S1E2: Tara Raghuveer on hijacking Kansas City’s elections by being “ruthless” about basebuilding

On Election Day two weeks ago, Missouri was not on the list of states progressives were paying attention to – but it should have been, because it was the site of an unprecedented ballot initiative victory won by a working class tenant union. In this episode, we'll hear about how KC Tenants went from ten people sitting around a borrowed conference room in February 2019, to an organization of 4,300 dues-paying members who have won at least five citywide campaigns that have radically transformed conditions for hundreds of thousands of the city’s renters. We’ll hear about their first campaign to radically reshape the city’s municipal election, without spending a dime on partisan electoral engagement (13:35); the debate inside the organization (42:12) that led to the disruption of 919 eviction hearings in a single month (47:15); how they built a culture of nurturing reflection during the pandemic (52:30); and how “ruthlessness about basebuilding” has helped them succeed. 

Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Tara Raghuveer is the Housing Campaign Director at People’s Action. She is also the Founder/Director of KC Tenants, where she organizes poor and working class tenants in Kansas City, and the Kansas City Eviction Project, a multi-year research project on evictions in the Kansas City metro area. 

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: So far this season, we got to hear an organizer reflect on the transformation she experienced when she got to got to look at an issue through the lens of a campaigner, a theme several of our guests touch on this season. 

The story we’re about to hear had that kind of effect on me. It shook me into a new perspective on something I had taken for granted. 

As an organizer early in the pandemic, I took for granted that we were unable to generate enough power to win many of our demands, because of the organizing conditions the pandemic had created. Many of us “took our foot off the gas”, I think, as we pivoted to starting mutual aid funds and demanding better protections for our members at their workplaces, protections that almost never came. 

In our case, in 2020 North Carolina, we started a hotline for Spanish-speaking tenants, and joined others in calling for local and statewide eviction moratoriums. When those expired, we hounded legislators with car caravans and with other early pandemic socially distanced protest tactics. We tried to get more protections for immigrants incarcerated at local jails. We tried a lot of things. But our direct actions, call-in days and Tweetstorms had little impact. Instead of turning up even more, we shifted away from visionary campaigns, and to mutual aid programs, voter registration and many different kinds of rapid response. Seeing so much failure, I thought, we just can’t win that much right now. This isn’t a campaign moment. 

Tara Raghuveer with KC Tenants in Kansas City, Missouri, who we’re about to hear from, took a different approach. Unlike me, in 2020 the members of KC Tenants never let up, they never stopped believing that they could stop all evictions, even after their attempts to intervene with one target after another hadn’t yet paid off. They eventually stopped over 900 evictions in January 2021 alone. And then they went on to win at least five other campaigns that year, like regulations on fees landlords could charge, a new city-funded Office of the Tenant Advocate, the right to counsel for every tenant in eviction court, and a new housing trust fund controlled in part by the tenants themselves. KC Tenants also built so much grassroots power through their basebuilding, they elected a pro-tenant City Council that went on to pass the most far-reaching tenant protections in any midwest city, without spending a dime on partisan electoral canvassing, paid ads, nothing like that. And just two weeks ago, they not only won $50 million for the housing trust fund they partly control through a referendum they themselves got placed on the ballot, but also won a redefinition of “affordable housing” - before Election Day, any unit that charged less than $1,200 a month, qualified as “affordable”, but now, only units charging less than $750 a month can receive affordable housing funding.  In this episode, Tara shares the origin story of KC Tenants, lessons in the interplay of base-building and campaigning, and how savvy tactical decisions - in the midst of pre-vaccine covid - build tenants into a powerful political force.  

Tara Raghuveer is the Housing Campaign Director at People’s Action. She is also the Founder/Director of KC Tenants, where she organizes poor and working class tenants in Kansas City, and the Kansas City Eviction Project, a multi-year research project on evictions in the Kansas City metro area. 

Andrew Willis Garcés: Tara Raghuveer, thanks so much for being here on Craft of Campaigns. 

Tara Raghuveer: Thank you for having me. 

AWG: So, first question is always about the trailer for the movie we're gonna watch. If this campaign, or this sequence of campaigns in your case, was a trailer, what's in the trailer?

TR: KC Tenants is the citywide tenant union in Kansas City, Missouri. We now have 4,300 members and about 350 leaders who are directly impacted by our work, and they have roles within the citywide union. We've got two neighborhood unions doing work within geographic boundaries. We've got building-wide unions across the city, and we're only three and a half years old. So this all kicked off in February 2019, in a dusty old union hall where our headquarters was basically a fold out table, and there were 12 attendees at that first meeting, including one landlord infiltrator. So that's the trailer, and the movie is all the stuff that happens in between.

AWG: All right. In the trailer, we get to see the beginning with 12 people and the end with 3,500. Can't wait to hear about how you multiplied…4,300 divided by 12. I can't do that math in my head, but it's a lot of multiplication. 

Great. Can't wait to hear this movie. But before we get into it, can you tell us about your connection to this story, this movie we're gonna watch, and how you got involved?

TR: Yeah, I have a kind of weird connection to this work. My story’s similar in a lot of ways to the stories of the leaders in our base and different in really significant ways. My family are immigrants. We came to the US in 1995 and started out in the Bronx. My parents had to do something that a lot of immigrants have to do when they come to this country, which was retrain in their professions, setting them back about 10 years and making us move a lot. For the first 10 years that we were in the US we were renters, we were moving all over the place and we ended up landing in Kansas and it was the first time my parents could buy a home. They were lucky enough to do so, and they did another very typical immigrant thing, which was buy the cheapest house on the block that would send me to the best public school.

So I ended up growing up in a white, wealthy suburb on the Kansas side of the state line, very close to Kansas City, Missouri, where I now organize, but sort of in a different world as well. And I got all the benefits of what it means to grow up in a community like that. Also dealt with some of the downsides of what it means to be a little brown kid in a community that doesn't exactly reflect my identity or anything close to it.

