What does a winning grassroots campaign look like? How can movements build power for change? Where do they go wrong?
On Tuesday, May 4, 2021, the Ash Center hosted a book talk of Prisms of the People: Power & Organizing in Twenty-First-Century America with co-authors Elizabeth McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa. Joined by Alejandra Gomez and Tomás Robles of Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), the panel draws upon their collective research and experience to discuss the characteristics of winning and losing campaigns, sharing how movements build power for change as well as where they often go wrong. Tova Wang, Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center, moderates the discussion.
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Presenter: You're listening to AshCast, the podcast of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School.
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Tova Wang: Welcome everyone. My name is Tova Wang. I am a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. And thank you so much for joining us today. It's a really exciting conversation. Before we begin a few words. The Ash Center would like to acknowledge the land on which Harvard sits as the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people and a place which has long served as a site of meeting and exchange among nations. So welcome again, I'm really, really happy to have this discussion about a new book by two authors. And the third, that's not with us, Harry Hahn about it's called "Prisms of the People Power and Organizing in Twenty-first Century America." But the book will be coming out, I think in a month or two to be determined, but serum, I got to read it. Okay. So I got to read it so I can vouch for it as being a really excellent, interesting, very useful book. And I just wanna mention also that it's really special to have Liz and Michelle and my friends at Lucha on with us. I get to work with these guys pretty much on a daily basis as part of a different project called DPI but with very similar missions which is connecting and co-constructing research and projects and solutions with organizers and scholars together to kind of work on issues as a team. And I see that as also the part of the Ash mission as well. So we're really glad to be coming together here today. So let me introduce you to the panelists and I wanna just they might seem a little bit long but I thought it was really important for you to know a little bit of the background particularly of Tomas and Alex. So I'm just going to start and I'm sorry if they're a little bit long. So Alejandra Gomez was born in Pomona California to immigrant parents. She began her career in community organizing in 2007. During the beginning of Sheriff Joe Arpaio's racially charged criminal suppression sweeps that targeted immigrant communities. Seeing the fear and harassment her community was experiencing that was reminiscent of our own childhood. Alejandra began working with Maricopa citizens for safety and accountability to organize against Sheriff Arpaio after his and his unfair practices. Since our starting organizing Alejandra has focused her work on immigration rights through large-scale civic engagement efforts to bring out the Latino vote and direct action. Alejandra was the field manager for the Adios Arpaio Campaign that registered over 30,000 Latinos to vote. Rooted in her family's immigration struggle Alejandra led the organizing efforts and the fight for DAPA and expanded DACA at United We Dream National Network as the Deputy Organizing Director currently Alejandra serves as a Co-executive Director for the Arizona Center for Empowerment. And then we have her partner Tomas Robles who serves as the Co-executive Director of the Arizona Center for Empowerment. Tomas became involved in grassroots organizing and activism after SB 1070, which some of you will remember an anti-immigration bill that legalized racial profiling in Arizona and that was passed. Tomas became a community organizer in 2010, helping to promote civic engagement and comprehensive immigration reform. Since then, Tomas has worked with various organizations working for different causes such as immigrant and worker rights veterans' issues and housing discrimination. Thomas is the son of Mexican immigrants and was born in Tucson, Arizona and raised in Phoenix. He is a veteran of the United States Marine Corps and is a graduate of Arizona State University with a Bachelor of Arts in transporters studies with an emphasis on immigration policy and economy. And then we had the two authors of the book first Michelle Oyakawa, who is an assistant professor of Sociology at Muskingum University in Ohio. She studies the intersection of race, religion and social movements to her research on leaders and organizations. And she is, as I said, the co-author "prisms of the people" and has written several other works including "Black ministers and mobilization in the 21st century." And then finally Liz Mckenna She's a postdoctoral scholar at the Agoura Institute at Johns Hopkins and she studies left and right-wing political organizing in the United States and Brazil using multiple methods to examine one civil society organization's safeguard against authoritarianism. And when they become the primary carriers of it. She is the co-author of two books on grassroots organizing the one that we're gonna talk about today and another great book that I recommend called "Groundbreakers" how Obama's 2.2 million volunteers transformed campaigning in America. And then at the very end we're gonna have the Q and A from Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz who is in the Harvard Kennedy School and PA program and is also concurrently pursuing her MBA at Wharton. And we should all congratulate her 'cause she's she's actually graduating this month. So, right. So let's go get started. I'm gonna shoot a question at each of the panelists and then we'll go to a more group Q and A and I just wanna start off with turning it over to Liz to start us off with an overview of the book itself and sort of the framework that we're looking at, organizing in the book.
