It Could Happen HereYou already know how to organize, you just don't realize it. Mia and James discuss the skills and knowledge you already have from things as basic as having a dinner party that will allow you to start organizing today!
Original Air Date: 12.13.24
All media. Hi everyone, It's me James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would likely to do when it's very important to do so today I want to talk to you about Syria, and specifically Northeast Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as a brutal dictatorship of Bashara Lasad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have bought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing, and occupation by Turkish back Jahaddis groups in an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rajava Revolution. Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forced to be displaced, and thousands of borrowing danger to make matters worth this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like to share your solidarity with the people of northern and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing the Emergency legislation to stop the violentce, hold Turkey accountable, and commit US support to the Syrian democratic forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to Defendrojaba dot org. That's d E F E N d R o ja va dot org. If you are able to the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives. One representative and one senator. Representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York. He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is two zero two two two five three four six one. Leathon will be Senator James Rish He's an Idaho Republican. He is a ranking member's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be two zero two two two four two seven five two. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on Defendrojaba dot org. If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to this humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances, you can donate to two organizations that I would suggest to. First, we be heavier store, the Curtis Red Crescent. That's h E Yva s O R dot com and you want to go slash e n if you want to see their website in English, you can donate there. The other one will be the free Burmer Rangers who are currently working in Raka. I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www dot free fr e E Burma b U r m A rangers dot com. We will put all of this in the show notes or the URL, so if you're driving, you do have to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now and what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in nor Syria. Thanks. I hope you do the episode.
It's it could happen here the podcast that's hafftic right now. This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes of I'm Your Host Mia Wong with me.
As James Stout, a guy who likes it to put things together.
Yeah, and you know, on the subject of putting things together over the last I don't even know three four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is how do I start organizing? And you know, the problem with how does we're organizing is that it's not a question that has cleaner simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you were hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org.
Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating left to spaces in the in the United States are trash, yeah, and bad for people. Bad people in them, bad people who are not in them. Yeah. Here's a little test you can you can do, is your org currently sad that Basha a Lasad is no longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave yep.
And that's that's a lot of orgs that that's a lot, Yeah, take the most of them right now. We'll come back to orgs in a bit. But what I'll say about orgs is that, Okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either in fighting or talking about doing work, you join them.
It'll be good.
But the important thing about organizations is something we'll come back to you later. The important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah, but something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right, you know, I'm having them with friends, I'm having them with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realize something sort of startling you. The person listening to this almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
I have encountered some of the most stunning or I mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of, but like, some of the best organizing I've ever encountered. I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. I was like, what, like, people are winning victories that like the like hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like thirty years. Yeah, and it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.
Yeah, can I tell a little organizing story? We do have time, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, go for it. So I remember, in like twenty eighteen, I am on a trip with a friend with coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant caravan is the one that everyone decided to have a fucking cow about right before the twenty eighteen mid terms. And at that time, they were corraling the people of the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana, and like it was raining every day. So the baseball stadium ends up looking like the Battle of the Psalm after like a couple of days, right, you know, kids in needy, mud and shit, and I particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry and thirsty, and so I get three of my friends. At this time, I was still making about half my money riding bicycles and the other half riding so my friends and I was supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes. Right, We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, hey, guys, this is fucked. Which we do. We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles, where we obtained like as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online, people sent us money, and we continued feeding people for months. None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a scheduled. Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times, but we were able to do that and with a lot of other people. Clearly it wasn't just us, right, but we were able to process tenth of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people. Be everyone there. And I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with well with refugees. For the most part, people are so good at organizing each other in themselves. Like when we got there with bottles of water and food. There are a thousand people there who have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right, everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got what they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people. It just we don't call it that. Yeah, And that's part of what I want to try to the myth.
I want to try to puncture with this because I think particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places. There's this way in which the organizers sort of TM capital T capital O. The organizer gets held up as this sort of I guess even a particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with specialized knowledge.
Yeah, and that's just not true.
This brings us something that I think is actually really important, which is what what even is organizing?
Right?
