Dear John,

My name’s Elly and I’m the California Director here at PowerSwitch Action. I’ve been helping to build worker and community power for two decades now, and lately I’ve been thinking about how our short term fights can advance long term transformation. 

Since I joined the network in 2005, I’ve been part of campaigns from minimum wages to living wages to fair work schedules and more. But while our work improved the lives of millions of people, over time it became clear that corporate power has been fueling a set of threats to our communities far greater than at our founding. We needed a new strategy to counter the outsized and unchecked power grab by corporations. We needed to figure out how to move beyond asking “what can we win today?” and instead seek to change the terrain, so that the things our communities truly need but are currently unwinnable come into reach.

I’ve been exploring how to do that through bringing together our seven affiliates here in California. California’s diverse regional economies and politics has long made it a testing ground for new ideas and strategies on all sides — from app corporations buying a carveout from labor law with Proposition 22, to landmark environmental and worker protections like minimum wage hikes and vehicle emissions standards. Our California program set out to test ways to put our long term agenda (shifting power from corporations to communities) into practice, and identify approaches that would be useful far beyond the Golden State. 

In that vein, we asked two outside evaluators to embed with us through the early years of the program. Through their evaluation report, they identified some of the factors that have helped us navigate common coalition pitfalls and rapidly grow into a key piece of California’s movement infrastructure. 

In a Nonprofit Quarterly article published yesterday, we share four key lessons identified through this evaluation process: 

• Take the fight to the villain. We can’t rely solely on government to rein in corporate excess in an environment where corporations can reshape government. We need to directly call out and challenge the corporations that are harming our communities, rather than letting them hide behind politicians and industry lobbying groups.
• Use a ‘Whole People’ analysis to weave intersectional alliances. We can unite broader bases of support to challenge corporate power when we lift up how corporations extract from us in nearly every aspect of our lives: from paying us low wages to charging sky-high rents to siphoning off our natural resources while polluting our neighborhoods.

• Braid together local, statewide, and national strategies. Local campaigns draw people in and show that new ideas are possible, creating momentum for state and national action. Meanwhile, state and national campaigns can create conditions that fuel power building and organizing locally. Braiding these efforts together can form campaigns stronger than any individual strand of work.

• Forge multiracial feminist spaces. To sustain strong and effective coalitions, it’s critical to craft structures and systems that equitably attend to power dynamics, leverage diverse styles of leadership, and understand that the smartest person in the room is actually the collective wisdom. 

We share our learnings from the evaluation as a call to all organizers to think deeply about how we do our work. How are we doing more than just reducing harm in a system that treats people — especially Black and Brown people, gender-oppressed folks like women and trans people, and immigrants — as disposable? How do we ensure our work today is setting up our communities for bigger and bolder wins tomorrow? 

Check out the article in Nonprofit Quarterly to read more about these lessons and how they’ve been critical to our work taking on corporations like Amazon. And if you’d like to dive deeper into the findings from the evaluators, you can read their full report on our website. We hope you’ll share your reflections and insights with us as well!

PowerSwitch Action
1305 Franklin St.
Suite 501
Oakland, CA 94612
United States

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