In recent years, a growing chorus has pointed to community organizing as critical to rebuilding our democracy and countering rising authoritarianism. But community organizing is only as strong as the people who do the organizing work, and right now, many organizers lack the support they need to grow and thrive.
Effective organizing depends on organizers with the skills, experience, and motivation to be in the work for the long haul. However, across the country, organizations report high turnover, staffing instability, struggles with hiring, and a dearth of experienced organizers who can help develop the next generation. The ability of organizing groups to recruit, develop, and retain organizers is inextricably linked to their ability to build and wield power. If we value the transformative impact that organizers have, supporting the organizer workforce cannot be an afterthought.
Over the past three years, a team of researchers, strategists, and organizers, led by Grassroots Solutions, has explored the challenges and opportunities to better recruit, develop, and retain organizers. As former organizers, many of our team have experienced firsthand the transformative effect of organizing in our lives and communities. But we’ve also experienced how grueling, complex, and undervalued organizing work can be. Through conversations with nearly 100 organizers from across the country our project, Built to Last, has sought to better understand what supports organizers to grow and stay, and what gets in the way.
While the challenges are widespread, there are bright spots in the field. Across the country, organizing groups and networks are experimenting with and investing in practices to address staffing challenges. Some organizations have cracked the code on recruiting new organizers from their base. Others have doubled down on organizer development, investing in organizer growth in unique and diverse ways. And still others are turning traditional compensation models on their head, making organizers the highest-paid staff on their payrolls. Here, we share four lessons from our conversations with organizers that point to opportunities for investment and action.
Supporting Organizers in All Phases of Their Career
Over two years, we gathered organizers to hear stories of how they entered and grew in their organizing careers. Those stories highlighted that there is a universality to the arc of organizer growth, no matter the context or organizing tradition. Organizers described similar significant and defining moments in their careers:
- The exciting moments when they first felt called to pursue organizing as a job;
- The overwhelming years when they first began learning the art and science of organizing;
- The powerful time when they had honed their leadership and skills, confidently organizing communities and mentoring the next generation;
- The moments of doubt when they questioned their future in the field and sought out inspiration and new perspective to keep them going;
- And, for some, when they made the decision to transition out of organizing and move into other jobs and roles.
Many existing programs focused on organizer development tend to emphasize certain phases of the organizer life-cycle more than others. For example, training and cohort programs for organizers in their early careers, when they first learn foundational skills, are fairly common. Meanwhile, organizers later in their careers reported struggling to find support to deepen their leadership and skills and to address challenges unique to people who have been organizing for years.
For example, senior organizers often described experiencing times in their career when they felt uninspired, directionless, burnt out, and in need of “regeneration.” “There’s just periods where you kind of get bored with things. And part of it is when you’re in a place too long, and you can’t see the possibility anymore,” one senior organizer explained. The organizers who came through this phase had experiences that allowed them to step back to get a new perspective, reset, and recommit to organizing. In some cases, those organizers took a sabbatical or spent several months or a year or two organizing in a different community or organization. As another of the organizers described: “It helped me stir my imagination and better understand what good organizing looks like. So, I think for me, this particular moment in my career was important because I needed to step out of my context and see myself and see the work differently.” Unfortunately, whether or not senior organizers are able to have these types of experiences depends significantly on what kind of opportunities their individual organization provides. Organizer exchange programs, sabbaticals, and other structures that give organizers the opportunity to step back and out of the work for a short period of time are not commonly available across the field.
Understanding and regrounding ourselves in how organizers actually enter, move through, and exit the career provides pathways for supporting organizers, building more durable organizations, and strengthening the broader field. It offers a framework through which we can see opportunities for intervention, support, and action and can inform more strategic choices about the infrastructure and support organizations, networks, and funders need to provide organizers.
