Articles
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A Divide on the Commons
An excerpt from Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing
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An Invitation to Organize
A review of Arnie Graf’s Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing
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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.
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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.
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What the Teacher Strikes Taught Us — And What We Still Need to Learn
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?
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Brooke Anderson Lessons from Organizing Slowly with Siblings of People with Disabilities
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.
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Let’s Make the Township and Ward Organizations More Like Movements
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.
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Elections 2020: Strategy Debrief
Our task, rooted in our communities and workplaces, is to layer strengthened electoral practice with deeper, long-term, power-oriented organizing and continued sustenance of social movements.
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Out of Chaos, Progress
We must change the rules in American politics to expand participation and make government officials more accountable to organizations and the public at large.
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A Deeper Look at Electoral Organizing During a Pandemic
We are proud to be part of the effort that forced Trump to deepen his investment in Florida, helping to create conditions where power-building organizations in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia could deliver the victory we all needed to give our communities a fighting chance.
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Democrats Should Take the “Wine Moms” Seriously
Lessons from a “get your people” project
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Getty Images The Work Ahead of Us
The notion that we could reclaim our innocence through this election was always naive. We inherited a knotty, intractable, bloody, painful, and extraordinary political project of determining whether or not America will become a multi-racial democracy. It is a project that remains unfinished.
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The Power of Pluralism
In order to defeat facism, capitalism, and white supremacy — the forces that are killing and oppressing our communities — we must organize against racism in every single corner of this country.
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Our Movements Beat Trump. Now What?
Movement power saved the country from four more years of Trump, but our anti-majoritarian system still shut us out of true governing power. How do we build enough power within a rigged system to unrig it?
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Who Showed Up in Michigan, and Why It Matters
Our willingness to experiment with new tactics and our insistence on inspiring voters through substantive demands offer a model that the Democratic Party would be wise to follow.
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Of Ducks and Democracy
As we confront a decades-long crisis of democracy, our hopes for victory depend on whether millions of people see our indispensable task clearly: a return to the craft of building durable vehicles for collective power.
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A Radical Take on Voter Turnout in Rural America
Last spring, West Virginia Can’t Wait transformed our gubernatorial campaign’s field operation into a COVID response team. The program ended up outperforming conventional voter turnout programs — forever changing the way our movement will run electoral campaigns.
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Elections Are Not About Elections. They Are About Voters and Their Lives.
This year provided the hard evidence, in the hardest of election environments, that building movements based on the needs and concerns of working people is measurably more effective at winning votes — and doing so in a cost-effective way.
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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.
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On Postcards and Superpowers
Restricting volunteers’ understanding of the ways they can make political change to the kind of one-off anonymous voter contacts most easily reported as metrics does a disservice to those volunteers — and to the organizers seeking to build longer term political power.