And the answer is that most organizing is you get you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something right. And the thing about this, right, that's something all of you know how to do. If if you can organize a dinner party, right, if you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is it is largely the same skill sets, and all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to you know, work a job, right. You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but you know you have to manage it is that organizing is about people and sometimes you have to you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have work jobs, right, you have had to like deal with your boss being on one right, you have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's that's just what it is.
Yeah, that's the core of it is getting people to do stuff like you do it every day.
Yeah, And the way you do this is by building relationships with people, right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you are already friends, you have pre existing relationships and being like, okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go do something.
And actually I love that.
The first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself, and you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower I know people who've done this just solo.
Is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah. Literally, it was this morning yesterday morning. I have some man house neighbors right and it was cold, and so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do. If you are struggling socially wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends. I know that's the thing that people often struggle, especially if you've moved to a new place or post pandemic, or you're still concerned with cloud gatherings or any of those things. Like, if you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. Like so many of my friends I organize with are people like when we had the end of Title forty two and people were in between the fences that a lot of the people who I organize with now or who helped people with Now I didn't know. I just showed up with a giant siler generator that I happened to have and some stuff that we had a whip around a call zone for and like, people who care about the same things as you are generally cool and it's a good way to make friends. And then you can go on from there.
Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here too, which is that you know, feeding people it's a way to build relationships with people, and also it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah, and from there, and this is a very common exception. I mean this is I literally had this conversation with one of my friends who's like an old school food not Bombs organizer. Food nut Bombs is a very very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a food nut Bobs chapter. They have like a couple of principles, or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right. If there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles, and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah, and that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so, how do you get a group of people together to do a thing? And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you you presumably at some point in your life, have like organized a group of friends to go do something right, Like you've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.
Yeah, and it could literally be anything, right, like, yeah, if you've got some people to go to a bar, you have the skills.
One way I've been thinking about it recently and in my project is putting is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. And so, okay, I could vouch for this, right, the feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team, and.
I want you it is.
It feels you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you. Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it put from the Ice movie.
It rules. It's so fun amazing.
Yeah, and and and but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do right, because obviously you know there's two vectors of this. There's on the one hand, you have the aspect of okay, who do you know? Right, And a lot of organizing is just about here's a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can that can help deal with it, and you put people in touch with each other. And that's organizing. That's so much organizing is literally just hey, like I have like a broken part of my car. I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right, and you put you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made all of the sort of social web that creates organizing, You've made it stronger. Yeah, it also just feels good because you know, and that that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's it's a great it's a great way to sort of break break the isolation we're all under.
Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is I'm thinking of a quotation here something that the busy bee have no time for despair. But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up. And like, I think, organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done. Yeah, And do you know what else will help you enter your situation? Is it the products and services that support this podcast.
I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads.
They just do it. We're sorry, here's a really long period of ads.
I'm so sorry we are back.
So I want to I want to return to my my hight career. If I don't know if if you're a D and D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons and Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the way you need to think about this is, Okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right. You see, you've seen something in the world that is bad and you you figure it. You go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe and maybe that's you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's you know, I want to start. I want to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because my rent is too high, right, or people are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense.
Yeah.
And from there you make a list and that list is you know what you're interested in doing, and you try to match what things need to be done with people you know who have those skills. Yeah, and this is you know, this, this is is where you release get into the heist things, right, because everyone has their sort of like hight role. Now, obvious part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams.
Right.
You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing. And part of the way the successful organization works over time, and I mean just how successful organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say, you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, you know, or just you're gone, or you cycle onto a next thing, or you know, any any number of things that can happen. You want the organization to still be able to keep working without you, and you want you want your you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's like organizing the thing, right. Yeah, And at this point we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing, and a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people, and like especially women and especially like a lot of binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right, I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll get you in a second, right, Or like I don't know, I have a car, that's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things, and I'm just gonna go over loss of things that are actually really useful to get to get people a sense of like the kinds of things that there are. There are massive roles for so one of the most important ones, and this is something you can you deliberately look for. You know, this is this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends. That is a staggeringly useful person because again, most most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships. And you know, one of the things you do when you're when you're doing you're sort of they call it power mapping. But when when you when you're figuring out how you're going to organize a workplace, is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects, and you talk to that person. Yeah, because that person can you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have their relationships already and also they're good they'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading your organization that way. And so like you know if you're just someone who's social or and this is also very useful if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us on operary social but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations that is charming and is good at making friendships. That person unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.