Elizabeth McKenna: Great. Tova thank you so much. Thank you to the Ash Center for hosting us and for everyone who is on this call today it's really exciting to see all of the people in the room virtually. So as Tova said, Michelle and I, and our esteemed colleague Harry Hahn Political Scientist have a book coming out. It was due to be published in December but COVID delays have pushed it back to June and now July, we think, but we're excited to give you an overview of the book right now and then most excited about having two protagonists in one of our main case studies on the call with us, Alex and Tomas. So I'll do a 10 minute overview and then we have 15 minutes for Alex and Tomas to tell their story. And then Michelle is gonna walk us through the highlights of the cases that we weren't able to cover. So here is the book cover very our pink Floyd aesthetic. It's called "Prisms of the People power and organizing in Twenty-First Century America." And the question that we asked in this book which we started research for in sort of the depths of despair of the fall of 2016 was how do organizations, build and exercise political power, given the improbability of their work? And so we set out to answer this question sort of in response to, of course everything that was going on in the world the kind of global illiberal right-wing authoritarian tilt and also in response to a long line of research which we kind of think of as the status quo bias. And so to start I'm, I've got this table here from Frank Baumgartner Political Scientist and colleagues ran a study published in 2009 where they wanted to understand whether or not there was any way to predict which kinds of resources predicted the outcome of congressional bills and policy passage. So they got about 500 bills and then they tallied up before the, before the votes were tallied up which side of either the proponents or opponents of the bill controlled greater resources and the list of the table here are the different types of resources they looked at. So high level government allies mid-level government allies, lobbying officials, lobbying expenditures, membership or people which side had more people, campaign contributions and so forth. And I'm gonna ask a little bit of audience participation in the chat to see before I show the results. Who, which of these resources do you think was most predictive of a winning on policy passage? This is the, at the national level, by the way. So just chat to the panelists. All right. I'm gonna read these out because I know not everyone can see it but we have some votes for lobby expenditures with $3 signs. We've got one vote for mid-level government allies another vote for lobbying, another one for lobbying more lobbying, campaign contributions. Okay. Business is another one we've got. All right. So sounds and we've got one vote for membership. So more and then we've got a hope, a hope for people a hopeful vote cast for people as well. So I know not everyone can see these in the chat but this is a really good kind of national experiment here. Okay. So the answer is most predictive were these top three. So 78% of the time the side that had more high-level government allies prevailed, followed by covered officials lobbying and then mid-level government allies. Now the sobering finding from this study this bottom half of the table is that only half the time. So a flip of the coin did decide with greater members. People actually win. So that's just a numerical count or the side with even lobbying expenditures and even and even money as well. So for all of those who voted about lobbying and money it turns out that the side that spends more doesn't necessarily always spend it's only 50% of the time. So that's what we mean when we say the status quo bias is that the work is quite improbable. And then you see this image here even when there are more people. So even when there are more, you know quantitative members on one side they don't necessarily outweigh the status quo bias. So that was our question. The way we went about researching it was to identify cases that fall in this table the low resource high power box. So what do we mean by that? We can think of lots of organizations that don't have very many resources, traditional resources and also don't exercise much political power. It's also possible to think of sort of that off diagonal organizations with a great high number of resources. So probably all of those resources on the table and also exercise high degree of political power. So the photo here is from a new book that just came out by Matt McComb about the NRA and how the NRA turned gun owners into a political force. So they have lots of people and extremely well organized based and they also have high level government connections. More interesting from a theoretical and a practical perspective are the cases that fall on these off diagonals. So organizations that actually do have access to a lot of resources. This is a picture of designed to represent Peter Scottsville research on highly resourced environmental movement organizations. So she wrote a piece in 2013 observing that there are a number of green organizations environmental groups that have access to huge war chest and yet exercise little power. But our interest was in this upper right-hand corner. So organizations that have traditionally fewer resources and yet were able to exercise a high degree of political power. So examples of scholarship in this tradition are Elizabeth Clemens The people's lobby. She studies in this book among other things, the women's movement which even before they had the right to vote. So they weren't even enfranchised political actors. They were able to exercise significant political legislative, political, and legislative power. And then a book by one Marshall Ganz, Ash center Scholar and Harvard Kennedy school lecturer, who is on this call. Thank you. Hello Marshall who wrote among, among other pieces of research on the United Farm Workers Movement the book called "why David sometimes wins." So how was it that the UFW was able to outmaneuver and out organize the far better resource counterparts the Teamsters? Spoiler alert the title of his 2000 AJS article is resources and resourcefulness. So our curiosity was could we identify contemporary movements in cases that fell in that box and identify commonalities? So to get some analytic leverage around it, the way we designed the research was to pick cases in the United States that operated in different political contexts. And this was in response to a large body of scholarship about the structural determinants of when movement succeed or fail. So in sociology it's called the political opportunity structure literature and we wanted to choose cases that were not necessarily operating all in favorable terrain, external terrain, because then we would simply be able to say that perhaps they won, perhaps they shifted power because of those external factors as opposed to something that they did some kind of agenetic and strategic choices that they made. So we landed on these four States as our core cases the purple dot here is, is designed to represent what they were at the time considered. Most of them were considered swing States or almost thing States. Here's a quick reminder of what the political landscape presidential vote looked like in our six States. So we had four court cases and two shadow cases, extension cases. So we're really excited to hear about this particular first panel about Arizona's this remarkable story that Alex and Tomas will talk us through going from a state that was pretty pretty red for many, many years. And then of course flipped in 2020. We also wanted to very other factors that sometimes are attributed or given the attribution for why movement succeed or fail. So things like population growth, diversity of the population, economic factors the density of civic organizations