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Building Our Capacity, Growing Our Movements |
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by Matthew Smucker
(No verified email address) |
11 May 2006
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While many people hold beliefs compatible with social movement goals, a small percentage actually take action; and the primary factor for why some people do become active is that they encounter an opportunity provided by people who are already active. Proximity to social movement activity can activate people’s dormant beliefs. So, if we want a growth trajectory, then a primary role of grassroots organizers is to provide opportunities that turn others’ favorable dispositions into activism. |
People often ask me why I returned to “conservative Lancaster County,” PA.
I left this area almost immediately after high school and lived away for several years, mostly in Minneapolis, where I found a strong progressive community and support network. I was generally happy there. I learned a great deal from movement mentors. The campaigns I worked on offered me a crash course in activism and organizing.
Something gnawed at me though. I didn’t have meaningful relationships with anyone who held significantly different politics or worldview. I was living an insular subcultural existence. My activism was largely preaching to the choir.
While understanding on a very human level why progressives/radicals cluster together, I began to see a detrimental effect on our long-term social change efforts. We were able to feed our own need for meaning, support and sanity, as well as enjoy occasional small victories, but we lacked a growth trajectory. Growth—dramatic growth—is precisely what we need if we are ever to gain the power to achieve the kind of change we long for.
How could we develop a plan or strategy for growth? Well, growth means getting more people involved in social change efforts. How do we do that? What motivates people to become active in such work? What makes an activist? I had always explained my own activism in terms of my beliefs. Somehow I had developed a set of beliefs, and then those beliefs demanded action. However, I began to question this assessment as I discovered that many people held similar beliefs that did not translate into activism.
In their essay Collective Identity and Activism: Networks, Choices, and the Life of a Social Movement, Debra Friedman and Doug McAdam cite proximity to social movement activity as the single biggest factor for why people become activists or take part in activism:
…Structural proximity to a movement, rather than any individual disposition, produces activism. Although individuals differ in their dispositions, the opportunities afforded by structural location relative to a movement determine whether they are in a position to act on these dispositions. Empirical support for these positions is unimpeachable…
In other words, while many people hold beliefs compatible with social movement goals, a small percentage actually take action; and the primary factor for why some people do become active is that they encounter an opportunity provided by people who are already active. Proximity to social movement activity can activate people’s dormant beliefs. So, if we want a growth trajectory, then a primary role of grassroots organizers is to provide opportunities that turn others’ favorable dispositions into activism.
How many opportunities can organizers provide to new people to become active when all the organizers are clustered in the same places; when they surround themselves with only each other? If activism occurs more from proximity to opportunities to become active than from individual dispositions, then shouldn’t organizers work to embed themselves into as many different social networks as possible, so as to provide opportunities to more people? And doesn’t this require, to at least a degree, spreading themselves out rather than clustering together?
These questions were part of the discernment process that led me back to my hometown. After a series of transitions, I ended up returning to Lancaster in December of 2002, in the height of the Bush Administration’s attempt to sell the looming invasion of Iraq. Some of us began meeting weekly to plan for an anti-war vigil at Penn Square and a direct action at the local shopping mall. To our surprise we turned out 300 people to the vigil. During this organizing effort we learned about a meeting, called by Women in Black, Community Mennonite Church, and the Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church, to take action to stop the impending war.
This meeting drew about 200 people. They were upset about the prospect of war, but glad to be there together. I was beyond pleased to see so many people come together in this politically conservative area. We decided we should keep meeting. It was clear to me that, while a meeting of 200 people was valuable, we would have to structure the next meeting differently if we were to harness the energy and skills of those in attendance. I volunteered to co-facilitate a follow-up meeting in which we formed working groups to focus on specific projects. I had prior experience with the working group model, and it seemed a good fit for getting so many people active quickly. The meetings and working group projects continued and became the Lancaster Coalition for Peace & Justice (LCPJ).
An obvious challenge with all-volunteer organizations lies in the actual finding of volunteers. An even bigger challenge, I believe, is getting volunteers to stick around. The lead-up to the Iraq War provided circumstances that encouraged people to put parts of their lives on hold in order to be more active in stopping the war. In short, there was an abundance of new volunteers. The first wave of leadership in the LCPJ was mostly comprised of people who, like most people, already had important responsibilities in their lives. A few individuals in particular had taken on some overwhelming responsibilities. As the LCPJ institutionalized and took on a longer-term existence, many of these people were unable to sustain the level of sacrifice the LCPJ seemed to demand of them. For the most part these folks, while still supportive of the LCPJ, dropped off as active participants. Conversely, those who took on manageable, ongoing tasks are mostly still active, still attending to the same roles or tasks that they originally committed to (e.g. our treasurer and archivist).
