Special Episode Part 2: Lauren Jacobs and Harmony Goldberg on facing corporate power and authoritarianism and how to build long-term governing power

This episode is part two of a two-part special episode. You can listen in any order. Unlike our standard episodes where we zoom in on one particular campaign, we’re zooming out around broader strategy themes. To help us zoom out, we invited five insightful thought leaders, who each recently wrote vital resources for campaign organizers, to talk with Andrew. 

In part two of two, we talk with two guests. First Lauren Jacobs of Power Switch Action highlights the role of corporate targeting campaigns in resisting authoritarianism, pulling from her co-written article Reining in Amazon to Build Up People-Powered Democracy in The Forge. Then, we hear from Harmony Goldberg of Grassroots Power Project, about interventions from her co-authored guide Governing Power. Beyond cutting issues for easy wins given a terrain of power, she invites campaigners to orient toward the long term project of winning durable governing power, to transform the terrain of power itself. The episode touches themes of effective allies, building enforcement into demands, narrative struggle, and the importance of base building fundamentals. 

Lauren Jacobs is the executive director of PowerSwitch Action, a national network of local powerbuilding organizations that weave together community, labor, faith, racial justice, and environmental justice movements into powerful coalitions. She has dedicated her life to supporting working people as they gain power to shape their own working and living conditions. Lauren has organized with textile, janitorial, security, and restaurant workers at UNITE, SEIU, and the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United. She recently published an article on Why Jeff Bezos Loves Trump’s Big, Ugly Bill.

Harmony Goldberg is the Director of Praxis at Grassroots Power Project and has been providing political education and strategic facilitation for social movements in the United States for more than 25 years. She cut her teeth in California’s youth and student  movement in the 1990s, where she helped to found and lead SOUL, the School Of Unity and Liberation. Then, she worked closely with the domestic workers movement and other low-wage workers organizations as the workers center movement was coming into its own.  Harmony completed her PhD in Cultural Anthropology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where her research focused on the promising forms of worker’s struggle and class politics that were emergent in domestic worker organizing in New York City.  At GPP, Harmony works closely with People’s Action, and she leads the development of strategic education programs. She recently coauthored a booklet on Governing Power.

Transcript

Zein Nakhoda:  Hi, this is Zein Nakhoda fromm Training for Change. This is part two of a two-part special episode we're excited to share. If you missed our first three guests in part one, check it out. But you can listen to these two in any order. 

In these special episodes, instead of zooming in on one particular campaign like we normally do, we're zooming out around broader strategy themes. Campaigns aren't waged in a vacuum. They're shaped by the political landscape. They work in tandem with other kinds of organizing, and they're often in service of longer term movement visions. So to help us zoom out, we invited five inspiring thought leaders who have each recently written resources for campaign organizers to talk with Andrew. 

We recorded these interviews in 2024, before the US election, and we're releasing them now several months into Trump's second presidency. We are seeing attacks on trans people, on immigrant communities and working people, and the dismantling of democratic institutions and resistance is happening. From Tesla Take Down to ICE resistance, from public sector defense to solidarity with jailed Palestinian rights activists, campaigns targeting pillars of autocratic power are an essential part of our way forward, and we think that insights from these next guests are as relevant as ever for organizers today. In this part two of two, we talk with two guests.

First, Lauren Jacobs of Power Switch Action highlights the role of corporate targeting campaigns in resisting authoritarianism, pulling from her co-written article, Reigning in Amazon to Build Up People Powered Democracy in the Forge. Then we hear from Harmony Goldberg of Grassroots Power Project about interventions from her co-authored guide called Governing Power. 

Beyond cutting issues for easy wins, given a terrain of power, she invites campaigners to orient towards a long-term project of winning durable governing power to transform the terrain of power itself. This episode touches on themes of winning effective allies, building enforcement into demands after you've won, narrative struggle and the importance of base building fundamentals.

With that, let's get into the interviews. 

Andrew Willis Garcés:  So Lauren Jacobs, thank you for being with us on the Craft of Campaigns. 

Lauren Jacobs: Thank you for having me and inviting me to be with you today. 

AWG: What is one snapshot that you could tell us about from when you were first learning to be an organizer or strategist?

Lauren Jacobs: When I was a baby organizer, I did work in the labor movement. This is like the funny thing for the kids - There was no device, electronic device, directing you where to go. I had a big map book that you had to purchase for every new area you went to that you use to chart out directions and where you were headed. I think there's two things, because I think, you know, there's being an organizer and there's being a strategist, and they overlap, but they're not necessarily the same thing.

The skill that was so important to hone as a very young organizer to be successful, I think it was just listening very deeply. And that means not being ready to leap to your next thing. So you're both taking in the information and somewhat processing it. But you're watching and listening and seeing how people are physically reacting to things that they're telling you about as well.

And just getting a sense for who they are, as well as the relationships they have with other people that you are organizing. And I think the biggest thing is becoming a strategist, which I'm sure it'll be a variation on a theme in this conversation. But the most important thing I remember learning, and has stuck with me throughout, is just being really sharp and clear on our power analysis.

