Introduction

Several years ago a group of organizers from the nation's premier community organizing networks and labor unions, along with other friends and allies, have thought about the need to develop an Organizers' Forum to support and promote programs designed to assist and build a "community" of constituency organizers and their skills. Such preliminary deliberation has led us to take some concrete first steps and to make some initial decisions about priorities.

Three working premises have guided our discussions. First, we believe that a Forum that allows organizers to create common space is essential. Second, we believe that a board of organizers and knowledgeable supporters drawn from common commitment though diverse experience would be most able to create such a Forum. Third, we believe that the Forum's overall goal should be to allow organizers to reflect, regroup, and then more forward as practitioners in their common work.

More broadly, we all share the view that there is a need to celebrate and support the difficult but critically important work of community and labor organizers who are committed to building democratic power exercised by resident and worker constituencies in their communities and workplaces. We recognize that there are widely varying models and methodology employed by different organizers, organizations, and schools of organizing, but we believe the Organizers' Forum can bridge these differences by supporting directly the workers who have toiled in these vineyards and allowing them the opportunity to think, write, and dialogue both individually and collectively. Having worked with thousands of organizers over the years, we have become convinced of the need to come together on common ground to advance the work and provide benefits and opportunities to those who have been doing the work.

Board

As a first, and critical, step, we have convened a Board from among those who have participated in our initial discussions. The following people have agreed to serve as the Board of the Organizers' Forum:

• Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union, Washington DC

• Mark Splain, Special Assistant, Department of Organizing, AFL-CIO, San Francisco/DC

• Mary Gonzales, Associate Director, Gamaliel Foundation, Chicago

• John Calkins, Executive Director, Direct Action Research Training, Miami

• Miguel Contreras, President, Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, Los Angeles

• Rev. Jim Sessions, Executive Director, Union Community Fund, Knoxville/DC

• Ken Johnson, Southern Regional Director, AFL-CIO, Atlanta

• Drummond Pike, President, Tides Foundation, San Francisco

• Pat Sweeney, Executive Director, Western Org Resource Councils, Billings, MT

• Michael Kieschnick, President, Working Assets Funding Service, San Francisco

• Tho Thi Do, Secretary-Treasurer, Local #2, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), San Francisco

• Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director, Center for Community Change (CCC), Washington DC

• Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Executive Officer, South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council & Executive Director, Working Partnerships, USA, San Jose, CA

• Wade Rathke, Chief Organizer, ACORN, HOTROC, & SEIU 100, New Orleans

We have always enjoyed the leadership of an excellent board from diverse and exciting backgrounds in organizing. Many of the current board have served since the founding of the Organizers’ Forum. Others that have made important contributions though they have cycled off at this time because of retirements, other obligations, and regrettably even death, include: Rev. Jim Sessions, Andy Stern, Mark Splain, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, and Miguel Contreras.

Staff, Organization, Office, and Seed Money

We were fortunate to find and hire a coordinator for the Organizers’ Forum: Barbara Bowen. Barb is an organizer whose career spans thirty years of work with the National Welfare Rights Organization, ACORN, Project VOTE, SEIU, and the AFL-CIO. We could not have found anyone with more breadth of organizing experience, so this serves us exceptionally well in translating the many voices of organizers into a solid, dynamic program. Barbara worked tirelessly until retiring at the end of 2008 with the thanks of all of the Board and participants of various dialogues.

The Organizers' Forum also became a project of the Tides Center based in San Francisco in order to handle our administrative affairs and house the operation. This development dovetailed nicely with Barbara's location in the Bay Area which allows us to coordinate directly and effectively with the Tides Center there while directing the operations from there and New Orleans. In 2000 we received a planning grant to begin the development process of the Organizers' Forum from the Frontera Fund which enabled us to move to a fuller range of activity in 2001. In 2009 the Organizers’ Forum made a change and became a project of the Labor Neighbor Research & Training Center, a 501c3 organization, in New Orleans.

