On November 16, 2021, New York Foundation and North Star Fund hosted an online conversation about Harnessing the Power of the New Electorate, the second report in our Streets to Statehouse series looking at the critical role of hyper-local grassroots organizing in building electoral power.
Special thanks to grassroots leaders Fahd Ahmed of DRUM: Desis Rising Up and Moving and Juanita Lewis of Community Voices Heard for sharing their brilliance and leading us in a lively conversation about how organizers can build a more inclusive, accountable, and transformative democracy.
New York’s 2021 elections offer many lessons—but a key one is that we must deeply invest in a statewide organizing infrastructure. But don’t just take our word for it, you can check out the recording here:
Jenn Ching: Thanks, everyone for joining us today. My name is Jenn Ching, my pronouns are she and her. I’m the executive director at North Star Fund. Welcome to Streets to State House: Harnessing the Power of the New Electorate. And yes, we could have chosen a shorter title, but every word here was vital. We’re really excited to be joined today by some wonderful speakers, but Rickee and I just wanted to take a few moments to introduce ourselves and to share some background of what sort of brought and germinated this particular report and webinar. Rickee, would you like to introduce yourself?
Rickee Mananzala: Sure, thanks, Jenn. Hi, everybody. My name is Rickee Mananzala. My pronouns are he, him and his, and I am about four months into my new role as executive director of the New York Foundation. So great to see so many familiar faces on the screen today. Glad to be here with you all and supporting this important work together.
Jenn Ching: So why are we all here? So I just wanted to open by sharing a little bit of background on the reports that really brought this webinar together. A really popular question I would say that probably North Star Fund and New York Foundation together often receive is why as a funder or as a donor, should we fund smaller groups when we really can see very clearly the impact and scale of larger national or regional organizations, right? And particularly since 2017, I think a number of philanthropy spaces have kind of posited to say we obviously have very big problems in U.S. democracy, and therefore the solutions must be also scaled accordingly right to size and severity. But what Streets to Statehouse is is it’s essentially a two part report series that I would like to say really makes the case for why and how funders and donors and really anyone interested in protecting democracy must support hyperlocal grassroots organizing as a core strategy for achieving long term transformative wins.
Our first report, which was released in early 2020, made the case that hyper local grassroots organizing is necessary to achieve long term statewide policy wins. In other words, how does organizing move an electorate towards transformative action? And we examine the role of grassroots organizers in two seminal campaigns, the Green Light Campaign, which was for driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, a campaign that had numerous high profile losses over decades of work, and Housing Justice for All, another decades long sort of campaign that resulted in expanding, for the first time in decades, rent regulation. And at the time when we released the Streets to State House report, for the first report, we had discussed internally the need to create a companion or a follow up piece that really examined the role of hyper local grassroots organizing towards building electorate power from within. Or how does organizing itself transform local democracy? And this really came about from feedback that we received as soon as we released the report from philanthropic partners that there continued to be really less interest in funding local grassroots organizing around elections and democracy protection. Because again, these questions of scale and sort of this view that in a world of limited resources, that where, you know, people really wanted to move their investments into larger organizations and spaces. Well, what we have seen since 2020, certainly and over and over again over the past several years, is that these traditional vectors for philanthropic investment in moving a progressive agenda, whether it’s media, statewide offices, creating coattail effects, coordinated litigation, these are no longer really the central points for where hot issues are being debated and won, right? We are in a time where huge questions are being controversially debated at a very local level. School board elections, town councils, right? It is these regional and local spaces, neighbor to neighbor, where power has to be built.
So after 2020 and amidst COVID, we really sought to follow up with our first report and to broaden our examination from legislative advocacy to really why and how grassroots organizers really play a critical role in local democracy and why philanthropic partners must support this work as an equal companion strategy to broader democracy protection. And I would say add, especially in New York, right? We love to bathe in the fiction of a blue sudsy New York or a blue New Jersey or blue Virginia, right? And what we’re really seeing now is that we are across the country and especially in New York, reflective of highly polarized local political spaces. And we need to cement the support of local grassroots organizing, building the power of Black voters, Indigenous voters, voters of color, and new voters. So our aim for this report was really to show the complex and very nuanced role of organizers within this broader political ecosystem. That the stronger the grassroots ecosystem, the stronger the local democracy, from the system itself to voting to who becomes elected, and that organizers are not just on the streets outside agitators, but are effective changemakers bringing about transformative wins. And for a theme that North Star Fund has touted since our founding, what is people power? Well, people power is still also pragmatic power. People power means building power from within and outside political structures, often simultaneously. So I really first just want to thank our report authors Alexa Kasdan, who authored the original Building Grassroots Power in New York, and Seema Shah, who authored Harnessing the Power of the New Electorate. I want to just give a shout out and thanks to Maria Mottola, the former head of the New York Foundation, with whom I really partnered to kind of think through the genesis of these reports. And of course, as noted in our reports, the dozens, like literally dozens of organizers who took time to speak with our researchers about their work and their strategies. So we’re excited to be in conversation with you all today.
