Plank 1: Growing Boston DSA & Fostering a Healthy Organizational Culture
We (Beth Huang & Maddie Howard) are running for Boston DSA co-chairs on a shared platform. Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be releasing detailed explanations of our platform planks. We welcome any questions or comments about these documents! Check out our platform summary here for an overview.
The scale of change that we need to transform our world can only happen with the force and energy of a mass movement. To win socialism in our lifetimes, we need to grow DSA beyond a small cadre of thinkers and organizers. We can accomplish this by demystifying democratic socialism to working class people, building a strong foundation through political education and discussion, expanding our recruitment and onboarding processes, and crafting a welcoming mien for the modern American socialist movement. This starts with strategies that continue the explosive growth of Boston DSA and foster a healthy organizational culture that entices leftists from all corners of the Boston area to join.
First and foremost, our growth strategy needs to focus on recruiting marginalized segments of the working class, especially people of color. We cannot let the lack of racial diversity in Boston DSA become our Achilles heel. While accomplishing this will be slow, we can pursue a variety of tactics, including “serve the people” programs and volunteering for grassroots community campaigns. The goals of this broader base-building strategy include building trust in communities of color in Boston and increasing the relevance of democratic socialism to working class people as a viable alternative to the precarity and indignity of life under capitalism. We will expand our outreach capacity and build a durable and sustainable recruitment plan, especially in working class communities of color. This will require us to begin leading our own direct actions and community events and to build our multilingual organizing capacity to reach out to working class people who do not speak English as their native language. We also may include happy hours that appeal to leftists who are not DSA members, such as the Afrosocialist Happy Hours in NYC DSA or social events for teachers, union members, or parents (parents’ night off).
These recruitment tactics need to be paired with a strong onboarding process that fosters relationships and deepens members’ political education. We propose introducing a membership coordinator as a position on the Steering Committee to serve as a point person to expand a decentralized network of relationships within Boston DSA. This membership coordinator would be responsible for creating and implementing a plan for onboarding new members and reaching out to potential members. They would manage the current mobilizer network, including planning trainings and neighborhood socials, distributing member lists, holding coordinators and mobilizers accountable to progressing with their outreach, and recruiting new mobilizers. Having a single point of contact for this work will be immensely valuable for staying coordinated and unifying our membership growth and engagement strategy.
We’re committed to deepening the political analysis of our members in Boston DSA through political education that is tied to on-the-ground organizing in multiple ways, including using a model called Head and Heart. We envision a series of events that help define the socialist vision for various issues, educate members about the current state of these issues, discuss our long-term strategy, and organize for action. For example, a housing Head & Heart could include a reading on socialist housing visions and history, a panel with community leaders on housing justice, followed by an internal debate on the socialist vision of housing, and then an anti-eviction canvass alongside City Life/Vida Urbana to help form a tenants’ union. These experiences could then inform Boston DSA’s municipal experiments in creating socialist housing policy in Somerville.
To achieve a healthier and multi-tendency organizational culture, we need to plan programming that integrates various working groups and teams to encourage collaboration and coordination as opposed to isolation. Working on issues in the overlap of several working groups, such as a socialist response to the opioid crisis, may help bring together members of various backgrounds and tendencies. In the same vein, working on issues through various approaches (mutual aid, political education, coalition building, electoral/legislative, protest/direct action) can advance our transformative reforms and build our movement further. We need a “both/and” approach to our work. The more we collaborate, the more opportunities we have to share an understanding of our goals and strategies, to offer a variety of engagement levels and a coherent progression of events to our members, and to learn from each others’ mistakes, so working groups can always be building on a shared knowledge base.
To limit bottlenecks and burnout, we will empower members to take initiative on and lead their own projects within this “both/and” approach. We will equip our members with the skills to build strong, healthy teams and make democratic decisions to cultivate a collaborative and welcoming organization. These skills include meeting facilitation, storytelling, coalition building, one-on-one organizing conversations, and more. To build these skills, we will survey members about the knowledge they want to develop and then help coordinate trainings and workshops through Boston DSA’s working groups.
Finally, to ensure that all members feel agency to work within Boston DSA, we commit to supporting an engaging and accessible social culture that values internal debate and rejects harassment and bullying. Ratifying the Code of Conduct and the Resolutions Process in 2017 was an important first step and helped cement Boston DSA’s national leadership on addressing issues of harassment. We can continue to lead on these issues. To take further steps to prevent harassment, both in-person and online, and increase comradely behavior, we will commit to hosting more events in alcohol-free venues, encourage working groups and teams to regularly review and implement guidelines for comradely debate, and plan internal debates that replace hostile online conflicts with deep strategy discussions. We encourage trainings on conflict mediation and a culture of radical honesty among members to help build trust and strengthen our relationships. As we seek to practice external solidarity with other activist groups and political allies, we also need to foster internal solidarity.
More about the Synthesis Slate:
Introducing the Synthesis Slate
Our World to Win: An Overview of the Synthesis Platform