Over the last month we’ve talked about how issues move from quiet conversations to coordinated action. Each step built on the last. Each step had the potential to resolve the problem. Sometimes that happens quickly. Often it doesn’t.
When a group has been acting together for a while, the biggest change isn’t always external. It’s internal. Energy that felt high at the beginning starts to level off. Meetings that were full get a little quieter. The same people start carrying more of the work. That isn’t a failure. It’s a normal part of doing something that lasts longer than a few weeks.
Up to this point, much of the work has been organic. People have talked in small groups, supported each other in informal spaces, and shared information in ways that fit into their daily routines. Once you begin coordinating actions, the expectations change. You are asking people to move together at the same time, and that requires more effort and more reliability than any one person can provide on their own.
This is why sustainability has to be part of the plan from the beginning.
Within the first month of coordinated work, you should be identifying backups for every role. As soon as someone starts to feel overwhelmed, they step back and someone else steps in. That isn’t a loss of momentum. It is how momentum is preserved. The same is true for participation. If an event has lower turnout than the last one, it isn’t a sign that the campaign is ending. It is usually a sign that people need a different kind of gathering.
This isn’t separate from the work. It is the work. A campaign that cannot pause and regroup is a campaign that will eventually run out of people.
There are actions beyond what we’ve talked about in this series that require serious planning and a much higher level of coordination. Those only become possible when a group has learned how to move together, how to share responsibility, and how to take care of its own energy over time.
The goal is to build something that can continue even if the original volunteers need to step away, even if you need to step away. That means planning for the long term, even while hoping for a quick resolution. It means accepting that people work in cycles and building those cycles into the structure of the campaign.
Strong unions know when to apply pressure and when to take care of each other. The ability to do both at the right time is what allows collective action to last long enough to win.
Over the past five weeks we’ve covered these ideas together at UNITY, but only about thirty people have been in the room for those conversations out of more than 5,500 members. If this series has been useful to you, print these articles and share them in your workspace. Talk with your coworkers about them. Make sure the people around you have access to the same framework for how change happens and what it takes to sustain it.
We’ll take a few weeks off from the weekly trainings, and when we come back we’ll start focusing on specific collective actions and how to coordinate them using the roles and structures we’ve been talking about. Knowledge is one of the most powerful things we can share with each other. Right now you have it. Passing it along is how we build a culture where no one has to start from scratch and no one has to act alone.
Joey Hicklin – WPEA Organizer & IT Admin