Rickee Mananzala: Thanks, Jenn. Hi, everyone. I think it’s my role to do a little bit of the so what? Why does this matter? The second report in particular and getting to dig a little bit deeper with Juanita and Fahd. But first, just want to say it’s probably pretty obvious, but worth repeating that New York is at a time of significant political transformation. We’re seeing the most diverse City Council election in history. We know 2022 has a lot in store across the state for the potential for deeper political transformation, there’s so much to unpack. But the so what of today’s conversation we’re thinking about in the report in three particular areas. So, what is the impact of building electorate power? So the first one Jenn has really captured building off of the first report is the possibility around transformative policy changes. We’re seeing this across the board over the past couple of years, especially recently around progressive revenue, rent regulation, immigrant justice, among other key issues around political transformation that is largely due to grassroots power. I think in the words of one organizer that you may have seen from the report, a really important quote to uplift is “along with other victories that we’ve seen in recent years, this is an example of what is possible when movement energy gets translated into electoral energy that turns into a governing agenda”. So we go from not just the policy changes themselves, but the power that was built to achieve those and the influence that these groups are having in progressive policy change. Another area that’s key to explore, like why does this matter? Mutual accountability. So when groups are essential to electing community based leaders, that accountability and that relationship to community and government is transforming. When organizers and community based leaders are getting elected, they see themselves as organizing from within as well and remaining accountable to their communities. And then finally, transparency and inclusion. When community based leaders are getting elected, how they see themselves in government is not just to fit in and align with how things have always been, but it’s to transform relations of power, including how community and government relate in terms of the transparency, in terms of how community voices are included in government decisions. So these are just a few examples of this So What we want to pack more about today with Fahd and Juanita. So I want to turn it back over to Jenn to help us jump into the conversation.
Jenn Ching: Hey, everyone, so we are super thrilled to be joined today by two incredible organizers and I would say political strategists together. So I don’t know how in a meeting set up–so this is where my Zoom knowledge has has hit the wall–but like, how do we, because we’re in a meeting, so I know we can’t like spotlight folks visually, but we’re going to figure this out. We’ll post their speaker bios in the chat, and we’ll also post the report links in the chat for folks who have not thoroughly reviewed the reports yet, but we are joined here today by Juanita Lewis, who is, can I still say new? Sure. Right, you got new car smell, who is the new and wonderful executive director of Community Voices Heard. And Fahd Ahmed, who is sorry, the no longer new but still wonderful executive director of DRUM: Desis Rising Up and Moving. And so we are just going to have a short conversation reflecting on some of the themes from the report as Rickee uplifted in particular around electoral strategies. We set this up as a meeting because we were hoping to build in time for all of you to participate as well and to be able to be in conversation with us. So bear with us, but we’ll start first wwith a question for both of you, Juanita and Fahd. And it really just goes to sort of why we’re here, since most of philanthropy, and by most I really mean 99% of philanthropic resources, do not view grassroots organizing and particular groups led by BIPOC communities as a necessary investment when building out a democracy or an electoral strategy. And so I would really love to hear from you all about why this is dangerous and what have you seen in your many years organizing in New York as a result of disinvestment in grassroots driven organizing around electoral participation? Juanita could we start with you?
Juanita Lewis: Yeah, that’s fine. So hi everyone, thank you so much, Rickee and Jenn, super excited to be here. And I mean, that’s an interesting question, right? Because as I said in the report, less than three percent of philanthropic dollars actually is going to social justice work, particularly organizing. And that’s dangerous because the communities that we’re working in, low income communities of color, are folks who have been not engaged in the work, right? Not engaged in the electorate and not engaged in being able to make decisions around policies that are important to their communities. And by not having organizations being invested in, it limits the opportunity of really digging in and building with them. So being able to do leadership development programs with them. Being able to have staff to work directly with members on building up their leadership and building up their voices to build power in order to make these changes. And these are people who are directly impacted by the issues that we’re working on. So, you know, we’ll talk a little bit about CVH’s Follow Black Women project. But you know, fifty nine percent of Black women are registered to vote, but they’re the ones who are least engaged in voting. But when you do engage Black women, we vote. And what would it look like if we were actually putting resources into organizations that are specifically organizing Black women, Latinas, whoever who have not been engaged in the process to actually come out and raise their voices and change policies. Policies that are different. Policies that are impacting our communities all the way, from housing to education to infant mortality. Those are all the things that are happening in our communities that are not being changed the way that we want them to because those were impacted aren’t involved. But being able to have some real resources behind investment allows us to be able to deepen that work.