In their essay Mobilizing Technologies for Collective Action, Pamela E. Oliver and Gerald Marwell explain:
…a lot of the technological knowledge about mobilizing volunteer time is about organizing and dividing labor and structuring events and jobs so that people can be invited to participate in well-defined and limited ways… A technology often used in the charitable sector but only occasionally used in social movements involves creating long-term jobs that involve only a few hours a week such as calling for Jewish charities for three hours every Tuesday night or being on call for the rape crisis center three nights a month. Many people who are unwilling to make the major short-term open-ended commitments that activism entails are quite willing to make a long-term commitment to a well-defined task. They also are aware that failing to keep their commitment will cause a noticeable problem for the event or the organization’s mission.
By the end of the LCPJ’s first year, recognizing the limits of our all-volunteer organization, we decided to hire a part-time coordinator whose primary job it was to maintain regular contact with point people from our various working groups.
I spent most of 2004 abroad in school, but applied to fill the coordinator position when it became vacant January 1, 2005. Since becoming coordinator, I’ve been working to package long-term task-sets that are unlikely to be overwhelming. At times I’ve invited individuals to take point on specific ongoing tasks. With this set-up volunteers are able to participate meaningfully, and there are usually ways for people to take some creative autonomy in the particulars of their roles. I want to leave space for people to contribute more and take more leadership, if they are so moved, but my experience is that many times when people commit to a large workload, they end up flaking on a lot of their tasks or burning out and dropping off entirely. It’s a challenging position for me to be in, and I’m finding that transparency helps. I’ve already said to people, “I want you to be sure that you’re not taking on too much. Your contribution is important to the coalition. Please make sure it’s sustainable for you.”
Given our current national context, my primary strategy for social change work is to grow our movements and build capacity. To affect the kind of change we long for we need the strength of far greater numbers than we currently have mobilized. To grow, first we must attract new people. Then we have the greater challenge of keeping them with us.
To grow we have to tell a story about a different future than the one that is prescribed to us by the power-holders. By a different future, I do not mean utopia. I mean a future where conditions improve in important ways. Critical to the success of our story, is our ability to articulate a strategy for how we will get there – from point A to point B. Many, if not most, people agree with us that there’s a problem. What most people lack is a sense of political agency – that they can do something to change the problem. Many, many people who agree with activists’ critiques do not get involved in activism primarily because they don’t see the efficacy in it. If it doesn’t change anything, why do it? Many potential allies view activism as a self-righteous coping mechanism, devoid of strategy. And there is often some truth to this perception. A persuasive story about a better future then is largely about how we get there.
We also have to tell a story that people can easily see themselves stepping into. Once someone is convinced that we can affect change collectively, they may still lack a sense of how they, as an individual can contribute meaningfully. In recent months I’ve been taking time to sit down one-on-one with individuals who have expressed interest in getting involved with the LCPJ. I ask about their interests, their experiences, etc., and I tell them about our current projects. I also identify a few specific roles that I think we are lacking. I encourage volunteers to find or invent an ongoing role or task that they can sustain. For every new role someone fills, we increase our collective capacity. Telling this story of the parts working together as a whole to build and exercise grassroots power gives meaning to even mundane tasks by putting them in the context of a trajectory of change (to borrow a phrase from movement strategist Michael Albert). Telling this story is the very goal of this essay. My hope is that in articulating a capacity-building strategy, others may examine it, and perhaps even embrace, internalize and own it as theirs.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, if we want to inspire people to stick with social change work for the long haul, then we must make them feel valued and appreciated. It’s basic. People like to be around people who are nice to them. If social movement groups want to compete with the myriad of often more appealing options for people’s free time, then we have to treat each other well. We have to be very, very good to each other, to take care of each other, to rise above the social elitism that infects our society. To end on what may sound to some like a ridiculous note, social change work is about love. Yes, the world is in crisis, and the work is often draining, but if we are to appeal to broader participation, we have got to step out of crisis mode organizing and take the time to love—not only humanity in the abstract, but each other specifically—along the way.
Matthew Smucker has served for the past year and a half as coordinator for the Lancaster Coalition for Peace & Justice. He is currently writing a book exploring tensions between the narrative needs and strategic imperatives of social movement participants. Email to: matthew (at) lancastervoice.org.
© 2006 The Lancaster Voice
http://www.lancastervoice.org/ |
Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