Yeah.
There are also things like research people who are good at and I think people are much better at research than they think to take like a Tenet's organizing example. Right, one of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right, Yeah, And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard. Also want to I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies that it's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right, It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easy things in that, right that all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah, and this is very useful. Yeah, for like union campaigns, bosses.
If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a wo man, yeah, yeah, then you know how to ocin. Actually maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill, but one hundred percent that like you've developed that skill to keep yourself safe and you can use it for good.
Do you want to explain what ocenters and yes? How that how that process works?
Yeah? Sure? So open source intelligence is it's an acream that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information of open sources things sort of openly accessible, right, as opposed to like humint, which is like being a spy, or singint, which is capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on good Reads. Right. All the data that is out there, largely on the Internet, about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the and it's very easy. And I would imagine if you're under fifty and maybe if you're over fifty two, like you just know how to do this because it's what you do. Anyway you want to find out about someone and especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend, but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself safe.
Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right there's you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running them out. People say from them and you can find information about them. But I mean it's useful for cops who are beating people. Is useful for like politicians particularly. It can be very useful for it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very very useful for bosses in union campaigns. Unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff. But the thing is also and this is something I don't think people understand. Those guys, like the people they're hiring the researchers are just you, but they got a job being a researcher for a union. Like they have the same skills as you. They know how to like Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's like dating profiles and like look through their their facebooks and their Instagrams and like a big one, a big one that that the rich people especially do not think about, is like cash app and venmo oh Venmo, because yeah, yeah, because because people's people's people just leave public transactions out there like that. That's how they got what's his name, the congressional Gates. Can I legally call him.
The congressional pedophile? I guess they call him the accused pedophile? Yeah, yeah, the man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman lots of times, you know.
And one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying paying for that, right, yes, which is which is rape. By the way, I want to be very clear about that, Like, yeah, having sex with someone who is underage is rape.
It is always rape, you know.
And the way people found that was that they just looked through like his cash app history and they found all of these money transfers to people. You know, This is all very very simple stuff. That's that's very very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do.
Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute ban to people. Yeah, that may be pinning.
You know if if if you're hearing some of these things and and you think that you can figure out how to do this. That's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is a huge benefit to to organizers because you know this, this gives you, like, this gives you a flexible person, right, it gives it gives you someone you can like flex into into any of a bunch of roles that you need. And also can you know, pick up skills to learn things. Having a car, being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place, Oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful.
The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there, it's vast, Especially when I talk to migrants right have recently arrived in the US. They don't have a US cell phone, they can't uber Oftentimes, nowadays, you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You have to have a special card and then you have to get to the place to get the card right. The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous, especially in the US where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times. Yep.
Yeah, And like transport based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of you know, I mean even things like like setting up summer camps is the thing that like leftist groups do right, and being able to hike very good for that. It's good for things like wilden just rescue. There's a lot of you know the James like the work you do that has to do with like going in helping migrants. Like being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill.
Yeah, yeah, it's very Like, it's useful. It's important. It's okay if that's not something you can physically do or you know that that works for the way you like to in your life. Like another thing I was thinking of which can be massively important and people don't realize, is if you know how to take off a tail light and replace the bulb in it. Yes, like we're entering a time when people with darker, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people are on temporary migration statuses, are going to be definitely afraid of any interaction with law enforcement. If you can change the bulb on someone's tail light or their turn signal indicators of US in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way. And it can literally take ten minutes.
And this is something that you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have. Right, there's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But you know, like if you're a carpenter, right, if you're an electrician, you do some kind of trade work, right, you do plumbing, right, That is thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet, oh yeah, yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting and like having a thing that lets you be like, Okay, here's when everyone is free, Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything. That is what literally, genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here?
Yeah?
And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time? And then trying to figure out a time.
Yeah.
So we're going to close out the sort of skill section with some I think just sort of like domestic These skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization that. Yeah, well you can obtain a button maker there. They're very easy to use. But if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker, and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps, it helps enormously. It's awesome.