Who is driving the opposition? Whose interests are being served by either the status quo, or a clawback initiative? And really being very sharp about not stopping at the obvious answer, but continuing to look up and go as high as one can up the chain.

AWG: So I want to ask you about an article you wrote in 2023, Reigning in Amazon to Build up People Powered Democracy, with Stacey Mitchell as co author. In it, you lift up the 22nd century initiatives framework, linking concentrated corporate power with the rise of authoritarianism. And so for listeners who haven't read your article, can you summarize how you see the role of campaigns with corporate targets in the project to defend and expand political democracy, how you see them as being connected, as opposed to being separate, projects for the left?

Lauren Jacobs: Yeah. Thanks for that question. Stacy, my co author and I co-chair the Athena Coalition and both our orgs were part of the founding of that coalition with several other partners. And the reason why we started to take on Amazon, which is the focus of the coalition’s work, wasn't because Amazon is just a unique bad actor and everybody else is good and they're bad. It's that they are emblematic. And in fact, a leader in a developing and growing problem that we can see. And that is both growth and monopoly power, not just in the classic sense that we understood it with the old Carnegies or Rockefellers. Like Iwould say this horizontal, across the different planes of capturing so much of a market that you can start to drive prices.

But in this sense that Amazon's doing it both vertically and horizontally. Because of them having multiple businesses and multiple ways that they touch folks, so I'll get to their authoritarian reach. They are able to touch and integrate themselves into core pieces of the economy and just day-to-day life for folks. It's almost impossible to avoid them. And that is literally quite true. If you turn on a computer and go on the Internet, you are using Amazon. So this whole point of like, could you boycott them? It's kind of impossible in that sense. 

Now I want you to think about, for workers in certain regions and towns where this is the only job, right? What does that start to say in terms of the amount of power they have to drive the labor market? And what happens when you have algorithmic surveillance moving in warehouses? When we start to think about it, it is a panopticon and mirrors a highly surveilled state and we have to think people are spending eight hours a day in these workplaces, right? Both the warehouses, the headquarters office, We have to know, and I don't think it's that hard a leap, that is going to have an effect on how we operate, and what we believe we have a right to expect, and how we're treated and how we interact with society and others. But that's going to translate from the workplace, those eight hours, into the rest of life. 

And then also Amazon is involved in the military state. They have had bids on defense department contracts and other work for the federal government. Doing a step back that has an incredible amount of data that they have access to in terms of all of our buying histories and purchase histories. The number of workers that they employ, in some states, they are the largest private sector employer in those regions. And in fact, they're one of the top private sector employers nationally. And then when we get to the question around their intersection with the policing apparatus of the state, this all top dovetails together.

So the reason why we wanted to lift this up is that we do think the problem of rising authoritarianism is critical, it is code red for the movement. We wanted to also lift up was that we can't divorce the state actors from the economic actors. And in fact, we can see this was the revolving door in and out of different employees and others from different corporations into the federal government or state government. But through that, we wanted to lift up that when you start to look at how these corporations act and treat civil society and the legislative process, you can start to see how they're driving a lot of the crises that we see, and how we experience governance and whether we will have popular governments.

AWG: Becauseyou mentioned we can't really, in a lot of ways, boycott Amazon, as far as like, boycotting the Internet. And obviously PowerSwitch is heavily involved in multiple kinds of worker organizing around Amazon. Is there anything else you want to lift up as, just like we often don't see the ways that they have integrated themselves into our lives in a control manner, is there a kind of leverage that people powered organizations - that maybe aren't in the labor movement - have that you think is underappreciated as far as a semi-monopoly like Amazon? 

Lauren Jacobs: I want to lift up, yes, each of the organizations that are part of ATHENA may have a focus: like we are dedicated to organizing warehouse workers in X geography or we're dedicated to organizing low wage workers, and this happens to be one of the biggest sites where that's happening. Then we have others that are focused on monopoly power and more focused on the questions in DC based advocacy. We've even also had groups that do direct organizing of consumers.

 I think that leverage of the folks that are talking about different types of organizing and bringing folks together - we're bringing together people that are unlikely allies and probably never consider themselves allies. Seeing workers who work at the headquarters take leave of absence and fly out to Minnesota to join warehouse workers when they're on strike against religious discrimination in the warehouses of Minnesota to having small business owners stand with warehouse workers in Missouri and elsewhere as they talk to senators and congressional leaders about the ways in which Amazon's vast economic power affects their lives.

It is that reflection of building together a society. It's taking people out of the factions that sometimes they can get set into. I mean, I think this often happens with small businesses and employees. Like, Oh, if you make more, it's going to drive me out of business. But here's an opportunity for folks to work together on something and really see each other as people who are working hard to try to take care of their families and their communities.

AWG: You referenced small business owners, but that there's a real opportunity here. You're basically saying to have unlikely allies, potentially, and to cut the issue, if you will, from- it could be cut pretty narrowly (this only affects this group of us) versus, oh wait, much wider than our normal coalition or a normal set of partners are. And so speaking of that, Power Switch, you mentioned, has grassroots affiliate organizations all over the country, working at this intersection of building democracy, challenging corporate power. 

