory of power and the leverage we believe we need to win the campaign? What does “winning” mean and why?
We also encourage organizations to study strategies and methods that issue from undemocratic conditions. For example, in the early 20th century workers engaged in strikes to take direct action against restrictions on their rights to organize and advocate for themselves. In our current political context, creativity is a necessity rather than a luxury, so we must relate to failure as a critical opportunity for learning rather than a discouragement from trying new things. In our organizations, disincentivizing innovation often comes from a place of fear, but we can courageously push against that instinct because we know what is at stake if we don’t evolve the ways we work.
- Prioritize the work that gets us to our goal and ruthlessly say “no” to work that doesn’t advance that goal. We have limited time and resources. Too often, we scatter our energies away from the core work of organizing and then end up depleted, reinforcing a cycle of inadequacy that leads to burnout. We have to prioritize how and where we channel our resources to maximize our leverage. We must ruthlessly say no to work that is not part of a coherent strategy that gets us to our goals — even if it upsets allies, sacrifices potential funding, or fails to satisfy the personal interests of individuals in the staff and base.
Our current political climate may require new forms of collaboration, but participation in coalitions, networks, and national formations can sometimes sap energy away from the work an organization is driving rather than turbocharging it. Being clear about what lane of work your organization is holding down helps determine when and why to join forces with other formations; it helps you know your lane and cheer on others as they hold down theirs, and it helps you know when to pass.
- Prepare our organizations for movement upsurges. Organizers agree that upsurges both interrupt and accelerate our work. They can open new political possibilities at the same time that they can scatter our energies. As a result, organizers often find themselves unsure of whether to rush headlong into rapid response at the risk of distracting the base or stick to the existing plan at the risk of missing the moment.
We may not know when an upsurge will come, but we know that they will come. We need to leave time for crisis response as we build our broader plan to win, accounting for the shifting political terrain and opportunities that upsurge moments create. Given our recognition that we are in a time of polycrisis (a period of interlocking political, economic, social, and ecological crises), we recommend designing staff work plans for 70% capacity because a “normal week” no longer exists. Having some wiggle room allows staff some flexibility for the things we need to get done but often doesn’t account for attending to local crises, preparing the organization for potential upsurges or legal attacks, and stepping into upsurges or what Momentum calls “moments of the whirlwind.”
How are we going to execute on all of this necessary change within and amongst ourselves amid the many crises we face? By innovating and experimenting together; by creating a shared culture of learning, coaching, and feedback; and by preparing for unity and action in moments of crisis (especially in moments of opportunity within a crisis).
We know we’ll never forge our way to change through a report. So we offer these insights, ideas, and recommendations to serve as an invitation to pivot toward actionable strategies together. We’ve included some specific experiments that we intend to undertake in the near-term and we know that there are many experiments already underway or taking shape in the field. We hope you’ll share with us your own reflections and plans, and collaborate with us on transforming organizing to create a stronger field and a better future.
About the Strengthening Organizing Project
The Strengthening Organizing Project focuses on one of the critical pieces of movement infrastructure: transformational organizing to build the scale and power we need to achieve the democracy and economy we deserve. This Future Currents project aims to help organizers across tradition, region, and tenure to learn from the strengths of current and past practices; identify the gaps in our practice, given the new social, economic, political, and cultural context; and seed experiments and practices to fill the gaps. The project also endeavors to seed and nurture resilient relationships between organizers far beyond existing networks to make possible future breakthroughs in joint work and organizing practice. The core team includes Connie M. Razza, Cristina Jiménez, Crystal Zermeño, Lissy Romanow, Nsé Ufot, LJ Amsterdam, Kandace Montgomery,Travon Anderson, and Deborah Axt.
About Future Currents
Future Currents creates space for movement leaders and social justice organizations to prepare for the future we might face, build resilient relationships to confront crises and opportunities together, and develop strategies to achieve the future we deserve. Visit us at https://futurecurrents.org.