and union member rates. So again we wanted to find States that were cases that were operating in really vastly different political and economic environments. This is known as sort of a most different case selection strategy. So we could control for that. That was the background on the study. And then our first step because we were looking for cases of success outliers movements that were able to kind of buck the trend the status quo bias, we had to demonstrate and figure out ways we can actually measure power shifts. So I'm only gonna give one example in this section and Michelle is gonna walk us through the other cases. And then of course, Alex and Tomas will tell the story of Arizona. But the one example I'm gonna give here is the case that we studied in Virginia which was a rights restoration campaign. So up until recently, Virginia was one of only four States in the nation that permanently disenfranchised people with a felony record and the group that we were studying them New Virginia Majority built a multiracial base and pressured the governor two subsequent governors. So in a row, and finally, Terry McAuliffe who you see here, who ended up renfranchising one by one all of formerly incarcerated people who had who had been permanently disenfranchised. So that was their win. And we wanted to go beyond just kind of a visible policy when, because this as we know, power operates in multiple, at multiple levels in dynamic ways and not always in the most visible ways. So they had a policy win, but that wasn't enough. So we just, we figured out other ways or other methods by which we can measure power shifts. So in the case of Virginia what we did is we fielded a network survey of all of the Virginia House Delegates. And we asked them, we gave them a list of organizations that operate in the state and ask them a series of questions from which we built these network maps. So one of the questions was with which groups listed here do you, have you experienced any form of opposition? So what this very, very sparse network map is telling you is that only delegate 10 this golden rod one right here identified about five groups from which he or she had experienced opposition. This other group over here identified two groups and then delegate eight identified the Virginia Teachers' Association. But the vast majority of respondents in our survey just basically didn't say any groups for that but more interesting to us were questions that we asked about strategy. So we asked with which organizations in the state do you strategize? And here the network map looks a lot denser. So this meant that the delegates were citing organizations listed on the right as being organizations with which they strategized and New Virginia Majority ranked fifth in terms of it's the eigenvector value which is a measure of influence and network analysis behind national organizations. So the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the largest union in the State, the Virginia Teachers Association the League of Conservation Voters. So this was surprising to us. Well, could it be surprising on the face of it because New Virginia Majority was a small organization less than seven years old, had a much smaller budget as compared to all of these other organizations listed above it and only had I think, four or five staff members full time staff members at the time. So this was one of the ways we went about measuring power shifts beyond just the visible win. And we did that in different ways in each of the cases. So how do we answer that question? Now, this picture on the left looks a lot more promising. We've got the people who are finally outweighing the elephant moneybags over here on the left and this analytic step in our project took us to ask, okay, well what are the commonalities? What do the groups across all of these States working in different environments, building durable political power beyond just visible wins have in common. And we developed the metaphor kind of central metaphor of the book, which is The Prism and in the book, The Prism is the organization. And so the idea here is that organizations take in resources, be it money, people or any resources of a community that you can think about including allies, including elected officials and allies and make strategic choices about how they're going to design their internal prism. So there are consequences to how organizations decide to allocate resources for example, and then as a function of that they refract power outward in this sort of rainbow. The rainbow refraction of light is represents the kind of external manifestation of their power. So that's the sort of central idea behind the prism metaphor and the strategic logic of it is that as follows this kind of four step process that I'm gonna go through briefly before I turn it over to Alex and Tomas, but the kind of underlying premise is that movements work in uncertain contexts. This means that no amount of resources can necessarily guarantee success. And all of the movements in our cases recognize that, second we found that all of the leaders and organizers and member leaders in our case we're not necessarily interested primarily in an immediate, visible win. So rather their priority was maximizing the set of strategic choices that they could make. So how many different opportunities and different ways they could go about maneuvering in a situation was their primary interest not necessarily the bill passing or the elected official falling. And we can think of a couple of examples of this. I think Alex and Tomas will talk us through it. But for example, in 2012, the movement in Arizona sought to outlast jar pile and failed in 2012 before winning again in 2016. And it the way in which they, the way in which they built the campaign in 2012 redounded to the campaign in terms of capacity four years later. And then finally, to maximize the strategic choice that we found that all of the groups needed a constituency that had four key characteristics, the characteristics were that the base was independent meaning not beholden to some external actors assessment of their value, whether it's an elected official or an ally in DC or a philanthropist, the basis we're both flexible and committed. I'll talk through an example of that. And then they were populated by distributed strategists. So strategy was diffused throughout the base and organization. As I said I'll go through this very quickly just so to get the clarifying the concepts and then I'll turn it over to you, Alex and Tomas. But what do we mean by a base that is independent or has an independent source of power? So on the left is a network map from our Ohio case that Michelle will talk through a little bit later. The green node in the middle is the Executive Director of the Anchor Organization, Amos that we were setting there. And he was involved in a pretty big internal coalition fight with business leaders, with the superintendent of the public schools and other city elite in Cincinnati arguing on behalf of his base that about the specific tax mechanism that they were gonna use to fund universal preschool which was sort of the central theme of that case. And he wrote in his weekly reflection he turned over his weekly reflections for, I think three years of three years worth of weekly reflection data which was really great from a research perspective to understand sort of what was going through his mind as a social movement leader at that time. And he wrote this in February at sort of the height of the campaign where he was pushing back against the business elite about the specific mechanism that they use to fund preschool and a business leader pulled him aside and asked him "aren't you afraid you're going to make people angry?" And he wrote in his weekly reflection, I quickly said, no. I later realized why I could answer so quickly because of where my power comes from. Most people in the