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Many indicators of well-being for black communities haven’t improved since the last generation. And if we don’t invest in newer and more innovative organizing strategies we will continue to be outflanked by the opposition.
We can’t continue to pretend a 1960’s organizing model is adequate to deal with an environment where digital ads, disinformation campaigns, decentralized threats, and big data structure the ecosystem. That means structures, coalitions, gatekeepers & strategies need to be changed.
Some of the most organized contexts can be ineffective because they’re hamstrung by bureaucracy, competition for funding, too many cooks in the kitchen, no experience with digital organizing and generational issues that prevent newer and effective strategies from being deployed.
And often the most effective campaigns happen because they’re lean and able to move quickly in response to issues that evolve rapidly and not because of they’re large organizations or coalitions with a lot of funding that can at best put out a statement 3 weeks after the fact.
The organizing ecosystem changed. Funding or coalition size doesn’t equal results. Results come when you apply rigorous methods to identify solutions and use all scalable strategies to advocate at the right place at the right time. That requires the ability to move quickly.
It requires being able to create platforms that can involve and onboard people beyond what any one organization or coalition can claim as membership. Nobody can claim a right to any given bill or policy affecting the entire population of a city or state. It’s bigger than that.
There are millions of people who care about *any* given social issue. And that means if we are treating 3 or 5 orgs as owners of those issues we actually exclude the vast majority of people and energy and potential to make change. Crowdsource the energy. Connect people to action.
Institutions and organizations are players in an ecosystem so much bigger and more connectable than that. Transformational change requires engaging and building capacity of people in thousands of local jurisdictions simultaneously. That requires decentralized action.
Once you create coalitions/structures with processes that require newcomers or new strategies to take 2 or 3 weeks to adopt you’ve foreclosed the potential to make impact in today’s political environment. You can’t influence a 24 hr news cycle with 3 week decision cycles. Period.
If you have a large organization where people can’t tweet or respond to current issues as they evolve without having to wait on higher ups to approve those statements then you’ve kept them out the conversation and prevented your org from impacting the national debate. Failure.
