Miami, Oklahoma ACORN is working with the Anthropocene Alliance to build State Organizing Committees, that can bring together groups in solidarity and collective action to tackle issues that might be larger than an individual group or might need to find common cause in order to make progress, power, and change. A2’s new field director, Tanya Harris, and I caucused at Jerry’s Diner in north Miami, Oklahoma to get our act together on this new initiative before meeting with founder and executive director Rebecca Jim and her team with LEAD Agency, who have been tapped as the anchor group for the Oklahoma SOC.
We arrived to find not only Rebecca but eight to ten of her staff, board members, and super volunteers. We thought we were just meeting to make an SOC plan, do some door knocking training, and then make it real by hitting the streets with the rap. We were wrong. Rebecca didn’t want any quick and abbreviated tour of organizing methodology; she wanted the whole package: go big or go home. And, so it would be. We understood her thinking more over the next three hours of discussions. She wanted all the key people on her team to know what this was all about and what it might mean to the entire organization.
Miami is an EPA lead superfund site with every manner of issues that spring from that including flooding, polluted water, damaged streams and more. LEAD Agency has, like its name says, been leading the fight on these and related campaigns for decades now. In northwest Oklahoma, it has been a lonely fight. If the organization tried to go deep and focus on a couple of their central campaigns, build their organizational base, and create coalitions to help them win, one of the team, understanding their long status as the lone wolf advocate in the region, worried what would happen in the vacuum, if they didn’t continue to be the first and often only responder on these issues. This is an issue, but when you are stretched too thin, the organizing and campaigns are quixotic and your base doesn’t take seriously that you will win or that you have the capacity to sustain a campaign. My advice, for what it was worth, was to reprioritize, and compartmentalize the advocacy, perhaps just a piece of one person’s time, so the rest of the organization and its resources could fight to win.
Being an advocate isn’t easy, but I imagine for some people and organizations, it has its pleasures. The advocate is the erudite spokesperson to the press, politicians, and funders. Not spending time building the base to understand the issue or plan and lead the campaign saves mountains of time. Not having to be accountable to people or members means that for the advocate its your truth to power. An advocate doesn’t necessarily need a big money operation – lean and mean can work well for quite a while, when you’re the only voice in town.
The problem, for all its attractions is that speaking truth to power isn’t the same as building power to win and moving people do demand and implement the change. If that’s the program and aspiration, it takes a big, mass-based organization ready and able to fight the big issues as long as it takes.
It was fun and inspiring to talk to the LEAD Agency team. Next steps are making a plan and making it happen.