That's a badge. For those in the Commonwealth. Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that, yeah, yeah, you're a hero. Yeah. One of my friends recently made me a little patch and it's really cool and I like it put not all my stuff, but if you can sew, like, that's a skill that I do not have. And it's so great when people can fix stuff for someone or you know, make stuff fit someone. You know, if you're a person who finds it hard to get closed that you like to wear that make you feel good and someone one of my friends could do that. And one of my friends was making clothes for another friend for like a Renaissance fair, and like it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time. And it really made her, like, yeah, feel like nice and cared for. And like you might think that like this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that.
Yeah, And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right, and that that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful, is I mean just like being nice to people, being kind to people, and having people around who are good at like keeping groups together. Yeah, that's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable. And it's something that you can look for, you know. And if that's not you, like you can there's something you can you know, find in your friends. You can find in this sort of the people around you. Yeah, definitely, there's also something that I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing with the quality drops drawing and graphic design are very very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah, and yeah, you know, and this is also something you know later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah, and along this line, these things like making music, and there's a bunch of different ways this can go. This can be an immediate thing where you know, like you have people on a picket line, right and everyone's singing songs and this is great.
We love this.
Yeah, also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows, yes, has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the unions off up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know, people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great.
I remember one of we had one night last September, so cold. We were in the desert and I'm like a thousand people, right, and we were well at that point, we were really struggling to feed everyone, even you know, because there was so few of us. But my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had, and I think I had my harmonica in my truck, and like we were sitting around with these. We had some Sikh guys had some Wiga folks come from China and then some Kourdish people and they were all explaying their different music and it was so nice like that, taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music. Again, like, don't underestimate how important that it. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one.
No, And this is something I've I've been starting to say more and more. If if you need a theory brained way to say this to someone who like is is like a curmudgety Marxist who hates fun. Morale is a terrain of struggle that this there's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. Yeah, and being able to raise people's morale, it's it's this massive if you want again, want to go into technical language, is a massive force multiplier, right. It makes everyone you have enormously more effective. The better they feel about themselves and the better they feel about the situation they're in, and things like music, things like art, I mean, things like pulling pranks. This is a yeah, if you were if you were in good practical jokester. This is a staggeringly useful skill both like in terms of you know, you need to be careful about whether you're you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org, but like you know, if you know how to just like pull pranks, this is a really really useful thing. In like union camp Tenant's organizing. There are a lot of people who you can pray and it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises your morale.
Yeah, and I going back to your music as all like, like morale is a terrain of struggle. Like the other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rajava, being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck all the time and it was dangerous to be driving around sitting around with some ZD friends, and like we spent all night playing the ood, which is like a it's like a guitar with a gord on the bottom, and to describe it like it's a string instrument. It's a string instrument, is what it is. And like that made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through this relatively difficult thing, Like, you know, it sucks that people are being killed and just for driving around are existing and they're bombing all this cuitly and infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things, right, like, but there's a reason that those people have ooed around after fifteen thirteen years of war, and it's because it is important, and so don't overlook that.
And you know, and resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right. A lot of the ways that people like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people. This is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And things that you know, the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very very important. And you know, on sort of this note, one of the things that you know, as you've assembled your group of people, right, one of the things that that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the captialty organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together. There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
Hm hmmm. I don't want to call out any organization in particular, there is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And like maybe there are several organizations like that. I don't know, I've just I've perceived one locally. If you don't have those bonds that, like, those interpersonal relationships, like these things won't hang together. Like yeah, So many of my happiest organizing memories, like again going down Jen's memory lane, I guess I have a memory of like Christmas Eve last year twenty twenty three, me and my friends have been out. I know some of them listen because some of them have come across from different states to help us, or at Christmas Holidays, which is nice, and it was cold and we had been feeding people all day and then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find, and then we got to the end of the day, and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of we had some MRIs left. Refugemri is sort of vegan. Lots of us are vegan, so we were like, we're not going to find any other vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here, so we'll set around eating the vegan MRIs and like just talking and like sharing some thoughts and things we experience over the last months of doing this, And like, it's those moments that make you're organizing groups so much stronger. No one's telling anyone to do anything. You know, there's genuine bonds and that the love and friendship we build up between each other doing things that are very important. Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.
And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily, where Okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it?
It's like no, why? No? Probably not, Like I don't.