But for the most part I was super lucky and lived with a lot of stability and privilege, and then went away for school. Got really interested in housing in a kind of intellectual sense. The literature I was reading was kind of boring though, and it all felt like propaganda about the perils of the public sector. And I didn't have the kinda analysis to know what it was back then. But I ended up wanting to study the private rental market because that felt like the most relevant place to understand how the most vulnerable people were impacted by housing insecurity. So that led me to study evictions and that brought me back home to Kansas City where I started my eviction research in 2013 and met a bunch of people who lived just five minutes away from where I had grown up, but really in that other world.

So very quickly that became less of a intellectual interest and more of something that I felt really deeply in my gut – that led me to organizing. Organized in immigrant rights for a couple years. Then started organizing on a national campaign called the Homes Guarantee, and then ultimately felt really called to come back to Kansas City and try to build power with people who are impacted by this issue here locally.

AWG: And that was what year that you were working on Homes Guarantee and then decided to come back home? 

TR: I started working on the Homes Guarantee campaign in 2017, and I ended up back in Kansas City in 2019. 

AWG: Okay. And since you are still the director of the Homes Guarantee campaign, maybe can you just give us a teaser of what that is?

TR: Sure! The Homes Guarantee is a north star in our tenant organizing, and I think in housing policy across the country. It is a very simple premise that we live in the richest country in the history of the world, and we can, and we must, guarantee that everyone has a home. But of course that simple premise is complicated by what we like to call a conspiracy of the profiteers, who have stifled our imagination and convinced us that only the private market can deliver our homes and they must be treated as someone else's investments or commodities.

We disagree with that, and the Homes Guarantee is an intervention in the kind of political economy that considers our home's investments or commodities as opposed to guaranteeing them as public goods or human rights. 

AWG: So you're working on this really inspiring national campaign. There's a frame, there's strategies, there's figuring out how to win power at the local level, at different places around the state, around the country.

Most people working on those kinds of national campaigns keep doing that and don't say, “Let me come back home to where there isn't an organization”. What was your vision at that point?  Was it building to a 4,000 member organization that's building power and getting people elected or what, what was it in 2019?

TR: It had everything to do with a woman named Tiana Caldwell. Tiana's one of the co-founders of KC Tenants and I had met Tiana and her husband in late 2018 after they had been evicted for the second time in one calendar year while Tiana was undergoing treatments for ovarian cancer. And meeting Tiana was an extremely affecting experience for me because Tiana was clear that she wanted to do something, not just for her own family, but for everyone she knew who she considered actually worse off than them. She was basically like, “We're the lucky ones”. And I was like, “You're the lucky ones? You've been evicted twice in a year and you're paying $300 to live at a hotel”. 

But her perspective was that she was the lucky one. Out of everyone she knew, she was actually the one who was the most stable for the longest. And that this issue was literally killing a lot of people who she loved. So she basically said to me at the end of that conversation, “What are we gonna do about this? You know, are you gonna move back here? Are we building something?” 

And that I think was kind of the initiating premise for KC Tenants. It wasn't a lot more complicated than that, and there definitely wasn't a lot more sophisticated theory of the power that we were trying to build at that point. But it came quickly thereafter. 

AWG: What came quickly? What was the initial, “Here's the thing we have to change and that we can change through base building, through campaigns”. 

TR: Basically, Tiana, Diane Charity, Brandy Granados, three women who co-founded KC Tenants with me, had all been deeply impacted by this issue for years, and what they knew is such a simple idea. But a really radical one in a city that functions like Kansas City did at the time. What they knew was that the people closest to the problem were the closest to those solutions. So what we needed to build was an organization that expressed both the power and the expertise of people whose lives had actually been impacted by housing insecurity.

There was no data that could tell their story more effectively than they could. There were no advocates who could speak for them better than they could speak for themselves. And so the simple premise in the beginning was, “We're building a power organization where people who are impacted by these issues are speaking with their own voice, and building a path to their own liberation”.

AWG: So how'd y'all get started? What was the first sort of initial push? 

TR: So the first push and the reason for some of the initial urgency, right? I had met Tiana in December 2018 and then moved back by February 2019. So there was a quick turnaround uprooting my whole life and then corralling this crew of people who were deeply self interested and mutually interested in building this project.

The urgency initially was that there was a city election that spring, so the primaries were about to really kick off in earnest starting in about mid-February. And when I asked people like Tiana, Diane, Brandy about those elections, they sort of rolled their eyes and said, “Politics in this town isn't about us. And if you go to these forums, you'll hear that they're talking about potholes and trash. They're not talking about people”. And I asked them, I was like, “Well, if we let that continue, if we just allow that to be true, where do you see yourself in four years after the new mayor and council are elected?” and all of them said, “I won't be in Kansas City anymore. I just won't be able to make it here. Right? I won't survive in this city that I love and where I want to live and die”. 

So the first project became making housing, not potholes, not trash, but housing, and the people who live in homes, tenants, the center of the municipal election that spring. And we did that successfully, but one important thing is that in that first campaign, goal number one was actually to build a base. And goal number two was to impact the election and the conversation around the election, and keeping those priorities in check was really important to us. The intervention in the election was primarily to serve the first goal of building the base of our organization, not the other way around. And I think had we been a little bit looser on that, we might have gotten lost in the sauce of electoral politics too early. And instead we were very grounded all along about the type of long term power organization we were trying to build. 

AWG: Can you give us an example of a choice that you made? Cause on the outside people are probably like, “Oh, they're just trying to influence an election”, but a choice you made that maybe only, you know, that was like, “No, no, we did this to prioritize base building instead of doing this”.

TR: A lot of it was how we spent our time in those first few months. Starting on February 17th, we had a two hour tenant meeting every weekend for, well, the next three and a half years. We still have a two hour tenant meeting every Saturday. And that was a huge expenditure of time and energy in the beginning, to orchestrate a two hour meeting, to get people there, to get more people there every week.

