Craft of Campaigns — a new podcast from Training for Change

By Andrew Willis Garcés

I’m excited to announce Craft of Campaigns, a new podcast for organizers that I’m hosting, from Training for Change. It’s live now! We’ll drop our first episode on November 15, 2022. Subscribe today so you don’t miss it.

In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today.

In Season 1, we share powerful stories of campaigns that have won huge changes in communities across the United States. You’ll hear from:

• Neidi Dominguez on the fight to win DACA, which currently protects one million immigrants from deportation
• Sasha Wijeyeratne on preventing Amazon from moving into a working class neighborhood in Queens, New York
• Justin J. Pearson on stopping an oil pipeline that had been routed through a Black community in Memphis, Tennessee

And many more. Subscribe now, here!

You may be wondering: who am I, and where does this podcast come from?

I’m an organizer in North Carolina, and two decades ago, I was a nineteen-year-old in Washington DC wanting to join movements challenging injustice — I was watching from a distance, as a coalition of anarchists, unions, and climate warriors, mobilizing thousands of people to risk arrest, derailed plans by the world’s biggest economies to further dominate weaker countries. And then I watched as our next protests failed to have the same impact. Global capitalism and imperialism rolled on. In DC, I got involved in a local effort to fight gentrification and protect working class tenants, and was confused about why we had such a hard time gaining traction. It seemed so arbitrary. Hundreds of us could shut down a City Council, that then went ahead and gave tax breaks to unpopular corporate landlords over our objections. And we could get thousands of people to put up yard signs across the city standing against a publicly-funded baseball stadium, and then lose the final vote at 2am on a Saturday morning, after we were shut out of a round of insider deal-making moments before. Was building and using our collective power just a roll of the dice?

Today, following the uprisings of 2020, and efforts like the mass movement that came together to elect Bernie Sanders, I hear a new generation of organizers asking similar questions. And by “organizers”, I mean, people who have made a commitment to recruit and develop others who are currently “on the bench”, in order to build power within organizations. So, how do we do that, and make real, durable changes to our society that reshape who benefits from, who belongs within, and what defines a real multiracial democracy?

A mentor of mine once told me, comparing organizing to change our conditions to a basketball game, we always take more shots at the basket than we make, but, are we always just taking them from half court, without really knowing if they’ll go in? If we don’t have the people power to win our visionary demands today, is there a roadmap we can follow to level up our ability to change our material conditions over time? I hear these questions offered by younger comrades between house visits, after planning meetings and mobilizations. It feels like just yesterday, they were my questions too.

And then, a few years into my journey as an organizer, I stumbled on a less visible network of change-makers, a group of organizers, who weren’t just building a base and throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks, but were organizing differently, more methodically, more purposefully, and drawing on a rich history of being able to move a base more powerfully over time. And they had won huge victories, using the essential social movement technology that has powered the fights to desegregate housing and schools, win voting rights, stop deportations, and as I record these words, are the reason millions of us, including me, are having our student debts canceled by the Biden Administration — campaigns.

Campaigns powerfully focus our collective actions to bring our organizing visions to life. Campaigns are a sequence of collective actions designed to generate leverage, or the force we need to move the pillars of power holding up the status quo, out of the way. That action sequence might happen over weeks, months, and most commonly, over years of organizing. Campaigns often win through stages that build on each other, like climbing stairs, step by step, slowly dislodging and realigning the pillars of power, as we reshape not only how the people in charge assess us and our demands, but also the stories everyday people tell about us. Sometimes the next stage is a fight to get a candidate elected or toss one of our opponents out of office, but campaigns are bigger than any one election — they end with a change to our lived reality, not just swapping out who pulls the levers of power.

At Training for Change’s Organizing Skills Institute, we believe it will take millions of us taking part in collective actions to fundamentally change our material conditions — not just to give workers higher minimum wages and give Black, Indigenous and students of color somewhat better schools, but to end racial capitalism, to reverse climate change, to change our society’s relationship to policing and incarceration. We believe campaigns are an essential craft, like the craft of basebuilding or leadership development or narrative strategy, that our social movement organizations must cultivate in order to win.

And here’s the best part: campaigns are a craft we can learn. I got trained in the craft by elders who came from the Black Southern movement tradition, and who had been part of labor fights to transform the working conditions of tens of thousands of immigrant office cleaners. In this podcast, we’ll hear about campaigns shaped by other lineages, looking for elements most relevant to organizers today.

We’ll see you on November 15th, for our first episode, unpacking what we can learn about pushing a Democratic president to take action, ten years after immigrant organizers won their campaign to win work authorization and protections from deportation.