Principles & Processes

These are the skills that leaders need to develop in order to build resilient organizations. Humility: A culture of humility lowers everyone’s blood pressure, providing the key foundation for people to be able to work through their differences together. Self-discipline: Self-discipline builds power at scale. Imposed discipline occasionally has its place (firings, etc.), but anything held together only through imposed discipline will be a lot smaller, more fragile, and less powerful than an adaptable, decentralized organization with self-disciplined leaders. To create self-disciplined leaders, we emphasize the skills of simplicity, habits, and joy. Love: It’s valuing people for who they are, seeing the best in them, and figuring out how to integrate people together into mutually beneficial relationships.

The climate movement has recently tried more disruptive direct action tactics. Some of these include protests by the group Just Stop Oil throwing soup in famous art and the movie How to Blow Up a Pipeline. Sociologist Dana R. Fisher argues that these tactics generally can have the effect of mobilizing more people to join movements (not persuading people in the middle. Further, more research is needed to understand the various political effects of direct action tactics. The intensifying effects of the climate crisis have grown the climate movement, and its focus has changed to more material effects on people’s lives. A diversity of tactics is necessary for movements to create lasting change. Rose Abramoff, a climate scientist, protested lack of climate action and eventually lost her research job because of it. Ilana Cohen, cofounder of Fossil Free Research and leader of Divest Harvard, helped push Harvard to divest from fossil fuel investments. Cohen argue that persistently organizing with creative tactics helped the campaign win.

Choose Both is a collection of movement builders, supporters, and mobilizers helping partners realize a more open, just, and habitable world. They believe that pursuing equity for marginalized folks is the only way to get there. They work with storytellers, campaigners, designers, and more transforming the way that organizations and initiatives take on racial equity as an impact priority. Choose Both identified 5 key decision-points where these partners can choose both equity and evidence to strengthen their impact. First, choose goals that both capture new visions and meet existing needs. Second, choose storytelling that’s both emotional and technical. Third, choose to reach both loyal audiences and new communities. Fourth, choose to both consider data and challenge bias. Fifth, choose reporting that both inspires your own community and accounts for others.

Deeper community engagement is important as states complete build-out of the initial electric vehicle charger deployment along highways. To do outreach to communities, employ a wide range of outreach strategies to disadvantaged communities, including social media, email lists, local media, and campaigns targeted specifically to communities of color (Black, Brown and Indigenous communities); hold a mix of virtual and in-person meetings, including within disadvantaged communities, to achieve broad geographic and demographic representation; consult with community-based organizations, especially those that represent disadvantaged communities, throughout the NEVI planning process; actively solicit feedback from disadvantaged communities through virtual and in-person meetings, listening sessions, public surveys, and recommendations from community-based organizations; and engage tribal nations, who were often entirely omitted from state NEVI planning but should directly benefit from the program.

In this Upstream Indisposable podcast episode, host Priscilla Johnson talks with Just Transition Alliance Executive Director José Bravo about building grassroots power and bringing restorative justice to frontline communities. José says, “There is nothing like knocking on somebody’s door and having a conversation, and building community. That’s super important because you start to understand that there are people who think like you, and there are people who understand where things should be.” Later, he describes how “There’s been a lot of game-changing solutions. In particular, when we’re talking about exposure to chemicals, I think that there are communities that are over-impacted by the exposure to chemicals. There’s communities that have literally the extraction of what will later become a chemical, the production of that chemical, the use of that chemical, and then later the disposal of that chemical. So, in communities of color and low-income communities in the United States in this case, we see that chemicals keep on giving at different parts of the cycle of production and use. And I think for us, it’s about forming local economies to scale.”

Organizers can make coalitions work by following these tips learned from organizing in Chicago. Set up transparent admission criteria: require that each member has the capacity to deliver a busload of constituents to coalition actions and events. Let a thousand flowers bloom: once you trusted some of our coalition allies, you can relax our attempts at control and let each member do things their own way. Wear your organizations’ colors to the rally, and each organization should bring its own signs with its own logos on them. Invite participants through one-on-ones: begin with a conversation in which the coalition creator explores the self-interest of the organization that is being invited. Make sure your coalition adds value. Be clear about who has decision-making power. Set up an agenda-setting committee. Talk about power disparities. Make permanent friends.

There are things we can and must do to shift movements for justice toward a powerful posture of joy and victory. Existing movements for justice are often fractured and have underdeveloped ideologies—mostly because of historical oppression of those movements by the government. To improve the strengths of contemporary movements for justice, we need resilient organizations, which are structurally sound, ideologically coherent, strategically grounded, and emotionally mature. Resilient organizations need committed leaders and thoughtful hierarchies; well-developed, clear ideologies; strategies and theories of change that guide the organization; and emotional intelligence, understanding that the establishment and re-establishment of connection, meaning, and belonging are the center of the work.

From studying past social movements, the Lab has learned that the transformational change necessary to equitably address the climate crisis is more likely to occur when multiracial, cross-class (MRXC) movements* claim their collective power, expand the imagination of what’s possible, and organize and mobilize people at scale. In the last 5 years, the Sunrise Movement has demonstrated a commitment to learning and practice on multiracial, cross-class movement building. This week’s newsletter features reflections and lessons from Lab member and Deputy Organizer Director at Sunrise, Dejah Powell. As a Lab member yourself, you can read the full report* on how Sunrise has been working to build a movement across race and class, and the implications and learnings based on those efforts. This report was developed as part of the Lab’s Climate Justice Microgrant Program.

Solving complex social problems offers unique challenges—here are lessons from “social-change makers” for fellow leaders. First, a critical step to build trust is to center the voices and perspectives of those most affected by inequitable systems themselves. Second, given constraints in human capacity, consider experimenting by hiring differently, deploying talent differently, and surrounding yourself with people who think differently than you. Third, measure your impact—use principles that center equity and learning, track the state of the field’s development, monitor your progress, and don’t forget the health of your own organization. Fourth, be sure to find balance between long-term visioning and planning and short-term action.