Jenn Ching: Great, thanks, Fahd can we turn to you?
Fahd Ahmed: Good afternoon, folks. I’ll apologize if you hear any background noise, I’m out in the park. I think of a couple of things. The first is, I think we’re particularly seeing this over the last five years. But the fight to maintain democracy or expand democracy or build more genuine, deeper democracy requires fighting forces. We can’t just wish it into existence. No benevolent being or slate of electeds is going to bring it about for us. The only way that it will happen is if communities are organized and engaging in that process, fighting for that process within their communities, with larger institutions and in society at large. And I think, you know, we’ve seen particularly being able to see the right wing being able to organize, how quickly they are able to undo things, destroy things and move things in the direction that they want. And so similarly, we need investment in our communities for the mass face organizing because that is where we develop our fighting forces. And then I think the second point is that it is particularly our communities who are at the front lines of having democracy restricted from them. I think from what we’re seeing across multiple states in the country over the last few months, what we saw with the ballot initiatives that happened in New York state a couple of weeks ago, that these issues are very directly impact our communities, in particular a Black, Indigenous and other communities of color, poor people, working people, women, queer folks. And many of the institutions themselves do not take those things seriously as a result of their existing marginalization or invisiblization of our communities. And so for example, in New York state, the ballot initiative was not taken seriously by the leadership of the Democratic Party. And so it is critically important to invest in the very communities that have the greatest stake in these fights. And the last thing I’ll share is that, what happens if we don’t invest as progressive movements? You know, I think this varies across some of our communities, but within a lot of Asian communities and I would say a decent number of immigrant communities, there is right wing organizing that’s moving in and making headways both from the outside, existing right wing, as well as right wings that are emerging from within our communities. And they’re seeing that the disinvestment and taking advantage of it to push a further rightward agenda. I’ll take a pause here.
Jenn Ching: Thank you, Fahd. And I have to say, speaking from experience, I saw this Election Day, the Chinese right wing political machine highly effectively mobilizing voters at a level and a tenor that I had not seen in New York City before. So let’s actually talk about the work that each of your individual organizations has actually done. Juanita, you mentioned briefly the Follow Black Women work. I’m wondering if you could talk about how CVH has specifically pivoted towards developing an electoral strategy that is rooted in grassroots organizing.
Juanita Lewis: Yeah. When we first–I will talk in particular around our work in the Hudson Valley and how it’s all connected together–so our outside of New York City chapters, Westchester, Orange, Dutchess, so Yonkers, Newburgh, and Poughkeepsie, were founded through a voter registration project as a way of engaging in conversations with people and asking, what are issues that you care about? But then getting clear around who were the people that have power around it and figuring out where people were in terms of engagement, and then using that as an entry point to have people come in and come into organizing meetings and then using that as a way of developing campaigns that we have seen over the decade plus that we’ve been in the Hudson Valley. From our housing justice work, which we saw this huge win last night in Poughkeepsie of Good Cause passing, where we had members there who have been testifying, door knocking and getting elected officials to understand the importance of making sure that tenants were able to stay in their homes. And to the very beginning of our work, now that we’re starting to reimagine public housing around, what does it mean to have tenant control and governance? And as we see an opportunity with this new administration coming in to be able to hand over our plan of what does it mean to have tenant and resident control around public housing and having a say of what that looks like and being able to specifically target voters in those districts and have those conversations. So, you know, in our work in Poughkeepsie, for example, the individuals that we were knocking doors on, we were going into wards that had low voter turnout, high propensity people of color and that were renters. And so we knew that that was our base of people that hadn’t been engaged consistently but needed to be engaged in order for us to build the work and have this win and deepen relationships with to build on our campaigns.