It required the canvassers who were working with us at the time, and the leaders who we had recruited in early, and me, to be doing dozens of one-on-ones with potential leaders every week. And you know, that's time that, if we had been confused about our priorities, we might have been spending engaging candidates or writing policy documents or something.  But we were very deliberate about the way that we spent our time in the beginning, primarily being all about building our base. Who are our leaders? How do we get them to the meeting? What's the ride plan to make sure that people who don't have transportation are getting to the meeting? What's the childcare plan? What's the follow up plan? 

Who's following up with this leader who came and told a story to make sure that, you know, we're clear on their self interest and they're clear about a role they can take in this organization in the next step. And so that sort of created the infrastructure that we needed, and then the election stuff became a way that we could immediately plug leaders in to act on the things that they were attracted to the organization by. They'd come to a meeting and then the next week we'd be like, “Well, there's three town halls next week. Our plan is to show up and disrupt all of them and ask questions about housing. Are you in? Cool, sign up here. Here's a yellow shirt. See you on Tuesday at the public library.”

AWG: And so on the doors, you're finding people who want to change their housing conditions, who want to maybe change policy, but probably mostly their conditions. And you're like, “Come to this meeting. Okay, at this meeting, we can change something right now.” If we can influence the debate, if we can influence what side candidates are on, and then what happens? How does the election go and how does the base building go? 

TR: Well, one thing I think is important to add is that – again, to that question of priority, our base was always the priority over the electoral work, even though the electoral work was important and kind of a motivating arc of action.

Another way that the base was a priority and that was important for us to signal that, was that we were absolutely meeting a lot of people in crisis, like in housing crisis. And we were clear like, we're not a service organization. We can't try to solve everyone's problem. That's not why we're here. We're here to intervene in a system, and there are like solidarity actions we can take, and there are ways we can wield our power even in the beginning of this experiment that may end up in alleviating some of this crisis that some of our folks are facing. 

One example of this is that, that spring when we were organizing, I think just a couple weeks into our building, we heard from some of our tenant leaders that a property manager in town called Landmark Property had illegally charged a fee to every one of their tenants to help them subsidize the cost of this new Healthy Homes ordinance in town. And that was considered by law retaliatory behavior that was not supposed to be allowed. 

So we caught wind of this. We got the letter and we just blasted it out on our socials. After talking with the folks who were impacted by this and getting their permission, we put all this information on social media and did a public call to action for all of our followers to call the city's health department, the mayor, city council, call Landmark Properties Office, and demand that they retract this fee. And within 24 hours they retracted the fee, put a letter under everyone's door saying, “You know, our bad, we didn't realize this was illegal.” So as little things like that that we figured out we could do pretty quickly, that would demonstrate in a material way to the leaders that we were recruiting in, into our organization, why this thing was worth their time. Like what the power of the collective could actually be if wielded effectively. There were five, six examples like that within the first six months. 

AWG: So that started to happen. There were moments of people feeling powerful, taking collective action. And was it around then after the primary and into the summer that you all launched your first issue based campaign in 2019? Or when did that happen? 

TR: Yeah, that's right. So to round out the election story, we did a forum for city council candidates. We wrote a questionnaire and put out a voter guide. We did house meetings with each of the mayoral candidates in the general election, where they had to actually go to the home of one of our leaders and sit in the conditions in which they lived, and do a really intense meeting with about 15 folks from our crew that informed the voter guide. We did work on election day, et cetera. We ended up electing the people that I think were probably representative of like the most aligned with us at the time. We'll get back to that later. On the first night that the mayor was the mayor, he slept in the home of one of our leaders in a property owned by the biggest evictor in Kansas City. Right? 

So this is like August 2019. By August 2019. What that represents to me is, we had built a pretty substantial amount of power to be able to call that kind of shot, right? And that power was completely and totally dependent on our focus on building our base, which was really widely known in town at that point. Cuz we started rolling deeper and deeper and deeper in yellow shirts to all these public events. People knew that they couldn't get away from having to engage with us by August. 

One of the campaign promises we had asked for from each of these people running for office was a tenant's bill of rights, written by tenants, within their first hundred days in office. So basically right after all of the winners were inaugurated, we got to work drafting a tenants bill of rights internally first.  The mayor's team was like, “We can write it for you, like our lawyers can draft it”. And our leaders were like, “Nah, we're good on that. The people closest to the problem or the closest to the solutions.” 

So we spent countless hours drafting wishlists, working through some questions with legal partners, drafting the actual legislation ourselves, workshopping it with the mayor's team and with members at the council. Introducing that ordinance in the end of October 2019. It was heard in committee. It was highly contentious. And this was back in the day where the landlords were, they weren't exactly well organized, but they were more willing to oppose us publicly than they are now. And there was a lot of very staunch organized opposition. Much more so than really anything we’ve faced since then.

But then nonetheless, by the beginning of December 2019, the tenants bill of rights passed. And then here's the most important thing is that again, the base that we built through this campaign was the reason that campaign was worth running in my mind. The tenants bill of rights is okay, but the city has really struggled to implement it. I shouldn't say struggled, that would give them too much credit. The city has failed to implement the tenants bill of rights to the full capacity that we expected. They barely funded it in the beginning. We fought and won for 1.5 million of funding annually, which is good, but it's still not enough. They don't implement it. We have a hotline that basically does the business of what should be the city's business on a regular basis. 

All of that is to say running that campaign was primarily worth it in my mind because of the leaders that we recruited into our base through that campaign, and the leaders who developed in a whole new way through running the campaign that we did in 2019. We've got people on our staff now, who came up through our base, whose first entry point to our organization was the tenants bill of rights, like Jenay Manley, who's one of our organizers. She may or may not be running for city council in the spring, and she joined our base during the tenants bill of rights fight when she was an overnight manager at a QuickTrip and was living with intense housing and security, which forced her to stay with her abuser. Because she couldn't afford to move out, and she joined our base during that fight. Fought hard, developed in extraordinary ways, and now is an organizer on our team who's developing other leaders who are in really similar circumstances to the ones that she was in just three years ago.

