Investing in Grassroots Infrastructure
As a grassroots organizer, deciding whether or not to invest resources into building infrastructure and capacity for your organization can be difficult. There is a continual temptation to push the question aside in favor of focusing on immediate goals and immediate ways to make an impact. There’s pressure from within to do so, too- people likely signed up for your organization to work on issues, not logistics.
There is no one-size-fits-all method to assess what’s right for you or your organization, but there are still some common pitfalls and overlooked aspects of grassroots organizing to consider that may help you better assess the importance of infrastructure, capacity-building, and determining best practices for your group.
1. Organization has a multiplicative effect
While cooperation can make the efforts of individuals more than the sum of their parts, the inverse is also true: when done badly, collaboration can be a net drain, leading to resources dwindling away to nothing before they’ve managed to do anything worthwhile. Important decisions and progress can be made at meetings, or they can result in nothing but the planning of the next meeting. Organizational structures can provide transparency and facilitate a diverse group of people working together, or they can be overly rigid and prevent meaningful cooperation.
This is critically important when a group has a sudden influx of resources. If its core infrastructure is dysfunctional, it doesn’t matter how many resources are poured in, whether in terms of funding, people, or capital, because the group operates too badly to make good use of them. In fact, as counterintuitive as it sounds, greater resources can actually be a detriment: greater resources require more infrastructure and capacity to manage, and if the organizational structure was bad in the first place, it will only get worse when it builds upon itself to expand and accommodate those greater resources.
Creating good infrastructure and organizational practices is not a luxury, it is a basic requirement that every group should hold itself accountable to doing well.
2. Stagnating = dying
People’s interest in and energy for what your group is doing has a limited lifespan. If a group finds itself merely treading water, it is only a matter of time until key people drift away to find something else to do. Thus, resources must always be devoted to expanding capacity. Thinking that it can be put off until later is to assume that all else is constant, but it never is. There are a thousand different forces that chip away at the ability of a group to continue operating as normal.
Similarly, there is no such thing as “putting off” finding best practices for your group. Current practices get entrenched, assumed, and eventually taken for granted. It’s never easy to shift a group’s M.O. to something new, but it only gets harder as time passes. Even worse, novel unhelpful practices can creep in and go unnoticed if a group is not constantly vigilant about how it is doing what it seeks to be doing.
3. Organizer burnout
Without infrastructure to bring in new blood, help them learn the ropes, and encourage them to take on responsibilities, the same faces continue running operations until they burn out. It becomes accepted that the parts of the organization traditionally handled by them will continue to be handled by them, leaving the group as a whole in a precarious position when they depart. At that point it is an open question whether or not the group survives.
It’s worth emphasizing that it’s okay that this happens. People shouldn’t be expected to stick around forever. The circumstances of people’s lives- and indeed, the world around them- change. The important thing to recognize is that a community or activist group can’t just post an opening on a job board and expect people to show up to fill it. Employees may play a critical role, or they may not be used at all, but there is one thing that all organizations are constantly looking for: people who believe in what they are doing and are willing to commit themselves to it. No one has that right away. It takes time to build and grow, and that building and growing has to be a constant project that the organization is engaged in.
4. Crisis Management
Crises inevitably happen- things that threaten the cohesion of the group or its operation. Crises are varied in their sources and effects: a crisis could be a sudden loss in volunteers, a shift in the political climate, or even something as mundane as a critical piece of hardware breaking down. There is no avoiding crises entirely, as they often come about due to things that are unpredictable and out of the hands of organizers. However, the long-term health of a group depends on its ability to pull together and deal with a crisis before the next one hits.
This means that the actual capacity and infrastructure needs of an organization are greater than those required simply for day-to-day operations. It also means that the capacity and infrastructure-building necessary to deal with crises has to be done upfront. By the time a crisis hits, it’s too late.
If these problems seem frightening or off-putting, take heart! Grassroots organizations are uniquely well-suited to deal with them. They are built from the bottom up, taking input from diverse individuals, avoiding stifling hierarchy, and naturally resilient to sudden changes. The tools are there to deal with all these problems, but groups do need to take care to be prepared for them.