I wonder if you could give us one specific example that helps us understand how you all use issue based campaigns specifically to build power toward a long term vision. So that campaign organizers and strategists who might be listening to this might be cutting their issue and developing campaign plans - Based on that example, other examples, what advice would you give about how campaigns can be most transformative? 

Lauren Jacobs: One core strategy that I think we're all very much aligned on is really having a very strong power analysis. There are a plethora of issues affecting communities of color, low wage communities in any number of regions, and we can spend a lot of time trying to staunch or triage crises, but if we don't have an analysis of who has power, how are they wielding it, and where are they vulnerable, then we can really spin our wheels and the never-ending thing of a lot of wins, but very little advancement.

It’s my very strong point of view and would push anybody in the field: where we're fighting is the venue that we're fighting on. Ultimately, I would say any problem we're tackling, whether it be climate, whether it be housing, whether it be dignity at work, whether it be , expanding democracy or fighting back the contrailment of democracy, ultimately at the end of the day, if we look hard enough, we're going to find corporations or, and the very wealthy deep in the midst of the opposition.

And I think we have to be very clear about not just naming and shaming, but having that taken into our strategy and having clear alignment on it. I want to give a really perfect example of what I'm talking about. Our affiliate UNE United for a New Economy in Colorado has been co-chair of the Colorado Homes for All coalition with a number of other groups, nonprofits and labor unions at that table.

And they had for several years been trying to push through a pro-renter, anti-displacement variety of ordinances at the state level. Much housing legislation in the state is preempted, so it can only be passed at the state, not at the municipal level. And then this last year, in the last couple of years, they began to pivot their strategy by both doing some very deep analysis of who's been driving an anti- renter agenda in the state and landed on Greystar - one of the nation's largest renters and apartment building managers in the country - had really been the strong voice against any move to make a justice, fair system. So they began to pull and target Greystar in the organizing. As a result of doing that, they were able to gain, they had the governor come out early that he was going to be neutral and okay with whatever moved on the new legislation they were moving. The apartment association came out neutral. In part, because the fight moved from, is Governor X or State Senator B or State Legislator Y - are they good people with a good moral compass? And it moved to, are you with renters and the people that live in your community? Are you with this multi-billion dollar corporation?

And so it became easier to polarize and they won just-cause eviction statewide. The coalition just won that and I think they're moving forward to think about, how do they upend preemption of local rent control? And how do they take lessons from that past strategy forward into the next phase of campaigning?

AWG: And it might be obvious from that story, but for those of us listening for whom it's not: If I'm cutting a campaign strategy, a campaign plan, tomorrow, an issue - who does this impact, who do we need to get together in order to win? What does that story tell you about what advice you would have for me or someone else cutting an issue in the way that you're describing?

Lauren Jacobs: One, cutting the issue to just cause eviction. One, I just think the framing of it, for much of the labor movement, one of the cornerstones of if you are a union member is; you have just-cause termination standards. It just means like your boss can't on a whim just fire you or discipline you. There's gotta be a reason. And there's a whole series of steps that the employer has to go through before they do anything. And so that's going to have resonance with that base, right? It just makes sense. 

So it's already like cutting the issue in a way that you can start to see. Whereas we maybe don't talk about housing as a labor issue. It automatically pulls in the base and, we are, in a way of speaking to an experience they have along with the base of renters that people have been organizing.

I think the other thing here in terms of thinking about cutting the issue with Greystar, particularly. It takes it out of “all landlords.” Maybe small landlords are like, well, that's not us. It pivots them in a different way. They have a different choice point. Am I going to go up and defend Greystar? Is this where I think my dues or energy and the association should be going to - is protecting them? Or is it, I have a very different interest here against theirs. So I do think that there's ways in which the cutting of the issue brought together some different allies as well as started to divide the opposition.

AWG: Coming back to your article you mentioned what Power Switch Action calls “braided strategy” or knitting together a broad and even unexpected range of allies, to your example just now. To redefine the “we” in the face of corporate attempts to keep us apart and in our place. I know you just gave us an example of that, but is there more to say about what you mean by braided strategy? And do any other examples come to mind, and how campaigners might use that to think about their audience for their actions, demands, their core narratives, that kind of thing?

Lauren Jacobs: We like to think of this in multiple ways, right? We think of a braided strategy as saying we need to be fighting on a number of different terrains. Post 2016, I remember a lot of back and forth in the movement of like, Well, you know, federal's not going to be the place to move things. It's all about cities or in states, right?

And then 2020, it's all about federal. It doesn't need to be cities and states. We would argue and say it needs to be all those things simultaneously. In fact we need to be thinking about the dynamic interaction between the various governmental structures as well as the, I think, that those governmental structures are set up to frame an identity and help people understand themselves.

They understand themselves as living in a particular community. They understand themselves as residents of a state. They understand themselves as residents of a nation. And so it's also touching on different ways that people identify and see themselves. So that's one lever. We could also name that is the integration of legislative and corporate facing strategies as well.

