A different kind of field model, a recap on I-1631 and the culture we built
Originally written as a speech at the Sustainable Seattle Awards
It was May 2011 when we stepped off the plane in Pittsburg. My small team and I had just landed from Boston where we had a week-long intensive training on how to run a canvass office. The script for our door-knocking campaign was playing on repeat in my head like The Song That Never Ends. My head was throbbing from having a few too many the night before with my new colleagues, many of whom were likely feeling it too as they landed in their respective cities across the country.
Despite the hangover, I was excited - we were setting out to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund - a federal program that would clean up our waterways, restore habitats, and protect communities from water pollution. The plan was to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors across the country and engage people by talking about local waterways, then asking them to donate to sustain the campaign. As Team Pittsburgh we had to learn how to say words like ‘Allegheny’, ‘Monongahela’, and ‘Susquehanna’ despite knowing nothing of the history of these places. We were all transplants. We would pound the pavement to talk to the people living in houses concerned about the state of the river banks, never acknowledging the violence done by their ancestors to the people the rivers were named for.
Veronica, our fearless leader charged through the airport to the baggage claim insistent that we head straight to our campaign office to begin setting up. It was a Saturday afternoon, but Veronica was right. If we were going to get everything ready to open Monday morning we had to start tonight.
Mark, my fellow assistant director lagged behind us and placed a quick call to his girlfriend. “So, I am really sorry, but I can’t be there for dinner. I know!... I know…’. He sighed, ``I know it’s been a week - I promise I will make it up to you, I just can’t ditch my team that way tonight - we have a lot to do.’ He paused, ‘I’m sorry, I love you.’ He hung up and didn’t say anything, looking deflated as we continued walking.
As we approached the baggage claim, Veronica’s buzzed “Hi there, yep we just landed, we’re heading straight to the office - what’?” Her voice dropped. “Yes. We all took the same flight. Why?”, “oh, thanks for the flag...”. She giggled nervously. “Right, right. Talk soon!” She hung up.
She was a little stunned. I asked what she had said. Veronica paused and said “she was surprised we had all taken the same flight...If the plane had been delayed, or god forbid crashed, who would open the Pittsburgh campaign office on Monday’?” My stomach lurched a little. Mark and I exchanged a look of concern but didn’t say anything. After a long pause, Veronica said. “It may be harsh, but ya know, she’s right. We need to be thinking that way.” We all looked straight ahead at the luggage carousel, avoiding each other’s eyes.
Campaign organizers are often told that we are the martyrs of the movement - that long hours and grueling work are best fueled by cigarettes and coffee and the value of our work can be solely quantified in the numbers: of doors knocked, petitions signed, dollars raised, and the unspoken street cred, that comes from hours worked. Real organizers don’t let anything stop them from getting to their goals - not getting sick, not needing to take time to be with loved ones, certainly not taking a “mental health day”, that is just code for not wanting to work that hard. If you experience problems with your coworkers, if someone makes a misogynist, homophobic, or racist remark, we don’t have time to deal with that. If it was bad, fire them, if it was not so bad, ignore it and move on. While this isn’t true on every campaign, elements of this culture permeate throughout the sector and across campaigns.
Spending that summer walking the suburbs of Pittsburgh, I’d like to say that I saw this culture clearly and that I called these organizations out on their hypocrisy, but the truth is, I drank the Kool-Aid. I went on to work for that organization for another two years. I believed that the campaigns we were working on took precedence over my needs and that we had too much to do and not enough people to do it. My dwindling savings and aching body were taking one for the team. A mantra I often told myself was “We’re working to stop global warming after all - we can relax when the work is done.” I was reminded on a regular basis, I was being paid to do this work and that was a privilege. That I probably shouldn’t complain. The truth was, I was burning out.
