bottom up change

Note: All links to photos, video, live-blogging, and live-tweeting of the OFA-MA Grassroots Organizing Forum are at the bottom of this post.

As regular readers of Bottom Up Change know, I have been very interested in the development of Organizing for America since I created this blog in early January.  In particular, I have wanted to see whether the grassroots energy of the 2008 Obama campaign could be translated to help President Obama achieve the changes that many of us spent so much time and energy working for during the campaign.  Some observers have expressed serious doubts as to whether an organization like OFA will be able to work.  Zephyr Teachout, for instance, made a case against the very existence of OFA in a provocative post at techPresident.  While I have been hopeful about OFA’s chances, it was only this past weekend that I saw real evidence that, contrary to Teachout, OFA can succeed.  In fact, as I argue below, the event I attended this weekend offered a case study in how OFA should work.

On Saturday, May 16, the Massachusetts chapter of OFA (OFA-MA) held a “Grassroots Organizing Forum”.  This forum was part of the OFA “listening tours” that are going on around the country right now, but it was much more ambitious in its scope.  There were 6 speakers and 2 panel discussions of grassroots organizing, advocacy, and policy.  There was also an hour-long break-out session involving the different regions of the state.  Right now, Massachusetts has no OFA paid staff, so the Forum was planned and organized completely by volunteers.  In the end, around 100 volunteers had participated in making the Forum a spectacular success.

The planning for the Grassroots Forum began in January, when Sarah Compton, the former Field Director of Massachusetts for the Obama campaign, began talking with staff and volunteers from the Massachusetts Obama organization to plan an OFA-MA event.  By the time I started attended meetings in early May, they had about a dozen core volunteers with specific roles and the planning was in its late stages.

The Forum was held at the SEIU 1199 office in Dorchester, which is Boston’s largest neighborhood.  The night before the event, nearly 700 people had registered on myBO, so we expected a good turnout and we held a training for volunteers to do a run-through of all the tasks that volunteers would need to perform.  Many volunteers ended up staying at the site until past midnight, and they had to be back at 7am on Saturday morning.  The logistical complexity of preparing for the event was high, and there was a lot that could go wrong.

Volunteers

Saturday was a beautiful day in Boston, and we haven’t had many of them this spring, so it was impressive to see that out of the nearly 700 people that signed up, more than 400 attended the Forum.  We had feared that there would be logistical problems getting people registered and seated before the 9am start time.  We only had an hour to register several hundred people.  But as you can see in the photograph below, registration was not crowded and it went very smoothly.  Another logistical challenge was helping people find the SEIU, which is very hard to find.  To solve this problem, volunteers (or “human arrows”) stood outside at key locations holding signs, wearing arrows (hence the name), and directing cars to the building.  Most everyone got inside, registered, ate their free coffee and donuts, and sat down with time to spare before the first speaker started.  The only problems that we encountered during the day were some minor glitches with the audio-visual systems, but those weren’t a very big deal.  From a logistics standpoint, nearly everything went perfectly.

Registration at OFA-MA Organizing Forum, 5/16/09

The event was very insightful for anyone who is interested in the future of the movement begun during the Obama campaign.  Mitch Stewart, the National Director of OFA, traveled to Boston from Washington DC and was one of the featured speakers.  This was one of the most fascinating parts of the day.  I hadn’t heard Mitch Stewart speak before and I found him to be a very grounded, reasonable, cool-headed person.  He’s from South Dakota, and he has a certain low-key, Midwestern sensibility which I believe will be effective.  In other words, he seems like just the kind of person that Obama would want to lead his grassroots organization.  The fact that he is a tested field operative who led President Obama to key victories in the Iowa caucuses and in Virginia during the general election is evidence that he has what it takes to manage OFA, which is very ambitious and unprecedented undertaking.

There were a few key pieces of information in Stewart’s speech which I thought were most interesting.  First, he emphasized the need for the grassroots to take a very active role in the health care effort that is coming this summer.  There was no doubt that health care was the top priority for the Obama administration and for OFA. Congress will apparently take action on this issue within the next few months.  Already, OFA is seeing a very positive reaction from the grassroots and an interest in helping on this issue.  Stewart noted that when he sent an email last week asking supporters to sign a statement of support of President Obama’s three health care priorities, the response was much bigger than anything OFA has seen so far.  Specifically, 170,000 people signed this declaration in 24 hours, which was three times bigger than the number of people who signed a similar statement in support of the budget earlier this year.  (By the way, if you haven’t signed this declaration yet, please do so.)   Stewart also stated that the second priority for OFA is to support the administration and Congress in passing energy legislation and in supporting the Supreme Court nominee that is expected to be announced shortly.  Interestingly, Stewart said nothing of education, which has been one of President Obama’s three main planks in his budget.  This omission most likely reflects the fact that education reform is a priority that will be addressed after health care and energy.