Program

When we first started circulating a concept paper for the Organizers’ Forum in late 1999, we sampled a full menu of possibilities including facilitating sabbaticals for organizers; providing career development scholarships for learning and skill development; assisting organizers to travel in order to broaden and deepen their work; organizing dialogues on an annual basis to allow senior organizers to explore issues involved in the work with other organizers; assisting in meeting emergency health and welfare needs when necessary for some organizers; and considering an annual publication on organizing issues of interest in this community.

In our initial discussions with Organizers' Forum board members, we have found that there is interest in the full course of the menu, but increasingly two areas have galvanized the most discussion: the concept of dialogues and creating opportunities for cross-training for organizers. (delete: The Board is planning to discuss these and other topics the first weekend of December in order to make final decisions, but) These two proposals have galvanized people more than any others.

Shaping Dialogues

The Board's interest in dialogues for organizers is both personal and professional as they assess the work from their unique perspective as experienced constituency organizers, who themselves define the possibilities and experience the obstacles that characterize our work. A sense emerged from the surveys of the Board that there are felt needs by many people on various levels that might be met by direct and directed discussion.

• Organizers want to find a way to learn from each other, particularly from other people who understand the language and practice of organizing, but have perhaps filtered different insights on common problems from diverse experience.

• Organizers want to explore common problems in a forum and setting that allows for discussion at the highest possible levels of the debate, rather than the lowest common denominators. Diverse organizers understand that there are real problems in the work of capacity, resources, range, and production, and want to be able to have the discussion at a level where the problems are understood, so that the energy can be directed at hard facts and potential solutions.

• Organizers want to wrap their arms around the issues and squeeze them in a space that allows for challenging discussion without having to explain the work.

• Organizers want to explore different methodologies that are unusual or unique in their own experience to see if such techniques might address difficult problems in their own work.

• Organizers want small settings that allow peers to be able to fully engage and discuss the issues.

Within this format the array of issues that the Board would address ran from appropriate and adaptable technologies to how do organizations recruit and retain organizers - questions both perennial and unique. The early discussions have focused on smaller groups of organizers (20-50) on an "invitation only" basis in order to ramp up the level of dialogues and maintain the highest level of quality to the debate. There continues to be discussion of whether these discussions could be national or regional or even done fly-in at airports or dial-up through e-mail and other forms. Nonetheless, the consensus that organizers want and need space and a forum to allow for such discussions to meet the challenges of the work and our time seemed virtually unanimous among the board.

Cross-Training of Organizers

A second interest that resonated equally well focused on creating space and opportunities for organizers to develop skills through training experiences with other organizations. In some ways one program leads to another. To the degree organizers perceive there to be methodology breakthroughs in other organizations, they want to access them for their staff and put their top staff in learning situations where they can develop skills to solve problems or extend capacity. There is no interest in re-inventing the wheel. Experienced organizers want to find a wheel somewhere that is rolling at high speed and efficiency and then get their people to roll with it.

Organizers expressed the interest that the Organizers’ Forum could be the matchmaker between organizers and organizations facilitating, organizing, and assisting in financing training and development opportunities that met these expressed needs. Unspoken is a sense that "if we can get together to build the Organizers’ Forum, can't the Forum also get organizers together across networks and experiences." A program of matchmaking, if you will, marrying people, needs, skills, and opportunities is part of the demand and unique mission that the Organizers’ Forum could fill.

What the Organizers' Forum is Not

The discussions have been equally clear about what the Organizers’ Forum should not be! The Organizers’ Forum believes there is huge demand from constituency organizers for the programs currently being designed, but also believes that there are programs for others that fill important, and critical, needs. The Bannerman Fund for years has been a model of a program offering work breaks and independent experiences for a dozen or so organizers and activists of color annually. The National Organizers’ Alliance (NOA) holds a meeting every other year that is an important gathering place for activists from a diverse number of progressive organizations, as well as working to create portable benefits to advance longterm organizational benefit programs. Many organizations furnish job postings, announcements, and updates for the broadest community of people in this work, which are invaluable. The AFL-CIO Organizing Institute has developed the experience and capacity for successful national recruitment of organizers and introductory trainings (3-days) and internships that have helped many men and women from all walks of life become organizers. The Organizers Forum is categorically clear that we do not want to duplicate any of these efforts! We have plenty of ground to cover with constituency organizers. We have no need to go over ground that is already plowed.