There's another way in which we also talk about this as bringing unlikely allies - or just more allies, I should say - more people that have a stake in the issue. Really opening up our aperture pretty wide of thinking about, what are the ways in which we can speak to more and more hours of people's lives?

If we're thinking about a campaign around greening a public utility, well, can we bring in issues around jobs and job access? Can we bring in issues around pipelines for certain neighborhoods into those high quality jobs? Soon, We're starting to talk about expanding a tent, bringing in more folks.

Another one of our affiliates, Grassroots Collaborative, who has had a long standing relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, groups like ACERS, United Working Families, and others in Chicago, are all engaged in a broad housing fight that has had the Bring Chicago Home campaign, which has had many different facets.

They had a ballot measure, they have been moving inside/outside work, with the new mayoral administration. And right now CTU and their bargaining has also done public bargaining sessions where, you know, you could get on Zoom and observe what's going on. And they have, you know, taken on the issue of understanding how revenue works in the city and where it's going and where it's not going to different schools, and have made housing a core issue of their negotiations.

So I think that's one of those ways of thinking about the different groups that are together, the different strategies in different ways that people are playing on and organizing around this. And certainly in that geography, they've both done stuff at the city level and then also at the state level. 

AWG: Well, coming to a close here, do you have other wishes or encouragements for campaigners as they take action toward their demands on uncertain or shifting ground in 2025? 

Lauren Jacobs: I think when we sign up to be organizers or take on that mantle or campaigners or strategists of any variety, We sign up to say, I'm going to take responsibility, I'm going to be a protagonist for changing the balance of power. And taking responsibility for making a way that our communities can thrive and have the kind of dignity and peace that I think is every human being’s right. 

When you sit in that frame, the big question we have to answer is: how are we getting big? And that means both base building and expanding. I think it's also the sophistication of our base and all of us, like. It’s not about people are in paid positions versus base members - there's no difference on that. It's more like we're all getting more sophisticated and learning as we're going and getting sharper. But how are we getting big and taking responsibility to win? This year, especially, has shown us both the national and global price we pay when we don't have people that really take seriously the sanctity of every human life in charge. Like what happens?

And so I just really think that we have to commit ourselves to: what am I doing today that is going to make us big and powerful in a way that we can win tomorrow what we couldn't win today. 

AWG: Well, Lauren Jacobs, thank you so much for these offerings. Thank you for your time. 

Lauren Jacbos: Thank you so much, Andrew. It's been fun.

AWG:  Harmony Goldberg. Thank you for being here on the craft of campaigns. So if we watched the movie of your life, what's a key scene we'd see about you getting developed as an organizer or strategist or a snapshot from when you were first learning to be an organizer? 

Harmony Goldberg: Let's see. Well, thank you for having me, before I jump in. And so I first got involved as an organizer when I was a student at U. C. Berkeley in the 1990s. In the years where they were ending affirmative action at the university.

And that was part of a wave of racist ballot initiatives in California as the population of California became majority people of color, but the electorate remained majority white. And affirmative action was one of the first fights in that.

In that fight, I had a real reckoning with the question of power. Actually, even before affirmative action became a ballot initiative in California, the UC Regents went through an internal process where they had a vote about whether to keep or eliminate affirmative action. And as part of a ton of student organizers from around the state who did months of lobbying of the Regents, we did all kinds of research and documentation and education of the Regents. So they would understand that if they decided to eliminate affirmative action, they would effectively be resegregating public education in California. 

And so we had face-to-face conversations with all of these people. They knew the truth. They knew what was right. They knew the data. And we were there when they won by one - voted to eliminate affirmative action in the UC system. And it was a real reckoning for me. Cause I think before that I had what I would describe as like a “the truth will set you free” theory of change. Like, if we just educate people, if they just understand the facts, things will be okay. And I watched these people understand the facts and still vote in a terrible way. It was a real breaking point for me, when I started to understand that we couldn't just use truth and the facts to win the kind of change we need, or even just defend what we have. We are going to need a different kind of power than we had. And I feel like that has been a defining question for me throughout my organizing life. What's the power that we actually need to build if we're going to move the kind of agenda that we want to move in this society?

AWG: So speaking of power, you recently co-wrote a booklet with Dan McGrath called Governing Power with the Grassroots Power Project. So for listeners who haven't yet read the booklet, can you give us an overview of what you mean by a “Governing Power Orientation,” and why it's important for the Left in this moment?

Harmony Goldberg: So we wrote the book in part because, as the work of building electoral power has been taken more and more seriously by organizers around the country, which is a real addition to the kind of outsider work and direct action that organizers are known for.

As we've incorporated electoral organizing and electoral power building into our work, this phrase “governing power” has become more and more common. And we wanted to both celebrate that tradition to really expand the arsenal of power building, to understand the relationship between the outsider protest direct action strategies and the insider power building - what we would consider more insider work - to both elect people to elected office and then figure out how to move an agenda once they are in office. So I want to celebrate that transition. But we also wanted to ground it and challenge the ways that that phrase has been used, right?

