The organizing sector is immersed in a critical debate over what it takes to win. In a political climate in which our vision for the future seems further out of reach than ever, we’ve seen calls to refocus on community organizing to bolster base building efforts1 as well as criticism about a perceived lack of rigor in the current state of organizing.
It’s true that base building efforts need significantly more investment and infrastructure in order to keep and recruit members. But scrutinizing the work of organizers in a rush toward correction risks getting the diagnosis wrong.
The team at All Due Respect has spent the past five years researching the attitudes, working conditions, and needs of community organizers. We advocate for meeting the basic needs of organizers so they can pay their rent and take care of themselves and their loved ones, while also investing in the training, mentorship, and management that will allow them to stay in
their role long enough to get good at it.
Community organizers are the ones who knock doors, listen to stories, build deep relationships, put events together, manage data, execute campaigns both in person and digitally, and serve as the ear to the ground of what communities need and want. Their work is in service of bringing together people to demonstrate for policy change on issues like health care access, reproductive care and abortion access for all, and pathways to citizenship for new Americans. This is a big, hard, vital job.
We’ll say from the outset that we are not here to advocate or excuse underperformance. Everything we’re up against demands competency, tenacity, and dependability. But we also believe there are larger forces at play than the performance of individual organizers:
- A lack of accessible and comprehensive movement infrastructure that values and invests in organizers as skilled workers,
- An inherited culture of organizing that encourages personal sacrifice and a relentless pace as evidence of commitment to the struggle, often above long-term strategy and at the cost of burn out, and
- The very systemic, external conditions of patriarchal and racialized capitalism—and a lack of benefits and social safety nets—that we’re working to shift.
1https://inthesetimes.com/article/trump-trumpism-action-movement-building-community-organizing-sociali sm
https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/the-sky-is-falling-weve-got-this
https://ourfuture.org/20250406/what-will-it-take-for-the-resistance-to-win
For the purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the first two dynamics as the places where decision-makers and funders currently have the most leverage to make immediate and tangible changes in the daily lives of organizers, thereby increasing movement-wide impact.
A Return to Fundamentals?
In our focus groups and interviews, many organizational directors and funders have emphasized the need to re-ground in the fundamentals of organizing. They want to see more evidence that organizers are putting in the long hours and intensive pace they believe are required to win campaigns.
Several recent publications echo the idea of returning to fundamentals. In May 2023, People’s Action called for an organizing revival, saying one “nationally recognized community organizing leader noted that a whole generation of organizers and volunteer leaders has entered the field without a solid grasp of the fundamentals of the craft, despite their enthusiasm. This failure to share the most effective skills across our movement and from one generation to the next lowers the overall impact of community organizing, even as groups and initiatives proliferate.”
A similar recent report from Future Currents, “Fighting Shape: An Assessment of U.S. Organizing,” further examines both the challenges and opportunities facing the field of organizing today. Their research highlights several critical issues, including a weak analysis of power, insufficient scale and depth in organizing efforts, difficulty effectively harnessing movement moments, and philanthropic funding structures that prioritize short-term, issue-specific wins over sustained base-building and structural change. One major concern raised in the report is the weakening of rigor and accountability in base-building practices. Some interviewees argue for a return to core organizing fundamentals, such as in-person one-on-ones, constituency and workplace mapping, and strategic direct action, often associated with hyper-local, place-based organizing.
Across these reports and our own research, we see a lot of agreement: we all believe organizing needs to be better. But evidence shows there’s a right way and a wrong way to make this happen. The call for increased rigor is currently framed as the need to drive organizers harder, demanding higher outputs and outcomes. But as our research and the reports above echo, rigor should focus on training and investment—not increased pressure on an already starved class of workers.
We cannot reasonably focus on organizers’ performance without shining a light on the poor working conditions they face and the broader structures that exacerbate those conditions. These are the symptoms of a field that’s been chronically underfunded and a profession that’s frequently characterized as “entry level” despite requiring a great deal of skill and strategy.
The challenges these organizers face are real: a mismatch between the rapidly rising cost of living and the salaries and benefits of their jobs; a lack of onboarding, training, and mentoring in jobs that require juggling multiple complex roles and relationships; and workloads that are too often unmanageable, disconnected from the needs of the base they’re tasked with organizing, all in pursuit of a strategy in which they have little say.
There is no way for organizers to become more skilled if they don’t have access to the knowledge, practices, and tools to conduct one-on-ones, create power maps, strategize targets, and run actions, along with ongoing mentorship and management that helps them hone those skills. If we buy into the diagnosis that organizers mainly need to practice more rigor, we’re liable to believe the solution is simply to push them harder. At best, this excuses the current working conditions organizers face; at worst, it exacerbates them, leading to mental and emotional trauma2—already at alarmingly high levels across the movement.
Current State of Play
From our research with organizers across the country, we’ve learned that building a stronger leadership and talent pipeline in organizing fundamentally depends on making sure organizers can stay in the field. To do this, we ought to ensure organizers aren’t encountering such high levels of burnout that staying in organizing positions would significantly jeopardize their physical, emotional, and mental health.