The most interesting part of Stewart’s talk came during the question and answer period.  Throughout his speech, Stewart repeatedly made it clear that OFA’s mission is first and foremost to “support the President’s agenda.”  While he was answering questions, a woman interrupted and shouted out “We want input in that agenda!”  A large number of people in the crowd applauded.  Stewart handled this issue deftly, stating that he encouraged people to provide input about policy by going to whitehouse.gov and also by speaking to local elected members of Congress.  OFA, he said, was not a policy organization and he was not a policy expert, so “at this time”, the best way to voice policy concerns is by using these other forums.  The issue of policy input from Obama’s base was one of the major themes throughout the day.  Closely related was the issue of top-down versus bottom-up control of OFA, which I’ll get to later.

I’m not going to provide a summary of my reactions to every speaker and every panel.  The videos are posted for you to see and the event was live-blogged in exhaustive detail.  Just a few more observations from my experience at this event, though.  There were some terrific speakers and panelists–especially interesting to me were Marshall Ganz’s speech and the first panel on “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement”.  I also found the presentation by David Cutler on health care riveting.  Cutler was a senior advisor to Barack Obama during the campaign and he is Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard.  He eloquently communicated the urgent need for the grassroots to get involved in the health care fight.  But from my perspective, the most valuable part of the Organizing Forum was the hour-long breakout session in which attendees broke into their region of Massachusetts and discussed their views about OFA.

Marshall Ganz speaks during a panel discussion on "Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement"

One nice surprise in the breakout session that I helped facilitate was a woman who lived in Dorchester and just happened to walk by the OFA-MA volunteers outside directing traffic to the event.  She didn’t know about the Forum, but she decided to attend when she saw the volunteers.  To me, that was just a sign of both how incredibly organized this event was and how there is still a strong desire among ordinary citizens to get involved.  People were just walking into this event from off the street!  Clearly, a lot of people are still fired up.

The breakout session revealed some of the questions that had arisen during Mitch Stewart’s talk and which I heard repeatedly from participants throughout the day.  Many people felt that OFA needed to have some kind of connection to local politics and local issues or else people wouldn’t get involved.  There was a concern that OFA may be trying to “recreate the wheel” since there are already many local organizations working on many of the same issues that the President is working on.  Also, reflecting the concerns of the person who had interrupted Mitch Stewart during the Q&A, people expressed a desire to push for their views on policy through OFA.

What this discussion left me thinking was that the only way OFA is going to be effective is if it is truly grassroots.  There is always going to be some element of a top-down structure to OFA–or to any large organization, for that matter.  However, there needs to be a groundswell of activity and support at the local level for people to get involved.  I think that health care reform is an issue that will rally Obama’s base supporters because most of us feel passionately about it.  But unless some of the grassroots’ policy concerns are taken into account by the President, there will not be the kind of intense activism at the local level that can make a difference in terms of passing legislation.  For instance, many people in the audience Saturday wanted a single payer health care system and there was some disappointment that this was not on the table.  But if the “public option” is taken off the table as well, I am doubtful that a large segment of Obama’s base will be motivated enough to spend time volunteering or donating to OFA.

Incidentally, Massachusetts may have a role to play in helping the public option succeeds, because moderate Senators to our north in Maine will be key players in whether or not reconciliation has to be used to pass health care reform.  This report suggests that Sen. Olympia Snowe is trying to delay the creation of a public option.  This is just the kind of thing that OFA volunteers in Maine and Massachusetts should be acting on now, and I imagine there would be a lot of support for some kind of action to put pressure on Sen. Snowe not to try and delay the public option.

But going back to the need for OFA to have a very strong “bottom-up” component: I think the reason why the OFA-MA Grassroots Forum was so successful had a lot to do with the fact that it was organized entirely by volunteers.  A group of people decided on their own that they could build from the idea of a listening tour by making it an opportunity to hear from some of the most prominent organizers and policy minds in the Boston area.  The kind of energy that I saw at the Forum and the way it was organized should be a model for Mitch Stewart and his team at the OFA headquarters in Washington DC.  Grassroots success depends on grassroots commitment and passion.  That kind of involvement requires that volunteers and activists at the local level will largely drive an organizing effort around their concerns and their agenda.  The good news is that OFA will be receiving all of this feedback.  After hearing from Mitch Stewart on Saturday, I trust that he will be listening.

Below you will find links to various media from the OFA-MA Grassroots Organizing Forum:

Here are some of the pictures that I took during the event.

A much more impressive collection of photographs by one of OFA-MA’s volunteers, Harmony Wu.

Here is the video of Mitch Stewart speaking and his Q&A (you can also see me introducing a speaker in one of the videos on this page)

Here’s the live-blog from the event.

Video of Panel 1: “Grassroots Organizing: Harnessing the Obama Movement”

For a lot of this material in one place and more, check out the website for OFA-MA, www.massforchange.com

Finally, here’s the Twitter page for OFA-MA and the live-tweet from the event under the hashtag #OFAMA.  By the way, this experiment with Twitter was encouraging.  I’ll have more to say about this in a later post.