Hopeful Stories of Communities Organizing

Energy of millions can be turned into action

 

 

What does it look like to take the frustration and energy of millions of isolated individuals and turn it into real, collective action?

In 2018, the citizens of Idaho—one of the nation's most conservative states—voted overwhelmingly to adopt Obamacare's controversial Medicaid Expansion.

The group behind the effort, Reclaim Idaho, built a network of more than 2,000 volunteers across 25 counties. Instead of focusing on partisan messaging, they asked neighbors a simple question: How has the lack of affordable healthcare affected you and your family?

The responses cut across ideological lines—stories of skipped medications, delayed surgeries and mounting debt were common everywhere from Wallace to Dubois. These conversations set Medicaid expansion apart from abstract partisan positions and made it personal. Two years after Idaho elected Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 2-1 margin, it expanded Medicaid by the same ratio, a victory that allowed more than 100,000 Idahoans to gain access to health care.

Early in their campaign, a political consultant advised them to take a more conventional path: raise millions of dollars for a poll, use the results to court major donors and rely on paid advertising to persuade voters. Instead, Reclaim Idaho stuck to organizing—and won.

Their success serves as a reminder: it is not polls, ads or consultants that drive real democratic change. It is ordinary people, organizing their neighbors, building power from the ground up — the same way movements for women's suffrage, labor rights and civil rights were built before them.

So if there is an appetite, how do we get started? Several ways are to join a union, organize in our congregations or take an active role in public schools. Unions, congregations and schools are the institutions that ward against tyranny.

American historian Timothy Snyder warns: "Do not speak of 'our institutions' unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning. So, choose an institution you care about–a court, a newspaper, a law, [a congregation], a labor union—and take its side."

We face the undeniable challenge, however, that many of us no longer have easy access to these spaces. So how do we, like Reclaim Idaho, rebuild or build new local democratic institutions?

We start by realizing the scope of how many people already have an appetite to do something. In 2016, more than 350,000 people donated to the ACLU in just one weekend. Imagine if those people had formed 1,000 new local groups with an average startup budget of $24,000 and set about raising enough additional funds and recruiting enough additional members to put 1,000 paid organizers at the service of half a million active volunteers in 1,000 American neighborhoods and towns.

Imagine if, like Reclaim Idaho, they went out and began to address the issues affecting families who lived right down the street, dedicating themselves to building more affordable housing, improving environmental protections and demanding fair wages or basic government accountability. There is a never-ending list of things we can do to make a difference in our own backyard. They impact all of us and give us vehicles to come together and take on the larger issues.

Imagine if, like the first women who brought together the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention to launch the women's suffrage and women's rights movements, these groups in turn began to seek one another out and build strategic relationships along lines of common interests.

Then they can help set new precedents in state legislatures that can serve as a model for national action.

Cameron Conner – Columnist