AWG: And can you give us a sense, there may be people listening to this podcast who don't have a sophisticated understanding of Kansas City, Missouri's population, political geography.  In terms of how working class, how Black versus white is the electorate– Cause I could make up the story that like, sounds like you have overwhelmingly Democratic city council and a mayor who's already on your side and you all just kind of  mopped it up.

So can you give us a sense of what that political geography looked like coming into then the fall of 2019, where you basically steamrolled the housing lobby, it sounds, like the for-profit housing lobby. 

TR: Yeah. Well, we gotta roll it all the way back. Not all the way back, but the beginning of the 20th century, one of the architects of some of the most racist housing policy in the country is a developer named JC Nichols. And he was actually from Kansas City. He was sort of the power broker of Kansas City and invented things like racially restrictive covenants. Some of these things that then became popularized and spread across the country. 

So Kansas City has a political geography that looks really similar to a lot of other cities like ours, that is to say mid-size post-industrial Midwestern cities. There's a history of racial segregation. There's a history of redlining. There's a history of disinvestment in Black and brown communities that plays out in very real ways today. For example, in the eviction data that I studied for years before moving back here, there was just a bright line in those eviction maps that we would make. And that bright line was not the state line, it was the historic racial dividing line called Troost Avenue. All the evictions were concentrated east of Troost in the historically black neighborhoods that had been redlined and disinvested from. 

So that's a little bit of the kind of racial political geography of Kansas City. The East side is the historically Black community in Kansas City. West of Troost is more white. The kind of dominant political racial groups are Black and white. There's a growing Latinx population. There's a growing immigrant and refugee population, especially closer to the river and in the Northland. 

And it's a pretty sprawling city. 

I would say most of the people on our city council are registered Democrats, but not all of them. And even so, again, Kansas City is very similar to a lot of other cities in what are considered blue pockets in red states, where the blue is mostly relevant to federal politics. These are people who are voting Democrat at a presidential level or maybe for the member of Congress or whatever. They're equally influenced by the local real estate developer for profit housing lobby. Developers run a town like Kansas City, and it's not unique to Kansas City. This is the story everywhere. Where the kind of dominant political force in town is the development community and the Chamber of Commerce, and they're all in cahoots with one another. And every politician, regardless of party, is in some kind of relationship with them. Some much more than others, but all of them to some degree. And then I guess the one other relevant thing to say is that we don't have partisan city council elections. So that in some ways provides even more cover for our city council  to present as a little bit more neutral in the eyes of various different groups that might lobby them one way or another. 

AWG: And so you started in February 2019, building this base, getting people immediately to jump in and give them things to do, to move – really to, it sounds like dislodge the real estate investors and developers who are just wrapped up with probably all of the city council members at that point in the mayor, and in the primary try to dislodge them a little. It sounds like they didn't really, the developers get in the fight then, as much as after the election when you're trying to win this tenant bill of rights. That's a short amount of time to dislodge a political power structure that has been embedded for so long. 

So what would you say was the secret sauce in terms of being able to pry it open by the end of 2019 when you had in hand, unimplemented but still had in hand, a tenant bill of rights for the first time?

TR: It's important for me to say, I don't think there was a secret sauce. I don't think there was really a magic to it. It was just good organizing. It was like the basics of organizing and campaigning. We had a target, the mayor and city council. We had a demand, a tenants bill of rights written by tenants passed within the first hundred days. We had a deadline, because of that hundred day piece of the demand. And it was sometime in early December. We recruited the mayor as a champion. 

This became one of the key lessons of that campaign is that we didn't really understand among ourselves yet what it meant for someone to be our champion, and therefore it didn't articulate that well enough to him. And then we weren't therefore able to hold him accountable in the ways that we should have been able to that would've made the win in the end more substantial. So I can come back to that.

But the main thing that I think went right in this whole campaign is that we recognized what our power was versus the power of the organized opposition. The organized opposition had access and money and influence, and let's be clear that the people coming out to the public meetings were the kind of like ragtag, you know, loosely, badly organized, what some people call mom and pop landlords. The people who never have to go to that public process are the much better organized, behind the scenes, kind of Wizard of Oz type figures who run like the apartment association. And these kind of bigger industry groups that are not gonna scrap in public with the tenants, right? They would never deign to do that, but they're gonna take the council member to lunch and convince them that everything that we're organizing for is the worst. So the thing that we had to recognize was they might have money and influence and access in that way.

What we had was people, and we had to get very – we had to be ruthless about wielding that kind of people power. And we had to get ruthless about our power analysis of our targets, and especially our champion when he stepped out of line with what we expected of our champion. One quick story here is that there was a committee meeting where some of this stuff was gonna get heard. And there had been two weeks in between the last committee meeting and this one. And in that time, the opposition had taken it upon themselves to just completely lie about everything that was in the tenants bill of rights. And we learned a tough but necessary lesson early at that point, which was that a lot of people were not gonna read the policy that we had written and find out the truth for themselves. A lot of people were very willing to believe the lie and they weren't gonna do the reading that could have proven us right and them wrong. 

So there was a moment, one of the lowest moments in the campaign, where these lies were being spread. Media was continuing the spread of these lies. Council members were believing in them, and it seemed like we might lose. At that very moment what we needed most was our champion to be out front and say the truth about what was in this policy that he was the sponsor of, but he wasn't taking any sort of public position. And then, 24 hours before this next committee meeting, which would've been the next opportunity, we, and he, had to tell the truth about the ordinance, he canceled the meeting and delayed it another two weeks, which basically bought the opposition another two weeks to spread their lies. And we were like, “Aww, hell no”. 

But that day that he made that decision, 24 hours before the meeting, we were in city hall cuz we were having a meeting with a different council member. We already had 200 people organized to be at the committee meeting the next day. And by the way, most of our leaders needed childcare and needed to take off work. They had sacrificed to hold that time on their calendar. So we went up to his floor in city hall and we demanded a meeting with him then and there. And we said, “If you're not gonna do the committee meeting with us tomorrow, you have to do a press conference with us where you speak directly to the cameras and tell the truth about what's in this ordinance before they get another two weeks to lie”. 

