“Anger doesn’t make a movement — organizers do.”

Whatever you’re doing to change the world, you might be more successful if you think of yourself as an organizer.

Organizers focus and sustain individual actions in concert to produce a given result. If that’s true about your work and that of your organization, you’re probably winning.

This is why it’s critical to understand the “advocacy disconnect” – the vast chasm between how most progressive causes train advocates and how decision-makers can be influenced.

It’s why programs that develop and rigorously work engagement ladders see more sustained involvement and mission success.

Organizers (and organizations that work from an organizer mindset) are better at raising money for social change because they get how fundraising and advocacy and social change are linked.

Professor David Meyer penned a compelling argument about the importance of organizers in last Sunday’s Washington Post. (The quote in the title of this newsletter is from the article.)  It’s been on our brains and a regular topic of conversation for us in the EC office this week – give it a read and let us know what you think: Americans are angry. Why aren’t they protesting?

Our favorite paragraphs in the piece [emphasis ours]:

What gets people out into the streets to demonstrate? It’s not general unhappiness about policy, be it on immigration or the national debt. Social movements are products of focused organization. Even the icons of activism in American history wielded influence through larger groups. Rosa Parks wasn’t just a tired seamstress in 1955, when she refused to move to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala. She was a longtime organizer who served as chapter secretary of the local NAACP, which organized a bus boycott and a lawsuit in response to her action. Earlier that year, she had attended a workshop on nonviolent action at a labor center, the Highlander Institute, where she read about Gandhi and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Educationdecision striking down segregation in public schools. All of the specific actions weren’t choreographed, but activists had spent years building the infrastructure and cultivating the ideas that made the bus boycott possible.

Without such organizational support, individual actions might be dramatic and heroic, but effective movement politics is a test of endurance. Organization gives individual efforts meaning and staying power.

During these dog days of August we hope you’re making a difference while members of Congress are home for recess, preparing to organize for change when Congress comes back to DC to fight some more about money and the role of government, and getting a bit of rest for the big battles to come.

As ever, let us know if we can be helpful to you. We’re at 202-683-8465 and ten.nilgnenull@ofni.