How might we...
- How might I lead an organizing team that can powerfully basebuild?
- How might we as an organizing team practice collective leadership around base building?
- How might we build a base of 2500 activists whose identities include a majority of those most oppressed by our systems and history to lead this permanent ideological shift?
- How might we organize to a critical tipping point-3.5% of Minnesotans or 215000-to make a permanent shift in Minnesota's ideology?
Hypothesis
Organizers sharing their base-building goals in a fun and visual way will serve as a touchpoint for individual and collective leadership.
Design
- Organizers are in the midst of developing their base-building goals.
- Cross section of drawing:
- Soil – what do we want to be feeding
- Blacktop- what do we need to bust through
- Plant life What do we want growth to look like
- Sabrina ask them what they want to title mural and this experiment.
Metrics
- Everyone has something to add to the mural on base-building goals.
- No one says, I don’t know.
- People engage with what they see from other people. Offering directly.
- Naming what support they need.
- People are able to answer:
- What piece of my oppression and liberation tied up in this?
- Organizers and Sabrina feel hungry, can’t wait to look in their phone for who they can contact. Spark to reconnect.
Learnings
- I have often attributed challenges around base building to a management challenge. But starting to see from this experiment that’s not what it is. There’s something to just naming that management tactics alone do not build the hunger for basebuilding. Worth articulating that. I can do everything the Management Center says to do and it’s not enough on its own.
- Movement is happening with the team but is slow and smaller than needed.
- Naming vulnerability as an act of courage and explicitly inviting it, creates space for people to do it. The one person who shared they didn’t feel connected helped surface how they were challenged in other parts of their work. How can they be hungry for organizing if they’re not connected w/ the team? I feel emboldened to call people in to sharing when there’s no engagement.