And you know, he was surrounded by 20 people. And we knew his self-interest as our target. We knew he was deeply motivated by an opportunity to look good in front of the press and deeply scared of looking bad or looking like he was lying in front of the media. So we orchestrated this opportunity for him to look good, and for us to get the truth told about what was in the ordinance. We showed up the next day with the 200 people that we had already organized to be there. The opposition wasn't even there cuz the committee meeting had been canceled. And we got this beautiful moment where the mayor is just speaking directly to the cameras about what's actually in the ordinance. And that became a key inflection point in that campaign. 

AWG: Let me try to summarize KC Tenants’ first year so far. You spend a lot of time having 1-1 meetings with tenants, trying to convince them that there’s a unique opportunity to influence their conditions at the level of City Council policy, by making the elections about housing and the people who live in rental housing. Youimmediately recruit tenants to join you at  candidate forums, you put together a People’s Platform and ask candidates where they stand on it, you then issue a nonpartisan voter scorecard on where they stand in advance of the elections in July, after each candidate sits for a long interview with your members. Many of the candidates that scored the highest get elected, in part because, you all did succeed in getting the public conversation changed, to be about housing. The mayor also fulfills a campaign promise and spends his first night as mayor in one of your members’ homes, in an apartment building owned by a notorious landlord. And you all hadn’t even started your 501c4 sister organization yet! 

At the same time, you all are putting at least as much if not more emphasis on finding tenants who want to fight their landlords right now, and are experimenting with building enough leverage to force them to make repairs, change the conditions today, which itself keeps bringing in more dues-paying members. And then in the fall, once the new mayor and council are sworn in you all draft your own Tenant Bill of Rights policy, which will actually create a new city agency, the Office of the Tenant Advocate, and eventually get it passed. 

And so you end 2019 with your policy passed, and what's next? 

TR: Well, then we come back after a brief hiatus, debrief, and evaluate the tenants Bill of Rights campaign, start to fight around funding for its implementation. And then Covid hits. So like March 2020, everything shuts down. Within 24 hours we recognize this to be the complete and utter crisis that it was for tenants, especially poor and working class tenants. 

Before the vaccine, housing was the vaccine. We were told to stay home in order to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. But for so many of the people in our base, there wasn't a home to stay in, or the home to stay in was unsafe or unhealthy to them.

So within a matter of literal hours and days, we had to figure out what we were gonna do to respond to the public health emergency and make sure our tenants were protected. And we started pushing for a local eviction moratorium, which we won. It was short term and then expired in May. We spun up a statewide coalition to organize for rent and mortgage cancellation and a statewide eviction moratorium. We started a hotline, because again, the city hadn't really taken the steps they needed to to show up for tenants in that moment. And tenants were literally calling my cell phone. It was really, really bad in those first couple weeks of Covid and being on the receiving end of those phone calls without any real system to do something about them was horrible. So we started this hotline that continues to this day and is led by a team of 30 of our leaders. At the time it was a lot scrappier of an operation. 

And then we also started a mutual aid fund, because many of our leaders who we needed in order to continue wielding our power in the way that we had been, were completely devastated by the pandemic, by layoffs. And even those who were essential workers – like Jenay for example, she was working the overnight shift at QuickTrip still, but her kids were sent home from school, so she basically had 30 minutes to sleep in any given 24 hour period. So a lot of our leaders were deeply in pain and in crisis, and we needed a mutual aid fund in order to show a kind of radical solidarity to one another during this time of need.

AWG: That's a lot of work and a lot of pivoting. I don't know what that was like for you all to have to let go of the implementation of this tenant bill of rights and just move to rapid response to defense, keep people in their homes. But sounds like you all were able to pivot and even, I mean, I guess it was still defensive, but being able to say, “No, we're gonna stop evictions”. What did that look like through the fall in terms of actually trying to figure out how to, how to keep evictions from happening without a moratorium? 

TR: Yeah, so this is one of my favorite stories to tell. This is the part of the movie that I really like. The soundtrack becomes more interesting, the characters develop more depth, et cetera.

So basically, by the end of May, our local eviction moratorium expired. And let me use active language. The presiding judge allowed the local eviction moratorium to expire, during a time when all over the country, cities, counties, states, were extending eviction moratorium policies to keep tenants in their home during a public health emergency. So we were one of the first places to lose an eviction moratorium that had initially been won by tenants. 

The moratorium expired in late May, early June. And we did everything we could to try to stop that from happening. We wrote letters, we made phone calls, we did all the things that they tell you to do to try to get the result that you want from a person in a formal position of power. We held a vigil at the presiding judge's house. We called people who go to bible study with him, and compelled them to compel him on a moral basis to reinstate the eviction moratorium. Nothing worked. So evictions returned in Jackson County, Missouri, and evictions began occurring in two ways. One in person in the courtroom, but actually mostly by conference call. And this was a covid safety measure, but also deeply concerning to us because of all of the ways that a conference call eviction was set up to violate a tenant’s due process, which is already so limited in an eviction case. So there were no instructions on how a tenant should access the call if they didn't have a device or if they didn't have internet. There was no guidance about how you were supposed to access if you spoke a language other than English or if you had a disability. 

So, what we started hearing from tenants in our base and otherwise was that they were just being kind of like auto evicted by conference call without even a semblance of justice in this process that's already pretty deeply unjust. And we were like, “Well, this sucks. We have to figure out something to do about this.” But there was this whole debate in our base, which was really interesting, I think. It was a debate about what is our goal here? And some of our leaders were like, “Well, our goal is to win an eviction moratorium”. And we're like, “Yeah, but we've  tried all this stuff and he's not budging. We're not gonna win it.” The Missouri Supreme Court's not gonna give it to us. The governor's certainly not gonna give it to us. At the time there was no national moratorium. 

