It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: You Already Know How to Organize

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

You already know how to organize, you just don't realize it. Mia and James discuss the skills and knowledge you already have from things as basic as having a dinner party that will allow you to start organizing today! Original Air Date: 12.13.24See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means

to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. CALL ZONE MEDIA Hi, everyone, it's me, James, and I'm coming at you today with one of these little requests that I make sometimes when there's something that we would like you to do when it's very

important to do so. Today, I want to talk to you about Syria and specifically Northeast Syria. So with the world's eyes fixed on Syria, many are rightly celebrating as the brutal dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad comes to an end. But for Kurdish and other minority communities, recent days have brought violent attacks, ethnic cleansing and occupation by Turkey's back jihadist groups. In an attempt to take advantage of the chaos by crushing the Rojava Revolution, Turkey and its mercenaries are openly committing war crimes against the region's autonomous communities. Many thousands have already been forcibly displaced and thousands more are in danger. To make matters worse, this remains largely absent from the mainstream media reporting on Syria. If you'd like to show your solidarity with

the people of Northern and Eastern Syria, please call on Congress to take urgent action by passing emergency legislation to stop the violence, hold Turkey accountable and commit US support to the Syrian Democratic Forces and the diverse communities under their protection. If you want to take action today, you can go to DefendRazhabah.org. If you are able to, the most effective action we can take right now is to call a couple of representatives, one representative and one senator. The representative would be Gregory Meeks. He's from New York.

He's a Democrat. He is a ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His phone number is 202-225-3461. liaison would be Senator James Risch. He's an Idaho Republican. He is a ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His phone number would be 202-224-2752. If you'd like to have some talking points, you can find those on defendrejaba.org.

If you'd like to donate financially instead, especially to the humanitarian aid effort for the tens of thousands of people who have been displaced by the SNA's advances. You can donate to two organizations that I would suggest. The first would be Have Your Saw, the Kurdish Red Crescent. That's H-E-Y-V-A-S-O-R dot com. You'll want to go slash E-N if you want to see their website in English. You can donate there. The other one will be the Free Burma Rangers who are currently working in Raqqa.

I was talking to my friend Habat who works with them. You can donate to them at www.free-BurmaRangers.com. We will put all of this in the show notes or the URLs if you're driving, you don't have to write them down. Those are the concrete ways that we can help right now in what is unfolding as a very terrible situation in North Syria. Thanks. I hope you enjoy the episode. It's It Could Happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the putting things back together episodes of I'm your host Mia Wong with me is James Stout.

Yep, that guy who likes it to put things together. Yeah, and you know on the subject of putting things together over the last I don't even know three four weeks the question I have been asked the most by everyone is how do I start organizing? And you know the problem with how do I start organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org, and the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join

their org. Yeah. Also, the problem is a lot of the orgs that are currently dominating leftist spaces in the United States are trash. Yeah. And bad for people, bad people in them, bad people who are not in them. Yeah. Here's a little test you can you can do. Is your org currently sad that Bashar al-Assad is no

longer governing Syria? Because if that's the case, leave. Yep, that and that's that's a lot of orgs that that's yeah. Yeah, that takes most of them, right. Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, you join them, it'll be good. But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later,

the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah. But something I realized that the more I had these conversations, right?

I'm having it with friends, I'm having them with strangers, I'm having them with other organizers and the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling, you the person listening to this almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing? Yeah, that's a very good point I have encountered some of the most stunning or I mean organizing that like I can't discuss the specifics of but like some of the Best organizing I've ever encountered I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers And started talking to me about their stuff It's like what like people people are winning victories that, like, the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in, like, 30 years.

Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything. Yeah. Can I tell a little organizing story? Do we have time? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, go for it. So I remember in, like, 2018, I am on a trip with a friend. We're coming back and we see the arrival of the migrant caravan. One of the migrant caravans, the one that everyone decided to have a

fucking cow about right before the 2018 midterms. And at that time they were corralling the people of the migrant caravan in a baseball stadium in Tijuana. And like it was raining every day. So the baseball stadium ends up looking like the battle of the psalm after like a couple of days, right? You know, kids in needy mud and it's shit. And I didn't particularly know what to do, but evidently there were people there who were hungry

and thirsty. And so I get three of my friends at this time, I was still making about half my money riding bicycles and the other half riding. So my friends and I were supposed to do a long bike ride. All of us are people who make a living riding bikes, right? We're not like expert organizers. And I was like, Hey guys, this is fucked, what should we do? We called a friend who has a company who makes waffles. We were obtained like as many waffles as we could physically carry across the border. At that time, we weren't able to get in. We found a way to get in. We began distributing the waffles. After that, we put something online, people sent us money and we continued feeding people for months. None of us, I think, had a particular plan or a schedule. Yeah, it was a bit chaotic at times. But A, we were able to do that with

a lot of other people. Clearly, it wasn't just us, right? But we were able to process tenths of thousands of dollars and feed thousands of people. B, everyone there. And I've seen this countless times, especially working and organizing with, well, with refugees for the most part. People are so good at organizing each other and themselves. Like when we got there with bottles of water and food, there were a thousand people there who have not had sometimes a drink for days, let alone more than a thousand, I think, let alone something hot to eat, right? Everybody made sure that the children and the sick people got where they needed first. Organizing is something that is very inherent in us as people.

It just, we don't call it that. Yeah. And that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this sort of, I guess, even particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this this guy with specialized knowledge. Yeah.

And that's just not true. This brings us something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right? That's something all of you know how to do. If you can organize a dinner party, right? If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to you know, work a job, right? You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but you know, you one of the things that comes up a lot in this which is less discussed and also kind of annoying

But you know you have to manage it is that organizing is about people? Mm-hmm And sometimes you have to you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos But like I don't know almost all of you work jobs or have work jobs, right? You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? Yeah, you you have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is.

Yeah, that's the core of it, is getting people to do stuff. Like, you do it every day. Yeah, and the way you do this is by building relationships with people, right? And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends, you have preexisting relationships and being like, okay, motherfuckers, we gotta go, we gotta go do something. And actually I love that the first thing that you brought up was it admittedly sort of medium ish scale lift version of this, but one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind.

You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower. I know people who've done this just solo is that you can just go give food to people. Yeah, literally it was this morning. So I'm tired. Yesterday morning, I have some in-house neighbors, right? And it was cold. And so I went out and gave them some hot breakfast or hot coffee. It's super easy to do.

If you are struggling socially, wherever you are, maybe you're finding it hard to make friends. I know that's the thing that people often struggle with, especially if you've moved to a new place or post pandemic or you're still concerned with large gatherings or any of those things, like if you start doing that, you will find other people who want to do it too. Like so many of my friends I organize with are people like when we had the end of title 42 and people were in between the fences there, a lot of the people

who I organize with now or who I help people with now, I didn't know, I just showed up with a giant solar generator that I happened to have and some stuff that we had to whip around a cool zone for. And like people who care about the same things as you are generally cool. And it's a good way to make friends and then you can go on from there. Yeah. And there's a second compounding thing here too, which is that, you know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know

you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common, I mean, this is, I literally had this conversation with, with one of my friends who's like an old school food, not bombs organizer, food, not bombs is a very, very, it's a cool organization. You can just like found a food not bombs chapter. They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest

anarchist project in the world. Yeah. Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right? If there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help feed people. But the thing is from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it.

And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly, once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit.

But I wanna go back to the beginnings of how, so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing? And the answer is you kind of already know how to, because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? Like you've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task. Yeah, it could literally be anything, right? To go accomplish a task yeah, it could literally be anything right like yeah, if you've got some people to go to a bar You have the skills what one way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is putting is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew Okay, I could vouch for this right Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting

together a team and I want you. It feels, you can just do it. There is nothing stopping you. Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it would from a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun.

Amazing. Yeah, but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this. There's, on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about here is a problem And I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can that can help deal with it

And you put people in touch with each other and that's organizing That's so much organizing is literally just hey like I have like a broken part of my car I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right? And you put you put them in touch and you have you have successfully organized people and you have built relationships I have like a broken part of my car. I know someone who's like a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch and you have successfully organized people and you have built relationships and you have made all of the sort of social web

that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah. It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break break the isolation we're all under. Yeah, I think the best solution for despair is... I'm thinking of a quotation here, something, the busy bee has no time for despair.