And it’s the same approach that we’re wanting to take with our public housing work, right? Public housing has a lot of people who are registered, not as many people are turning out the way that they need to. What would it look like to have some real attention paid to voters in public housing with a message around tenant control and saying, well, you know, the next mayor of New York City says who the chair of NYCHA is going to be. What would it look like for tenants to say who the chair should be? Being able to connect that to the voting piece and the issue campaign. And as a person who’s been doing organizing for almost 20 years and started out with issue stuff and now electoral, it’s a great marriage of the two, of being able to see how we’re doing the outside work of leadership development, based building, campaign identification and overlaying that with political analysis of who’s in charge, what level of government do they run, how can we actually disrupt the status quo? And what would it look like to envision that when we’ve been consistently told that we are not worthy of that. And we’re saying, no, we are worthy of it. And this is why, and we’re about to build a plan and a strategy around that. And for me, Follow Black Women encompasses all of that. The ability to say, what does it look like? Do you have an agenda that is centering the voices of Black women of all different shapes, sizes, experiences, persuasions, of what an agenda could look like for the next governor of New York state? And how does that translate down to the next mayor of the City of Yonkers? So we’ve been able to use all that information to inform our organizing work to move things forward.
Jenn Ching: Thank you. Fahd, similar question for you. With respect to DRUM’s c3 work, how have you shifted? How have members shifted your organization towards civic and electoral participation strategies?
Fahd Ahmed: Yeah. So, you know, DRUM has historically been an electorally skeptical organization. I think it’s always taken the electoral process and relationships with electeds with a grain of salt. And I think we still do. But I think for us, there were a few assessments that we have been making over the last couple of years. The first of them is that the need to build hyper local power, that given that the concentration of our communities, namely South Asian and Indo-Caribbean working class communities, that if we just sort of recruit members, whoever wants to join, it produces a different kind of power. But if we sort of hone in on particular neighborhoods where we have a presence, we can build a much more concentrated form of power, which can particularly be leveraged in the electoral arena. And the second consideration was that while we may be skeptics, at the end of the day, it does make a material difference. What legislations are introduced, what passes, which electeds are influenceable to what extent. That these are all things that have a material impact on the day to day lives of our members and our communities and society at large. And so we can’t just leave that alone. And if we do, we end up ceding that arena to if not right wing forces then to other forces that may not always have the interests of working class communities at mind.
And so with this calculation we launched a c4, DRUM Beats, earlier this year in the spring. And the idea is to use a model of hyper local power, to be able to leverage it in the electoral arena. And then I think for us, because of the particular skepticism that we’re coming from, we are very much also interested in leveraging the power that we can build to develop different models of the relationship between movements and electeds. And I think for us, it is tricky if we think of the electeds as our leaders of movements, which is what oftentimes we default to, living in a hyper capitalist society that there is a lot of tendency to focus on individualism and people that will sort of help us or save us. And at the same time, we know that they have a critical role to play. And so how do we build? I think the ideas of co-governance are becoming more and more popular, but a rigorous model of co-governance is still yet to be developed. And so I think we’re very much interested in figuring out and experimenting with models where electeds are actually accountable to movements in real tangible terms structurally, and are making decisions in partnership and in coordination with movements. And so I think that’s a lot of what we’re really looking to experiment with as a way of building genuine power, not just like power that we build and then hand over to an elected, but actually power that stays within communities, within movements, and allows us to build stronger movements for the long term.
Rickee Mananzala: Let’s keep going with that Fahd. And I just want to let you know–you can’t see the chat right now–but I think DRUM Beats as the name of your c4 wins the best name for a c4, so props to you on that. Let’s keep going with this theme around the skepticism right now. And I’ll just say, as a former organizer before I came into philanthropy, I came up with Yvonne. I remember almost 15 or 20 years ago, our skepticism of electoral work. Seeing where we are now, though, with so many groups, and we highlight this in the report, starting c4s, including DRUM and so many others. So can you talk to us a little bit more? Maybe we’ll start with you Juanita, and then go back to you, Fahd. What factors went into your process of deciding, yeah we’re going to develop a c4, and what reflections do you have on that work thus far? Fahd, you’ve already shared some of those, so I’m going to give you a slightly different question after Juanita responds to this one.
Juanita Lewis: I appreciate the question because I had to go back into the Rolodex. I’m like dang, what was it like when we first started talking about the c4 stuff? And I remember some of the initial meetings when I first became an organizer in the the back room of the CVH office, and it was just very clear we wanted to have more tools in the toolbox, right? We were still doing our c3 work and we saw the the limitations around that. And so at a time where we saw more organizations being much more engaged in electoral work, thinking about what would it look like for CVH to evolve into a c4? And it was the ability, or wanting the ability to not only do more clearly lobbying and pushing the envelope, but also being able to identify candidates or individuals who could become candidates that aligned with our values and our issues–or not–around housing, access to jobs, and racial justice and all the things we’re working on. Wanting to be able to identify folks that fall into that category and have conversations with them around what would an agenda look like? And we were able to hold candidate forums from those conversations that informed our candidate questionnaires. They were all around our platform and getting a better understanding of where these individuals fell on that and having members have a say in not only just interviewing, but being able to really have a real conversation, robust conversations–I remember a lot of those were–around who was the best person to reflect our values that we would want to work with? And so seeing that evolution has been exciting and it’s a continuation. Because now we’re going into our next phase of this.