Because we're concerned when we've heard organizers who have won some hard fought victories to get singular champions elected to their city councils or to state legislatures. Those are important victories, but when we hear people declare: now we have governing power, we got somebody elected, now we have governing power, it raises some flags for us.

Because that is an important first step to get single people or small groups of people elected to these offices, but it's not the whole path. And we think that if we confuse the first step on the path for the whole path, we're bound to get disillusioned when those singular champions or small groups of champions can't accomplish all of what our communities want or need.

And so then we'll spend all of our time trying to hold those individuals accountable. Like, we elected you to office - move the agenda that we told you to move! That approach to accountability neither works for that elected official who doesn't have the power to actually move that agenda, and on the organizer side, it can lead to disillusionment with this process before we've really even gotten very far down the path. 

So we wrote the book because we were like, what if instead of trying to hold an individual elected accountable to changes that they don't objectively have the power to make, what if we step back and proactively realized that it's a long road, a long path to get to that level of power? And what if we then set out to build that level of power primarily on the outside, but also in collaboration with these champions who we worked so hard to get elected? We tried to name this big benchmark “governing power” that we thought would be a huge stretch, but that we think we could actually attain to some degree in our lifetime.

One example of the kinds of shifts in organizing that we need to make is that in organizing, we tend to work only in one arena of decision making. Not only, but much of community organizing plays out in the realm of legislative: We're trying to lobby elected officials to change policy, to improve the conditions of our communities. And we need to build power in the legislative arena. And we actually need to build power to be decisive in the legislative arena, not just to be lobbyists or like have an influence, but actually to be deciders in that arena. 

Now to get there, organizers have realized that we need to move beyond just legislative work to engage in electoral work. If we're going to be decision makers in the legislative arena, we need to actually shape who's in that arena. That takes place in the electoral realm. But even that - if we're decisive there and we don't actually have power in what we call the administrative arena - the power to implement these decisions - even if we win substantial change, it's going to be really hard to make them real. So we need to actually think about government staffers. We need to think about the work of enforcement and so on.  And there's even more arenas that we need to continue to think about. 

We watch the Right reshape the judiciary in this country, and that sets them up to really move a much deeper agenda to - eliminate access abortion in this country, for example. We need to be more decisive in the realm of what we call “narrative.” The realm of ideas shapes what's possible in all of these other arenas. And our enemies have been moving a very long term agenda to reshape the common sense in this country. For example, people think that government is broken and government is the source of the problem, and people blame communities of color for the problems in our society, not blame the wealthy few. For all of those are examples of when they can shape the common sense, it starts to make it more possible for them to move their agenda. We need to do the same. 

And finally, we need to think about actually governing in the realm of the economy. We have a tendency inside of a capitalist society to assume that the people who govern the economy are the people who own big things. We need to undo that assumption and find ways to exercise power in the economic arena. Unions do this, right? And that's one front of an effort that we need to move to have real power in that sphere. And, we're only going to have governing power, like the actual power to determine conditions, the actual power to move a new common sense of governance, if we actually build power in all of these arenas. And not just build small amounts of power, but actually decisive amounts of power. 

Now that is really very sobering, like to think like, oh my goodness, we need to build not just influence power in any one arena, but decisive power. And we need to do it not just in one, but in all of these. We actually believe very deeply in the capacity of power building organizations to step up to challenges that we're clear about. And so we wanted to, to raise this bar both to try to clarify our ambitions as 

well as to prevent that disillusionment that I had talked about earlier, where if we run a campaign and it doesn't work, do we just conclude that that whole strategy is bankrupt?

We're suggesting that we have to build on those skillsets and build capacities in addition to those skillsets. Because if we understand all of what we're trying to do as just move single issue campaigns, we're going to get trapped in a cycle where other people are shaping the terrain of power, and we're winning what can be won on that terrain. 

We're trying to say, how do we actually aim at shifting that terrain of power so that we can move a much larger agenda, not just win what can be won. 

AWG: So what are some of those capacities? 

Harmony Goldberg: We talk about making shifts where we build on existing capacities around doing target-focused power analysis to doing what we call governing power analysis. Effective organizers have built the capacity to analyze who is the right target who can actually meet our demands, right? 

Campaigns 101. You need a target. You don't want to shout to the sky. You need to know who can actually give you your demand and you need to do a power analysis of them. What's going to move them? What do we need to do for that person or group of people to advance our decision? And we need to look at - if we're talking about governing power, we can't just look at an individual. We need to look at the structures of power, the landscape of power that's around them. 

Grassroots Power Project, which is where I work, we work with organizations to help them look at the terrain of power in a state. To look at the balance of power in the state legislature, to look at the strongest corporations in the state who have a lot of say over what happens in the economy and over what happens in the legislature. We look at not just those corporations but at both the corporate infrastructure and the conservative infrastructure in the state. So, for example, are there lobby firms? Are there research and think tank firms that shape politics in the state? We have to look at the balance of political opinion in a state. What are the demographics in a state? How do those distribute around race, class, and region? And what is the potential power base that we could build to counter the power base of corporate and conservative forces in a state?