room from the chamber of commerce have power that is vested in and determined by their proximity to wealth and power via corporate leadership. They have to make certain trade-offs with their source of power, which means that they have to be careful what they say and how they say it. Lest someone get upset with them and upset their career and livelihood with organizing our power does not come from networking or proximity and access to people of wealth and influence that comes from a base to whom we are accountable. So this is an illustration of what we mean by building a base that is independent and not beholden to external assessments of power. And Michelle will give another example later. Second, the characteristics of having a base that is both committed and flexible we can illustrate through our Minnesota case. Faith in Minnesota is the name of the organization there that ran a campaign in 2018 to influence the outcome of a gubernatorial election in the State. And so what this meant is they actually equipped members of their base to become DFL Democratic Party delegates and cast their vote at the primary kind of caucus election that I said, you know Michelle will again talk us through the details of that. But the key point here is that those 150 people members of ISAIAH, Faith in Minnesota, base went into the caucus, supporting different, different candidates. They did not all agree necessarily on whom they wanted to vote for. There were four or more gubernatorial candidates that Faith in Minnesota members backed, but they realized that if they were going to act together as a collective and not kind of respond to each of these candidates trying to pick them off individually and actually exercise power as a collected they had to all stand together. And indeed 100% of them chose to back the same candidate and were decisive in her winning the caucus. And finally strategy we found across all of the cases was not concentrated in a single kind of genius, general official at the top of the organization, but was rather distributed throughout. And this data, again, come from Faith in Minnesota, ISAIAH it is network data based on a campaign that they ran in 2019, where you have in the middle, the organizer on staff, Vivian the purple nodes surrounding her are the super leaders. I think there is actually an ISAIAH super leader on this call. I noticed just based on that, based on their name in the chat, but these kinds of intermediate tiers of leaders were then able to strategize equip and develop what they call Democracy Builders shown us the blue nodes in just a month. And then finally when it was time for them to mobilize around the election those democracy builders strategized engaged and mobilized more than 2000 voters in that particular municipal election. So the idea here is that Vivian the staff organizer was not necessarily the one kind of doing all of the strategizing throughout but rather it was devolving that through various subsequent intermediate tiers of leadership from this data demonstrates that. Okay, so that is sort of the, the final piece of my overview. I apologize for going a few minutes over here. I'm actually just gonna flip forward a little bit because I don't wanna lose any more time from Alex and Tomas's bit. And if we have time, we'll go back to the other slides that I just flipped through very quickly. But here's the quick summary and conclusion is that we found that the organizations across all of our cases shared keep those four key characteristics. They were independent, committed, flexible, and populated by relationally connected network of member strategists. And the key takeaway here that we found is that building constituency internally and exercising power externally operate in mutually reinforcing ways. And I really look to hearing now from Alex and Tomas will tell us the story of Arizona in depth. Thank you.
Alejandra Gomez: Thank you so much. It is an honor to be on here with you all. And as I'm seeing all of the questions from my teacher and organizing Marshall Ganz I'm a little bit nervous, but also excited. Co-executive Director of Arizona Center for Empowerment and Living United for Change in Arizona Lucha alongside of Tomas And as Tova was sharing my entry point into organizing and my entry point into the political arena was because of a set of experiences that I had as a child. So not your traditional entry point into democratic politics, but shaped by real challenges and struggles that I lived firsthand through my father's experiences and experiences as a undocumented immigrant in California. I just remember my father bringing us into the living room and sharing with the family. I am going to be detained or deported if we do not leave California. And as a child, listening to that and wondering, you know what's gonna happen to your hero as a family we decided that it was time to leave. And when we came to Arizona what we found was much of the same. And so now as an adult faced with the same type of anti-immigrant sentiment that we were experiencing in California, what I learned then is that you can't run from bad politicians. You can't run from bad policy and that you have to lean in and find your people and fight, but the stakes are different when you're someone that has lived through a particular experience because so to speak, right you have more skin in the game because you have lived firsthand that pain. And so for my family, when our PIO started doing the raids in the workplace here, when our PIO started doing checkpoints on the street, and I now knew that I wasn't the only person in the community that was experiencing this. I found myself with a clipboard in hand and fist up marching at the Capitol. And that's where I also found my people. That is where I met Tomas. And since that moment, our organization has dedicated itself to finding other people in the community building relationship with people that have had these sets of experiences, whether it be immigration, or we like to think often that communities that are, or have experienced issues within immigration that that's their only singular issue, but that's not the truth, right? The truth is that healthcare access to healthcare, inability to put food on the table With so many other issues are the realities that our communities are facing in addition to their status. And so for us, it was important to build an organization that was responsive to all of these issues but where we can also create a political home. And so though Lucha was not where I started. It is where I continue building and where we continue inviting our communities to join us in action so that we can continue building. And I think what we now have is because we believed in our work and we centered a couple of things we believed in redefining power. What does power mean to us? Because it is not 50 plus one. Centering relationships and leadership development so that we can continue passing the torch. As we continue to build power, we needed to be able to have the staff people to help those in governing. We needed to be able to move organizers into governing but be able to maintain the infrastructure that we built within the State. And then also politicians are not the litmus of our power. Our role as organizations are to contest for power. So for us it is to be able to have a code governing approach. And then also as we're uncovering and we're having this conversation about data I think what I will bring into this is our community has been oppressed for so long and there is significant inequity but the dominant culture defines how we research how we measure data and often the sets of data and the way that we research are responsive to the dominant culture, but not how we actually need to go out and speak in very nuanced and culturally responsive ways to communities that have been disenfranchised over generations. And so with that, I will pass it over to Tomas.