And then other people in our base were like, “That's not the goal. The goal is to end evictions. And a moratorium is one path to ending evictions, but there might be other paths and it might be time for us to explore those”. So that ended up being the camp, that kind of one out at the end of the day. Because it was clear to us that there wasn't actually a viable path to win an eviction moratorium. And so we pivoted to try to figure out a sort of, by any means necessary strategy to end evictions. We were like, “Okay. Time to channel the energy of the chant: If we don't get it, shut it down. We tried really damn hard, we didn't get it. Now it's time to shut it down”. 

So the first kind of shut down action we took was at the end of July. We organized a big rally outside of the courthouse, and we sent people into the courthouse to verbally disrupt eviction proceedings. And meanwhile, we had people log on to the conference call evictions to verbally disrupt those proceedings. And what we found was that the verbal disruptions on the conference lines were extraordinarily effective. The rally outside was an effective kind of decoy action, and the disruptions internally were good, but they weren't disruptive to the whole process at scale because people were just kicked out. And actually, two of our leaders were arrested that day, and most of the evictions were happening by conference call anyway.

So we learned a lot through that first action. Then the beginning of September, there was a national eviction moratorium that Trump announced through the CDC. We're like, “Okay, let's wait a minute and see how this plays out locally”. Our local judges all but ignored it, and they exploited the loopholes of that moratorium. Kept eviction courts open. So by the beginning of October, we had to go back to the drawing board on shutting down evictions again ‘cause Covid numbers were spiking as the winter was coming. 

So October 15th 2020, we orchestrated an action where leaders chained themselves to the doors of the courthouse. And meanwhile, we had teams of disruptors in every single courtroom for both the morning and afternoon eviction dockets in Kansas City. And within 30 minutes we shut down every eviction that was scheduled that day on the phones, and the chain action went off without a hitch. And we met a bunch of tenants at the courthouse that we then recruited into our base.

So that was mid-October. In November, we decided to kind of experiment with those online tactics even more and try to sustain them over time, with the goal of putting so much pressure on the individual judges that they would just close down their courtroom for a set of weeks. And we got the judge with the highest volume eviction docket to shut her courtroom from the beginning of November through the end of 2020. So that delayed hundreds of evictions within the span of a couple of weeks. And then we decided,  we know that January's gonna be one of the coldest months of the year. And that's gonna probably coincide with another spike in covid cases. And keep in mind, this is all prior to the vaccine, right? So we're not just doing this, you know, for shit saying giggles. It's like, still, there is an imminent threat of death if someone does not have a place to shelter themselves from the pandemic. 

So we decided to run a kind of mini campaign called Zero Eviction January, where the goal was to try to orchestrate sustained direct actions such that there were as close to zero evictions able to occur in the month of January 2021 as possible. And so we planned two direct actions every week on Tuesday in one courthouse, on Thursday in another courthouse. Those are the two days evictions are heard. We recruited hundreds of people into in person and online actions. We did a house hit on the presiding judge that first Friday in January because his deputies shot a tenant that they were trying to evict that day. We ended up in the judge's yard that night after two actions had already occurred that day, and by the next Monday we won a two week moratorium from the judge. Effectively won Zero Eviction January, but we came back hot for the last week. And in between we did a bunch of house hits on the circuit court judges as well. In the end, we delayed 911 evictions over the course of that month and many of them were delayed for then several months, if not dismissed at a certain point. 

AWG: And can I just slow down there a little bit? Cause just the bigger picture as an organizer. Also during that time, a community organizer, who was working with both, with tenants, with immigrants, with educators. I think I had a self limiting belief at that time of like, well, if it's not a national news story that we can do a local version of, we're gonna have a real hard time generating the kind of people power, narrative power, political power that we need to do something as drastic as stall or stop evictions. And there were other versions of that, schools and whatever. 

And so it's incredible to me this story, what you all did. Despite not being anywhere near a national media market, it's not like there was a national wave of everyone was doing eviction blockades.

 But just to give listeners a sense of what that actually meant. The day that the circuit court of Jackson County resumed evictions, the 152 evictions were scheduled for that day in January, and you all stopped 136 of them through direct action, which included 80 of your tenant leaders blockading two sets of doors outside the courthouse, 9 leaders inside orchestrating a disruption, and 50 people disrupting online evictions in the morning and afternoon, and by 3:00 PM had intervened in most of the scheduled evictions, and a week later got a temporary eviction moratorium reinstated by the presiding judge, week after that expanding to Clay County.

So I just felt like it was useful for people to hear a little bit more of the granular detail. There's a lot that went into that and to manifest in a time in January again, where a lot of us organizers are like, “Well, it's a slow time. That's not a time you can really turn up the heat”. And I think this sort of mini campaign as you called it, proves that wrong. 

So you did zero Eviction January, just about got there and then what's next? 

TR: Yeah. And just about got there is right. The 911 evictions that we delayed that month, that was about 90% of the evictions that the court had scheduled to hear. And again, one of the biggest outcomes of that month of action was just an incredible level of leadership development among people in our base. And that's leadership development that still pays off to this day. We built these teams for Zero Eviction January, ‘cause we were doing two direct actions every week that were pretty massive in scale. We built teams to do security, to do Covid safety, to do press, to do social media, to do the kind of legal and jail support stuff that was necessary just in case anything popped off.

I was just thinking about this this past weekend, ‘cause we have a whole security team. That we trained up in a really intense way during that month that now I can just call. I can call Gary and Howard and be like, “Hey, we got an action this weekend. Need you to do security”. They know exactly what that means. They know how to train other leaders on it. And it's because we built this amazing collective muscle during that month that can't atrophy at this point. We'd worked out so much for that one month that, so long as we have even a core of those leaders with us, we have this infrastructure that's unshakeable that we can deploy in any direction that we want.

There's all sorts of outcomes of that month, well beyond the material impact of actually delaying 911 evictions, which by itself would've been an outstanding outcome. We didn't actually think we could get close to zero evictions in January. We were being kind of gutsy in saying that. We were trying to be ambitious and scare the court. But we actually got close to it. That by itself would've been a totally outstanding outcome of that month. 

