Time for a Change
It’s the beginning of a new year — a time when many organizations are reexamining their priorities for the months and years ahead. So we sat down with Susan Sabella, Coming Clean’s director of operations, to look back at our strategic work with her team — focusing on the process, the value of introspection, and the ways the organization is embracing change 20 years after its founding.
Coming Clean is a group of 200 organizations and 350 individual experts working together to fight for environmental health and economic justice for all. Their members are determined to ensure the safety of products, chemicals, facilities, the fields where farmworkers labor, and the food we eat. They’re also one of Friday’s favorite clients. We asked Susan Sabella, director of operations, to discuss our collaborative efforts to find new ways to expand their staff’s capacity and deepen member engagement.
First off, tell us where your organization fits into the environmental landscape.
We really help organizations come together and collaborate on advocacy and strategy. People don’t always realize how difficult it can be for very small groups and very large groups to find each other and to work effectively, in an equitable and principled way — we’re the bridge, the intermediary, the grease, the glue… whatever it requires to help people move forward together.
When you came to Friday, what problems were you trying to solve?
Initially, we needed some help on a communications project, and Friday ended up creating a microsite for us. But that process helped us recognize that there was a lot more work to be done: We hadn’t been doing the best job of describing ourselves, our partners, and all the experts in our network. We felt like we might be missing out on certain opportunities. And we’d seen our members’ level of engagement ebbing — this was after Donald Trump was elected, and it was a weird time for our movement, but it presented a good opportunity to reexamine our processes and reconsider how we deploy our resources to bring more to the network, reinvigorate the membership, and spur more collaboration. And lastly, we’d been considering a voluntary membership contribution, so we could do even more for our members — but knew we’d need to be careful with the structure, the messaging, and the rollout if we decided to go that route. So we put all of these items into a “capacity-building” bucket, and got to work with Friday.
Any self-analysis of this sort requires staff to be pretty open-minded and vulnerable. Asking “Should we be doing things differently?” can often feel like “Have we been doing things wrong?” What was that process like?
We started by recognizing that the landscape of our movement was shifting — other organizations were evolving, claiming their turf, addressing different priorities, so there was definitely introspection around what makes us unique, and is that changing? And what emerged was recognition that we’re in a really good position — there really isn’t another network, structured as ours is, with our sort of expertise around energy and climate and health and chemicals; some related movements are very siloed, whereas we’re always trying to identify the connections between issues that are often considered separately. Our conversations also led us to double down on our “bottom-up” organizing approach, hearing solutions that are generated from the grassroots and working in a way to help those efforts move forward naturally. On the whole, those early conversations led us to recognize we don’t need to make any major deviations, we just need to identify how to take our work to the next level.
You mentioned a desire to re-engage members and get them to collaborate more with one another. How did you go about that?
We’d been kicking around the idea of hiring a network organizer for a long time — no one on our team had the responsibility of focussing solely on our members, their needs or making the most of our members as a whole. So we worked through a lot of exercises with your team to create a job description and identify roles and responsibilities really clearly — we hired Jim Irby in February.
We also took a look at our listserv platform which was 15–20 years old, clunky and unsearchable, but really the central hub of activity, information sharing, and collaboration. We’d just had no capacity to research new options or get a deep understanding of how people were using it, how many were quietly lurking, how many people were signing on to letters shared on the service… So with your team’s help, we were able to review other options, find out what members wanted most, and launch Groups.io, which is now embedded in our website. And Jim has started incentivizing folks to fill their online profiles so that people can understand who they’re working with, so they can see a face, and so they can get a sense of the breadth of expertise in the network.
A lot of these tasks can feel very “nuts and bolts,” but it’s a huge part of sharing the work and improving engagement. And through the entire process of thinking about our members and working with Friday, we’ve had a chance to reaffirm our values, our principles, and the ways we work together — because when push comes to shove, cracks emerge, bad things can happen, collaboration can split. But every time we dig into the day-to-day and focus on these little decisions, we’re reminded of the principles that our work is founded on, which means the value of these conversations always goes well beyond whatever tasks and decisions come out of that process.
In our movement… very few things can be accomplished by an individual organization. When people realize that Effort X or Initiative Y requires a certain level of support, expertise, and broad buy-in on a state level or federal level, they come to us.
You mentioned asking members to make voluntary contributions, which seems like a big change, and one that could’ve been intimidating for Coming Clean or your members. Talk about that process.
We’d been kicking this idea round for a while, thinking about how to structure it all in an equitable way, as an opportunity for our members to demonstrate their commitment and recognize the value of the network. Because, honestly, if everyone in our movement could accomplish everything they needed to accomplish on their own, they would just do that, because it’s the most efficient way. But very few things can be accomplished by an individual organization. When people realize that Effort X or Initiative Y requires a certain level of support, expertise, and broad buy-in on a state level or federal level, they come to us. And when asked to reflect on that through a survey, our members’ responses were even more positive than we’d anticipated.
And what did you learn about your own team’s ability to embrace change through the project?
Well, Coming Clean has a really particular way of describing our work, and that language has a history to it, and it resonates with people who know us, so we tend to stick with it. But in many ways, our organization has been really open to changing things: Among our team, there are those of us who hear a new idea and immediately ask, “What are the downsides?” and others who think, “Well what are the opportunities?” And looking at some of the decisions we’ve made over the last few years, we can definitely say that we’ve done significant things to make our network more effective. In a lot of ways, it was a really good use of the Trump years to re-tool and take the time to increase our capacity and put ourselves in a better position for the next few years ahead.
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