Going Public Book Club – Chapter 8: The Hard Edges of Effective Organizing

One term came up for me as I re-read and reflected on Chapter 8: self interest.

I recall a 2015-timeframe meeting with Frank McMillan who was at the time the lead organizer for Jersey City Together. In that meeting, Frank was gauging my appetite and interest to lead. And in doing so, he shared a bit about Jersey City Together. He shared the frame on organizing - that Jersey City Together was an affiliate of Metro IAF, which itself had a long history of organizing that stretched back in time and across states (and, I would find out later, across countries). Metro IAF, he shared, was about getting things done. It tackled systemic problems that often dealt with big money. 

He was grounded in practicality. And the importance of self-interest was what really resonated. What made me realize: yes, this is worth learning more about.

Frank shared that self-interest is not about selfishness. It's not inherently bad or good…it is simply a reality of who we are as humans. Acknowledging this idea of self-interest is liberating and important in this space of community organizing. Years later, Frank’s successor, Boris Franklin, shared with me a “list of universals of organizing” and one of them was: “Clarity is self interest.” Yes. Clarity is self-interest.

Self-interest is, in turn, clarity.

I see this clarity in part as someone who is immersed, every day, in thinking about money (as a CPA and tax/public budgets blogger).

Business owners have an implicit understanding of self-interest because they have to work hard to understand their customers: what do I need to do to get this person to part with their hard-earned money to buy my product or service?

I see a parallel to organizing.

Because effective organizers have to work hard to understand:  what will get this person to part with their precious time to share in the pursuit of our shared, collective mission?

Years later, reflecting on Chapter 8, I see that self interest gets at “the hard edges of effective organization” because it requires honesty, reflection, and evaluation about mission, use of time, and what we are willing to work on together. 

The initial stages of volunteering, and coming together in common cause, are at the warm and fuzzy center of effective organizing. But over time, individuals drift away absent some self-interest that will keep them involved. That is human nature and ignoring it is just a recipe for exhaustion and burnout. The “hard edges of effective organizing” deal with that drift by pursuing the question: what is your self-interest as it relates to the mission?

That is why, when we seek to organizing schools, we ask: “What is one thing that YOU would change to improve your school?” Notice:

• The mission is rooted in the object of the sentence: the schools.
• The self-interest is rooted in the subject:  YOU.
• The organizing is in the fact that you’re asking the question in the first place, in the context of a relational one-on-one or a listening session

When individuals are given space to freely share their self-interest, they are actually serving the common good. Because it is in that space of shared self-interest that people will be most inclined to give their time and energy to help. And, if the shared interest does not align, that's fine. But at least there is clarity. 

Self-interest will not emerge without the “hard edges of effective organizing” because we are primed - especially in volunteer, community spaces - to be polite and to not offend. We are too influenced by the paradigm of “SHOULD.” 

I have lived in Jersey City for over two decades and been actively writing about property taxes and underfunded schools for nearly twelve years. I am very clear-eyed about the need to dispense with the politeness and ruffle feathers if it helps you understand the true self-interest of others in community. Because many issues - especially those that are systemic in nature and involve money - are too big to address absent a critical mass of conscientiously informed and engaged citizens who are willing to roll up their sleeves and work together. 

About a decade ago, I had the opportunity to attend a regional training and strategy meeting of IAF leaders and organizers. Towards the end of several days of thinking, listening, arguing, and learning from each other, one of the organizers had us all take out our calendars and look at what we could stop doing. His point was that, in order to take on the things that we were planning to do, we would have to make time for them. And that meant making choices about what we were (personally) NOT going to do, in order to do these other things.

In chapter 8, Gecan talks about some of the ways that groups and institutions are organized that are just not very effective, and that waste people’s time. It is one reason that some people do not want to get involved in organizations: sitting in on committee meetings that do not accomplish anything is a really demoralizing experience. Multiply that by years, or numbers of committees, and it tells us that we need to reorganize and reorient our collective work.

In organizing, we owe it to each other and to our leaders, whose time is precious, to use our collective time well. This is why we always strive to start on time and end on time. People need to be effective in their public work, while not giving up the joys and obligations of our personal lives. Part of this, Gecan argues, is that we need to disorganize. We need to dismantle those ways of being together in our institutions that are not productive, not useful, and do not result in accomplishing our goals.

Disorganizing can be difficult. Gecan uses the example of church Bingo nights that raise very little money for the church but take a lot of time to manage. But I’m sure we can all think of ways that the organizations with which we are familiar could use a bit of disorganization, of shaking things up, of reorienting to think once again about our purposes and goals, about why we are doing what we are doing. Indeed, many aspects of public life need some shaking up, and we need organizations that are up to doing this work.

The need to raise the fundamental question of what we are doing and why we are doing it is also a reason why we always build evaluation and reflection into our work. We want to know what works, what doesn’t, and what can keep us going, keep us motivated and engaged in the work. Sometimes, that means taking things off of your calendar. After all, as Mary Oliver asked us all in her poem “The Summer Day”: 

“Tell me, what is it that you plan to do 

With your one wild and precious life?”

Is your answer that you sat in committee meetings for twenty-seven years? Or is it that, with your neighbors, you worked to get your local school district fully funded and to get twenty-first century water fountains in every school in your city?