Tomás Robles: Thanks Alex. Hello again, good morning or afternoon depending on where you're at in the country. Tomas Robles Co-executive Director of ACE and Lucha. My upbringing was similar as we, I was born in Tucson Arizona and grew up actually in a border town the first few years and a town that before Google maps existed, you couldn't find on a regular map, which is not quite Arizona. And so my story is, is littered with family members and I experiencing racial profiling especially down at the border, border patrol was there at all times that has jurisdiction over every law enforcement organization because they're within a hundred miles of the border. And so for us, a daily occurrence was dealing with, with you know, being seen as the other. And so the most, the most glaring example that has formed my activism and organizing through the years was when I was young. I was 12. We were driving from visiting family in Naco at the border and driving to Phoenix. And then we were, we got to, we were broken down because we had two flat tires on the road of the city called Mirana. And so at the time it was '94. So no cell phones, we couldn't reach out to anybody. And after about an hour in the middle of a June summer a police officer pulled over from behind. And so as a 12 year old, you're taught, you know police are the good guys. They're gonna, he's gonna find a way to help us something like that. And so what ended up happening is that he ended up accusing my dad of having weapons or drugs in the car. And despite the fact that we're a family of five the police officer thought we were criminals. And so without a warrant without even asking you pull my dad out of the car and forced him to have his hands on the hood in the middle of summer a steel car and 106 degrees can cause burns. So that's actually what happened to my dad's hands. And then without a warrant, he went to the trunk and searched our car and found nothing but made a mess. And the whole time I'm staring at him and I'm a 12 year old. So this is actually, I'm actually reflecting on this and processing as it's happening but I don't know what to say after the cop finds nothing. He doesn't apologize. It doesn't ask if we need help with water he just gets in his car and he leaves. And so we're still stranded there but now feeling like we were just made we were just criminals in the State and not actual residents. And so that really stuck with me in 2010, until 2010 when SB 1070 passed. And then my experience became not just the law of the land but also encourage that, you know law profiling that this happens. And so 2010, we began organizing, I met Alex and we started really forming a new world of Arizona so that we can prevent SB 1070 from happening again. And as we began to organize as we began to do leadership development we found ourselves consistently fighting immigration an anti-immigrant bills at the legislature. And we knew this was not sustainable. It wasn't sustainable for us to only be on a defense every single year. And so the building out of deep relationships the leadership development that we needed, because for us we were brand new to organizing and sober thousands of people. So we knew that in order for us to continue this movement we would need to organize ourselves out of the job that we currently had and put new people in place. And when Alex and I eventually met up again after 2012 to form Lucha we finally had an opportunity to build out an organization and the vision that we saw and that we were experiencing through our work with other nonprofits. But we also could build it in the vision where we felt was most conducive to this new way of doing it because the old way of organizing for us was no longer cutting it. And we needed to ensure that we found a way to take care of our staff and our members, as well as we, as you know with as much grit and as much passion as we did working 12 to 16 hour days registering people to vote and getting them organized. And then from Lucha's perspective we also saw that immigration while a flagship issue wasn't the most important issue to our communities. It took listening sessions and also taking a step back and realizing as Luchas like, we don't always have to work on immigration just because we're from Arizona. We can work on the economic justice issues that are happening in our State that are happening in our communities. And these day-to-day conversations led us to really see how can we affect change at the state level if we don't have to what traditional folks would think of power which is a progressive majority in our chambers. And so we knew that there's no way for us to get a majority at this moment at the state legislature, even if we did we wouldn't have the level of progressive elected officials yet to be able to pass really progressive policies. And the third part is while we do have one option in the State, and that is changing policy at the ballot which meant a whole new endeavor for us which meant that as two leaders of color building out a multimillion dollar campaign that not only was it going to get people excited at the level that we did not expect but we also got opposition from those that are from those that claim to be on our side because we were dreaming too big for our for in their minds, our State. And so it really tested our notion of how it is that we organize by building up these leaders and putting them in positions to succeed but also taking risks when we're told we're not to. And so in 2016, we started to form a plan to really put the put Arizona upside down. And that is, we wanted to run our own ballot initiative. And so we ran the prop 206 valid initiative which would, which was to raise the minimum wage. At that time, it was $8 and 90 cents. We wanted to raise it to $12 by 2020. And then we wanted to include five days of earned sick time. And we started with that notion and we started really organizing around those issues. And it really started to come out in terms of people were now overtaking the politicians that were saying, don't do this, or don't work on this. And at the same time we decided we're still gonna take out our pile. And so I'll pass it back to Alex to talk about how we were able to balance the Arpaio campaign and prop 206. And then after those, how we move forward to keep building four years later after that, I guess.
