Melanie Breault
Ana Maria Archila standing in front of a mural done by artist and organizer Amir Dread at the Center for Popular Democracy offices in Brooklyn, NY.
On the Friday the Senate Judiciary Committee was set to vote to nominate Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Ana Maria Archila was supposed to get on a train back to New York City. It had been a long week of protesting in Washington, D.C.
But some friends suggested they pay one last long-shot visit to Arizona Republican Senator Jeff Flake—the only committee member who still appeared undecided. Then Archila and fellow activist Maria Gallagher saw reporters huddled around a phone outside Flake’s office. He had just announced that he would vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Suddenly, Flake fled his office—not from the front door, but another door—in a full run toward the elevators. The reporters followed suit, and so did Archila and Gallagher.
“Running behind him, that is what gave us so much adrenaline,” Archila tells The Progressive. She and Gallagher caught up and started telling Flake their stories of sexual assault, hoping to connect with him on a human level. “‘Oh, you’re running? Let me tell you what is going to happen!’”
“Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me,” Gallagher now-famously told the Senator.
Archila, the co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy and a twenty-year professional community organizer, says the whole encounter came from an organizing tactic known as “bird-dogging.” Because of how increasingly difficult it has become to schedule a meeting or have a direct conversation with representatives in Congress, organizers have learned that following an elected official with a camera and a story to tell can be politically effective. As Archila puts it, “The disruption is as much part of the story as the stories themselves.”
The whole encounter in the elevator came from an organizing tactic known as “bird-dogging.”
Flake voted to move Kavanaugh’s nomination forward—on the condition that a week-long FBI investigation take place before the Senate floor vote. His encounter with the two activists was seen as one of the factors that drove his decision.
Though Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed to the Supreme Court, the work of Archila and Gallaugher stands as a clear example of the power of organizing. What Fox News anchor Laura Ingraham dismissed as the rantings of two “paid protestors” and President Donald Trump chided as the work of “paid professionals” is actually an integral part of a democratic system.
“It may seem uncivil, but think about it: they are an elected official and they work for us,” says Darius Gordon, who works with Archila as a national field organizer at the Center for Popular Democracy. “We put them in these positions. There are not a lot of jobs in the United States of America where if you are not held accountable you continue to have a job.”
As Gordon puts it, community organizers are people who see “holes in society, holes in their communities” and want to fix them. The way they do it is to try and bring more people into the fold, and use civic engagement, and “just being citizens” as tools.
“We are talking with elected officials, who are also very organized,” he adds. “Community organizers are doing that on a grassroots level, on a very person-to-person level.”
Charlene Carruthers, author and founding national director of BYP100 (Black Youth Project 100), knows this all too well.The fifteen-year professional activist and community organizer says the work of reforming and dismantling systems in order to bring about change involves pulling people in from various lived experiences and building the leadership of those who have been historically most marginalized.
“[Community organizing] is work. This is my job,” she says. “Our work is marginalized in the same way that we’re marginalized in life.”
BYP100 was convened in 2013 by a group of young black activists to address a fundamental question: What does the social justice movement look like beyond electoral politics?
“We work to address the material conditions of people—quality housing, education, labor,” she said. “That’s what our work is about. People are part of the process to ending apartheid in their communities.”
This concept of community organizing as a key component of democracy—and a fundamental element of political change on the left—is not new. Organizations like the Highlander Research & Education Center in New Market, Tennessee have been doing it for eighty-five years—including training some of the best-known activists of the Civil Rights era, such as Rosa Parks.
It was this kind of work that inspired Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, now co-executive director at Highlander.
“I found civil rights elders who have been doing this work for longer than I’ve been alive and had theories of change that made me want to do something and made me want to be accountable to something bigger than myself,” she says. “You can’t be out here willy nilly throwing tactical spaghetti at the wall. You have to have a theory that informs your practice.”
Henderson says a big piece of this is being able to identify and support emerging movements.
“When we talk about training, we’re not just talking about people who can shut down streets and knock on doors and win elections and write articles,” she says. “We’re talking about people that can help put together a broadband network. We’re talking about making sure our people have everything they need to live holistically well lives.”
“You can’t be out here willy nilly throwing tactical spaghetti at the wall. You have to have a theory that informs your practice.”
Ericka Stallings runs the Center for Neighborhood Leadership program at the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development, a training and support center for organizing in New York City. While other training programs have come and gone, the Center for Neighborhood Leadership is celebrating a decade in operation. (Full disclosure: I work for this program doing their communications and alumni outreach.)
Part of this involves organizing in ways “that are expansive rather than narrow,” she says, involving people from marginalized communities. “Our organizing will ultimately be more effective and more grounded in a true commitment to justice, if the primary actors are directly impacted people.”
Since Trump was elected, the scale of organizing has ramped up as more people have become politically engaged—including veterans, long abandoned as a constituency by the left. Common Defense, an organization born out of the 2016 election, is among those organizing veterans and military families.
“A lot of us who have done formal and informal [organizing] work, especially women in this sector, saw the 2016 election as an awakening moment for our country,” says Pam Campos, Common Defense executive director. “As a country that is supposed to be the beacon of freedom in the world, our civic life was really not that active before Donald Trump.”
As the daughter of an immigrant mother who grew up working-poor class, Campos was politicized at a young age and enlisted in the U.S. Air Force at eighteen. One of the reasons she established Common Defense was to dispel the myth that veterans are all cis, white, conservative, Christian men. She wants to help veterans to take back their agency and claim their own narratives.
“There are more people who are trained on how to bring people together in concentrated and calculated ways, and I think that serves the country well.”
“The process has been to build our political voice and power in key places were progressives are not always found,” she says. “We as veterans go home to places like Missouri and Montana and we have to build our own voice and organize locally. At the end of the day, what organizing is about is to hold power accountable, to check power, to check corruption, and to really shepherd in the values that society aspires to be that comes from the grassroots.”
When Gordon of Center for Popular Democracy was first starting his career, he didn’t even realize being a community organizer was an actual job. He says the term “paid protestor” needs to be flipped—and that we need a narrative that justifies paying organizers to put food on their table as they carry out essential work.
Ultimately, organizers agree, this paid work is about building leadership, especially among the most marginalized people, so headlines don’t continue to read: “Did two women in an elevator just change everything?”
“I think folks now in this Trump era are more energized and are looking for places to go,” Gordon says. “There are more people who are trained on how to bring people together in concentrated and calculated ways, and I think that serves the country well.”