At this moment, our sector is immersed in a critical debate over what it takes to win. Yet primarily scrutinizing current organizers in a rush toward correction risks getting the diagnosis wrong.
Right now, organizers are hard at work across the country. They are training volunteers to door-knock and get out the vote; they are coordinating community safety patrols during ICE raids; they are the first point of contact for community members who attend a rally and wonder, “What’s next?” To those doing the work, that organizers must juggle manyroles—from therapist to event planner, from strategist to coach to data manager—is no surprise. Yet to those outside the profession, the job is often seen as entry level, with the low wages and lack of training to match. And unfortunately, our movement has paid the price, burning through talented organizers who leave not just their jobs but the movement altogether. Organizations lose years of institutional knowledge and relationships as a result, interrupting base-building efforts and setting back campaigns.
Five years ago, All Due Respect was formed to tackle that issue, recognizing that addressing the high rates of burnout and turnover we’d seen in our own organizing journeys would require a movement-wide shift. In that time, we’ve researched the attitudes, working conditions, and needs of community organizers. We’ve also partnered with organizers, organizational leaders and funders to set new standards for organizer jobs, ones that meet organizers’ basic needs and invest in the training, mentorship and management that allow them to stay in their role long enough to get good at it.
At this moment, our sector is immersed in a critical debate over what it takes to win. Faced with a political climate in which our vision for the future seems further out of reach than ever, we’ve seen numerous calls to refocus on organizing, both as a tactic and a funding priority. Frequently, this includes criticism about a perceived lack of rigor in the current state of organizing. We understand the impulse: everything we’re up against demands competency, tenacity, and dependability. The stakes are high and the urgency is real. Yet primarily scrutinizing current organizers in a rush toward correction risks getting the diagnosis wrong. There are larger forces at play than simply the performance of individual organizers:
1. A lack of accessible and comprehensive movement infrastructure that values and invests in organizers as skilled workers;
2. 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 burnout; and
3. 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. 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—and our ability to change the third dynamic together.
A Return to Fundamentals?
In the past few years, we’ve heard a chorus of movement analysis emphasize the need to double down on organizing, and in doing so, re-ground in the fundamentals. In 2023, as part of People’s Action’s call for an organizing revival, they shared the analysis of a national leader who commented 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.” Other national reports—from The Forge and Action Lab’s “Power to Win” to Future Currents’ “Fighting Shape: An Assessment of U.S. Organizing”—have sounded an important alarm on related trends, identifying a lack of standards and rigor in base-building; organizations that struggle to prepare their organizers to succeed; and philanthropic funding structures that prioritize short-term, issue-specific wins over sustained organizing for change.
We hear similar arguments in our focus groups and interviews, as organizational directors and funders across the country have emphasized the need for our movement to re-commit to the craft 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.
Between these comments and the reports we noted, we see a lot of agreement: we all believe that the current scale and depth of our organizing is not sufficient to build and wield the power we need to win, and that the craft of organizing requires rigor and practice, rooted in some fundamental skills. But we believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to intervene. As our research and the reports above echo, addressing a perceived lack of rigor should focus on training and investment—not increased pressure on an already starved class of workers.
We cannot reasonably focus on organizer performance without shining a light on the poor labor conditions they face and the broader structures that exacerbate those conditions. Organizers are navigating a discrepancy between the rapidly rising cost of living and the salaries and benefits they’re offered; 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. These are 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.
There’s no way for organizers to deepen the impact of their work if they can’t access the knowledge, practices, and tools of their craft, along with ongoing mentorship and management that helps them hone those skills. Too often, we hear the diagnosis around a lack of rigor get distilled into the need to simply to push organizers harder. At best, this excuses the current working conditions organizers face; at worst, it exacerbates them, leading to mental and emotional trauma that’s already at alarmingly high levels across the movement.
Current State of Play
Building a stronger pipeline of organizing talent fundamentally depends on making sure organizers can stay in the field. To do this, we need to ensure organizers aren’t encountering such high levels of burnout that remaining in their roles 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 administration—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 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 after five to seven years, a situation which offers no encouragement to remain in the role despite having invested years of training and gaining critical experience in the craft. As one organizer put it, “If 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 . . . . 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, organizers earn an average of $56,933—over $10,000 below what a single adult in Brooklyn needs just to cover basic expenses. For organizers with families, the gap is even more stark: a single parent with one child faces a $48,000 shortfall. Additionally, 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. “We are told our work is important,” one organizer reflected, “but the conditions make me feel disposable.”
In the Bay Area, where organizing has deep roots and a long legacy, we’ve seen 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, instead asking 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 veteran organizers have viewed these shifts with skepticism—interpreting them as a lack of grit—others recognize them as a necessary evolution. One longtime organizer shared, “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.”
On top of movement-wide challenges, we know that BIPOC, queer and trans, rural, undocumented, disabled, and other marginalized organizers bear a disproportionate brunt of poor working conditions. In our work with immigration organizers across the country, the rates of burnout are intense. As one organizer told us, “Working as an immigration organizer has been both a calling and a constant emotional test. I’ve organized through some of the harshest immigration policies in Alabama, often with limited resources, little institutional support, and under the constant threat of harm to the very communities I love. So many of us are expected to carry our communities on our backs with minimal pay, no mental health support, and unrealistic demands. If we want long-term power in the immigrant justice movement, we have to build structures that nurture organizers, not exploit them.”
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 the constant, year-round conditions expected of them.
In this moment, we need organizers more than ever. Our communities are facing threats to their rights, care, and lives; the dismantling of existing programs and services, already insufficient, that they currently rely on; and attacks on civic institutions and organizations, including our sector, that stand in the way. We need our best players on the field, for the short-term defense of our communities and the long-term success of our movements.
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, grow in their roles, and remain in their jobs long enough to build powerful bases. Better labor standards are a crucial component of those conditions. When organizers can make ends meet, when they can take care of themselves and their loved ones, when they can develop their expertise 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.