Alejandra Gomez: Thank you so much Tomas. Always heart-wrenching to hear your story and what your dad had to go through. What, what we did in 2016 was extremely exhausting, but we knew. And the thing that we kept telling ourselves is that we have to stretch. We have to stretch because the moment calls for it. And so what we did was we decided to build up two organizations at the same time, ACE and Lucha and we were going to run a ballot initiative which was prop 206 to be able to basically learn the process of running a ballot initiative and keep that intelligence in-house so that we can replicate it with our leaders while we were also what we learned during the Arpaio campaign. This is before the bust Arpaio campaign the Arpaio campaign is that we registered 34,000 people. We were able to get our communities onto the permanent early voting list. And that year Helen Purcell, which was the then County recorder throughout 180,000 provisional ballots Arpaio that year won by 80,000 votes. Arpaio would have been gone that year but due to the systemic voter suppression and the targeting of Latino surnames at the County recorder, our communities had to again face another more time with Arpaio in office. And so we said once, and for all knowing these numbers that we can actually drive people to vote, that we can now scale our and scale our efforts in our civic engagement work through the coalitions that we had built. We decided to also build the last Arpaio campaign. And so we created another C4 with a set of other two organizations because the moment was such an important moment and that year in 2016, we had incredible victories. We increased the minimum wage. We ousted Arpaio at the ballot box and we were able to get rid of Helen Purcell and elect Adrian Fontes. And so the short term focus on, on the electoral outcomes were based on long-term analysis that we had done that we needed to expand the electorate and that we needed to pay attention to certain offices, which in this case were the County recorder's offices. And then also that we needed to be able to circumvent the legislative process that was blocking our community from being able to move forward with legislation but the country had a national fallout with electing Trump. And so as we're starting to see gains in the State because of the engagement of our communities, because of the politicizing of our communities, what we started to see nationally is that, you know, there we were not having the same outcomes. And so all of that to say that for us it was also a very strategic and important decision to have a co-director ship because it allowed us to scale. And most of our organization has a code structure to the directors so that we have thought partners so that we also are able to increase the output because we're building up two organizations at the same time, which are separate but sister organizations, even though we're C4 fronting. And so this allows us to now we are going to open up a new office in Cochise County , which we are so excited. That is a fourth office of Lucha in a short amount of time because we needed to be able to expand out of Maricopa County. And be able to engage in statewide discourse around the issues that are affecting our communities because we believe in being able to engage our communities from the bottom up to make sure that our communities policy priorities are reflected when we're building out our legislation at the efficacy.
Tova Wang: Thank you guys so much, I think we're going to turn to Michelle to just give us a few quick highlights of some of the other organizations that are studied in the book that are great examples of what they're talking about.
Michelle Oyakawa: Sure. Thanks. Okay. Yeah. I'm just really quickly gonna go through some of the highlights of our other cases. And then, you know, of course feel free to ask us to expand in the Q and A session. Next slide please. All right. So New Virginia Majority, this is the one we're looking at ongoing efforts to restore voting rights to returning citizens. And in this case, we looked in particular at how the organization kind of was strategically using both an inside game and an outside game to influence state legislators. So we interviewed legislators and their allies and conducted a network survey. Next slide please. Okay. So Amos Project is in Ohio. This is one where we were looking at a preschool promise ballot initiative issue 44. This was a money municipal levy to fund universal preschool and K-12 education basically passing this meant raising taxes in a conservative area. So that was one of the kind of interesting things about this campaign. We did a network survey to track change and influence among business and community leaders over the course of the campaign. And this just shows the change over time. So in our network survey, we looked at, you know, who is strategizing with whom? So in 2013, Amos, our case organization is, you know, green dot. So kind of on the outside of the network. And then, you know, in 2016, they had in part in large part through efforts by their executive director to kind of build out their base and build his network of relationships. They moved more into the center of of strategy for, you know, for all of the kind of entities that we interviewed. Okay. Next slide. All right. And then our final case was ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota. ISAIAH is 501 C3 Faith Minnesota 501 C4. So, you know, like Alex was talking about that can be a strategic kind of configuration for organizations to have the Faith delegate campaign that we at mobilized leaders to caucuses for the 2018 gubernatorial primary. And their goal was to have the candidates adopt the "Faith agenda" that the base had decided on together. So in this one, we measured the power shift by looking at governor candidates rhetoric. And we did this through Twitter. What we were interested in, in seeing is, you know were ISAIAH leaders able to influence these these candidates, these governor candidates to kind of adopt ISAIAH's language. So next slide please. And so this shows that so we looked at certain words that are really common that ISAIAH uses a lot like abundance, dignity