But beyond that there was all this other stuff that brought our organization into a whole new level of sophistication and power and relationship with each other. We added a lot of leaders to our base. But one thing I think we did well during that month is – it could have just been a brutal grind, right? We were doing  so much all the time. It was cold, people were tired. We were a year into the pandemic at that point. It could have been a really, really brutal grind.

And it was in some ways, don't get me wrong, but we started every meeting with a pretty deep  relational check-in. We spent probably 20 minutes of the beginning of every meeting in breakout rooms on Zoom, deeply checking in with one another on a human level before we got to any of the strategy, any of the business, any of the next steps. And after every single action, we did a debrief. We did an evaluation later, but we did an emotional debrief right afterwards that was just like, “Hey, how are you? We just did that thing, do you feel amazing or do you feel burned out?” That sort of relational investment during that month, again, I think pays off in ways that we see and don't see every day even, a year out, more than a year out from that.

And at the end of that month, people were like, “All right, we did the damn thing. We cannot be in reaction mode forever”. Our leaders were basically like, “We don't know how long this pandemic's gonna go on. It's horrible that people are still dealing with evictions in the midst of all of this. But we actually can't be stuck in reaction mode forever. We can't send people to the courthouse twice a week, every week for the rest of our lives. We have to get back to thinking about the system and how we can wield our power, especially all this new power we've built, to grind the gears of that system to a halt in a more sustainable way than what we've been doing”.

And so that led to a couple different things. I kind of skipped over a whole arc here, but in the summer of 2020, we had been in the streets with everyone participating in the uprising after the police murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Our base had pretty quickly come to a kind of consensus around abolition as a core value and pursuit of our organization. There's a lot of really interesting work that happened both on an analysis level and on a practice level that summer around that stuff. And some of what that resulted in was a Black organizing fellowship. Where five of our Black leaders came on to learn how to be organizers with our team. And that was happening during this whole time of eviction defense and Zero Eviction January and everything. 

And then after one of our leaders started a homeless union in Kansas City, and 200 homeless leaders staged an encampment on the lawn of city hall for two months and forced the mayor to the table on a bunch of negotiations. Another one of our Black organizing fellows, Jenay actually, orchestrated a huge campaign to push the city to finally make that investment in implementing the tenants bill of rights and won $1.5 million in annual funding to implement that bill of rights. Other leaders started organizing in building wide unions. We had organized a really successful campaign in a building the summer before and kind of built on that practice into the spring and summer of 2021.

And then by the end of 2021, we got our opportunity to kind of attack the eviction system at a more systemic level. And we wrote a tenant's right to counsel policy that we workshopped for months with our leaders, sort of in the same way that we did with the tenants bill of rights. We introduced that policy on December 2nd, 2021, and it passed with a vast majority of city council voting in favor and no changes to the policy that we had written by December 9th. So a one week turnaround. It was signed into law the next week after that, and it was implemented by June 2022. 

AWG: That's a lot. And I'm wondering, just one nerdy granular question that came up for me. I'm hearing you talk about that ‘cause you talked about “Oh yeah. Organize a homeless encampment campaign”. It's like an offshoot, even building a new base, have a new campaign target that we've known, we've fought before. Also organizing tenant unions around specific buildings. And then we also have this policy fight. 

And I'm curious  to what extent one influences the other, because I think it's more common that organizers maybe who are listening to this are either engaged just in the micro, “I'm organizing in a building and trying to figure out how to build a base inside a building and tenant association”. Or, “We're just organizing this policy fight to try to get a right to counsel.” 

And I'm wondering, can you give us a sense of to what extent those were totally separate or is one feeding the other in terms of building your larger citywide base and your ability to shift the pillars of power? 

TR: Yeah. For us it's always been, and I think always needs to be, both/and. We are building power in buildings, on blocks, across neighborhoods at the same time as we're running any sort of policy campaign. And actually, those organizing efforts in buildings, on blocks, in neighborhoods can result in campaigns themselves that are not necessarily issue campaigns or policy campaigns, but sort of more in the vein of like a corporate campaign. 

We organized the Gabriel Tower tenants because their air conditioning had been off for three of the hottest weeks of the summer in 2020. Their landlord is an owner called Millennia Properties. They're based in Ohio. They're a big corporate owner in a lot of cities like Kansas City, across the country. They get a bunch of federal money, they get a bunch of state money, they get a bunch of local money. And so we had to figure out how to go after Millennia's money in the way that you would go after a national or multinational corporation as a part of a kind of a corporate campaign.

AWG: Can you just tell us, cuz people might wanna know as an example, how did you go after a multinational's money from Kansas City in this case? 

TR: Yeah. So in this case, in the case of Gabriel Tower, basically the tenants had self-organized in protest. They were in their parking lot on a Monday morning with a bunch of signs that Pappy, who would become the leader of the union – he had wheeled himself to the corner store and bought poster board and markers and handed them out to his neighbors. And they were out in the parking lot to protest, but also because frankly it was cooler in the parking lot than it was in their homes in this kind of big building where the air conditioning had been off for three weeks.

Their neighbors were getting sick and dying. This is a building of mostly elderly folks, mostly Black and a lot of folks with disabilities. And so people were getting sick. People were dying, literally. We got a phone call that Monday morning as people drove by and saw all these folks outside with signs. And so we ended up there within a couple minutes. Gabriel Tower is like five minutes from my house, so I drove over there, got out, met the folks. Within a couple hours on the pavement of the parking lot we wrote out their demands for their union. I ran home, typed them up, brought them back, and then a team of KC Tenants helped canvas the whole building and the whole parking lot to get people signed onto these demands.

So by the end of that first day on Monday they had a tenant union, and the union had organized a bunch of press to be there and kind of spread their message. And then had also driven hundreds of phone calls from supporters across Kansas City into Millennia's corporate office. So by Tuesday, Millennia put a corporate representative on a plane in the middle of a pandemic from Ohio to Kansas City. And in the middle of that day, we, the union, did a power meeting with that corporate rep and got several commitments including to get the air conditioning turned on. That Tuesday we also did a little party in the parking lot cuz it was still cooler in the parking lot than it was inside. So we had an ice cone truck and pizza and we did some grilling and stuff like that. It was a good time and in the midst of that, the leaders put on this amazing meeting, and by Wednesday the air conditioning was turned on. 

