Memo: Assessing Social Justice Paths to Power
By New World on February 01, 2009
Over the past two decades, The New World Foundation has supported the renewal of progressive civic activism in the US that can both engage and exercise political power. We have used our own resources, our work with donors, and our role in philanthropy to help social justice organizations engage their communities, expand the electorate, and re-assert the democratic mission of government. This perspective underlies all of our program areas, represented by the Phoenix Fund for Workers and Communities, the New Majority Fund and the Global Fund for Environmental Health and Justice. It also encompasses multiple policy areas and political arenas, from the local to state, national and even global levels.
Through our experience, we have evolved an approach to assessing the potentials for grantees to expand their strategic focus and roles, and to have a growing and direct political impact, in any given place. This memo roughly outlines the layers of analysis we use. While the steps are presented in their logical order, in reality, each piece of analysis gets filled in along the way, in ongoing and long term relationships with core grantees. Our goal, where we have invested over time, is that both the Foundation and its anchor grantees are working from an analytic framework that supports a feasible and promising power building strategy.
Conversations in the field are a crucial part of this analysis. While we recognize there are always disparities in the funder-grantee relationship, we have sought to build a mutual process of exchange, inquiry, and long term planning through our site work, focused discussions, and the proposal development process. We have invested in anchor organizations that play a strategic leadership role, and we have also invested in their partners, in emerging groups, in alliances and collaborations, in networks and exchanges, in new talent and the next generation. We bring these lessons back to philanthropy by helping to leverage greater resources where and when power building strategies are reaching fertile ground.
I. What Is Needed to Build a Power Matrix for Social Justice? Key Premises
- Left-Center Alliances: A social justice majority would represent a moving and inclusive spectrum from those with the most at stake in social change (generally poor, working class and people of color communities) to progressive and liberal forces uncomfortable with inequity and social exclusion, to centrist forces that recognize the need for a more sustainable social order. So it is necessary to build deep cores of organization (community, unions, churches, services) among the poor and working families. Without these social justice bases, we will not reach social justice outcomes. Yet it is also crucial to engage the middle class and people of conscience through broad issue campaigns and coalitions. The broadest common denominators are almost always economic justice, educational opportunity, health care and the environment. We will have made a lot of progress when we get an equal level of consensus to renounce superpower status and military spending.
- Bottom-Top Synergy: After 30 years of Conservative hegemony in national government, and the global preemption of government power by corporate interests, we need to reconstruct firm centers of place-based electoral power from the bottom up. While there is no lock-step pathway from local to national power, we have to establish sustainable bases, practices and models of progressive governance in major cities, counties and states. We can leverage national power from these bases. Where openings emerge from crisis, we will have opportunities to move federal government toward a justice agenda, which can provide real resources for local initiatives. We also need to think a lot more about how to leverage our power bases with counterparts abroad, particularly with the social democratic models of the EU and emerging democracies in the G20.
- Outside-Inside Engagement: We need oppositional movements that can use direct action and mass mobilization to raise issue demands and to create crises of order and legitimacy in the prevailing power structure. But we also need a way to exercise government power pro-actively, tapping government tax dollars, jobs and institutional strength to implement change and strengthen the public sector and democratic arenas. We need opposition to injustice linked to governing for justice. Over time, inside-outside strategies require some structure akin to a party apparatus, where multiple constituencies can negotiate with each other, where political leaders and office holders can develop, and where a distinctly progressive political identity can be forged. In the US, this was most fully achieved in the US during the New Deal—and in some measure, during the Great Society.
If we think these approaches can construct an effective new majority that bends toward social justice, then we need to look at the following ways to assess the potential or effectiveness of social justice organizing in any given locale:
II. How Do We Assess Potentials? The Objective Landscape
1) Place Based Politics x History
Among advanced industrial countries, US government is uniquely federalist, decentralized and weak. Building access to political power requires understanding the multiple structures of government and the locations of decision-making in any local or state system. Governance structures outline the formal trajectory for power building.