Recruiting Organizers from the Base
According to senior organizers, over the past 10 years the field has seen experienced organizers leave en masse, creating vacancies across the country that organizations are desperate to fill. Our conversations with organizing groups indicated that the challenges in recruiting organizers primarily lie in sourcing candidates for organizing jobs. In some cases, the challenge is in identifying candidates who understand and are committed to long-term community power building. Other organizations lamented the field’s lack of formal organizer pipelines from which organizations can hire: identifying candidates is time- and resource-intensive, and many organizations do not have the capacity to search widely. Still others we spoke with pointed to low salaries and lack of long-term career pathways for organizers as disincentivizing people from pursuing organizing jobs. “Fewer candidates see organizing as a long-term career that can be sustainable and enable you to live fully… It’s hard to imagine being able to raise a family while being an organizer.”
One of the most promising opportunities for addressing the challenge of sourcing organizer candidates is recruiting and developing organizers from the base. For many organizations, moving community members and leaders into organizer staff roles makes sense as they already have a demonstrated understanding of, commitment to, and relationships in the communities being organized. Somos un Pueblo Unido, a rural- and immigrant-led organization in New Mexico, is one organization that has made a point of recruiting from its base. As Marcela Diaz, Executive Director of Somos, says, “If we’re not giving [our community] the opportunity to do it, then what are we doing? What is this for?” Somos has an internship program that provides opportunities for its members to become leaders and organizers through training, shadowing, and on-the-ground experience. Having an organization “made of, by, and for its community” has allowed Somos to advance powerful campaigns to defend and serve the community’s interests.
However, obstacles stand in the way of the field doubling down on base recruitment. Some organizations creating base-to-organizer pipelines said that community members have different training and development needs and require different supports that are often not available. Somos, for example, has found that existing national training and resources are often not the right fit for their community members-turned-organizers. Many trainings are not language-accessible to their Spanish-speaking organizers and do not meet their organizers’ learning needs. Somos’s base leaders tend to come into organizing jobs with significant relationships and networks in their community, but need accelerated, intensive training in campaigns, power analysis, and strategy.
Recruiting organizers from the base holds real promise, but it requires more than just a shift in hiring strategy. Building robust base-to-organizer pipelines will require the field to grapple with larger questions about how we train organizers, structure the work, and adapt organizational cultures to recognize the different starting points and needs for community members transitioning into organizing roles.
Expanding Access to the Experiences and Relationships that Make a Difference in Organizers’ Growth
Organizers learn and grow in relationships and through experience. In our report, Tilling the Soil: Cultivating Organizer Learning and Growth, we describe how organizers draw on an array of relationships and experiences as they learn to organize. Through supportive relationships and meaningful experiences, organizers learn about themselves, their community, and the world around them. This helps organizers develop a personal, embodied, and intuitive practice that allows them to experiment, innovate, and pivot.
However, the field and many organizations lack the infrastructure and capacity to support organizers to grow in these ways. While some types of relationships and experiences are readily available to organizers, others are hard to access. A word that frequently came up in conversations with organizers about their current experience of the field is “isolation.” Organizers feel isolated from the training, experiences, and people that they need to grow and stay in the field. Disconnection from these critical relationships and experiences hinders development and contributes to burnout and turnover.
One notable example is mentors. In our conversations with organizers, we asked them to tell us about an important moment of growth for them — what they learned, how they learned it, and who they learned it from. The overwhelming majority named mentors, often external to organizations, as playing a powerful role in their growth. Mentors support organizers to connect and care for themselves, encourage them to take the long view of their career, and help them answer bigger questions about their place and growth in the field. But little structure exists in the field to connect organizers to mentors. Organizers with mentors said they had to proactively seek mentorship or that those relationships developed organically. In the Tilling the Soil project one organizer described the process of finding a mentor as heartbreaking: “It is challenging [to find mentors] and you put yourself in a vulnerable place asking people, ‘hey, I need help and I need you to be a source of continuous support,’ and rejection in that space doesn’t feel good.”