But the thing that makes me feel better about the world is that I have seen that people can fix massive problems with very few resources by just showing up. And, and like, I think organizing is what gives me, what allows me to enter this period of time that we're entering into with a, with a great deal more hope than I otherwise would have done. Yeah. And do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope? Is it the products and services that support this podcast? I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads.

They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We are back. So I want to return to my high school or if I don't know if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons and Dragons party or like an RPG party. And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure it you go, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad, and you figure it, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it.

And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's, you know, I want to start doing tenants organizing. I want to start because my rent is too high, right? Or people are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing.

And you try to match what things need to be done with people you know who have those skills. And this is, you know, this is where you really shouldn't get into the heist things, right? Cause everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You

want people who have overlapping strengths, so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing. And part of the way to successful organization works over time, and I mean, just how successful organizing works is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say, you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, you know, or just you're gone or you cycle onto a next thing or you know, any any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you and you want you want you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's like organizing the thing, right?

Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing. And a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like, especially women and especially like a lot of binary people and trans people, particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds and they're like,

well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one. We'll get to you in a second, right? Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of like the kinds of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of like

The kinds of things that there are there are massive roles for So one of the most important ones and this is something you can you deliberately look for, you know This is this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends that is a staggeringly useful person Yeah, because again most most organizing is just talking to people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because again, most most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships. And you know, one of the things you do when you when you're doing your sort of they call it power mapping, but when you when you're figuring out how you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects, and you talk

to that person. Yeah, because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have their relationships already and also they'll be good at talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. And so if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships. That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill.

There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tennis organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right? Yeah. And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard also. I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse

and finding records about who owns property companies. Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like, you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it, but there's also even just easier things in that, right? That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. And this is very useful for like union

campaigns, bosses. If you've ever been a person who uses dating apps, especially if you're a woman, then you know how to OSINT actually. maybe you don't credit yourself with that skill, but a hundred percent that like you've developed that skill to keep yourself safe and you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works? Yeah, sure. So open source intelligence is, it's an acronym that doesn't really need to exist. It's gathering information for open sources, things that are easily, openly accessible, right? As opposed to like HumeInt, which is like being a spy, or SigInt,

which is capturing signals. Open source information is you're creeping someone's Instagram, creeping their Facebook, looking at the weird fucking shit that they put on Goodreads, right? All the data that is out there largely on the internet about us. A lot of people put a lot of information on the internet and it's very easy and I would imagine if you're at under 50 and maybe if you're over 52, like you just know how to do this because it's what you do anyway when you want to find out about someone and like especially if you are a person who goes on dates with people who you haven't met before and haven't been introduced to by a mutual friend but you meet on the internet, you probably already do this to keep yourself

safe. Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with the local Nazi and you're trying to organize around like running them out, people safe from them, and you can find information about them. But I mean, it's useful for cops who are beating people is useful for politicians, particularly. It can But I mean, it's useful for cops who are beating people, it's useful for politicians particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords, this happens all the time.

It can be very, very useful for bosses in union campaigns. Unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff. But the thing is also, and this is something I don't think people understand, those guys, they're like, the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you But they got a job being a researcher for a union like they have the same skills as you they know how to like

Google stuff and they know how to look through people's like dating profiles and like look through their their Facebooks and their Instagrams and like a big one a big one that that the rich people especially do not think about is like Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold. Particularly Cash App because, yeah, yeah, because people will just leave public transactions out there. That's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... Maggates. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile?

I guess I call him the accused pedophile. The man credibly accused of sleeping with an underage woman lots of times. You know, and one of the ways they found that was that, and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like, having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always rape. You know, and the way people found that was that they just looked through like his cash app history, and they found all of these money transfers to people.

