Dear friends,
Here’s the good news:
The soil is more important than the seeds.
Stay with me, please.
I’m making a rare podcast recommendation: Democrats Chase Shiny Objects. Here’s How They Can Build Real Power. (Full disclosure: I listened to some, got impatient, and read the rest in the transcript. Still working on the not-rushing.)
Amanda Litman, founder of Run for Something, talked to Ezra Klein about the very real dangers of ceding control of local and state governments to far right ideologues. She offers the encouraging idea that elections are harder to rig than people think because they are so decentralized AND she encourages folks to run for office at the most local level.
In two sentences, Litman got me ready to run for office and then smashed my hopes to smithereens:
I am personally fascinated by library boards. Now where I live in New York City, you cannot run for this. I’ve explored it. I’m really upset by it. But in a lot of places, you can run for and win a position on library board.
She goes on to explain why libraries and their boards are a seat of community power:
[T]he library is one of the biggest centers for people to interact with government. Because if you maybe are homeless and you need somewhere to use a computer to apply for a job, you go to the library. Libraries hold English language classes and citizenship test classes for people trying to become citizens. Libraries are often the centers where we preserve and restore the history of a community. I think it’s so powerful to get to decide what kind of community place your library will be.
I may have to look into how we get public control of New York City library boards. Another day.
Anyway. . . central to Litman’s message is the very faulty way that we use our donation dollars:
Democratic donors give because it feels good. And that leads you to some really short-term decision making. It leads you to operate entirely around a presidential battleground state of mind. And even now, we are still getting folks thinking like, well, it really only matters if we elect local election administrators in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s like, there are elections in other states, too. And there are Democrats in other states, too, where we want them to be running on fair and just democratic processes.
And I think this is true for big donors who are looking for the flashy thing that they can get invited to the cocktail party for or they can have the photo for their wall. And it’s true for grassroots donors who are looking for the thing that goes viral on Twitter or the video that either makes them mad or makes them hopeful or a little bit of both.
And I don’t want to fault anyone for giving to the thing that inspires them. Donate where you feel like you can make the most good. But I do think there’s a clear failure to match goals and actions.
As an example, Litman discusses the misguided effort to oust Mitch McConnell by spending $90 million on Amy McGrath’s campaign. Litman is clear that this was not an effective way to build sustainable power.
Litman confirmed my conclusion that we build power by supporting the folks on the ground, rather than supporting individual candidates and ‘shiny things’.
And then yesterday, I read Ricardo Levin Morales’s Tending the Soil, recommended in Digestable.
Morales offers eight lessons for organizing (and I do love a curriculum!); lesson 5 is
The soil is more important than the seeds.
Morales develops the metaphor powerfully and illustrates how the ground has been poisoned by “toxic narratives.” He says we have to nourish the soil with stories and beliefs that will sustain our projects, the seeds we wish to plant.
Almost anything will grow in rich, nutritious soil, whereas it’s hard to get anything to grow if the soil is barren, toxic, and won’t hold moisture.
The soil is the compost of beliefs, ideas, values, and narratives that create the environment in which we are working.
This is what deep canvassing is for, and I first encountered the idea when I read about the work that Care in Action did ahead of the 2020 election.
Care in Action’s mission is to raise the status and visibility of caregivers in our society. Their executive director, Jess Morales Rocketto, explained what Care in Action’s conversations with voters are about.
One of the things that we talk about is helping people understand that care is not just a personal responsibility. It’s a collective responsibility. And I think the pandemic has made it really, really clear how hard it is to do it alone and how little support infrastructure there is for families. Because of the pandemic, we are seeing just a seismic shift in how people are thinking about care.
Care in Action built support for Stacey Abrams in her 2018 run and delivered Black voters for Biden in 2020. Before last January’s Senate runoff, their canvassers
knocked on more than nine hundred thousand doors in and around Atlanta and in the state’s rural “Black Belt.”
This year, Care in Action is endorsing three great candidates: Stacey Abrams for governor, Bee Nguyen for Secretary of State, and Representative Nikema Williams, who filled John Lewis’s seat and has been a voice for caregivers and the care agenda.
Care in Action got out the vote in 2020 and 2021. Support care canvassing to elect three great candidates in Georgia!
New York legislators are holding their Health budget hearings today and they need a reminder that home care is health care and caregivers deserve fair pay.
Help tell the story using Use NY Caring Majority’s toolkit to support Fair Pay for Home Care.
And some more good news, because that’s what Tuesdays are for:
My favorite tending-the-soil example from this week is a story about a Brooklyn police captain, Derby St. Fort, who interrupted spiraling gang violence by paying young people to participate in therapy:
He partnered with an anti-violence coalition and a neighborhood activist, whom he asked to gather 15 of the boys close to the dispute for weekly discussions led by a therapist at a local community center, paying them a $150 stipend to participate. Week after week, the boys kept coming back. In the four months since, none of them have been arrested with a gun or involved in a shooting, he said.
It is possible to nourish the idea of a different future by helping young people to understand and tell their own story in new way.
NYCHA dismissed tens of thousands of eviction cases!
The cases amount to 90 percent of NYCHA’s rental non-payment cases in the city’s Housing Court as of March 2021.
Eviction proceedings — even when they don’t result in actual eviction — are a huge source of stress for people.
“For too long, public housing residents' lives have been disrupted - by forcing them to miss work or their children missing school - when NYCHA took them to court and threatened them with eviction from their homes for money they didn’t owe,” said Legal Aid Society Staff Attorney Lucy Newman, who described NYCHA’s housing court practices as “chaotic.”
Legal Aid attorneys worked with NYCHA to find ways to reduce the chaos. They’ve eliminated multiple cases against one household, dropped cases where the head of household is over 62, and made sure that people who didn’t owe rent before the pandemic are no longer threatened with eviction.
Finally, here’s some COVID good news to go along with the declining case numbers: an improv performer is running a brilliant experiment to get strangers to accept and wear free masks.
Using improv’s prime directive —Yes, AND — Matt Adams, in full costume and mask as the Star Wars character ‘The Mandalorian,’ carries a Baby Yoda, also masked, front-facing in a baby carrier on his chest.
They are Maskalorian, giver of masks, and Masku. Together, they have distributed around a thousand masks in New York, Vienna, and on flights between the two cities, with the message:
“We must be vigilant and do what we can to keep each other protected.”
AND yes, I know the prime directive is from Star Trek, not Star Wars. Let’s take our cue from Maskalorian and lighten up!
I hope you are having a great day!
with love,
L