So really stepping back and looking at much bigger questions around who sets the agenda in the state and what's the power we're going to need to counter those forces. Which is a much larger and much longer term prospect than an immediate campaign issue analysis. 

A second transition that we are talking about is the transition from running short-term and immediate issue campaigns to having a long term governing agenda. And there's really three things that we think about in how we shift the way we do campaigns that are important here. The first is what we call extending the strategic time horizon. Weird words, but like, take a longer view - is another way to say that, right? 

So a solid organizer who's trying to move a campaign, an important criteria that we use is, is this winnable? Can we win this fight? If we can't win it, probably we shouldn't take it up except in very rare occasions where losing this campaign sets us up better for the next fight. But if we only stay there in the realm of the winnable, we're never going to break out of what is currently possible to change 

conditions. So we need to look forward to the bigger wins that we want to win that are not possible today and work backwards to figure out how our more immediate and winnable fights can set us up for the more structural changes that we want to win in the long term. It's approaching our current fights, not just as one-off fights on their own, but as stepping stones towards a larger vision. So we're not abandoning the long term vision, but we're also not abandoning the importance of winning in the here and now. 

Second, that the way we approach campaigns too often - today we've been influenced largely by philanthropy and donors to focus on short term mobilization, to pass immediate issues, to make immediate short wins. We need to turn that on its head and make power building - the process of building power in our communities - as important, if not more important, than delivering mobilization and delivering a win so that we're setting up in the long run for building power.  Finally, I can talk about this more later, but we talk about embedding power building enforcement into the policies that we are demanding. So we shouldn't just make a demand that's one-off and hope it gets enforced. We should plan the need to enforce and bring home our wins. And we should do that as much as possible in a way that facilitates power building in the future. 

Third is about building power in this narrative arena. Many organizations have gotten strong in running tactical messaging campaigns to advance their immediate issue fights. That's important. We need to build on that to think about, how are we shifting deeper narratives in the long run. So one example of this is taking on fights around government. The right has done a masterful job of demonizing government as a concept;  social programs in general to be not the source of a potential source of solutions to the problems in our communities, but in fact, to be the source of the problems in our communities.

We need to take that head on because if we're going to win the programs that our communities need, we need to reshape how people in our society think about government so that we can see government as a potential force for good, as long as it is serving the ends of equality, of justice, and as long as it's moving in a democratic and participatory way. 

But too often, government has been demonized by the Right and people have really painful experiences of broken government. And that's something we need to fix through our policy fights, but it's something we also need to fix in our understanding, right? But too often we fall into tactical messaging where we're like, you know what? Don't raise taxes. This is going to make this program good because it will cost less to the taxpayer. That actually plays into anti-government narratives when we do that. And so instead of like the easy and expedient message that gets us an easier win, we need to think about how our immediate messages help build towards longer term narrative change. For example, instead of playing into these anti-government messages, which is easier, we can engage in a longer term fight to advance the idea of governing for the common good.

In the electoral sphere, this is the next arena of shift. Organizers have grown strong in winning one-off elections. Super important. We need to build on that growing one-off election strength to think about developing independent political infrastructure. And to think about co-governing, not a one off election where we're trying to hold an elected official accountable, that's part of the mix. More importantly, how are we building flanks of elected officials? Caucuses inside of legislators who can co govern with us, who can take our agenda seriously, who can do the power mapping with us, who can 

strategize on moving other electeds along the way? Who can use their bully pulpit to advance our ideas and our agenda. And that we're not just being foot soldiers to more powerful forces but actually being strategists  with our own independent infrastructure that we're moving. That can, and ideally will, manifest in the form of independent political parties, like the Working Families Party. But it can also take more organization-by-organization forms, like the work that a lot of community organizations are doing through C4s and PACs and so on. 

And the final shift this one is probably the most fundamental, but also the most challenging. We need to build on organizing tradition with base building - the hard work of member recruitment and leadership development-  to move towards what we call majoritarian power. And there's dual challenges here. The first is that base building has by and large grown weaker over the last decade.  We need to make, first, a reinvestment in the foundational work of base building. But as we're doing that, GPP wants to encourage a few shifts in how we do that.

Too often, our base building has manifested in identifying a few good member leaders who can go be good advocates to decision makers. And that is different from building power to represent a constituency who can exercise more disruptive forms of power. 

It's the difference between a worker getting up and telling his or her story to an elected official, which has its role and has its place. But there's a difference between that and a union that organizes a majority of workers in a workplace to go out on strike. And what we're going to be able to win through a single worker story, and what we're going to be able to win through a majority of workers  - those are very different things. We need to think about majorities, not just a few leaders. There's challenges there as well. 

The second thing we need to think about is, we tend to think about our specific constituencies and we want to encourage us to, at least in the long term, to aspire to having our constituencies not just represent ourselves, but that our constituencies should be aiming to lead broader constituencies, to lead society as a whole. 

