Why organize?

The challenge of our time

To stop democracy from sliding toward authoritarianism, we need something that is in short supply right now: local organizing teams in communities across the country that actually know how to build power through organizing, able to conduct independent strategic actions rather than be limited to mobilizing on tasks issued from DC. These local teams need to recruit and develop new leaders, deeply understand their communities, set their own goals and strategy based on local problems and resources, and work as effectively-structured teams. To be sustaining and effective for the long term, they’ll need professional organizing training, coaching, and a level of financial sustainability that can support paid work in addition to a heavy reliance on volunteer commitment. And they’ll need to be connected to each other for mutual support, solidarity, shared learning, and coordinated action when it matters.

Research by leading scholars Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan suggests the scale that is needed for effective resistance to authoritarianism is the capacity to mobilize 3.5% of Americans (12 million people) for sustained noncooperation. This reveals an underlying organizing training challenge: to reach this scale, our pro-democracy movement will need to produce roughly 20,000 skilled coaches and 150,000 trained team leaders.

While these numbers may seem daunting, there is a way forward. Marshall Ganz is the legendary organizer and trainer at the Harvard Kennedy School that developed the training underpinning Barack Obama’s grassroots victories in the 2007 primary and 2008 presidential campaigns. His pedagogy has powered movements from the California farmworkers in the 1970s to Obama 2008 to the DREAMers and beyond. His global alumni organization, the Leading Change Network (LCN), is the home of continuing improvements from teaching and adapting the pedagogy around the world.

Through the Ganz/LCN framework and training community, we possess proven pedagogy that can develop individual contributors and activists into team leaders and organizing coaches. But at our current pace, we’re training roughly only 50 coaches annually worldwide, creating a massive bottleneck when our democracy crisis demands a vastly higher scale.

But when COVID hit, the US didn't keep vaccine production in business-as-usual mode. We collectively shifted our mindsets and our resources to “warp speed” production. Our challenge as a US pro-democracy movement is to make that same shift for organizing training.

From Burnout to Building Power

The Democracy Teams Initiative was born in June out of two simple observations: that, five months into the crisis, burnout was rampant among current and former federal workers organizing for democracy; and that people do not burn out of well-structured teams. Even in the worst conditions, effective teams are a source of joy and inspiration for us—they refill our cups and keep us going.

But after five months of organizing with recently fired federal workers passionate about defending democracy, certain patterns became unmistakably clear. The same questions kept arising: "How do we recover from burnout?" "How do we motivate others to join us?" "How do we recruit a team?" "How do we get our members of Congress to listen?" "How do we figure out what to do next?"

The foundational problem causing people to give up and burn out was ineffective teamwork. Most people have never experienced being on a high-performing, well-structured, well-coached leadership team. When they try to organize, they either go it alone, which limits them to individual actions like calling their members of Congress; or they tend to replicate the dysfunctional patterns of most volunteer groups and committees—what Jo Freeman called the "tyranny of structurelessness."

These patterns lead to feeling disrespected or unappreciated, self-doubt ("Will these phone calls change anything?"), and ultimately burnout and isolation. The actual organizing—effectively engaging the community in mass leadership recruitment and structure for action—never gets off the ground because the initial leadership group never learns how to function effectively as a team.

But we trainers and coaches in the Ganz/Leading Change Network community know how our pedagogy directly addresses these problems:

• Burnout → Team Structure and Culture training

• Motivating others to join → Public Narrative training

• Recruiting people to a team → Relationship Development training

• Stuck in reactivity/freezing → Public Narrative and Strategy training

• Getting people to make strong commitments → Public Narrative, Relationship Development, and Action (5 C's) training

• Figuring out what to do → Strategy training

• Holding commitments and keeping efforts on the rails → Team Structure, Coaching, and Strategy (Metrics) training

The Democracy Teams Initiative is an effort, started in July, to bring the Ganz/LCN organizing training curriculum into a flexible and accessible format for the many thousands of Americans organizing to save our country from a slide into authoritarianism: Current and former federal workers, Indivisible and No Kings leaders, defenders of immigrant communities, social justice-focused congregations, unionists -- wherever you are, we want to enable you to lead teams that can last, grow, and build power to achieve your goals.

The curriculum

These 12 workshops make up the full four-day workshop agenda for a typical Ganz/LCN training workshop.

The curriculum is organized into one Introduction (theory) course and 11 skill-building-and-practice workshops. (The Introduction is required before moving on to the skill-building workshops.) The other four workshops that make up the "Base" will provide a good foundation for your team building and organizing work. Continue to advance your skills with the seven workshops in the "Advance" category.

The schedule of Base workshops for the four weeks of the "second pilot" effort is below:

To get started, register for an upcoming Introduction to Organizing workshop, or to meet the team and learn more about the program, sign up for a free one-hour info session on Zoom.

Questions? Let us know