Appreciate you for going beyond the way we sometimes talk about a theory of a movement eco-system in the abstract. Giving some real texture to how specific types of bb orgs can compliment each other adds even more weight to the agitation around individualism.
Interestingly the org where I work, the NY Taxi Workers Alliance, followed the trajectory you lay out around discounts. After a couple of years of initial growth drivers created a dues structure and decided on benefits, one of which was discounted lawyer fees for dmv tickets. This keeps a steady stream of drivers coming into the org through driver to driver word of mouth and is one part of a militant mass struggle model that has achieved a greater scale than most worker centers (6k dues paying members and 3 actions last year with 2k drivers each). I came from a community organizing tradition that saw any service work as antithetical to building power organizations, but my experience with NYTWA makes clear it just creates a different contradiction than relying on foundation funding does.
Thanks for putting this here Gabe - and it's helpful (and encouraging) to hear more about what can happen in the worker center model. Been fond of the work from afar!
I think there should be more convos on really investigating the service model. To your point, I still hold skepticism about it because of the CO tradition. From my view I have seen examples where overtime it often over encumbers the staffing of the project and contributes heavily to a culture of a charity relationship between member & the project, making the goal of building culture of protagonism more difficult (as you know).
At the same time, often I have seen service provision in CO projects to be created using grant dollars before building a robust membership, with the thinking "if we provide services first, then we can compel people to actually become members". And the services are often ones that may require a trained professional (like mental health/legal services). Other examples, especially in the housing world, provide services using money from actual municipal budget that may have been won via a campaign, which then leaves the project vulnerable year to year, a whole other set of contradictions.
It's great to hear what you all have laid out doesn't seem to shortcut the basebuilding, but builds services/perks into the growth and having it be directly tied to the dues. To your point, different contradictions, but definitely on the outside seem like the better ones to hold than the grant dollars.
Thanks for posting this. I remember seeing Peter present several times in the early 2010s in various funder spaces. His work got a bunch of interest and they developed an incubator to help groups start organizations using this model. They were using ideas like lean start up to test out various services with the idea that one large national organization for immigrants, parents, domestic workers, etc.. was likely to develop and progressives should be the ones to get off the ground first. It would be interesting to look back at what become of those projects. My uninformed sense is that none of them really took off, but I could be wrong.
Nonetheless, I think there were some really useful lessons that came from his work about what it would take to truly build organizations with memberships in the thousands or more. The idea they our side needs large scale organizations like this and offering services is they way to get to that kind of scale, makes sense to me.
I resonate with your argument that we should view scale as an ecosystem question and understand the roles of different kinds of organizations. This seems to assume that different organizations share some overarching political vision which allows them to play different roles in shared strategy, something that I think is pretty limited currently.
The scale question I am most concerned about is about the relationship between breadth and depth. It seems to me like most base building projects have either figured out how to mobilize large numbers of people with little depth of leadership development or they have done intense development with small numbers of leaders. My concern is that neither approach is sufficient and resolving this question is one of the biggest challenges of the moment. This could be resolved, as you suggest through an ecosystem approach where different organizations play different roles. Im also interested in experimenting with distributed organizing models models where we invest in the development of leaders who organize their communities as an approach to scale. I think there is a lot of room to experiment within single organizations about how to coordinate mobilizing and organizing approaches.
All that said, the single biggest problem I see is the hyper fixation on scale without much attention to developing leaders and organization for the long haul. Our ability to reach lost of people will mean something real when we have leaders who are deeply rooted in their communities, have skills to organize, and a clear political vision for the future.
Appreciate you for going beyond the way we sometimes talk about a theory of a movement eco-system in the abstract. Giving some real texture to how specific types of bb orgs can compliment each other adds even more weight to the agitation around individualism.
Interestingly the org where I work, the NY Taxi Workers Alliance, followed the trajectory you lay out around discounts. After a couple of years of initial growth drivers created a dues structure and decided on benefits, one of which was discounted lawyer fees for dmv tickets. This keeps a steady stream of drivers coming into the org through driver to driver word of mouth and is one part of a militant mass struggle model that has achieved a greater scale than most worker centers (6k dues paying members and 3 actions last year with 2k drivers each). I came from a community organizing tradition that saw any service work as antithetical to building power organizations, but my experience with NYTWA makes clear it just creates a different contradiction than relying on foundation funding does.
Thanks for putting this here Gabe - and it's helpful (and encouraging) to hear more about what can happen in the worker center model. Been fond of the work from afar!
I think there should be more convos on really investigating the service model. To your point, I still hold skepticism about it because of the CO tradition. From my view I have seen examples where overtime it often over encumbers the staffing of the project and contributes heavily to a culture of a charity relationship between member & the project, making the goal of building culture of protagonism more difficult (as you know).
At the same time, often I have seen service provision in CO projects to be created using grant dollars before building a robust membership, with the thinking "if we provide services first, then we can compel people to actually become members". And the services are often ones that may require a trained professional (like mental health/legal services). Other examples, especially in the housing world, provide services using money from actual municipal budget that may have been won via a campaign, which then leaves the project vulnerable year to year, a whole other set of contradictions.
It's great to hear what you all have laid out doesn't seem to shortcut the basebuilding, but builds services/perks into the growth and having it be directly tied to the dues. To your point, different contradictions, but definitely on the outside seem like the better ones to hold than the grant dollars.
More soon
Thanks for posting this. I remember seeing Peter present several times in the early 2010s in various funder spaces. His work got a bunch of interest and they developed an incubator to help groups start organizations using this model. They were using ideas like lean start up to test out various services with the idea that one large national organization for immigrants, parents, domestic workers, etc.. was likely to develop and progressives should be the ones to get off the ground first. It would be interesting to look back at what become of those projects. My uninformed sense is that none of them really took off, but I could be wrong.
Nonetheless, I think there were some really useful lessons that came from his work about what it would take to truly build organizations with memberships in the thousands or more. The idea they our side needs large scale organizations like this and offering services is they way to get to that kind of scale, makes sense to me.
I resonate with your argument that we should view scale as an ecosystem question and understand the roles of different kinds of organizations. This seems to assume that different organizations share some overarching political vision which allows them to play different roles in shared strategy, something that I think is pretty limited currently.
The scale question I am most concerned about is about the relationship between breadth and depth. It seems to me like most base building projects have either figured out how to mobilize large numbers of people with little depth of leadership development or they have done intense development with small numbers of leaders. My concern is that neither approach is sufficient and resolving this question is one of the biggest challenges of the moment. This could be resolved, as you suggest through an ecosystem approach where different organizations play different roles. Im also interested in experimenting with distributed organizing models models where we invest in the development of leaders who organize their communities as an approach to scale. I think there is a lot of room to experiment within single organizations about how to coordinate mobilizing and organizing approaches.
All that said, the single biggest problem I see is the hyper fixation on scale without much attention to developing leaders and organization for the long haul. Our ability to reach lost of people will mean something real when we have leaders who are deeply rooted in their communities, have skills to organize, and a clear political vision for the future.