I think we’re actually approaching our soon to be 10 year anniversary of having our c4. This year was our largest c4 program. We endorsed 17 hopes to run for City Council. 14 of them, majority women of color, are coming into the City Council now and that is our, I would say, like our inaugural class if you will, of CVH power in terms of building a real co-governance relationship and structure. This is the work we did in these districts. We’re able to see some impact because of who we were targeting. Members were involved in the questionnaire and interview process. A lot of them are knocking on doors, sending text messages, making phone calls, showing up to the rallies, and candidates won. Now we’re in house trying to think about what does this strategy look like for 2022, and having those conversations with this new class around what that would look like. Members are engaged in that conversation. Staff are engaged in the conversation. That’s also helping inform our strategy around our campaign work, particularly in New York City around NYCHA.
And what does it look like to expand some of our work around jobs? How does that feed into our work with Follow Black Women, where we’re seeing where we’re getting some of the survey responses and how does that go up into our work with the gubernatorial races for next year? So this idea of, what would it look like to be able to say who the next mayor of Yonkers would be, which is still on the table, to be able to say CVH power members have not only built the apparatus, but are able to elect the next mayor of the major cities where we are is, it’s huge, right? And then being able to say this is who the next governor of New York state will be because of this intense political analysis we’ve been doing through our c4 work. And then being able to use it as a leadership development opportunity, like this is an opportunity of not just having people learn how to canvass, but to learn how to do campaigns, how to engage in this work and then hopefully start to replace people like me as organizers, so they can continue on this work and this legacy.
Rickee Mananzala: Thanks, Juanita. And Fahd I’ll wrap maybe as a quick lightning round for both of you before we start getting to questions from the group, I’m starting to see some come into the chat. But on the c4 work in particular, we know that it’s not easy to raise dollars for this work for a variety of reasons. We’ll start with you Fahd, and maybe end with you Juanita on this question. What challenges do you want funders to know about how it is to fundraise for your c4 work in 30 seconds or less? While you have this captive audience. Fahd, we’ll start with you. What are the challenges fundraising for c4 work?
Fahd Ahmed: So, you know, I think we have very limited experience because we just launched this spring and it’s been interesting. One is just getting any money is difficult. c4 money is generally limited, and then even the little bit of money that we have been able to raise, it’s like, Oh, you can use it for pretty much anything except for electoral work. And that definitely presents a challenge. I think we’re still kind of learning the ropes in terms of, OK, if that’s how the money’s coming in, what do we do? What are the sources that we developed to raise money that can be used in electoral work? And I think for us, we’re very much still in the learning process for it.
Rickee Mananzala: Good stuff. Thanks, Fahd. Juanita, you’re a little bit later in the game. But that doesn’t mean there’s still not challenges almost 10 years into the c4 work. So tell us a little bit more about what some of the challenges have been?
Juanita Lewis: Yeah, I would say some of the challenges have been definitely, it seems like the wanting to put money into some of the bigger states. Clearly we saw stuff around Georgia and in Arizona, right? Places that are definitely making that national impact, which is good and necessary. But as we saw in Georgia, it was the decades long of organizing work that led to that big win. And so it just makes me think around the first question. If philanthropic dollars were going into those smaller organizations, what would the result be? I think it’d still be the same thing, but it would have been an investment that would have happened earlier on as opposed to all the national money going in that direction. So I think there’s definitely the excitement around the big national stuff that draws that money and then not seeing all the work that happens to lead up to that big win. And then the other piece is that, you know, I think a lot of, more so like on an individual side, folks are interested in giving to candidates. Candidates and parties versus infrastructure and community that leads to that. Because we have been, I would say, we’re a society that’s very looking at the candidate and what that candidate is saying and how they speak to us and wanting to give to that, to that individual, and seeing what happens. And so being able to come up against that and say supporting candidates is all well and good. But that’s a one time thing. Being able to invest in movement building and organizations that are able to demonstrate the metrics and the impact is what’s going to get you the most bang for your buck. Because once those candidates are in office, they’re going to have to be held accountable. They’re not going to be able to do what they want to do just by themselves. They’re going to have to be in relationship with us, and we want to be the ones saying what that relationship looks like, and being in a real partnership with them to move things forward. So I think it’s really just a retooling or a rethinking of how the money is spent and what investments look like.