Next Steps

For many years in December each year the Board convenes for two days of meetings in New Orleans at the Fairmont Hotel. At that time a winnowing of priorities and an assessment of the program is formulated along the lines discussed above. Plans are designed for a Spring and a Fall Dialogue—currently a domestic Dialogue in the Spring and an international Dialogue in the Fall. Cross training and other programmatic initiatives are currently on the back burner. As importantly, the Board itself engages some of these issues of staffing, technology, capacity development, and expansion between its own members and with the assistance of some outsiders being brought to the meeting for this purpose. The Board hopes to use some of its own experience as a prototype for how dialogues might proceed.

A list of constituency organizations and organizers who might be able to contribute or benefit from the Organizers' Forum will also continue to be developed and expanded for future utilization. Our website continues to be one method of communication to our constituency of organizers and we are looking at notes and reflections on the Organizers’ Forum soon to be published in Social Policy .

Summary

We have found our exploratory conversations with organizers very rewarding and responsive. Long time and longterm organizers have increasingly come to a familiar place in the crossroads. The distance left to go is farther still than the distance already traveled. Unfortunately for many seasoned organizers the time is shorter than the road that stretches out ahead. The need is to begin to think differently, talk with people with other experiences, and learn to look with a new vision for the road less traveled or the road that allows us to make time and get there from here.

There is not a firmly rooted belief today that the path can be found, but at least today in this moment there is a willingness, perhaps unusual, and certainly unexpected, to try something different and find that we have enough common bonds rooted in maintaining and building real organizations with an accountable base in order to find a common language and do the hard work to find a way from here to there.