AWG: Thanks for sharing that. I think really helps give us a sense of what that means to integrate the micro level campaigns and building level victories and building power for the bigger fights.

And I wanna make sure we bring up to the present day before we wrap up. So by May 2022, you had told us that the right to counsel was implemented, which means that everyone who needs a lawyer in eviction court now has one for the first time, I assume, in history in Kansas City, Missouri. And I think I read that in January you all had about 70 people coming to those weekly Saturday, two hour tenant meetings.

What else can you tell us about leading up to where you're at today and even through, you know, May, 2022, how the organization grew through this mixture of short campaigns, bigger campaign fights, leadership development, and then where that sends you now after the right to counsel is implemented, what you all have been up to the rest of this year and what's ahead before we get into  the lessons that you think are important for us to learn from all this.

TR: Yeah. So we won right to counsel in December 2021. Along the way, a bunch of really amazing building and property and neighborhood wide union fights. I wish I could tell you all of them, but you know, we organized a trailer park over the summer and won 2.7 million from the county to make sure that those residents got properly relocated. The county was trying to build the jail and just kick them out of their homes.

We organized our first neighborhood union in the fall of last year, and that union started organizing against a corporate gentrifier that was seeking tax subsidies from the city and actually snatched back $10 million that that gentrifying developer was gonna get from the city, and had that money reallocated to the housing trust fund to be spent on truly affordable housing. So many stories about fights, wins, losses, and the people who animated them, that I could tell you. 

But basically all this work sets us up for what we've been doing in 2022, where our biggest bet is on building out a citywide tenant union. And I would argue that KC Tenants has been acting as the citywide tenant union since the beginning, since 2019. But we didn't actually assert ourselves to be the citywide tenant union until relatively recently. And now we've kind of been building our theory of power, like what does that actually mean? How does a citywide union function? How do we need to function? How do we relate to these building unions and neighborhood unions? How do we not just build a really long list of people, but actually figure out how to build at scale without sacrificing depth, and be really thoughtful about wielding that power? What does thousands more members in our union actually get us if we don't know how to wield that power? 

So a lot of this year has been asking those questions and experimenting with our ideas about what the answers might be. So we've started our second neighborhood union on the east side in the historically Black neighborhoods in Kansas City. That's the East Side Tenant Union. They've been experimenting with the types of campaigns that their leaders wanna run, that look pretty different from the campaigns that the Midtown Tenant Union has run.

We have developed a team that's fighting against some of the mayor's housing policy proposals recently, and we're sort of using those policy fights as ways of bringing new leaders into the fold and developing them into issue campaigns and then plugging them in elsewhere. We also just launched our c4, so our sibling organization to engage in more explicitly political work, and that's part of a much bigger game of chess.

Our local north star is that we wanna win municipal social housing. That is to say, housing that's deeply and permanently affordable. It's off of the private market, it's publicly backed, it is not available for speculation. And we think that one of the things that we're gonna need if we're ever to win that North Star is not just supporters, but real champions, who are our own people calling the shots in that direction on our city council. And, you know, people who are thinking of  the city's budget as the moral document that it is, and wielding that budget to house the people rather than harm the people, which is kind of how our budget is currently wielded. 

AWG: Thanks for giving us that, that sense of direction.

I think you probably have a sense of, of the things you all have done, of the principles you've used in campaigning and designing powerful campaigns, what would you say we need more of, or even just organizers even in Missouri, need more of, if not on a broader level or other housing organizers. And as an antidote to what might be making us weak and in different movement sectors right now, that we can learn from some of the campaigns that you all have run and how you've built this very deep base over time.

TR: I think the main thing we need more of is ruthlessness around base building. Our leaders are so power hungry, I mean that in a purely positive way. Our leaders are so power hungry. They believe that they're worth more than they're being offered today. And we believe that KC Tenants is a way that all of us get to act on those kind of motivating self-interests.

I see a lot of organizers hesitate to invite people into this work, and I actually find that to be powerless and oftentimes patronizing. I see a lot of organizers making choices for people about how they are gonna spend their time on a path to their own liberation instead of inviting them to make a choice for themselves, which is a choice to build power with their neighbors and to win shit that's gonna change their lives for the better.

So I do think there's just like a ruthlessness around base building that is part of our organizational DNA now. It's part of every single story I told you. The material wins are good and they're necessary, obviously, that's why we run these types of campaigns, both the issue campaigns and the union campaigns and everything in between. And every time we set out to run one of those campaigns, one of the first things that we do is write out all of our desired outcomes. Desired outcome number one is the material win, maybe. Desired outcome number two is like, this is the number of leaders we want plugged into this number of roles. This is the number of new leaders we want to recruit into the organization through this campaign. 

At the end of the campaign, at the end of every meeting, we evaluate everything. At the end of the campaign, we evaluate the whole thing and we actually look back on that and say, “Did we have 13 new leaders in these stretch roles? Did we recruit 50 tenants who had never interacted with KC Tenants yet into our organization? If not, why not? Right? Were we relying too much on the people that we already have? Was it too staff driven?” That's another big pitfall, right?

Basically this is all to say, I think we're very clear on power. Power equals organized people plus organized money. We have a lot of people to organize. There's more of us than there are them, but that depends on the depth of our relationship and our understanding of our self-interests and our mutual interests, how that can be wielded in a powerful way. And then we just create an abundance of opportunities to put people to work on their own interests.

We're not burdening people by asking them to do the work of fighting for their liberation. We are inviting them into something powerful and making the world better in a way that we only can through the power of a collective like ours.

AWG: Tara Raghuveer, thank you so much for offering these stories, your insights, and for sharing the organizing with us.

TR: Thank you!