This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful organizing-wise that you already know how to do. Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute bang for people. So much Pinterest. People are pinning. They'll be pinning. If you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this,

that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person. It gives you someone you can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is, you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water

to a place, oh yeah, huge, staggeringly useful. The amount of things that people can't access because they can't get there is vast. Especially when I talk to migrants who have recently arrived in the US, they don't have a US cell phone, they can't Uber. Oftentimes nowadays you can't even pay for mass transit with cash. You have to have a special card.

And then you have to get to the place to get the card. The problems you can solve by being able to drive someone five miles are enormous, especially in the U.S. where everything is designed around everyone owning a motor car at all times. Yep. Yeah. And like transport based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill.

There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue. There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants, like being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill. Yeah. Yeah. It's very like it's useful. It's important.

It's okay if that's not something you can physically do or you know that works for the way you like to live your life. Like another thing I was thinking of, which can be massively important and people don't realize is if you know how to take off a tail light and replace the bulb in it. Yes. Like we're entering a time when people with DACA, people with TPS, people who are undocumented, people who are on temporary migration statuses are going to be deathly afraid of any interaction with law enforcement.

If you can change the bulb on someone's tail light or their turn signal indicator, for those of us in the UK, then you can meaningfully protect that person in a really important way. And it can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right, if you're an electrician, you do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right?

That is the thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job. That can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Is is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting and like having a thing that lets you be like,

OK, here's when everyone is free. And like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything. That is what literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, Hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah.

And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time? Yeah. So we're going to figure out a time? Yeah. So we're going to close out this sort of skill section with some, I think, just sort of like domestically skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. Oh, I love that. Yeah.

Well, you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use. But if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule, everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome. That's a badge for those of us who are in the Commonwealth. Also, if you have a sewing machine. Yeah, I was about to mention that.

You're a hero. Yeah, one of my friends recently made me a little patch and it's really cool and I like it and I'm putting it on my stuff. But if you can sew, like that's a skill that I do not have. And it's so great when people can, uh, like fix stuff for someone or, you know, make stuff fit someone, you know, if you're a person who finds it hard to get clothes that you like to wear, they make you feel good. And someone, one of my friends could do that.

And one of my friends was making clothes for another friend for like a Renaissance fair. And like, it was the nicest thing I've seen someone do for someone else in a very long time. It really made her like feel like nice and cared for. And like, you might think that like, this is just a weird little thing that you like to do with your sewing machine, but you can meaningfully really make someone feel cared for using that.

Yeah. And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right? And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is, I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at like keeping groups together. Yeah, that's his own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable, and it's something that you can look for.

And if that's not you, that's something you can find in your friends. You can find in the people around you. Yeah, definitely. There's also something that I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing, because this is the first thing where the quality drops. Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful,

because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And, yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff.

Yeah. And along this line, there's things like making music, and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. Yeah. And along this line, there's things like making music, and there's a bunch of different ways this can go. This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like, you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs, and this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about

in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. Oh, yeah. This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if that's a thing that you can do, well, you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff

who are willing to contribute it to the cause. That's great. I remember one of... we had one night last September, it was so cold, we were in the desert and there were like a thousand people, right? And we were, well, at that point we were really struggling to feed everyone even, you know, cause there was so few of us,

but my friend bought out like their guitar and some bongo drums they had. And I think I had my harmonica in my truck and like we were sitting around with these, we had some Sikh guys, had some Uighur folks come from China and then some Kurdish people and they were all just playing their different music and it was so nice. Yeah.

Like that taking people out of a shitty situation for a moment with music again, like don't underestimate how important that is. Don't feel like if you have that skill, it's not a useful one. No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is like a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. Yeah. And being able to raise people's morale, it's this massive, if you want to go into technical

language, it's a massive force multiplier, right? It makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves and the better they feel about the situation they're in. And things like music, things like art. I mean, things like pulling pranks. This is a, if you were a good practical jokester, this is a staggeringly useful skill. Both like in terms of, you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org.