By the time 2018 rolled around, I had 8 years of professional organizing and campaigning under my belt and had unlearned a lot of this behavior. I knew what I needed to do to stay healthy and happy. I had remained friends with a number of folks I had met during those campaigns, and years later, many had left the profession, and some the movements surrounding it all together. One friend had such bad PTSD, after his time as a canvass director he developed panic attacks from knocking on doors - even of people he knew. For many, campaign work had become so toxic, that couldn’t be the solution to the problems around us. This hurt to hear, as organizers, our job is to grow the movement. Here were some of our most talented people, running away from this work, and for totally justified reasons - people didn’t feel respected.
We are in pretty dire times as far as the planet and our social institutions are concerned, and we need as many organizers as we can get. But, in order to do that we need all kinds of people to feel respected in campaign work. That means people with children, people who are poor, people with mental health disorders, more queer people, and black and brown people, need to see themselves being respected in this work, and that only comes when our campaign models are built with inclusivity as a core tenant.
This brings us to initiative 1631 -a groundbreaking initiative that would put a fee on corporate pollution to be invested in communities to fund clean energy projects and put Washington on a path to being a leader in fighting climate change. The amazing and terrifying thing about climate change is that fighting it will require an overhaul of everything - our financial, social, and political systems. It will take us fundamentally changing from the ground up. It became clear from the start, that this campaign could be no different.
From the moment I accepted a job on this campaign, our motto was “This is our campaign, we do it our way” - we set the rules, we allow people to come as their whole, full selves. The initiative focused on investing in communities of color, and we knew that many of these practices, while toxic for most people were particularly harmful to people of color and other Marginalized Identities, so we set out to build an inclusive field campaign.
We started by hiring a leadership team of largely queer women. Then, we thought about professional development and movement growth for the day “after the election”. We asked ourselves, what do we want this experience to be for the organizers. We worked with each organizer to identify their “long-days”, helping them to find time to engage in the things that gave them joy outside of work. We identified a professional skill that we would check in on the development of each week. We paid a living wage in line with the salary scales of the Campaign Workers Guild. As part of onboarding and throughout the campaign, our staff read up on the racist history of the environmental and conservation movements. We created a joyful office space where we played music, hung beautiful protest art, were accompanied by a cadre of fantastic office dogs. We worked hard, sure, we had the campaign to win, but we also encouraged dance breaks and brought joy to our work.
Most significantly, we employed a model that valued training and giving leadership to volunteers which did a whole suite of things, not the least of which was building up the Washington State Environmental movement with trained and tested leaders. It allowed us to scale to be the largest field operation Washington state has seen since the early nineties and the largest field operation the city of Seattle had seen likely ever. But, and maybe most significantly, it also allowed our organizers to catch their breath and step back, even in the most intense moments of the campaign, to stay calm and strategize, to get sleep and recover when they were sick. In order to do this well, we established values, norms, and accountability processes - both for staff and volunteers. The glue that held this all together was the shared responsibility for upholding this culture of respect.
Over the course of the campaign, what became clear was that the tactics - while not imperfect - are not the toxic part. We can knock on doors and engage with our neighbors and, to be clear, doing so is crucial to building a fairer more sustainable world. The truth is, this work is hard and we need an inclusive culture supporting and respecting the people doing it. While we certainly did not do all of this perfectly, we were able to stand up to 35 million dollars worth of oil industry money, and while we didn’t win, we got a lot closer than the oil industry ever wanted us to.
As we approach yet another grueling campaign season, I am inspired to see campaigns that are picking up this mantle and moving into more inclusive campaigning. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders’ campaign staffs are unionized, Freshman Representative, Alexandra Ocasio Cortez giving her staff paid parental leave and a living wage, Women and people of color are taking on major roles in leadership on key electoral campaigns. New organizing models are emerging to support people running who are not supported by the traditional democratic party establishment.
As it turns out, if we treat each other with respect and allow people to show up as their full selves, we can grow movements beyond any one issue or organization and reach more people than we ever thought was possible. The truth is, the fate of our planet may just depend on it.