Home Page Dialogues Articles People Board of Directors History Contact Us Links Mailing List	Introduction Several years ago a group of organizers from the nation's premier community organizing networks and labor unions, along with other friends and allies, have thought about the need to develop an Organizers' Forum to support and promote programs designed to assist and build a "community" of constituency organizers and their skills. Such preliminary deliberation has led us to take some concrete first steps and to make some initial decisions about priorities. Three working premises have guided our discussions. First, we believe that a Forum that allows organizers to create common space is essential. Second, we believe that a board of organizers and knowledgeable supporters drawn from common commitment though diverse experience would be most able to create such a Forum. Third, we believe that the Forum's overall goal should be to allow organizers to reflect, regroup, and then more forward as practitioners in their common work. More broadly, we all share the view that there is a need to celebrate and support the difficult but critically important work of community and labor organizers who are committed to building democratic power exercised by resident and worker constituencies in their communities and workplaces. We recognize that there are widely varying models and methodology employed by different organizers, organizations, and schools of organizing, but we believe the Organizers' Forum can bridge these differences by supporting directly the workers who have toiled in these vineyards and allowing them the opportunity to think, write, and dialogue both individually and collectively. Having worked with thousands of organizers over the years, we have become convinced of the need to come together on common ground to advance the work and provide benefits and opportunities to those who have been doing the work. Board As a first, and critical, step, we have convened a Board from among those who have participated in our initial discussions. The following people have agreed to serve as the Board of the Organizers' Forum: • Andy Stern, President, Service Employees International Union, Washington DC • Mark Splain, Special Assistant, Department of Organizing, AFL-CIO, San Francisco/DC • Mary Gonzales, Associate Director, Gamaliel Foundation, Chicago • John Calkins, Executive Director, Direct Action Research Training, Miami • Miguel Contreras, President, Los Angeles County AFL-CIO, Los Angeles • Rev. Jim Sessions, Executive Director, Union Community Fund, Knoxville/DC • Ken Johnson, Southern Regional Director, AFL-CIO, Atlanta • Drummond Pike, President, Tides Foundation, San Francisco • Pat Sweeney, Executive Director, Western Org Resource Councils, Billings, MT • Michael Kieschnick, President, Working Assets Funding Service, San Francisco • Tho Thi Do, Secretary-Treasurer, Local #2, Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union (HERE), San Francisco • Deepak Bhargava, Executive Director, Center for Community Change (CCC), Washington DC • Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, Executive Officer, South Bay AFL-CIO Labor Council & Executive Director, Working Partnerships, USA, San Jose, CA • Wade Rathke, Chief Organizer, ACORN, HOTROC, & SEIU 100, New Orleans We have always enjoyed the leadership of an excellent board from diverse and exciting backgrounds in organizing. Many of the current board have served since the founding of the Organizers’ Forum. Others that have made important contributions though they have cycled off at this time because of retirements, other obligations, and regrettably even death, include: Rev. Jim Sessions, Andy Stern, Mark Splain, Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, and Miguel Contreras. Staff, Organization, Office, and Seed Money We were fortunate to find and hire a coordinator for the Organizers’ Forum: Barbara Bowen. Barb is an organizer whose career spans thirty years of work with the National Welfare Rights Organization, ACORN, Project VOTE, SEIU, and the AFL-CIO. We could not have found anyone with more breadth of organizing experience, so this serves us exceptionally well in translating the many voices of organizers into a solid, dynamic program. Barbara worked tirelessly until retiring at the end of 2008 with the thanks of all of the Board and participants of various dialogues. The Organizers' Forum also became a project of the Tides Center based in San Francisco in order to handle our administrative affairs and house the operation. This development dovetailed nicely with Barbara's location in the Bay Area which allows us to coordinate directly and effectively with the Tides Center there while directing the operations from there and New Orleans. In 2000 we received a planning grant to begin the development process of the Organizers' Forum from the Frontera Fund which enabled us to move to a fuller range of activity in 2001. In 2009 the Organizers’ Forum made a change and became a project of the Labor Neighbor Research & Training Center, a 501c3 organization, in New Orleans. Program When we first started circulating a concept paper for the Organizers’ Forum in late 1999, we sampled a full menu of possibilities including facilitating sabbaticals for organizers; providing career development scholarships for learning and skill development; assisting organizers to travel in order to broaden and deepen their work; organizing dialogues on an annual basis to allow senior organizers to explore issues involved in the work with other organizers; assisting in meeting emergency health and welfare needs when necessary for some organizers; and considering an annual publication on organizing issues of interest in this community. In our initial discussions with Organizers' Forum board members, we have found that there is interest in the full course of the menu, but increasingly two areas have galvanized the most discussion: the concept of dialogues and creating opportunities for cross-training for organizers. (delete: The Board is planning to discuss these and other topics the first weekend of December in order to make final decisions, but) These two proposals have galvanized people more than any others. Shaping Dialogues The Board's interest in dialogues for organizers is both personal and professional as they assess the work from their unique perspective as experienced constituency organizers, who themselves define the possibilities and experience the obstacles that characterize our work. A sense emerged from the surveys of the Board that there are felt needs by many people on various levels that might be met by direct and directed discussion. • Organizers want to find a way to learn