Rickee Mananzala: Thank you both so much for kicking us off, and I think now, Jenn, we want to turn to questions from the group. You can use the chat and I also think–I hope this is okay to say–we’re a small enough group, but still lovely, so you can come off chat to also ask a question. So I see some starting to come in. And actually, this question from Robert has partially been addressed, but I want to share it again. If you both, Fahd and Juanita, can share a little bit more about your c3 and c4 work for 2022 in general. And I think there are some lessons that can be learned from Georgia and Arizona and groups like the Movement Motors project, which was mentioned in the chat. So what are some real quick teasers for your 2022 work on the c3 and c4 work, some of which you’ve already outlined. What else did we miss?
Jenn Ching: And also, Fahd, I saw you raised your hand, which is a very polite way to participate when you are actually one of the panelists, so feel free to also follow up on whatever you wanted to share.
Fahd Ahmed: Yeah, I think it was actually building on the point that Juanita was sharing, which is, we can invest money in the hopes of a particular electoral outcome, or we could invest in infrastructure, which is going to both produce our results in particular election, but also last beyond that. Not only to hold that person accountable, but also for the future. And so, when Juanita was talking about members being trained in how to interview candidates, how to ask tough questions, how to actually do research into the backgrounds of candidates, knowing how to canvass. Let’s say our organization is not here 20 years from now. The people that haven’t developed are still going to be there. The skills and the capacities and the education that they develop is still going to be there. And it is a much more likely chance that they’ll continue to use that influence to whatever extent that they can. And so I think it’s very much like Juanita said, it is a slight shift, but it’s a shift which has very significant consequences and implications. And I think that’s the thing that when we look at some of these other states, battleground states, a lot of times investment is just like, let’s just throw money in there and flood the streets to get people knocking on the doors without thinking about like, OK, how do we actually make an investment that can be seeded, will sprout, and will bear fruit over a long term?
Jenn Ching: Thank you. We’ve got a couple of questions in. Michael and Sabrina, do either of you want to come off mute to ask your question, or would you like us to ask it? OK, so from Michael Walker, we have a question. How do you make candidates accountable? What are the practical measures to hold their feet to the fire? And I assume he means not actually holding their feet to the fire, which I’m sure some strategies we have thought about before. Juanita can we start with you?
Juanita Lewis: Yeah. So we love a good accountability session, right? So what that is is, we’re at the point of the campaign where we have not gotten the response of what we want. And so it’s being able to publicly have them be somewhere in front of those who are impacted by this issue, asking them that question. And usually it’s do you support this? Yes or no? And as we’ve tended to see people want to, they say yes, but, and then all this other stuff and the best thing I love about CVH members is like they’re quick to say no, answer the question yes or no. They start chanting yes or no. Yeah, it’s just great, it’s just fun. And no elected official likes that right? Because that is making them have to make a very clear and decisive answer. And now they’ve done it publicly. And because now it’s public, we are able to say that to more people, X person said ABC, and now they have to be able to do it. And then we have a strategy based off of that, whether it’s showing up at their office, whether it’s doing petitions, whether it’s stuff on social media, if it’s a press release, whatever way of publicly calling them out–or calling them in–around a particular way of moving them to where we want them to be.
Fahd Ahmed: I want to add, because I think like this is particularly the point that I think we’ve been very interested in exploring. I think in addition to the things that Juanita laid out, I think we’ve been thinking with a few different ideas. One is thinking about what are decision making powers that electeds hold that should be taken to the public? And so, we are again, we haven’t had an opportunity to implement these yet, but we are in conversations with some of the City Council members that we supported their campaigns and endorsed them around implementing these. But one idea is around people’s assemblies, like zoning fights within districts are very, very contentious. And it’s one of the prime places in which vested interests, mainly real estate big money, swoops in and in backdoor deals just completely takes over and influences elected officials. What if elected officials said that like in my district, these sorts of zoning requests, I am agreeing that the decision will come out of public processes, say, for example, people’s assemblies where we can have open conversations, have struggle, have debate. And to that process, decide whether this zoning request should be approved or should not be approved. There’s some of that that community boards are supposed to do. But we found it’s one step better than the power that electeds have, but it’s still not quite as formidable and not as rigorous as we would like it to be. So I think part of it is thinking about what are decision-making powers that elected officials can socialize.
