By Jacob Klein
We need to treat each other with justice and respect, both on an individual and an organizational level, in this country and across borders. Defining and developing “just relationships” will be a process that won’t happen overnight. It must include clarity about decision-making, sharing strategies, and resource distribution. There are clearly many skills necessary to succeed, and we need to determine the ways for those with different skills to coordinate and be accountable to one another.
We’ve reached the penultimate column in this series, where I focus on “building just relationships”. In many ways, I see this principle as an amalgamation of the previous principles (read previous columns on each principle at sierraclub.org/san-francisco-bay/yodeler-archives). These columns explore the tools one needs to meet the criteria of resource sharing, accountability, and collaboration. Here, I want to explore the connections between relationship-building and cultivation of skills.
Relationships are essential for advocacy work in order to build up the grassroots movement that will achieve the change desired. As an organizer, it’s my job to get to know people so that I can learn about their interests and capabilities, understand what fires them up, and figure out how to create specific opportunities for them to take action.
In traditional organizing, goals and opportunities are often created by a lead organizer. Classically hierarchical, there is a person who is coordinating the campaign and slotting people in where their attributes make most sense. This isn’t an inherently bad way of organizing and can be very effective. However, in relying on classic structures of leadership, it can lead to a lack of democracy or opportunity for new leaders to flourish.
In distributed organizing, we instead recognize the inherent leadership of the grassroots. Priorities are set by the group, and while one person may be acting as the main coordinator, the structure is more similar to the hub of a wheel where someone can ferry messages and resources between the various spokes, rather than sitting at the top of a pyramid. This is a model that some of our partner groups, like Sunrise Movement, rely on.
Generally, I think the Sierra Club walks a delicate balance between traditional and distributed organizing. Our volunteer leadership model means that decision-making and action-taking happen largely through group processes. However, due to the limited capacity of many of our volunteers who often have jobs or other responsibilities, a more traditional style of organizing is helpful to fill in the gaps and keep the work advancing. It’s a line that I find myself walking often, even as someone who philosophically supports distributed organizing more.
But what brought me to this position?
Early on in my organizing history, I was still pretty intimidated by the kind of leadership that had me in public-facing roles. I preferred to work behind the scenes, administratively and logistically, to ensure the smooth running of events and actions. There was one group in particular that I was involved with where the leaders had very powerful voices, so it was easy to rely on them to work their magic with people.
From the time I was initially recruited to the end of my tenure in that group, I moved out from behind the shadows and began taking on more roles where I stood at the front and collaborated with people on larger scales. My comrades and mentors told me how this had been part of their plan from day one.
By talking with me and getting to know me, they recognized both my visible skills and my latent talents. They created opportunities for me to try out new things and supported me as I did so. In this way, they helped shape me into the organizer I am today. This is an example of how relationships built on trust and attentiveness lead to greater equity and skills-sharing.
It’s an organizer’s dream to be able to pass along the work to another person, to have someone take up the baton of engagement and action to keep the movement moving forward. A strong organizing space should be one where people are able to act to the best of their abilities with the capacity that they have available.
That’s why distributed organizing can be better equipped for building just relationships–the inherent space-making of this style of organizing gives more opportunities for skills to be flexed and grown. By bringing a justice orientation to relationships, we create space for the evolution of the individual and the movement.
Cornel West’s famous quote, “Justice is what love looks like in public,” points towards not just the structural nature of change-work, but also the personal aspect. By tending to our relationships across the movement and across the world, by sharing resources and power, by listening deeply and acting equitably, we can show the care we have for one another. Through the Jemez principles and other progressive values, justice can take root in our relationships.