Making The Road Is Hard on the Feet
An Analysis of Division from Inside A Movement Organization
Note: I am one member of the 11-member Interim National Coordinating Committee of Democracy Spring. I do not speak for the committee in writing this article. The facts are agreed upon, the opinions presented are my own.
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
If you’re reading this, you probably already know: Democracy Spring is experiencing its first genuine crisis as a new movement organization. We’re facing a challenge unlike any we’ve faced before, and I’d like to say a bit about how we got to this place. In the second part of this essay, I’ll talk a little about where I think we might go from here as a movement family & community.
So!
In Democracy Spring we follow a “momentum-driven” organizing model, a hybrid of “structure-based” and “mass movement” organizing. Kai Newkirk, our mission director, was one among a small group of progenitors of this unique approach to organizing for social change. The momentum model fuses wisdom from the American traditions of civil resistance with lessons from labor organizing, traditional community organizing, and mass nonviolent movements that have brought down dictators around the world.
The momentum model says that we must “frontload,” or decide prior to mobilizing, all the most essential elements of our movement strategy, structure, story, and culture. When we frontload, we have the chance to deliberately inoculate our emerging movement against all the worst aspects of our dominant culture. By working slowly and deliberately to craft a movement strategy, common story, organizational structure, and shared culture, we prepare ourselves to rapidly grow to massive scale while maintaining deep integrity and consistency with our core values. These essential elements designed in the frontloading process are called “DNA.” The frontloading process is best completed by a core team deliberately selected to reflect the community we hope to organize.
Movimiento Cosecha, another momentum-driven movement organization, formed a core team that spent nearly a year frontloading their DNA. IfNotNow, another momentum-driven organization, actually stopped organizing when they realized they were rapidly growing before their frontloading process was finished. This should make clear the degree to which this process is serious, and taken seriously.
The momentum model also tells us that movements work best when they frontload each new participant with the DNA, so that as they enter the organization they’re fully aware of precisely what theory of change, grand strategy, and shared story they’re signing up to join.
99Rise, the convening organization for Democracy Spring, properly frontloaded the organization. They decided on a grand strategy, an approach to change, and other elements of their DNA well in advance of calling for “the largest civil disobedience in a generation” in an action that itself was still months away.
99Rise was also deliberate about frontloading people who wanted to participate: new participants in 99Rise were regularly brought into DNA trainings prior to becoming full voting members of the organization.
For many reasons Democracy Spring deliberately did not frontload the participants in the April mobilization. In short, 99Rise had DNA — Democracy Spring, as a coalition-driven campaign and not yet a movement organization, did not yet have DNA. It would have been dishonest for us to push all of the coalition-generated energy into 99Rise DNA trainings. As a consequence, many who turned out and participated in the April mobilization were simply not on the same page about how we planned to win on our issues.
Many who turned out and participated in the April mobilization were simply not on the same page about how we planned to win on our issues.
To resolve this problem, the staff & volunteer organizers who stayed on board with Democracy Spring after the April mobilization rapidly got to work forming the Interim National Coordinating Committee (INCC). The INCC was created to be a diverse and intergenerational team whose mandate was to review, adapt, and adopt the DNA of 99Rise to form the basis of a new movement organization called Democracy Spring. Other volunteer organizers nominated me to be one of the twelve — I accepted and joined in May. Working through the DNA review process in May and June of this year, the INCC saw the DNC approaching on the horizon as an opportunity to mobilize, build momentum, and present the new DS DNA to our base.
A word about our intentions and impact in Philly: like a lot of organizations with a big picture strategy and an eye to the future, we were perhaps too focused on our vision. We didn’t come to Philadelphia prepared to prioritize and hear the voices of Philadelphians. We realized, through a painful process that involved a lot of work by local organizers to open our eyes, that our vision had blinded us to the reality right in front of us. Though we built relationships with local Philly organizers in the months leading up to the DNC, we could have and should have done more to prevent the T-Rex Comes to Town problem. As a 6 year resident of DC, I know very well what it’s like to have a nationally-focused organization come to your neighborhood and make a lot of noise that’s totally disconnected from what’s happening on your block. There’s at least a whole third article to be written about the challenges we faced in Philly, the work we did as a group to get through them, and our ongoing work to address our problems with inclusion and local relationships.
All that said, let’s refocus on our intentions for absorption in Philly.
Henry Jacqz, our absorption coordinator, spent weeks assembling the “Next Steps” training that would lay out our strategy and theory of change for those assembled in Philadelphia. The plan was to make up for the absorption opportunity we’d missed in the April mobilization, and finally belatedly frontload our extended movement family to create a shared understanding of who we are and where we’re going. For me, this was the best reason to go the DNC at all: we had to fix the — in my view — mistake of not absorbing after April.
Some people who’d joined us in April, then came to the Next Steps training, were bewildered by the strategy we were laying out. It seemed clear to some that in laying out the third phase of our strategy — which begins “Mobilize voters to elect a President[…]committed to honoring the reform agenda” — we were advocating an electoral position. We did our best as a team to answer the concerns raised, and then came home to the movement house & shifted our footing rapidly to prepare for the National Training. That meant the INCC had to finalize our new organizational principles and finalize the adaptation of the DNA.
As a part of finalizing our principles, we in the INCC came to what would be the 12th: “We vote.” We realized it was important, given the election on the horizon and the National Training we were planning for, to lay out our view on this principle with some depth. Unlike the majority of the 99Rise DNA we were adapting & adopting, there was not an existing strong elaboration of how we viewed the relationship between social movements and elections. We decided it was important to lay this out, and further to make clear how we viewed the implementation of this principle with regard to the 2016 election.
While we agreed as a group about the strategic view of elections, there was initially disagreement about how best to implement the “we vote” principle in the context of this contentious election. As a group the INCC laid out 8 distinct approaches we could take. We carefully discussed and argued the benefits, costs, risks and potential rewards of each of the 8 approaches. We spent hours in discussion, sometimes heated, before we settled on the approach we’ve taken. We then drafted, reviewed, and released “Democracy Spring After the DNC.”
The backlash through social media & email was swift, furious, and — as the digital organizer — primarily processed by me. You can read more about what came next, and where we’ll go from here, in “Making the Road is Hard on the Feet, Pt. 2.”