We need to think about the balance of power in a state as a whole, not just think about our constituencies inside of certain metropolitan areas, where a lot of our organizing is based. And not to buy the line that our interests are antagonistic, but that we can actually lead a movement that makes our interests, the interests of urban communities of color, actually our interests. We can make organizations that are rooted in urban communities of color leading forces in statewide alliances that represent working class suburban communities, that represent rural communities, whether they're white rural communities or rural communities of color. Right. We can actually build that kind of majoritarian power in our states.

That's a long term aspiration, but we think it's necessary if we're talking about governing power. And finally, that requires us to think not just in the form of individual organizations and the power their individual organizations can build, which again, that is the bedrock of organizing. We need to build powerful organizations, but no one organization is going to be able to win and leverage governing power on its own.

That is necessarily going to bring together organizations that represent different constituencies, 

different geographies, and different methodologies. And so we encourage organizations to build long term strategic alignments, whether that's in their city to try to exercise governing power in a city or a town, or build strategic alignments with other organizations to try to build towards governing power at the state level.

And we think that those metropolitan and state level experiments in governing power are the building blocks that we need if we're ever going to think about waging a fight for governing power at a national level - we need to exercise that in our cities and states and towns first.

AWG: Thank you for walking through all of that. And I know one of the shifts is specifically about how we relate to issue-based campaigns. And also, you say that actually, that's an existing strength for a lot of organizations is okay and know how to run an issue campaign. And actually there are quite a few people who listen to this podcast, who give us the feedback of, hey, how do you run an issue campaign? There's a lot of curiosity about how to do that, and a sense of, we don't actually know how to do that well. Or there might be a previous generation of strategists in my organization who did that. Or, well, I do it a lot and I'm struggling to learn how to do that. And so I'm curious about just, if we're thinking about cutting and winning issue based campaigns, could you speak to what role you think they do play in building long term governing power? And if there's an example that comes to mind for you?

Harmony Golberg: What you just raised is a constant tension in the work of Grassroots Power Project. A lot of our work assumes strengths in the fundamentals of organizing and is trying to help organizations that have those strengths build the next step. But I just want to say we cannot do that without organizations that are strong in the fundamentals.

So I want to say that because what I have to say from the lens of governing power does tend to assume some of those basics. But I just really want to uphold and celebrate like the work that you all do at Training for Change to strengthen those foundational skills of helping organizers know how to run campaigns. And I know a lot of other institutions are trying to make these foundational investments.

It can be easy to see this turn towards governing power as a distraction from that. And we really want to try to build a discipline that it is not like, drop your issue campaign, drop the fight for the winnable, and do this whole other thing. Because without issue campaigns that can win in the immediate interests of our communities, we're never going to be able to actually build power among poor and working people. And that is the only hope of moving towards governing power, right? We can't be like, we're just going to demand these things that are the big visions.

This is one of the sources of the tension in organizing right now. There's these big visions that we really want. We want to abolish the police. We want to win improved Medicare for All. We want to win so many things, right? Free higher public education.  A Green New Deal. All of these are crucial, like structural transformations that we need. But if we stay only over here and aren't fighting immediate issues that make those big ideas real in the lives of our communities, we're never going to build the power we need to get there. And we will spin here in alienation. We don't want governing power to be something that's on this dream list over here, but doesn't relate to the day to day work to win real issues.

We want to talk about how in this work to win day-to-day issues, we can take small steps in that bigger direction. We don't want to stay stuck here. We don't want to stay stuck there. We want to start where we are in those immediate issues and build small steps. 

One example of this is thinking about how we can embed power building and enforcement into our immediate demands. I spent about 10 years working with different low wage worker organizations, primarily Domestic Workers United in New York City, but also through them, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and other worker centers in other sectors around the country. 

And this question of enforcement was really important there. One of the fights where I saw this, where we had a hard learning on this, was the inaugural Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaign in New York State. And for those who aren't familiar, domestic workers have historically been excluded from some of the foundational labor and employment rights in this country. Domestic workers around the country have waged fights to try to both win full inclusion of domestic workers in things like overtime protections and so on, and to raise the floor of standards above those poverty minimums. Over time, that bill of rights got negotiated down to making sure that domestic workers were included in minimum standards and to running a report to see if the state could facilitate collective bargaining among domestic workers. It wasn't what we set out to win. But it was important to win those inclusions - to win those like equal rights for domestic workers. 

But promptly upon winning it, we realized we had an expectation that the State Department of Labor would make sure that workers around the state would know their rights, and that those rights would be enforced. Again, winning inclusion in the minimum wage is insufficient, but it matters a lot for in-home domestic workers who often make things like $2 an hour. But the Department of Labor has been decimated over the last 30 years by the neoliberal agenda that has destroyed the tax base, that has driven down the labor inspectorate. There's no way that the department of labor could go into homes around the state, the hundreds of thousands of homes where domestic workers work and make sure that every worker has their rights enforced.