Living political history (otherwise called “knowing where the bodies are buried”) begins to put meat on the bones. Understanding the past influences and present legacies of prior social activism is important to revitalizing old allies. There are roots to tap in rural populism, labor militancy, civil rights activism, public interest campaigns, anti-war upsurges, environmental battles, fight the Right mobilizations… Understanding past defeats helps explain dysfunctional political culture, recognize immobilized communities, and identify where collective hope needs to be rekindled.
Looking at past electoral breakdowns for constituencies and districts lets you know where you’re starting. Looking at some generational history of contested elections, major protests, and issue battles lets you know more about the political dynamics: is there a stalemate of old forces, a growing contest of old vs. new forces?
Seeing where current office holders sit within this history is essential tactically, helping to uncover non-linear toe paths and back channels to power. Most of all, it is important to grasp that power-building, like any form of organizing, is about operating in a web of civic relationships, which are often also personal as well.
2) Regional Political Economies
Government power has another overlay, in the US a decisive overlay, of economic power sources. The nature of the economy and locations of economic power (by industry, corporation, job density, fiscal control, tax policy, etc) in any given place requires additional mapping. Since the economy is highly globalized, it’s especially important to distinguish the leverage points for local vs. multinational capital, and to distinguish where conflicting and converging interests lie within the business community. Obviously, healthy or new economic sectors with potential for job creation are optimal arenas for organizing progressive policy initiatives. In any case, it is essential to include an analysis of the public sector as an economic engine and a crucial intersection.
Today, most local political power is concentrated in big urban governments (city and/or county), and these lie within dynamic regional economies that form hubs of production and distribution. This means that metro areas are probably the most promising power centers for movement building, with the added complexity that the regional economy will not neatly overlap with older political jurisdictions. Getting to scale necessitates having a regional analysis of the political economy, assessing the synergy of governmental and economic power, and developing a strategy for new public sector roles. The Obama campaign illustrates the potential for achieving scale relatively quickly, provided adequate resources, energy and vision to take advantage of the political moment.
One key piece of this analysis is examining broader layers of electoral life. Beyond the state legislature, what key local and metro offices hold power? In some places, this includes school boards and energy commissions, in other places it is a port commission or a city manager.
3) Demographic Shifts: Constituencies x Issues x New Forces
Every regional power center has a demographic profile that tells you where potential left-center forces exist, their relative size and overlap, core neighborhoods, etc. This is basically the geo-demographic map that can be overlaid with precinct or district maps and with local political history. And each established constituency has developed a set of economic and social justice issues that it identifies with, though often the bar is set rather low in terms of real policy demands. One area of important assessment is where there is support for pro-active policy initiatives and for solidarity with other groups.
Identifying the potential for new activist constituencies is crucial for assessing if the current balance of power can be shaken and re-aligned. This means looking at where sizeable groups may be poised for struggles of inclusion: new immigrants coming of age and criminalized youth are almost always in this position, and so are gays, religious minorities, families of the disabled, those without health uninsured… the actual assessment needs to be specific and real! Emerging constituencies that need to organize to establish themselves in civic life can add tremendous energy to social movements and political organizing—and they are almost always the primary supply line for new organizers.
The geo-demographic map will also help identify the constituency layers available to build a left-center alliance that can connect social justice cores and movements with mainstream political power.
III. What moves political activism? Key ingredients
4) Social Justice Infrastructure
Social justice outcomes depend, first of all, on how deeply social justice cores are organized. So in any given place, it is crucial to build an organizational map in addition to the political demography of place. We can understand the optimum breadth of social justice forces by identifying sectors which are likely to have organizations, leaders, and history.
Sectors x Organizations x Roles: It makes sense to have something like a chart of each social justice sector and the overlaps between them. There are three kinds of sectors; any combination of sectors is possible in any given place:
- Associational and membership organizations, such as unions, congregations, neighborhood groups, occupational associations, etc.;
- Identity and affinity organizations, often based on race, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, etc.;
- Social issue and service organizations, focused on jobs, environment, housing, etc.
We create landscape maps for each locale, identifying these sectors and also the main groups within each sector. In addition, we keep track of weak areas and missing pieces. We look for support institutions as well: key local intermediaries that work directly with base-building groups to provide research and policy back-up, legal and organizational assistance, fundraising expertise, etc. We also think about how to fill in the blanks with new organizing or capacity building. Above all, we identify established or emerging anchor groups in each sector who can build broader social justice alliances that connect to politics and governance.