and we counted how many times candidates use those words and tweets. And during the kind of primary season the candidate that ISAIAH was our that Faith in Minnesota was supporting was Erin Murphy. And she used the language a really good amount. I would also point to the general election. So Aaron Murphy ended up losing the primary, but, you know ISAIAH's influence was still certainly visible and measurable in the general election as well, in terms of influencing one of ISAIAH's goals was to make sure that candidates addressed race as well as class. And so we were interested in seeing the extent to which they were able to do that. And just to kind of get at something that Alex mentioned as well there is a challenge associated with our organizations trying to work through these things and, and build power. And that is the fact that they are working within a system of organizations that make that can make it difficult, right? So this is a quote from Doran Schrantz who's the Executive Director of ISAIAH "I'm of the opinion that there's not going to be a significant people powered independent movement funded by foundations. It's just that the philanthropic world has its own momentum and its own set of priorities. The things that's depressing is that you take some of your most talented organizers and you turn all their strategic energy on milking that thing, the world of philanthropy. And then that thing can also defang you. It turns you into a celebrity turns you into, into a commodity. So I've also seen that happen to people that they do really good organizing that becomes this big thing. And then you get positioned inside that whole system. And all of a sudden you could raise ten million dollars 'cause you're the new celebrity. So then you build a big national thing. And now you're a hustler. I mean, you hustle and broker, but the minute you float up into that thing and you get ungrounded from the base you turn into something different and you're still dependent on the base, but instead of it being an authentic relationship, you're essentially buying it." Right? So throughout our work, we found a lot of ways in which organizations are kind of under pressure to behave in ways that are, you know, counter to building the kind of base that we that we think, you know, helps them to build power. And so that is an ongoing challenge for for these organizations. And that's all. Thank you.
Tova Wang: Okay. Thank you all so much. And I want to go straight to Q and A because we have a lot of great questions, but I just want to make a note of one thing, which is since I do, I am in the world of ACARA a little bit and Ash, this is such a great example of the ways in which scholars and organizers and other types of practitioners can collaborate. And co-construct research that can help organizers on the ground to shift power and something that we can do going forward. And also we'll look at the different types of metrics we can use to evaluate shifts in power and measure shifts in power, other than, you know email lists and how many people you have on an email list or the number of voter registration forms you collected. And I think that's really important to do going forward. So I'm now going to ask Yasmine to take on the Q and A.
Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz: Thank you. So look, if you have questions, please add them to the Q and A chat. And I'll reading from there. One of the questions that came up as what can large organizations learn from social movements and community organizations? And this goes to any of the speakers.
Elizabeth McKenna: Alex and Tomas do you wanna respond?
Alejandra Gomez: Yeah. Can I repeat the question? So what can large bureaucratic organizations learn from grassroots organizations?
Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz: Yes.
Alejandra Gomez: Okay, awesome. That's a big question. So the challenge often is all I'll seek the kind of like problem, and then I'll just it over to the Tomas. But for me in working with organizations that either have a massive bureaucracy are part of are part of, kind of like the, the status quo operating or have a service orientation and take government contracts often are very risk averse. And because of that risk aversion, what we often find is that there is an upholding of the status quo, right? They don't wanna get involved in getting very political often will not engage with community organizations like ours. And so I think the first lesson is that we are not going to be able to service our way out of the challenges and the oppression that our communities are facing. And we are going to have to take political stances. And, or have an open door policy and engage with each other, particularly I don't know if this happens in other States but this is a challenge that we're facing in Arizona where a lot of these institutions do not see grassroots partners and particularly because they are a people of color led as strategic.
Tomás Robles: Yeah. I think that Marshall Ganz proposed against his quote on resources versus power it's ones when as a large organization, when that, when your dependence on your resources is usually corporations and government funding, you now have limited yourself on how much you can actually push on the system. If you're being fed by the system you're choosing you're gonna choose not to, you know disrupt that resourcing. And so for us, it's really about calling to the history of those larger bureaucratic organizations on what they used to stand for and calling out the fact that they've gone to a model that is very much capitalistic in terms of we're going to build it as a business instead of a community organization. And so for us, it's really about deciding who we work with and who we not, but never shying from who we are genuinely which is an organization meant to disrupt.
Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz: Yeah. Thanks for that. This question is for Liz and Michelle. So you, in your research, did you see a difference between movements that were centered around one person like in the past, or did you see a difference in movements a center around or an organization or more than one person?