The Western Organization of Resource Councils (WORC), an organizing network in the Mountain West and Plains States, is one organization that offers expansive organizer development support to its affiliates. In addition to the early career training that all new affiliate organizers go through, the network provides its affiliates with a cohort program for organizers with one to five years of experience, another for organizers who supervise others, an “organizer school” for continued development of foundational skills, one-to-one coaching and mentoring for individual organizers in the network, and organization consulting services to help organizations address everything from hiring and staff management, to training and meeting design and facilitation, to fundraising and communications support. WORC’s support for all levels of organizer staff has helped its affiliates build and retain more powerful benches of organizers. As one affiliate organizer said, “It is hard to imagine having been able to remain in this role these past years, much less begin to thrive, without the support of the WORC network.”
There is a resounding desire for more consistent and accessible infrastructure for organizer development within organizations and across the field. Given the scale of the needs, it cannot be solely addressed at the organization level. The field will need extensive funding to build the needed infrastructure, and there is a critical role for organizing networks and training institutes to play. How can organizations and the broader organizing field and its funders create and invest in the conditions and structures for organizers to access the relationships and experiences that make a difference in their growth?
Centering Organizer Work and Well-Being in Organization Cultures
The health and vitality of the organizing field and its organizations depend on having experienced organizers who can mentor and train the next generation, but retaining organizers is a perennial issue. Organizer retention is affected by a suite of issues. There is no silver bullet, and the field and organizations need to take a holistic approach to address it. Solutions that organizers named included everything from hiring people who have a strong self-interest in building community power, providing organizers with clearer career pathways, increasing mentoring and coaching capacity in organizations, focusing on organizer wellness, and increasing organizer compensation. One thing is clear: for many organizers, the hours, the pay, and the emotional and physical toll of organizing is not sustainable without considerable support.
Center for Health Progress (CHP) in Colorado is one organization that has made a deep investment in its organizers to support them to stay for the long-term. They believe that building power requires skilled organizers with significant experience in their communities. So CHP created a culture of care, rigor, and accountability that centered organizers’ work and needs. Some of the practices they put in place include compensation and personnel policies that provide economic security and work-life balance, clear job expectations and benchmarks that facilitate rigor and transparency, and regular agitation tables and reports to deepen accountability and trust. Their focus on retaining organizers has required considerable financial investment, experimentation, risk-taking, and unapologetically keeping organization time and energy focused on the team’s organizers. But for CHP, it’s been worth it. As their Co-Executive Director, Dana Kennedy puts it, “the benefits to our power and to our people have far outweighed the challenges that have come with it.”
When talking to organizers and networks about the challenges with retention, another challenge came into view — “a transition problem,” as our team member Kurston puts it. This work has us grappling with the reality that many organizers move on — they may retire, burn out, or want to try something new. Organizing is, after all, about transformation — of self, communities, and the world. For some organizers, this transformation leads them to seek new opportunities outside of the field, sometimes working in adjacent careers that touch on or support organizing. Many people who transition out of organizing have extensive wisdom and experience and are well-equipped to serve as mentors and guides to younger organizers. Some people we talked with feel we need to give organizers more options for moving on while still serving the field. As organizers transition to new opportunities, how can we continue to channel their wisdom and experience?
Conclusion
More than ever, we need a robust field of organizers who can nurture and fuel the power of communities to hold and advance a vision for a more just and equitable future. The scale of the challenges the organizing field faces in rebuilding its ranks is significant, but not insurmountable. They can be overcome if we can channel our admiration and respect for organizers’ work into resources and support that allow them to grow and stay in the field.
Creating stronger and more consistent scaffolding for organizer growth will require us to take the long view, seeing beyond the horizon of our organizations’ immediate interests, in order to imagine an organizing field with the capacity for transformative and sustained organizer growth. Only then will we see the organizing field step into its full power.
Inspired by a powerful reflection from one of the organizers who participated in one of the conversations, we leave you with this question: What would be possible if we took a sacred and generational approach to growing and sustaining organizers?