Taking as an example Miami, we can illustrate how the social justice infrastructure has filled in over nearly a decade of organizing. We have found that when the organizational infrastructure reaches a certain level of density and starts intersecting across sectors, conditions will be good for generating a new level of political action and alliance building (often beyond the scope of the original c.3 organizing centers).
The landscaping process also requires an evaluative layer of the different roles each organization and their leaders play. Social justice organizing will present a pretty predictable array of personalities and dynamics—just like any other slice of primate society. So we have to assess who’s who among us: the gatekeepers, bridge builders, divas, wreckers, nurturers, dreamers, mechanics, etc. It is not promising when you find lots of generals, a few tattered troops, and no lieutenants. It’s very promising when you find a mix of new and veteran leaders sitting around the fire together.
5) Anchor Organizations and Leaders:
The potential for movement building and power realignments can’t be realized without (a) the presence of core anchor organizations within the social justice sectors and (b) leaders from these organizations who recognize the need for a larger movement to engage and exercise political power. Our criteria for an anchor organization include:
- The authenticity, extent and power of its base;
- Its internal capacity to design and lead campaigns that provide a strategic trajectory of goals for others in its sector and allied sectors;
- The presence of talented leadership that has some outstanding mix of political vision for social justice movement building, an understanding of the political landscape (above), trust and respect from the base, and organizational development skills;
- A depth of staffing and attention to leadership development that can sustain growth in scope and scale, leadership mobility and transitions, and political responsibilities.
6) Power Analysis: Structures x Forces x Stages
With a good map of the social justice infrastructure and the political power system, it should be possible to see where anchor organizations can effectively wage key battles for political access and re-alignment. For example, in Miami, the battle for enfranchisement is huge; the issues of development are central but sinking; issues of disaster are contingent and rising; they converge around housing and the service economy. In LA, a high level degree of inside-outside power building has been achieved, with a focus on good jobs and in immigrant inclusion, but that now forces the strategic battles to the state level over tax policy and the strength of the public sector.
What we are looking for at this stage is how groups assess the road to electoral re-alignments and gaining a foothold in power. This goes beyond key issues or empowerment campaigns that engage the base and expand alliances. It is necessary to start formulating an Escalating Agenda:
(a) what is the game plan for issue campaigns that build on each other to greater levels of identity, influence and affinity in the political arena?
(b) how does the issue agenda coincide with a game plan for key public offices and electoral challenges?
(c) how does electoral engagement combine much broader level of outreach, messaging and organizing among liberal and center voters?
Things have reached a new stage when anchor organizations are engaged with each other, in coalitional and/or complementary formations, to think through these critical pieces and imagine the actual path to power.
What Does Power Look Like? A Two-Way Spiral
7) Political Action Capacities
This is the point at which we see anchor organizations create parallel structures for political action, well beyond c.3 activity and approaching the functions of an independent political party. At this point, the sum of anchor and alliance activity effectively combines to secure allies in elected office, enact policy reform, and gain access to administrative regulation and resources. Then all of the following arenas need to be operating with coordination and synergy:
If we break out the components, a flow chart might look something like this:
8) Moving to Scale: Metro to State
Significant political success in major metro areas and regional economies is a necessary prelude to gaining power at the state level, where at present, federal social service dollars and state tax revenues create the greatest opportunities for progressive policy innovation and reform. This may shift somewhat with a new Administration, but the federal powers that have devolved and eroded since the Reagan Revolution will take some time to reconstruct at the national level. In the meantime, we believe that state reforms will be crucial in generating new models for the nation in any number of areas: progressive taxation, green jobs, universal healthcare, K-12 education, environmental protection, energy conversion, and criminal justice.
