Want lasting change? Fund organizing.
This morning’s bright spot was a wonderful conversation with Senegalese feminist human rights activist and advocate Tabara Ndiaye. I am so lucky to have known Tabara for several years from her time in Board service at Global Fund for Women, and more recently as a colleague at American Jewish World Service. Tabara, who is based in Dakar, is an insightful, tactical leader who strategically determines where her voice, influence and knowledge will have the greatest impact, and applies her efforts in a laser-focused way on those targets. She is a valued advisor to numerous social justice leaders and organizations on the continent as well as funders who rely on her deep connections across West Africa to be more effective in getting resources to the region.
Because she is so deeply connected to movements for justice, it was meaningful to me when Tabara said that one of the things interesting her most right now is resourcing young people to organize in their communities, particularly in DRC and across Francophone West Africa. She described the support—not primarily financial but technical and in terms of mentorship and networking—young people need to actually do the work of organizing. It brought to mind immediately the words of Alicia Garza, who writes in her book The Purpose of Power about the challenge of Black communities in the United States being what she calls “underorganized.” In chapter 12, “No Base, No Movement,” Garza explicates the distinction between members of a constituency and members of the base of a movement—the difference being that the base is a group of people organized around making change on a specific issue. The effort of getting people to go to meetings to be part of a collective community expression of dissatisfaction with some policy or situation, the work of articulating a solution to some community problem and then enlisting the support of individuals in the community to work toward that solution—those are organizing efforts. Getting people to volunteer to canvass for signatures to a petition. Getting people to call their local representatives—organizing.
It is challenging, especially in a capitalist society where we have been acculturated to see everything in terms of money—paying for people’s time, allocating our own time based on the value that we get from it—to understand the importance of organizing work, because it is so relational, and relies on our understanding of our deep interdependence. In July, Zeynep Tufeckci’s editorial in the New York Times revisited her assessment of the importance of the 2003 global demonstrations in opposition to the Iraq War. Her original view had been that with the sheer number of people the demonstrations brought into the streets, the prevention of its initiation would be inevitable. But she realized that, without an organized base underpinning the demonstrations, the ability to bring even millions of people to a march (and indeed, millions did participate around the world) had no power to stop military action. That would have required being organized, not just mobilized. As Tabara said to me in our conversation, “organization must come first, to enable mobilization. Without organizing, mobilization is meaningless.” This is Garza’s conclusion as well. “There are many issues that people care about, and there is a lot at stake—but not enough of us are organized to make the impact we seek. … To build [a] movement, we have to go about the task of building bases—ever-expanding groups of people organized around our vision for change.” (More reading on this subject can be found in Tufekci’s book Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, as well as in adrienne maree brown’s always brilliant Emergent Strategy)
This is an exciting opportunity, it seems to me, as it points in a clear direction. If you have resources, use them to fund organizing. And as you are doing so, organize your own community by encouraging them to do the same. Move money out of big, national entities working only on legal challenges or federal policy change (after all, those groups WILL get the big money, will always have an easier time of “making their case” if only because they have the staff to generate the evaluation metrics or the marketing materials); instead, identify partners organizing communities locally, working through the patient, relational paths necessary to build the base for people-powered change. Organized people can move from one issue to another—if they are organized, then once one success has been achieved, the base can turn its attention, focus and work to another issue. The common denominator is the organized base, who become the voters, the meeting-goers, the letter-writers and the ultimate change-makers we all need.