And so we learned too late that domestic workers would need to help enforce those rights, to inform other workers of their rights through their networks. A thing we learned through the process was that we could have embedded resources for enforcement and for worker-to-worker education into that bill in the first place, so that the bill wouldn't just pass equal rights, and hope workers find out and that it gets enforced. We could have won, for example, a thing that workers in other conditions have done is anytime there's a violation, an employer has to pay triple funds, triple back that wage violation, and those additional funds, besides the worker getting their lost wages, those triple funds go to help support worker education. So if we had embedded in the Bill of Rights, a provision that any funds raised through enforcement of wage theft would resource domestic worker organizations to go out and do outreach, we could have embedded power building into that bill in the first place.

That was the hard fought example of, we didn't embed power building enforcement and the demand into the Bill of Rights. The coalition of Immokalee workers that organizes farm workers in Immokalee, Florida, and increasingly around the South, has done this in their campaigns with Burger King, with Wendy's, with all of these like grocery stores. They've embedded - it's was like a penny a pound - like like small things that seem small, and they included provisions that some of those resources would go to an enforcement arm of the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and that employers would be required 

to release workers for education on their rights.

And so now, as a result of building some worker power to win those contracts, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers set themselves up to have structured time with workers on every farm where organizers are resourced by the contract to educate workers about their rights, which sets them up to build power farm by farm in a much stronger way after their campaign than they did through the course of their initial campaign. They thought about embedding power building and enforcement into their demands. And we can all do that as well. So that we're thinking about leaving campaigns with more power and more potential to build power. Then we enter that.  

AWG: In your piece, you share a detailed case study spanning over 12 years of an organizing ecosystem in Minnesota centered on a formation called Minnesotans for a Fair Economy, which was initially focused on waging corporate campaigns and then quickly expanded its scope into electoral and legislative arenas in broader partnership with faith, labor,  and community based building organizations. And in reading this case study, it's clear that issue-based campaigns with clear targets and demands didn't stop happening. Rather, the broader focus on power building and deep collaboration between diverse organizations in the Alliance magnified the effectiveness of those campaigns. 

So as you've been saying, if having a winning campaign strategy is only a piece of the puzzle for building governing power, what are a few other puzzle pieces? And I know you've referenced a few, but any others that campaigners should be aware of like alliances, having shared targets with sibling campaigns, what does Minnesota, this case study, have to offer us to get out of issue silos and magnified effectiveness of our campaigns? 

Harmon Goldberg:  There's two that I'll try to share more succinctly.

The first is that especially in an initial campaign of the alignment of organizations in Minnesota, they took on a shared enemy. So they did this in two ways. One is they researched the power players in their state and named what they called the “dirty dozen,” the most powerful corporations in the state who are moving a conservative corporate agenda. And they used this to look at this governing power analysis thing I talked about. What are those forces moving around the state? And what is our agenda, our long term agenda to counter them? So they did a corporate power analysis of the state. But within that, they actually identified one target, which is ironically, Target Corporation, that they could take on together.

One of the first manifestations of the aligned work in Minnesota was that unions and community organizations came together to take on the Target Corporation together. So that included unionized janitors who cleaned Target's corporate headquarters. It included who organized through SEIU Local 26, it included non unionized store cleaners who organized. it included Take Action Minnesota that organized communities that were challenging the Ban the Box. Formerly incarcerated people were challenging the Ban the Box - the box where you had to check if you were formerly incarcerated, if you're applying for labor, for work, at Target. They also built power with Isaiah that was organizing African churches who wanted access to community development and jobs as well.

And all of those forces came together in a week of compression to challenge Target Corporation together. And that combined power won much more for all of those organizations than any one of them could have won on their own. 

Now, each of them had their issue fight they were fighting on. They each had their separate constituency, but they built shared direct action power and shared narrative power by challenging Target together and won a better contract for the unionized workers. It won the right to unionize for the store cleaners. So there's now unions in those stores. It won Target banning the box in their applications, not just in Minnesota, but across the country. Each of those issue campaigns was supercharged by coming together to target a shared enemy together. 

Really briefly, I keep using this word alignment, but it's just important to note that what organizers in Minnesota did was build their own power. Each of these are very strong power building organizations, but they really realized the limits of what they could do separately and invested in building alignment between their organizations to take on the shared corporation, Target, but also to build long term power in the state. And if people want to look at the fruits of the labor, you can look at the last Minnesota legislative cycle where they won an incredible raft of progressive legislation after a powerful democratic trifecta came into power with a strong progressive caucus that had a clear agenda that was aligned with community organizations. So there's a lot of writing about this out there. You can just actually Google “Minnesota Alignment” or “Minnesota bargaining for the common good” to learn more about that incredible work. 

AWG: Thanks so much for those examples. Thanks for your time and your insights. Really appreciate it. Yeah. Thank you. 

Zein Nakhoda:  Zein here. Thanks for listening to part two of this special episode, and check out part one if you haven't, to hear from James Mumm, Stephanie Luce and Bill Fletcher. We are linking to all our guest resources in the show notes, so check those out.

AWG: The Craft of Campaigns podcast is a project of the Organizing Skills Institute, at Training for Change and made possible by grassroots donors. Visit Training for Change for workshops, training tools, and other resources.

We welcome your feedback and nominations for other campaigns that should be featured on this podcast. If you like these episodes, please consider donating to keep the show running. This podcast is produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.