Along with feeding my need for human contact, community organizing also matched up perfectly with my inner rage. I had a habit of talking back and fighting. Organizing gave me targets to talk back to, to fight against, where the vicious and ruthless stuff came in handy…Vengeance–for injustice, for racism, for inequality, for greed: some may have been lured to organizing by the need to make things right, but I was there at least partially to do some damage to the bad guys.

I remember to this day the look on the taller boy’s face: I sensed that he was charged with protecting the little ones. What a set-up. There was no way for him to win. I could see that he tried so hard, and I knew something about trying hard, never winning. I never forgot him.

Issues are tools that allow organizers to build powerful organizations. But I hadn’t yet found any good issues in Pine Bluff. That was why I was so excited when I pulled up to Walker’s small gas station on Ohio Street and noticed a large, hand-written sign posted out front. In big, bold, colorful letters, it declared “This Ain’t HUD’s Mud!”

Despite my feeling that I had nothing to offer, organizers do have one bit of magic. We can become a mirror for the person we talk to. When we listen excitedly to what they have to tell us, when we laugh at a great sign, when we answer tough questions honestly, when we ask questions of folks whose opinion is never otherwise solicited, we send a message: I see you. I see the leader you really are, I hear your great ideas, I’m excited to have the chance to work with you.  

I was beginning to love my job. I just showed up, and folks had already been making a plan. That was good because ACORN had taught me how to knock on doors and ask folks to join and pay their dues, but they didn’t have enough time to tell me what to do about the issues that people cared about. I was very excited to have found a tight-knit community that already seemed to know.  

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.