Know, maybe it's something like really sort of hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them. But like the odds are no you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing, and you know you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much much higher. And that's that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to You have a thing to do, and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it. And the stronger your relationships are, the more lucky that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh yeah, and like you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's it's good to you know, you do like one capital capital T organizing thing, right, You get like a little bit of work done, but mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
Yeah, if you're a baker, you know you can base people. It's a wonderful thing to shut god. Yes.
Yeah, and just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill, and it's useful in literally every literally any kind of organizing you could possibly be, and it is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like it's useful in war zones. It's useful like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people, oh yeah, and you don't even and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like you can show up with food that you have made. You have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
Yeah, definitely, Like I've had some wonderful meals in war zones, so I deeply appreciated those people. More broadly though, those ties like the way we organize without the state. The reason I believe that that is the way we should organize, the way we will continue to organize in a way that we can make the state irrelevant is because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people, and then we approach our organizing holistically, right with everyone in it, knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now, and I care about them, so I'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot and in a way that capitalism cannot right because fucking hurts rent a car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and love one another do, And like that's why our organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism on the state.
Yeah, unfortunately, speaking of capitalism of the state, we're taking our last ad break.
We're doing it. Yeah, hopefully it's hurts Rentica. We are back.
So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing, Because it's really not that hard, right, you just go do the thing, it will happen. Yeah, and suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge, and there's like, oh, this is a really difficult thing. If you just I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened. So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff. Knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever, meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings and places are a wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco. And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
Yeah. Literally, I reached out to a friend to book a room last night because I knew the would get at that stuff.
Yeah, you know, there's arranging people's schedules, getting people show up for stuff, things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right getting to the other a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization.
Yea.
Now, how formal informat you want it to be or just you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you in tandem with the email. Something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice yes, when Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate.
Right.
They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this. Childcare is something that's important. I did, I mean a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare what I was organizing, and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids, and so you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work.
One is that you know, you have everyone bring their kids.
You have like a little space, you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring them toys, you bring them games, and you just sort of watch everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing. Again, if you're good with kid that's very useful staggering or useful organizing skill.
Yeah.
Another way this stuff happens is you know, everyone pulls together ten bucks and you hire a babysitter, yeah, for a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing a thing.
Yeah, I organize with people who have kids I remember four years ago, fuck me twenty twenty a long time ago, and also yesterday, but like we were organizing to feed and house people and we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner, and like, some of my friends have very young children and they bought them, and I think it's actually really cool to do that, a like for those kids, it is normal that, like we look after people in our community. This is what we do, and ever since I've been little, this is what we did. And like it's also very nice for people. Like a lot of my friends also bought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had because there were children there anyway, right, Yeah, some of my friends who bring their children down and their kids would play the other kids, and like it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdition and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Columbia or whatever. They'll get along just fine. When they're four or five years old. They don't care. They just want to kick a ball or see a Teddy Bear or something. And I think it's really good for your children to you know, you're bringing them into a world which is cruel and at times unequal and like your kids seeing that, like we can make a difference and we can do this. I think it's one of the best educations you can give your children.
Yeah, and it's something that's good for everyone involved.
Yeah, exactly, And it's also very I think one of the things I see a lot and people are organized thing with refugees of the un housed is like they're just people, Like you don't need to be afraid of them, Like they don't want to hurt your children, And having your children around shows that, like you have grasped they're just people, and that you feel safe and your children are safe around them. And I think that that's valuable too. You're giving both parties some dignity in that moment. Yeah.
There are some other fair basic things that I think are very important. If you've never done this before, I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah, And you would think that this doesn't matter, and until you watch a group of one hundred people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done and they it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups.
Yeah.
So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting one oh one, Okay. A very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack, and those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, is an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it. And another thing that's very helpful with these is you know you're going to be operating at our time constraints because people don't have forty five hours to.
Be in meetings, and my god, you don't want to be in a meeting.
For that long. Yeah, you know. Knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very very useful and making sure that you're moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff you need to talk about. All of this again, like this all sounds very obvious, and again, you know how to do it, but until you've been in a room where people have not realize they need to do this, you don't understand how I.
Put on Yet it's the pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like science. These are like professional scientists.