We conducted national research in 2022, shortly after thousands of organizers had left the field during the first Trump administration3—a time of constant urgency, defense, and defeats. At that time, we found that 9 in 10 current organizers had experienced burnout, and, even more alarming, 3 in 4 had thought about leaving the field. Meanwhile, the directors we interviewed emphasized the difficulty in finding, hiring, and retaining trained organizers, especially those who come from and represent the communities they work with.
Even if organizers can avoid burning out, there is often little incentive to remain an organizer after the first few years. In a 2023 study we conducted in Southern California that focused specifically on organizer compensation, we found the current average entry-level organizer wage ($57,000) meets the cost of living for one adult with no dependents in only five out of the ten counties in the region. Further, the average and median pay leveled out at about $68,000 annually after five to seven years, a situation which offers no encouragement to remain in the job despite having invested years of training and gaining critical experience in the craft.
In the same study, we found that a majority of organizers—71%—had less than five years of experience in the field, with only 16% having more than seven years of experience. This suggests a trend of professionals leaving the field after five years. As one organizer shared, “If
2https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/26/us/they-push-they-protest-and-many-activists-privately-suffer-as-a-r esult.html
3 https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/organizer-burnout/
you want to have higher pay or a living wage, then you have to move up the hierarchy in an organization, which is frustrating because that’s not necessarily the work I want to be doing. … There aren’t a lot of models of folks who get to stay in community organizing long-term, with a long-term living wage, because people are pushed either out or up.”
In New York City, the financial reality for community organizers is also unsustainable. According to our most recent report, Compensation and Beyond, non-managerial organizers earn an average of $56,933—over $10,000 less than what a single adult in Brooklyn needs just to cover basic expenses. For organizers with families, the gap is even starker: a single parent with one child faces a $48,000 shortfall. Many organizers report struggling to make ends meet, and many—as the research shows—leave the field entirely.
Additionally, we found that NYC-based organizers have limited access to retirement plans, paid time off, and other basic benefits, conditions that contribute to high turnover and stunt the development of experienced leadership. Or if they do have access to those benefits, have not been properly trained on how to access or maximize those resources. As one NYC organizer put it, “We are told our work is important, but the conditions make me feel disposable.” These material realities make it harder to retain talent and build leadership from the very communities organizers are fighting for.
In the Bay Area, where organizing has deep roots and a long legacy, we’ve seen firsthand the tensions between generations of organizers—many of whom were trained in high-intensity, high-sacrifice political environments—and a newer generation coming into the work with equally strong commitment but different expectations around sustainability, equity, and care. Younger organizers are challenging the assumption that burnout is a rite of passage, asking instead how we can build movements that model the futures we’re fighting for. In our interviews, this shift was apparent not only in language around “self-care” and “work-life balance,” but also in calls for clear job descriptions, fair compensation, healthy management structures, and mentorship. While some veterans have viewed these shifts with skepticism—interpreting them as a lack of grit—others recognize them as a necessary evolution. As one longtime Bay Area organizer reflected, “This generation isn’t afraid to ask: why are we replicating harm in the name of liberation? That question is forcing all of us to level up.”
We Need Our Best Players on the Field
Organizing is hard work. It will never be a 9 to 5 job, and there will always be intensive periods that require long hours and late nights. Yet we know from experience that no one can do their best work if these are constant, year-round conditions.
We all want a movement filled with skilled organizers. Organizers need time to develop, and that means investing in them through intentional training and ongoing mentorship, valuing their labor, and—when we can—compensating them in ways that allow them to take care of themselves and their loved ones. It means offering jobs that enable organizers to pace
themselves and providing guidance to navigate the mental and emotional toll organizing can take.
The situations at the heart of these debates are not hypothetical. The organizers and leaders we work with navigate them every day as they work to build and support their teams. As one director we interviewed reflected, “There’s a need to not create a burnout culture. Some of my
elders who came from that older school, they saw the younger generation talking about self care, and they are frustrated because they come from the generation where you sacrifice everything for the movement and took a vow of poverty to do this work, so culturally there’s a rub there. There’s a sweet spot that creates a balance…we need to provide spaces to reflect the healing internally in our organizations that we are trying to create and build in our communities. We need to have viable employment and career pathways and all those things.”
Another director emphasized the impact that supportive working conditions can have on organizers: “When you feel recognized, when you feel seen, when you feel valued, you show up in ways that—you’re creative, you feel intentional. That will be showing up. I just feel like it would actually impact the work in such a good way to be able to have people be like, ‘I don’t have to worry about rent. I feel seen. I feel valued here. Let me do this. Let me pour more of my heart into this.’”
If we believe organizing is the answer to the overlapping crises we are facing, the question remains: what does it take to win? We believe it takes creating conditions for organizers to do their best work, to grow in their roles, and remain in their jobs long enough to build powerful bases. We believe better labor standards are the most vital component of those conditions. When organizers can make ends meet, when they can grow and develop in their roles and maintain a pace of work that ensures they don’t burn out, our organizations and movements are better set up to win—and win in ways that don’t leave the people doing the work behind.