In states like California and Massachusetts, where social justice organizing in the political arena has matured in multiple metro areas, it’s possible to begin thinking about how to deeply influence statewide elections and state legislative agendas. Florida is a multi-metro state where there is a strong infrastructure emerging in Miami/Dade, a good start in Central Florida and enormous work to do in the rest of the state. North Carolina has just seen an astonishing electoral mobilization in multiple metro areas, but a lot of infrastructure work remains. There are a number of other states, like Colorado and Georgia, where one major metro area dominates but doesn’t control state politics and building a strong metro infrastructure could greatly accelerate statewide work.
Since we have a deep belief in place-based politics, we think each path to state power will be custom-designed. But it matters to have an idea where we’re going, even as we make the road along the way. Here are some considerations:
- It will not be sufficient to elect Democratic Party majorities in state legislatures (or Congress), even if that gets the Right off our backs. There has to be a solid and educated caucus of progressive legislators that are directly accountable to our social justice bases, coming out of our own ranks. There will be a need to defeat elected officials of both parties who retreat to a narrow corporate agenda, especially in the face of massive fiscal crisis and downturn.
- It will be critical to develop a coherent state tax reform agenda that can finance reform and sustain a strong public sector, capable of regulating corporate practices, enforcing labor and health standards, ensuring public returns on public investments, and jumpstarting the new economy through energy conversion and green jobs.
- It will be crucial that policy victories come back to local communities through local budgeting, oversight roles, quality job creation, and the right to organize unions… In other words, policy reforms are not only about delivering services to communities, but also about delivering services in and by communities, in ways that empower civic participation.
9) National Intersections and Synergies
Political strategy is not an abstraction—it must always account for the times we live in, the stage we have reached in attaining our goals, and the actual resources we can deploy. We live at a moment that could well be a pivotal turning point in US, and world history: the end of US superpower status, the end of the Oil Age, the advent of Global Warming, the unraveling of laissez-faire globalization. Just this year, we have just witnessed the meltdown of the financial system, entered a worldwide recession, and conducted a historic election that closes the Reagan-Bush Era and opens the door to a very different political culture in the 21st century.
We think this is an exciting time to rebuild national government and redefine global priorities, but we do not believe that our leaders in Washington are suddenly transformed. Nor do we think change will be automatic, or necessarily progressive, or flow from the top down. We think national hopes and symbols of change can fuel activism much more readily than they can remove entrenched interests. Nonetheless, there will be some opportunities to expand grassroots access to the resources of federal government, at a minimum through pilot programs and competent government officials.
We want to harvest the energy of this election, the vision and hope it has revived, and whatever national resources it unlocks. Where we can, we want to help attach the thousands of volunteers and first time voters to ongoing organizations and real communities of interest. It will be equally important to help metro and state-base anchor organizations connect with each other, across their own borders, sharing their strengths, building nationwide networks, and regenerating politics beyond Washington power brokers. In the Clinton years, we saw how little was produced when the Beltway was encircled by conservative mobilizations to paralyze government, and progressive politics had no visible representation at the grassroots level.
We think progressive change will come, but only when there are popular movements and practical models compelling enough to push government through to new frameworks for sustainability and justice. On our everyday coins, we honor four presidents: Lincoln, Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt and Washington. Each was a leader in a time of extraordinary crisis and each had a peoples’ movement behind him, and often in front of him, especially at the moments of greatest risk—the volunteers of the American Revolution, the abolitionists and unionists in the Civil War, the CIO and prairie populists in the New Deal.
Now would be a good time to invest in some new and durable vehicles for civic action, some new paths to power, and some new kinds of power, so we too can hold a government in crisis to our best dreams and values.
10) Organizational Priorities: Internal Capacity Building
We should close by acknowledging that for anchor organizations to play a linchpin role requires a substantial investment in their internal sustainability and capacity for evolution. This means funding for general support, for the next phase of work, for learning and exchange, for internal growth. It means recognizing that we are funding the root system, as well as the flourishing treetops of organization. These issues clearly merit a full treatment of their own. The broad categories of that discussion, which is ongoing with the grantees themselves, and includes:
Each local area has its unique set of actors, history, political and economic forces to take into account. While there is not one recipe for success, it is our hope that this memo clarifies our approach and supports bold thinking among grantees, as they articulate their strategies for moving to scale and building progressive power.