Right.
This is an entire room of one hundred.
Feet of people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting, and it's a shit show. And all of this stuff could have been avoided with with some very very simple things. Yes, the other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right, it is the stack. It is very simple, right. You have one person who is the stack keeper, and whatsone wants to talk? You have one person talking at a time, and what someone wants to talk, they raise their hand, they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper, and that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list and people get the say things, and again you know how.
To do this.
This is not like a complicated thing. But again I have one watch people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week, Like who know, I could not.
Be able to pick this out, and you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you could do this.
Yeah, there's a very common Sometimes this is one person and sometimes.
This is two people.
A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to like call on the people and to try to like move the conversation forwards and get and make sure make sure everyone's involved. And also another important part of this, and this is again something you'll you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up. Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off, and you have to get to the next person.
Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill. Yeah. Yeah.
And finally, on this note, there's a lot of if you want to go into the like more technical stuff. Part of the things that facilitators use in part of you know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. And you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in degrees, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. And sometimes this is literally just like, hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time, and you can like ask them what they think about something, or asked if they have anything to say, and a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is a very very important skill for a facilitator or just even you could just do this in a meeting too, right, Like you can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really really valuable ideas and contributions and plans, and if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
Yeah, definitely, if you've been a teacher or in any way what you know, you probably have had you have this skill. You might not consider it as skill. But even if you've been a TA in grad school something like that. You probably know how to do this.
Yeah, So I'm gonna put all of this together one briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever day, which was a tenants union in Chicago. Okay, so this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was. Okay, So one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I was like a tiny baby, right this this was my first offline organizing project ever.
Right, I had no idea what was doing. I so thought I was a guy.
Which like that, that's how much of a fiasco, Like little tiny baby bea who doesn't know anything?
This was, you know.
And so my friend talked to some people that he knew, and he knew that I, you know, I was interested in getting involved in tennis organizing, and we we like went to a cafe and we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff and that's actually is something that's important too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah, and that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club, Like book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group. If you're trying to do a thing, has it just become a book club. But that that's you know that that was something that was very useful to us. And you know, we started making a plan, and our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers and then we went out and I did this and I walked around through a bunch of streets and put them a light post or whatever, and then we put them like we hung them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because you can just like walk up the stairs right and you just put them on the walls. And you know, we had this flyer, this firehead information. This flyer said, Okay, we're starting a tenant's union. If you have tenant, if you have issues with your landlord, or you want to talk about tenants stuff like, come here. At this time, we had an email you can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call, you know, and so okay, and so parallel to this, we like, I forget if it was a church or if it was some building, some center or something. We booked a room. We were kind of lucky and that we had like local press people nice who we sort of knew. And this is another useful like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people, is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it. Because you know, we're we're finding founding like the first tenants union in this place, right yeah, and you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night, but people still came, like people still came in the blizzard, Like a lot of people showed up for this.
What are things that we do?
We also, like, you know, we just we just started talking to people, right, We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just you know, we talked to our friends, we talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone, you know, and this is the thing that just happens as is spreads by word of mouth, right, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long time tenants organizer in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by portraying the old tenants' organizers, right, And like that's the thing is you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you'll just pick up someone who's you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah, and it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they want to do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting, you know, we were going to do some political education. We were gonna have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff, and we were gonna, you know, get get people to understand what we were doing how they can start organizing.
And then we did it, and.
I unfortunately don't remember much of what we talked about because I was often in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which is very nice, but I don't I don't remember what we talked about. But like that, you know, but like all of those things, right, all of those steps from the start of you get five of your friends to go eat dinner and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in like Microsoft or whatever. You make it in like PowerPoint p M, that's publisher, what's what's what's the one I'm blinking, I haven't used it in so long? The one you make greeting cards in I really program and I've forgotten what it is you see this to make Christmas cards? But like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer and then we walked around and put the flyers up and we made it. We made an email, you know, we got a space together, we figured out what we wanted to do, and then we did it, and you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right, But like we had started a thing, and you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah, you just have to go out there.
And do it. Yep, you can have faith, Yeah, and this has been It can happen here?
Go organize.
It could happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever.
You listen to podcasts.
You can now find sources for it could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
