Q: What are your wins?? What’re you celebrating about your organizing work this year?
A: We hosted an Organizing Summit that trained 30 RG leaders in campaign skills, built relationships between chapters, and prepared us to launch a National Campaign in 2024! We were honored to join the Center for Popular Democracy at their Peoples Convention in Philly in July, got a preview of what their Big National Campaign on Housing will look like, and joined 1500 CPD affiliate members in the streets protesting corporate landlords. Overall, we built the capacity and sorted through the strategy of what it will take to launch a national campaign, and we are looking forward to sharing more in the new year.
Q: How have you seen these successes embodied in our organizing this year?
A: We’re seeing more and more willingness from ourselves and other RG members to be protagonists in this work-- to assess and use the power we have access to on the side of movements. This is so important as the movement and the moment are demanding that we get off the sidelines and into the risks and rewards of cross-class power building.
Q: Share more about that process; where is RG’s campaigns work right now?
A: 10 Member-Leaders joined our National Campaign team this year to devise a strategy and structure for a National Campaign around Housing. We’ve also deepened our relationships with the Movement for Black Lives and the Center for Popular Democracy, our two national campaign partnerships, and we have plans for public power-building in 2024.
Chapters across the country are flanking local campaigns with cross-class grassroots partners in big ways. The New York City Chapter threw down big time for the Housing Justice for All campaign, mobilizing 60 RGers to fight for Good Cause Eviction in the state of New York. The RG Michigan Chapter strengthened their partnership with the Fund MI Future campaign to call for a graduated income tax to move money toward sustainability programs, clean water, public education, and investing in Black communities. These are just two examples of how our local chapters use their class privilege and access to power to bolster and support cross-class campaigns to redistribute wealth, land, and power.
Q: RG does a lot of personal transformation and leadership work to support members to redistribute wealth; why does RG also do campaigns work?
A: We’re clear that the path to a liberated world is not through philanthropy – wealthy people giving tiny sums of wealth amassed through the exploitation of people and the planet, often working to “solve” problems they themselves created, will not result in freedom.
In addition to pushing for personal wealth redistribution, we seek to participate in working class-led movements to win housing, education, food, and rest for all and remake the economy to work in alignment with the earth. To do so, we must train donors AND organizers and develop issue-based campaigns that use our power afforded by position, organized people, and organized money to change systems that allow for wealth hoarding.
We believe that it’s critical to move from individual action to collective action, as well as building lifelong organizers. We need to grow our base, reach, and politicize more young people on class privilege and redistribution. By utilizing the power of the most diverse and powerful generation to make wealth hoarding impossible, we will bring about involuntary wealth redistribution as a key mechanism in ending the ultrarich.
Q: Can you describe the felt sense you have of all of this organizing? Talk about the vibes, please.
A: At the Organizing Summit in August, there was a moment after we did a training on making strong organizing and leadership asks that I saw members who I’ve known for years come alive in a new way–feel a sense of their power as part of a collective and feel responsibility and determination to build campaigns that fulfill what the movement asks use to be. There was a sense of *agency* in the room– that we together were determined to take some strategic risks and
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 with make an additional year-end contribution!