from each other, particularly from other people who understand the language and practice of organizing, but have perhaps filtered different insights on common problems from diverse experience. • Organizers want to explore common problems in a forum and setting that allows for discussion at the highest possible levels of the debate, rather than the lowest common denominators. Diverse organizers understand that there are real problems in the work of capacity, resources, range, and production, and want to be able to have the discussion at a level where the problems are understood, so that the energy can be directed at hard facts and potential solutions. • Organizers want to wrap their arms around the issues and squeeze them in a space that allows for challenging discussion without having to explain the work. • Organizers want to explore different methodologies that are unusual or unique in their own experience to see if such techniques might address difficult problems in their own work. • Organizers want small settings that allow peers to be able to fully engage and discuss the issues. Within this format the array of issues that the Board would address ran from appropriate and adaptable technologies to how do organizations recruit and retain organizers - questions both perennial and unique. The early discussions have focused on smaller groups of organizers (20-50) on an "invitation only" basis in order to ramp up the level of dialogues and maintain the highest level of quality to the debate. There continues to be discussion of whether these discussions could be national or regional or even done fly-in at airports or dial-up through e-mail and other forms. Nonetheless, the consensus that organizers want and need space and a forum to allow for such discussions to meet the challenges of the work and our time seemed virtually unanimous among the board. Cross-Training of Organizers A second interest that resonated equally well focused on creating space and opportunities for organizers to develop skills through training experiences with other organizations. In some ways one program leads to another. To the degree organizers perceive there to be methodology breakthroughs in other organizations, they want to access them for their staff and put their top staff in learning situations where they can develop skills to solve problems or extend capacity. There is no interest in re-inventing the wheel. Experienced organizers want to find a wheel somewhere that is rolling at high speed and efficiency and then get their people to roll with it. Organizers expressed the interest that the Organizers’ Forum could be the matchmaker between organizers and organizations facilitating, organizing, and assisting in financing training and development opportunities that met these expressed needs. Unspoken is a sense that "if we can get together to build the Organizers’ Forum, can't the Forum also get organizers together across networks and experiences." A program of matchmaking, if you will, marrying people, needs, skills, and opportunities is part of the demand and unique mission that the Organizers’ Forum could fill. What the Organizers' Forum is Not The discussions have been equally clear about what the Organizers’ Forum should not be! The Organizers’ Forum believes there is huge demand from constituency organizers for the programs currently being designed, but also believes that there are programs for others that fill important, and critical, needs. The Bannerman Fund for years has been a model of a program offering work breaks and independent experiences for a dozen or so organizers and activists of color annually. The National Organizers’ Alliance (NOA) holds a meeting every other year that is an important gathering place for activists from a diverse number of progressive organizations, as well as working to create portable benefits to advance longterm organizational benefit programs. Many organizations furnish job postings, announcements, and updates for the broadest community of people in this work, which are invaluable. The AFL-CIO Organizing Institute has developed the experience and capacity for successful national recruitment of organizers and introductory trainings (3-days) and internships that have helped many men and women from all walks of life become organizers. The Organizers Forum is categorically clear that we do not want to duplicate any of these efforts! We have plenty of ground to cover with constituency organizers. We have no need to go over ground that is already plowed. Next Steps For many years in December each year the Board convenes for two days of meetings in New Orleans at the Fairmont Hotel. At that time a winnowing of priorities and an assessment of the program is formulated along the lines discussed above. Plans are designed for a Spring and a Fall Dialogue—currently a domestic Dialogue in the Spring and an international Dialogue in the Fall. Cross training and other programmatic initiatives are currently on the back burner. As importantly, the Board itself engages some of these issues of staffing, technology, capacity development, and expansion between its own members and with the assistance of some outsiders being brought to the meeting for this purpose. The Board hopes to use some of its own experience as a prototype for how dialogues might proceed. A list of constituency organizations and organizers who might be able to contribute or benefit from the Organizers' Forum will also continue to be developed and expanded for future utilization. Our website continues to be one method of communication to our constituency of organizers and we are looking at notes and reflections on the Organizers’ Forum soon to be published in Social Policy . Summary We have found our exploratory conversations with organizers very rewarding and responsive. Long time and longterm organizers have increasingly come to a familiar place in the crossroads. The distance left to go is farther still than the distance already traveled. Unfortunately for many seasoned organizers the time is shorter than the road that stretches out ahead. The need is to begin to think differently, talk with people with other experiences, and learn to look with a new vision for the road less traveled or the road that allows us to make time and get there from here. There is not a firmly rooted belief today that the path can be found, but at least today in this moment there is a willingness, perhaps unusual, and certainly unexpected, to try something different and find that we have enough common bonds rooted in maintaining and building real organizations with an accountable base in order to find a common language and do the hard work to find a way from here to there.

©2004 Organizer's Forum