And then a second thing we’ve been thinking about is, our opinion is that it is actually not realistic to expect that even the best of electeds, even if I got elected and I went in, that I would be able to manage all the different pressures and all the different contradictions that come as a result of being an elected by my individual self. When 80 people are yelling at me and trying to buy me off, bribe me, influence me in the wrong direction, even that 20 years of experience is going to get dislodged. Right? If not completely, there’ll be lots of questions like, am I making the right decision? We see there’s things that we know to be true, but when somebody is saying things about us repeatedly, like, we start to question ourselves. And so how do we actually build a process of collectivity, collective thinking, collective decision-making around electeds? And so we’ve been proposing and are starting to engage in conversations with some of the electeds around movement guidance committees. So in this district, here are the key formations. We have some reps from each one of the key forces that do the critical work in this neighborhood, and that committee, along with the elected, collectively go over like, hey, I’m getting a lot of pressure from this particular group. What’s that about? Why is that happening? How should I navigate this? I have $100. The hospital needs $99. The school needs $50. How do I make the decision? What usually happens is the groups that work on the schools end up fighting the groups that work for the hospitals. And so we end up pitting ourselves within the movements against each other. And what if those moving forces were there with the elected collectively talking about like, all right, we got a hundred dollars? How about this time we do $35 this way and $15 here. Next year, we’ll switch it up. All right. Like that makes sense. That doesn’t make sense. There’s a counterproposal. There’s these contradictions that come from living in an unjust society. We can’t wish those contradictions away, and we can’t fully resolve those contradictions. But if we collectively try to navigate those contradictions, we can strengthen our movements and try to produce the best result that is possible. It’s not going to be perfect, but within the realm of what’s possible, we can extract the best result that we can.
Juanita Lewis: And just to jump in real quick, what Fahd was saying is interesting because it has made me think of a sentence that someone said before that when the movement gives an assignment to an elected, that’s their assignment. And when the movement decides that their assignment is done, then it’s done. And so being very clear about what is that assignment? What are we wanting that elected or electeds to do? And then being able to call them all in together to develop that strategy and say, look, this is our goal, our vision, this is how we want to move it. Here are the pieces and parts that we will each play and let’s do it. And it sounds great in theory, and I feel like some of the work that we’ve been talking about now with both of our organizations, we’re starting to outline what that could look like and being able to put some of those pieces together to be able to put that into reality. So what does education look like, not just on our side as organizations, but with these new candidates and electeds that are coming in? What does it mean to really talk about structural reforms that we want to see happen? What are the pressures they’re going to come into? What are the pressures we’re going to face to be able to make all this stuff happen and see the changes we want to see? So I see all this stuff as, we have an assignment as a movement that we’re giving some of these electeds to do. But it’s not just their assignment, it’s our assignment to make sure they complete it and that we do it together.
Jenn Ching: I love that. We have one last question from Sabrina, which is a sort of brass tacks question about member education. Sabrina, do you want to come off mute and ask?
Sabrina: Sure, thank you. I was just wondering a little bit about working with immigrant communities here. Just like education about what are the processes here in the US and also kind of if folks are coming in with negative experiences from their home countries, potentially deadly experiences, what has that process been like?
Fahd Ahmed: I can start. Our membership is all immigrant. And so I think as part of our day to day organizing work, we have to do some level of education around processes and how government functions here. I think as part of the c4 work, we have to get much deeper and we started to get much deeper around what does City Council do? Specifically what does the state level do? What does the federal level do? And our folks, it really varies based on both individuals, but also the particular communities they come from. Some parts of our base come from like a very robust– not robust–but like very intense electoral kind of scene back home. Some come from places where there’s just lots of pessimism around electoral work. And so they’re just like, yeah, yeah, whatever. Elections and parties are all corrupt. And so we do have to use that as a starting point. Like, all right, that’s how things were there. Here’s how things are here. And then I think we also have to move them to a third place, which is like even the way things are here, even that’s not sufficient that the system in itself has limitations and lots of shortcomings. What is the type of system that we want to see? And I think that’s really the experimentation around the skepticism that I mentioned before.
We’ll have like in this last round, we had the range of people being super skeptical of like oh, I don’t know why we’re even bothering interviewing these folks, they’re all going to sell us out later. And then folks on the other extreme being overly enthusiastic, like, oh, she’s so nice, I think she’s going to be great. And it’s kind of like, well, yeah, of course she’s going to be nice right now because we’re interviewing her. But we’ll really see how things play out later. And I think it becomes an opportunity to, even for us as organizers, to test out the skepticism that we hold. Like up until what extent can we actually have expectations from the system and what extent is not possible? It’s going to be within our given society, it’s going to be limited. And so I think it’s a process of doing and learning, doing and learning, doing and learning, and it’ll take some time as that learning keeps accumulating and becomes shared within our folks.
