Q: What are your wins?? What’re you celebrating about your organizing work this year?
A: Our team hosted a Member-Leader Lab in October that brought together member leaders from around the country to learn from each other about leadership development & leadership transition. Members shared best practices and struggles from their work. We’ve heard folks reference lessons from each other in their local chapter meetings. We’ve seen members take leadership development seriously, and in some chapters (shoutout to Colorado, Philly, and LA!), leadership teams have been growing, and new folks have been moving into leadership in very exciting ways.
Also, the Midwest is holding a praxis for at-large members as well as a data training to support members to feel confident using our database. This kind of distributed capacity-building in a regional context is super important for membership culture, retention of members in locales where we don’t have official chapters, and the resilience of our organizing infrastructure.
Q: Talk about how $$ is moving in chapters; how does base building = redistribution?
A: Chapters have made exciting progress on their redistribution goals. The Bay Area Chapter has pledged over $870,000 to their chapter partners & is tracking their progress on this site. The Philly chapter raised $104,000 for a chapter partner, the Freedom Side School, to name just a few successes. AND, chapters around the country are digging deep into partnerships with local campaign partners to not only move money but also show up in support of tax, climate, and housing justice.
Oh, and according to this year’s Redistribution Pledge, RGers have collectively committed to moving over $120 million to movements this year!!! Sign the redistribution pledge here if you haven’t yet.
Q: Can you describe the felt sense you have of all of this organizing? Talk about the vibes, please.
A: Our members can hold and challenge each other in really beautiful ways. At Making Money Make Change (our annual conference) last month, I saw members support each other through a huge amount of growth throughout the course of the conference. I know this because I can feel it myself. I think much of the power of RG’s organizing comes from our ability to hold each other as full humans in this work, with all the contradictory feelings and actions that come from being from wealth/privilege, and bringing each other along into alignment with our values of justice and liberation for all.
I’m seeing this happen as members show up with each other in the streets to call for a Ceasefire Now. I’m hearing it in deep check-ins about emotional well-being in the midst of hard family organizing conversations. I’m feeling it as members share with excitement that they’ve been doing things they’ve never done before, and it was OK because they were in community.
Q: Amazing. What about you? How have you changed as an organizer this year? What have you personally learned? Give us the juicy details.
A: As anyone who talked with me in this past year knows, I participated with the rest of the Base Building & Leadership Development (BBLD) team in a “We’re a Nerdy Movement” Study Group. I love being a nerd! (It’s true; Nicole reads 10 books a week). We geeked out about studies of social movement organizing, and one of the lessons that I think about almost every day has to do with coaching: a powerful tool for leadership development.
As a team, we learned about the GROW model of coaching, which supports people to think through their current situation & think through goals & action, in partnership with a coach. As a Regional Organizer, in conversations with member leaders I often want to share resources, experiences in other chapters, or give advice, and the lessons from our study group shared that supporting folks to reach their own conclusions, with their own wisdom and understanding of their own situation, is ultimately a more powerful way to support folks in their leadership journey.
Q: How are you integrating those learnings?
A: I haven’t mastered this art yet, but I have been grateful to witness the brilliance of our members by asking them their assessment of the situation, their ideas, and watching them take action (which is, of course, the magic of organizing). It turns out, many of us need the space and support to bring our best thinking to the surface & to commit to action together. I’m grateful for this lesson & for the members who are on this journey with me–I’m excited to be able to learn with each of you!
Q: Wow, rad, cool, wonderful. How can I support RG rn??
A: Continue to powerfully move this work forward! Pay membership dues at 10% of your overall giving or make an additional year-end contribution!
