In Times of Crisis We Need More People Power

The Cosecha national assembly. (Cosecha)

Social movements often face a contradiction: To expand and thrive, they need to bring in ever-greater numbers of new participants. And yet, knowing how to effectively absorb new people and plug them into a movement’s work can be very difficult. This is a problem even during normal times, but it grows even bigger during times of political crisis — such as the moment we are facing right now.

Imagine that you are an organizer and that you just pulled off a fantastic direct action. A small and powerful protest you held locally generated excitement and made news headlines. The public noticed, and the next day there are 10 people at your office door who saw the demonstration and are excited to get involved.

What would you do? Perhaps you would gather contact information and plan individual meetings.

But now imagine that these 10 people, with your support, pull off an even more audacious action, making a big splash with a sit-in at the office of a local politician. A few days later, you have 200 people coming to your door who want to join the movement. What do you do now?

You can hold a meeting, but you probably can’t do one-on-one outreach to everybody in a reasonable amount of time. You are scrambling.

Now think even bigger. Let’s imagine that there’s a massive external political event, and all of a sudden your issue is the leading topic across the media — banner news in major papers and a fast-trending subject people are talking about on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. People across the country are hungry to take action. And thousands of them, maybe even tens of thousands, are knocking on your door, sending you e-mails, calling your organization asking how they can get involved.

What do you do with them, and where can they go? What will you do to seize the moment?

This is a thought experiment that Carlos Saavedra and Dani Moscovitch use when talking to organizers about the topic of mass training. Carlos and Dani are two of the people I have worked most closely with on the subject, and I am always impressed by the wealth of expertise and insight that each brings. Carlos, who now runs the Ayni Institute, was a leader in the Dreamers movement of undocumented young people fighting for immigrant rights in the first decade of the 2000s, and he built a training program for United We Dream that brought thousands of activists into the organization.

Dani is a co-founder of IfNotNow, a movement led by young Jews working, in their words, “to end U.S. support for Israel’s apartheid system and demand equality, justice and a thriving future for all Palestinians and Israelis.” She was the lead architect of that group’s decentralized mass training program, which has conducted repeated one- and two-day trainings in 14 cities, led by more than 300 volunteer leaders.

When Dani does the thought experiment in workshops (you can see her in action here), she tells her listeners to take a deep breath. “If you felt a bolt of fear or dread at the idea of thousands of people outside your door — or even 200, or even 10 — you are not alone,” she says. Many organizational leaders have felt trepidation at the prospect of such a sudden influx.

“But what does it mean that we are not prepared for those moments?” Dani asks. Certainly, we know that the urgency of the present moment and the scale of the problems we are confronting require us to bring tens of thousands of people into our movements. And yet, too rarely are we planning to succeed in those times when this is possible. “If we don’t make a plan for how to bring new leaders in at the scale we need,” Dani says, “it’s because we don’t actually believe that we can win.”