Michelle Oyakawa: Yes.So one of the characteristics of the, of all of the organizations that we looked at is that they did have, you know, some form of distributed leadership model where we call, you know we call bleeders on the ground distributed strategists, right? So even a lot of, a lot of different people were contributing ideas and leadership. There were some orgs that had more, you know had leaders that were more central I would say New Virginia Majority was one where they had an operative and the State House that was you know, very effective at kind of, you know, navigating you know, those, those halls of power. And so she, you know, was, was really influential. So I think it's one of, we don't I don't think our research really answers that question of like, which is better but we do have examples where, you know, the kind of having a more central leader can, can be helpful for and, and the New Virginia Majority's case helpful for minority groups in particular to kind of get their, their concerns heard.
Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz: Thank you for that. And for Liz, so little questions in the trout since around the ecology of the types of organizing and it was what type of civic action does well or not so well and needs to be complemented or supplemented by other forms of organizing?
Elizabeth McKenna: This is a great question from Carmen. And I think it also combines a few of the other things that came up in the chat about leadership development. So related to the previous one as well but I wanted to show a quick slide that I flipped through really quickly at the end to just try to give us a visualization of the different kind of typology or as the question exercise different types of organizing that organizations do. So one is sort of what we might think of as the electoral machine or there's a boom and a bust in even years. So you see this kind of light blue line at the top is influx of volunteers in 2016, and then a drop off in 17 and then an influx again in 2018, another type of organizing organization is what we might think of as like a mass action organization that does direct action creates tension. I saw the way, it was a question in the chat about the Floyd uprisings as well. So we might think of organizations that have maybe a small number of committed volunteers, but have big actions. This is data from an organization that was doing direct actions in response to ice raids in Arizona and then a third type of organization. This is Lucha data which is to answer the question about what these kinds of words do really well is the leadership development. So it's steady sustained structured growth over time of individual leaders who are doing that kind of strategizing work that Michelle and Tomas and Alex were talking about. But I wanna be really careful to say that it's not as though, like one of these is better than the other. And so the question about ecology is really, really helpful. So, like I said, if we think about the mass uprisings and response to the murder of George Floyd, largest protests the United States had ever seen these are, this is a map of the New York Times of where all those protests occurred including in places and cities that were like 95% white. And so Joy Cushman, one of our collaborators and movement leaders has a really interesting quote. I think about this, where she says "the orgs that are building more power are able to wheel different types of power. It's not all voting, it's not all civil disobedience." And I think the Arizona case is one of, one of the most interesting ones that we looked at because it really is a movement. So in some of the other cases, we looked at a single anchor organization, but as Alex and Tomas described, they were part of an organizing ecology that grew up over the past 10 years and was able to have all of these wins at the municipal level, the state level and then actually flipping the state in 2020. So we have, we have some data to like, look at what it actually looks like to strategize, not just at the level of members, but also in a movement in a movement organization. So I don't know, Alex, and Tomas if you want me to show that graph of like what the state organizing looked like in 2006 versus 16, or we can just go to the next question because I know there were a lot of questions for you guys about how you actually do that leadership development.
Tomás Robles: Yeah. And so we'll leave it up to the panel. We have more questions and then we can just go into a little bit without that.
Tova Wang: Yeah. We probably have, we're already over time. We probably keep talking. So if we can just have one last quick question and then just a minute or two to wrap up.
Yasmin Serrato-Muñoz: The last question, how do you come about the process of building future leaders but also learning as you go, because as you mentioned it is before practice to kind of keep up and catch up but also think about future strategies.
Tomás Robles: Yeah. I'll jump in and throw the Alex real quick. I think in a super quick way to describe it as we have a lot of accountability measures in between and we take everyone from certain steps that we we learned this lesson a long time ago which is never put a square peg in a round hole. And with staff it's very similar, like certain just because a staff member is great at one thing doesn't mean that's where they're going to want to work in this moment. And you have to find where it fits for them along with their strengths. That, and yeah. And so I'll pass it to Alex to talk a little bit more in detail of it.
Alejandra Gomez: Yeah. To, to dovetail off of what Tomas just said. We have a ladder of engagement for all of our members. However, we create space to really identify and have conversations with our members to determine where they feel passion where they feel called to lead. And we engage them, you know at the level where they come in. And so most oftentimes we have been engaging folks that come in through a services component, but then they attend one of our actions and they're ready to take additional action. So it's a combination of relationship and being data-driven to be able to understand how many times has this person come out to an event how many times has this person taken an online action or an offline action that come out to the state Capitol and begin to lean on them a little bit more, can you you know, begin to organize folks in your community. And then that person takes additional leadership. And what we end up finding is that we then begin to onboard a lot of these leaders that take significant leadership within the organization. And for us, what, what we're really also proud of is that we've had volunteers that have been with us since they were 14 and they stay with they'll go off to college and then they'll come back and they'll continue either organizing with us or volunteering with us, but it really does become a political home for, for our members which creates consistency, 'cause these are also the people that are the messengers within communities.
Tova Wang: I'm really sorry to have to stop it there. Thank you all so much. This is, I mean, you can see from the chat room it was so interesting and helpful for everyone involved. Thank you all so much for joining.
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Presenter: You've been listening to AshCast, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation's podcast. If you'd like to learn more, please visit ash.harvard.edu or follow the Ash Center on social media @harvardash.
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