But like, you know, if you know how to just like pull pranks, this is a really, really useful thing in like union campaigns, in tenants organizing. There are a lot of people who you can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises your morale. Yeah. And again, back to your music as a like, like morale is a terrain of struggle. Like the other memory I have last year of playing guitars is in Rojava being inside at night because everyone was getting drone struck

all the time and it was dangerous to be driving around, sitting around with some Azidi friends. We spent all night playing the oud, which is like a guitar with a gourd on the bottom. I don't know how to describe it. It's a stringed instrument. It's a stringed instrument is what it is. That made everyone so happy. We had such a nice evening. Everyone was able to like get through this relatively difficult thing.

Like, you know, it sucks that people are being killed and just for driving around or existing and they're bombing all the civilian infrastructure and the power keeps going out and all these things. Right. Like, but there's a reason those people have kept that oud around after 15, 13 years of war. And it's because it is important. And so don't overlook that. And resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right?

A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid is that it makes it harder for you to act and things that you know, the things that make you less afraid even if even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important. And, you know, on sort of this note, one of the things that you know, as you've

assembled your group of people, right? One of the things that that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital organizing thing all the time, your organization will not hold together. There has to be actual like, bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help. bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help. Mm-hmm. I don't want to call out any organization in particular. There is an organization that perceives organizing to exist solely in the realm of wearing a high vis vest and carrying a clipboard and getting people to write their email addresses down and then telling them to attend things. And like, maybe there are several organizations like that, I don't know.

I've just, I've perceived one locally. If you don't have those bonds, that like those interpersonal relationships, like these things won't hang together. Like so many of my happiest organizing memories, like again, going down James's memory lane, I guess, I have a memory of like Christmas Eve last year, 2023, me and my friends have been out.

I know some of them listening, some of them have come across from different states to help us over their Christmas holidays, which is nice. And it was cold. And we had been feeding people all day. And then we'd heard some people in another location that we'd gone to find. And then we got to the end of the day and like, rather than just going home, I had a bunch of, uh, we had some MREs left, the refugee MREs that are vegan, lots of us are vegan, so we were like, oh, I'm not going to find any other

vegan food in the middle of nowhere out here. So we all sat around eating our little vegan MREs and just talking and sharing some thoughts and things we'd experienced over the last months of doing this. It's those moments that make your organizing group so much stronger. Don't want to telling anyone to do anything, you know, like those genuine bonds and the love and friendship we build up between each other doing things that are very important. Don't overlook the value of those because it's extremely valuable.

And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? What? No, probably not. Like, I don't know.

Maybe it's something like really sort of, hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them. But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and you know, you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's all organizing is. It's finding ways to you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it. And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like,

you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done. Yeah. But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever. Yeah, if you're a baker, you know, you can bake people. It's a wonderful thing to share.

Oh my god. Yes. Just knowing how to cook. I realized, I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you could possibly be in. It is a thing, it is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful like, literally no matter what organization you are in. If you can cook for people, and you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made. You have instantly made this whole thing more successful. Yeah, definitely. Like, I've had some wonderful meals in war zones

and I deeply appreciated those people. More broadly, those ties, like the way we organize without the state, the reason I believe that that is the way we should organize and where we will continue to organize in a way that we can make the state irrelevant is because we understand each other as people and care about each other as people. And then we approach our organizing holistically, right, with everyone in it,

knowing this person is good at this, but they're struggling with this right now. And I care about them, so I'm not going to make them do that right now. That is how we can build sustainable communities in a way that state cannot and in a way that capitalism cannot, right? Because a fucking hurt's rent-a-car doesn't care or know about its employees in a way that we who organize with people and care and love one another do. And like, that's why our organizations will always be stronger than those created by capitalism or the state. Yeah. Unfortunately, speaking of capitalism or the state, we're taking our last ad break. Yeah, hopefully it's a rent-a-car.

We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of, doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing, because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. Yeah.

And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is really difficult thing. If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened. So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff. Knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces. And also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities is a huge thing. Because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco and you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work

into it. Yeah, literally I reached out to a friend to book a room last night because I knew they were good at that stuff. Yeah, you know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people show up for stuff, things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing right, getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah. Now, how formal and format you want it to be, or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you

in tandem with the email. Something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google voice. Yes. When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this. Child care is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids.