Jenn Ching: We are rapidly running out of time. We talked about movement accountability. We heard about movement assignments. I kind of want to move to and close with movement demands and specifically, a minute or less from each of you about what you would like to see funders do and change ASAP. This is a safe space. Go for it.
Juanita Lewis: Well, fund organizations. We are definitely wanting to make the structural changes and reforms to make things better. And that takes time and that takes working, that takes resources and takes development. And so being able to have larger investments over multiple years in order to see that work happen. And engaging in conversations, do some running around with us to see what stuff is like on the ground. I think this gives a whole different perspective around being able to see where the investment goes and things of that nature.
Fahd Ahmed: I don’t think I could say anything better than what Juanita said. Got to invest in organizations so that we can organize, organize, organize.
Rickee Mananzala: You two have the perfect segue to our closing, which is how can funders support this work? We couldn’t say it better than that. I think we’ll have some slides up here with some examples. These are highlighted in greater detail in the report, but just with limited time, I want to do a brief overview of some next steps from here. So like Juanita and Fahd said, but it’s worth repeating, supporting groups for the long haul. If they are building sustained community power, they need sustained funding. We know that that’s where the real impact is going to happen. These grassroots groups based in communities of color are building power for the long haul and they need our support. So the MYGOD, multi-year general operating support dollars, for groups that are doing this relational organizing, an obvious next step.
Next, invest in infrastructure for organizing and civic engagement statewide. So this includes some groups here that we see named, The Advocacy Institute, Center for Community Leadership, New York Civic Engagement Table. There’s other examples of these groups providing the technical assistance, the tools, the training data and other resources for power building capacity. Next is learn about and invest in the c4 work that we’re hearing about. We heard about how difficult it is to fundraise for this work. A lot of organizations are primarily focused on individual donors, which gives them the most flexibility to do partisan c4 work. But there’s possibilities for institutional philanthropy to support this work as well even though we often balk at this work. c3 funders, private and public, can fund the nonpartisan elements of c4 work. Here are some examples, and we’ll see a link in the chat box. I know you can see it on the screen, but if our tech team can add this link into the chat box as well, from Boulder Advocacy, highly recommend checking out their resources.
Or obviously you’re based in New York, the Lawyers Alliance New York is who many of us work with, including the New York Foundation. And they advised us, something I’m happy and excited to share about with this group, that the New York Foundation, our board just approved our strategy for 2022 and beyond, which will include the first time we are funding c4 work and we invite you all to join us in that. This of course is for the nonpartisan elements of that work. And that that’s important. That’s not little dollars, but that actually opens up the potential for them to invest in the infrastructure of the c4s and to focus the individual donor dollars on the partisan work. So these investments really matter. We’re making an investment as a foundation in 2022 and beyond and happy to share more about our process for how we arrived at that decision, both with our board and also the technical and legal guidance we needed to do that work. So happy to talk to any of you one on one. We’re feeling very passionate about organizing other funders in this space around supporting c4 work because we can and we should.
And then finally, support organizations that are committed to training, developing, and supporting new leaders to run for office. We’re seeing great examples of nonpartisan groups, there are plenty that exist that are helping to encourage and train and support new leaders that are based in communities to run for office, such as the New American Leaders, Local Progress, among others, bringing back the Advocacy Institute into the space on this, I believe they have a partnership recently with Local Progress, and they’re training our next wave of new city council leaders on budget processes and the legislative process. This is nonpartisan work we can support that is so critical to supporting community leaders in effectively governing and remaining accountable to our communities. So these are just a few examples of ways funders can support this work. But we are in community together. We organize each other and we’ve heard plenty from Juanita and Fahd about what the needs are, not only for their organizations, but for our grassroots organizing groups across the city and state. I would encourage all of us to go back to our various institutions, our affinity groups and other spaces where we learn and organize each other. Think more about how you can support these recommendations and more. With that, I’m going to turn it back to Jenn with any closing thanks and final points.
Jenn Ching: I just want to take a moment for us to come off mute and thank Juanita and Fahd for sharing their vision, their strategies, their practical work, their secrets to democratic success in power. So thank you so much for being a part of the conversation. And I want to thank everyone who joined today. We are going to be following up with you because we want to build a funder movement that is commensurate to the movements that are building power and to actually change what is happening in New York. I thank a lot of the partners here who are here today, who have been investing in this work in the long term and really invite you all to be a part of building something far more permanent, long term, and structural in New York. So thanks everyone. Good to see you all. Hopefully, we’ll see you in person soon. Bye.
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