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2009 Election Candidate Forum:
The Questions

What is your experience with grassroots organizing? What do you see as the key differences between 20th century grassroots organizing and 21st century grassroots organizing?

Boldman, Lane

Fundamentally, there is little difference between organizing now and organizing when I started in the club. Successful organizing involves identifying, informing, and inspiring people to come together and work for a greater cause, the same as it has always been. People organized against injustice in the coalfields in the 1920’s and 30’s, for civil rights in the 1960’s and for Global Warming in this century. What changed are the tools. Social networking, blogs, YouTube, Google Earth, and other advanced electronic communication tools allow us to move people on a larger, faster scale in ways we did not have even five or ten years ago. These are powerful organizing tools, and we must learn to use them well to engage younger audiences. But as a media professional, I know that tools are only tools and effective organizing requires a collective vision, knowledge, will, and strong leaders. Those needs haven’t changed.

Gibson, Laurence

The Rio Grande Chapter was privileged to be one of the first Leadership Development Project sites with Marshall Ganz. This year-long training taught us many important lessons. Although the internet is certainly a fine tool, in my opinion there is and will be no substitute for knocking on doors, tabling, and social events where folks can form relationships. We are so desensitized to media that they have become much less effective now. The media may serve to get us into the ballpark. But after that in my humble opinion, person to person, face to face is what it’s all about.

Mann, Robin

My direct experience with grassroots organizing has relied primarily on traditional, on-the-ground organizing tools with some simple, electronic outreach.  The much more robust online organizing capabilities the Club is developing offer a great opportunity to connect and engage a vastly greater number of our members and others in our campaigns.  As noted, however, it is imperative that we determine how to create a mutually reinforcing relationship between our online organizing and our local, on-the-ground activism.

Morris, Frank

I’ve worked in public housing projects in Manhattan's Lower East Side, going door to door to help elect New York City council candidates.  I’ve hired, organized, and managed election day get out the vote efforts that employed over 120 people   I’ve worked as the volunteer coordinator for a congressional campaign here on Long Island. I’ve organized petition drives.  There is very little in the way of grass roots organizing that I haven’t done.  Regarding the difference between 20th century and 21 century grass roots organizing, the simple answer is email and the internet.  With the touch of a button, through email, a network of people can be contacted…But it’s the personal appeal to those people that makes the outreach valuable.   Grass roots organizing in the 21st century has to be real, with real issues, real strategies, and real work to get the job the done.  Otherwise, it’s just spam.

Reyes, Rafael

I’m proud of my role developing leaders at the Loma Prieta Chapter.  We revamped fundraising, made staffing changes, established better training, decision-making and institutional memory.  In 2004 with the Bay Chapter we generated 30,000 battleground state phone calls.  For these efforts I received the 2004 Honorary Field Staff award for volunteers who "have demonstrated grassroots campaign skills, and worked to build the longer-term grassroots political power of the Sierra Club."

As always, it’s essential to build teams, develop plans, have clear tasks, thank people, etc.  However, the electronic tools enable us to do things on a far vaster scale.  Two areas where things are most different are the degree of “coordinated decentralization” which is now possible as seen in the Obama campaign and secondly, the speed of action requiring much faster analysis and decision-making.  We are now working to incorporate the learnings from the presidential race into our organizing.

Scott, David

I've led several successful grassroots efforts, including a campaign to get Congress to reject Arctic drilling in 2001 and a statewide campaign to stop a legislative giveaway of Great Lakes coastal lands.

The obvious change in grassroots organizing is the growing importance of the internet as an advocacy tool.  The danger is that the ease of “point-and-click" activism might blind us to the continued importance of traditional advocacy tactics: getting constituents to call, write or visit their legislators, knocking on doors , turning people out at rallies.  We need to use the internet effectively – to use social networking sites and technology to make it easy for people to join together,  contact legislators and press for change.  I'm helping to develop recommendations for the Board on how to link online organizing to our traditional advocacy work -- how to be sure online activists can be engaged in traditional advocacy, too.

Warshaw, Chris

I have very strong experience at grassroots organizing. As the National Field Director at Democracy for America (DFA), I coordinated over 400 local grassroots groups and helped plan thousands of volunteer-lead events. I have also led a number of other grassroots campaigns and organizations. In 2004, I helped organize over 25 monthly Meetups around Massachusetts during Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign. More recently, I helped organize 20 Cool Cities teams across the Silicon Valley area.  

The lack of a clear organizational hierarchy is the biggest difference between 20th century and 21st century organizing. In the 21st century, online activists will increasingly seek to organize their own events in response to national events. I believe that the Sierra Club needs to embrace this new model of organizing and give our members new tools and training to create their own groups, events, and local campaigns to help build a climate friendly country.

Wheeler, Phil

In my early Club days I tabled, recruited new members at local meetings, encouraged members to become outings leaders and supported outings to “places we’ve saved”.  As a Club leader (ExCom chair, committee member and chair, etc.) I’ve sought to engage new and more diverse members.

As we move beyond the 20th century into the 21st we can and must utilize the new tools at our disposal such as the social networking tools typified by MoveOn.com and our developing Activist Network. In this we can learn much from Barack Obama’s superlative and successful presidential campaign which demonstrated the value and viability of these new web-based tools.  Specifically the Board must:
•Foster development and enhancement of our Activist Network and its social network outreach
•Engage new constituencies in this outreach
•Develop metrics to measure the success of these efforts.

Our financial resources are limited; our outreach cannot be.