Keith Kelleher's Canvassing Rules: Training and working with experienced and inexperienced canvassers over the years and especially the last few weeks, right before the big elections, has brought back some key rules I've learned for canvassing. I've been lucky enough to do all types of doorknocking and canvassing: labor, community, political, issue, fundraising, or all of the above; and here are a few tips that help you keep it together through hours of doorknocking.

And that’s how i saw it – we had to collect dues because no one was going to fund us to organize poor people into unions. We were organizing the lowest wage homecare and childcare providers in the city – many who were legally classified as “independent contractors” and paid minimum and subminimum wages of only $1, when the federal minimum wage was only $3.35 an hour.

Having worked as a community organizer for barely six months before I began organizing fast-food workers in Detroit, I learned a number of critical lessons that informed the rest of my organizing career. 

This was one of the first meetings of the Chicago downtown workers — just a few months before the kickoff of the Fight for 15 in Chicago and New York in November 2012. Over the next few months, organizers would reach out to thousands of workers with the goal of building a mass-based organization of low-wage working people. The workers who stepped forward to lead the fight would risk job loss and deportation in the hopes of earning better wages and respect on the job. 

Like most organizers, I used to hate coalitions. They seemed to consist of a mixture of organizations that had something to contribute and organizations that wanted to tell the rest of us what to do. For membership-based organizations, our bonds with our members and our democratic decision-making structures were often threatened by individuals who wasted our time arguing about what our members should be doing. In a city like Chicago, however, we despaired of ever being big enough to make change without allies. Thanks to some fine organizers who taught me about good coalitions, we learned how to make coalitions work by following these tips.