7 Ways the Grassroots Get Stuck: Common Pitfalls & How to Fix Them

The typical origin story of a volunteer grassroots community organizer begins with passion and a problem. My own is silly sounding but true: I wanted my town to legalize backyard chickens. If I’d been allowed to have a few hens, well, things in South Jersey might be different right now!

I believe volunteer grassroots community organizers play an essential role in democracy, a role that no one else can fill. Grassroots organizers have on the ground knowledge of a problem and a place. We have a network of contacts in a community. We have a sense of what change would look like enacted in a particular place. We are deeply invested in change because it would alter everyday life. Grassroots community organizers bring a lot of heart to the work. But in order to not get stuck, we need to avoid some common pitfalls. Here are the most common ones that I’ve seen over the years.

1. You Obsess Over Your Local Villian(s). I get it. It’s hard. Probably early into the work, you showed at a government meeting, earnest and expecting fair treatment and what you saw instead was power held covetously by those who behave in a way that is ineffectual or unethical (or perhaps an exciting combination of the two!) It’s easy to become caught in a cagematch with a local power holder or a gaggle of them. So often when I connect with new grassroots leaders, the story they need to tell me is about how power is unjustly held by someone or several someones where they are. I listen well and I share my experiences and the experiences of those I work with on the ground. Because the bottomline is this: your local villain is a symptom of a problem and rather than just battling that symptom, you need to find ways to fight the root cause. In South Jersey, the root cause is generally the systemic plague of machine politics. You can’t fight the root cause on your own of course which is why you need to pivot from cage match with power holders who loathe you to base-building with allies who will work with you and support you.
2. You Don’t Keep A List of Supporters or Members. If you’re not keeping records of who your members or supporters are, you don’t know who your prospective volunteers are for that event you’re planning. You don’t know who your voters are next election season. You don’t know who you can ask to turn up at a rally or circulate a letter or a petition. You don’t need a fancy database. Put it in an excel spreadsheet. Write it on the back of a napkin if you have to to get started. But you need to be writing down names and contact information somewhere. Grassroots organizing is, in many ways, a numbers game and you can’t win the war with Facebook likes.
3. You Don’t Have a Theory of Change or Clear Sense of Target. “Theory of change” is sort of a wonky term but it boils down to a knowledge of how you will get to the goal you’re seeking. Is it a matter of collecting enough “yes” votes on a city council? Is it about forcing an elected official to nix some proposal? Once you have a clear sense of how the change you are looking for can happen, you can more effectively lobby the right target, the person in power. You need to make sure you’ve got the right target and not just one who’s close at hand or a familiar foe.
4. You Don’t Do Digital Enough or At All. It’s almost the end of 2022. If you’re running a group no one can find online, you need to step into the yes, messy but also essential world of social media and digital organizing. More than that, you need to evaluate where you are on social media. What demographics are you hitting or missing? What is the tone of your social media presence and does it match the tone you are trying to strike as a group? Social media accounts are free which is reason enough to use them. Free or low cost social media scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer make it easy to post content across multiple platforms so you aren’t lopsided in your social media visibility. Any group of any size can get a free or low cost Action Network account and utilize their tools. You don’t need a background in graphic design to make fliers or Instagram posts. You just need a free Canva account. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are more tools to utilize but first you need to embrace that organizing online is part of your equation for building power.
5. You’re Not Realistic About Timelines. It’s easy to envision change but it’s hard to get there. In my organizing experience, progress is seldom a linear path. We take two steps forward and one step back. Every win has to be defended. The only way to really assess your progress is to be engaged in regular assessment. Set some SMART goals. Celebrate small wins and learn from losses. Accept that only hindsight is 20/20 and some things you’ll only be able to clearly see once you’re all the way through it. You should have a sense of a timeline for any issue you’re working on so you know how to sequence various tactics but it should be open to revision. For me personally, timeline is always intertwined with narrative. The story of the campaign we’re working on–the setting, the cast of characters, the highs and lows and lessons learned. Maybe it’s just the writer in me but I always enjoy the story of the work we are doing.
6. You’re Not Prioritizing Relationships. If you’re part of a volunteer grassroots group, you continuously need to face an essential fact: the people you work with are choosing to be in the work. They need a reason to stay in it, not to wander off and take up whittling instead. Issues bring people to a movement but I believe what makes them stay is a sense of community, a sense that they have a role to play, that their voice and talents make a difference, that people would notice if they suddenly dropped off the map. In addition to valuing existing relationships, you need to be building new ones. Have public meetings. Yes, you might get oddballs who talk too much or your opponents might send spies to take notes but you don’t know who you don’t know. And a word of caution: if you build enough power or happen to be at the right place at the right time, you might find that certain groups or politicians suddenly wing in from out of nowhere and want to build a relationship with you. Consider their motives. In any collaboration, give plenty of thought to what your group is expected to do and what you will get in return. For fairness and accountability, it might even be worth formalizing arrangements in a Memorandum of Understanding.
7. You Get Stuck on a Tactic. We’re all creatures of habit in life and in organizing. It’s easy to fall into a pattern of doing the same thing on repeat. But there are lots of compelling reasons to try out new tactics. You don’t want to become predictable. The group that always has the rallies. The people that always flood the public meetings. Variety is the spice of life. Be creative and catch them unawares. It’s good for your group too to try out new things. It’s an opportunity to see what untapped talent you have in your group and it gives people a new way to plug in. Maybe you have someone who hates to speak at public meetings but loves writing letters to the editor. Maybe you have someone who can’t canvass but will table. And so on.

I guess of course the final pitfall of volunteer grassroots organizing is quitting. In my lived experience, some ally loss is inevitable. Some people are only in it for the single issue mobilization. They will fight like hell to fix that playground but they aren’t ready to get political beyond that. But many people will stay if they get a sense of how impactful it is to build collective grassroot power, if they have a feeling of being part of something bigger, something meaningful.

Organizing is challenging and requires skills that sometimes feel antithetical. You have to be confident in yourself to stay in the work but you have to be humble enough to learn from your mistakes. You have to be articulate and ready to speak up but you also have to know when to hold your tongue and really listen. You need to know how to land a punch and you also need to know how to take one on the chin. Grassroots organizing is exciting, messy and the only real way to build and defend democracy.