And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this can work. One is that, you know, you have everyone bring their kids, you have like a little space, you bring them like coloring stuff, you bring them toys, you bring them games, and you just sort of watch everyone for a while. And as an organizing thing, again,

if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter for a bunch of kids and that's a very useful organizing thing. Yeah, I organize with people who have kids. I remember four years ago, fuck me, 2020, a long time ago, and also yesterday. But like, we were organizing to feed and house people, we were having a big Thanksgiving dinner. And like, some of my friends have very young children, and they bought them. And I think that's actually really cool to do that. A, like, for those kids, it is normal that like, we look after people in our community. This is what we do, and ever since I've been little, this is what we did.

And like, it's also very nice for people, like, a lot of my friends also brought their children down to the border, especially last year when we had, because there were children there anyway, right? Yeah. Some of my friends who bring their children down, and their kids would play with the other kids, and like, it doesn't matter that some of the kids are Kurdish and some of the kids are from China and some of them are from Colombia or whatever, they'll get along just fine when they're four or five years old. They don't care. They just want

to kick a ball or see a teddy bear or something. And I think it's really good for your children to, you know, you're bringing them into a world which is cruel and at times unequal. And like your kids seeing that, like, we can make a difference and we can do this. I think it's one of the best educations you can give your children. Yeah. And it's something that's good for everyone involved. Yeah, exactly. And it's also very, I think, one of the things I see a lot when people are organizing with refugees with the unhoused is like they're just people like you don't need to be afraid of them like they don't want to hurt your children and

Having your children around shows that like you have grasped They're just people and that you feel safe and your children are safe around them And I think that that's valuable to you're giving both parties some dignity in that moment Yeah, there are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before. I'm gonna talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah.

And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done and it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah. So I'm gonna give you how to run a meeting 101 Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world

And it's very effective is you have two things you have an agenda and have a stack And those are like the technical terms for them the agenda. I mean it's the gender right? You know what an agenda is you put the things that you need to do on it Another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating at a time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings and my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah. You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is, is

very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda, because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this again, like this all sounds very obvious and again, you know how to do it, but until you've been in a room where people have not realized they need to do this, you don't understand how important this stuff is. Yeah, the pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like science.

These are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show. And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. Yes. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right? It is the stack. It is very simple, right? You have one person who is the stack keeper. And when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time. And what someone wants to talk, they raise their hand, or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper, and that person writes their name down.

And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list and people get to say things. And again, you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing. But again, I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week. Like, who know, like not be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you could do this. Yeah. There's a very common, sometimes this is one person, sometimes this is two people. A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker

and then have someone who's the facilitator, and the facilitator's job is to call on the people and to try to move the conversation forward and make sure everyone's involved. And also another important part of this, and this is again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up.

Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off and you have to get to the next person. Yeah, and doing that courteously is a skill. Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of if you want to go into the like more technical stuff, part of the things that facilitators use and part of, you know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. Yeah. And you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack right is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first.

And sometimes this is literally just like, Hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time and you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is, this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even, and you could just do this in a meeting too, right? Like you, you can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this dispersant of anything to contribute?

And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans. And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful. Yeah, definitely.

If you've been a teacher or in any way, you know, you probably have, you have this skill, you might not consider it a skill, but even if you've been a TA in grad school or something like that, you probably know how to do this. Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was a tenets union in Chicago. So this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was, okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer. I was like a

tiny baby, right? This was my first offline offline organizing project ever right? I had no idea I was doing I still thought I was a guy which like that's how much of a fiasco like little tiny baby Mia Who doesn't know anything this was you know? And so my friend talked to some people that he knew and he knew that I you know I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing and we like went to a cafe Mm-hmm, and we sat down and we ate and we tenants organizing, and we went to a cafe. And we sat down, and we ate, and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were,

what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually something that's important too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions and think politically about their actions. Yeah. And that's something that's very useful.

You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club, like book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure you're organizing group if you're trying to do a thing, has it just become a book club? Yeah. But that's something that was very useful to us. And we started making a plan and our plan was,

okay, we made a bunch of flyers and then we went out and I did this and I walked around through a bunch of streets and put them on light posts or whatever and then we put them like we hung them up in the buildings of tenants, you know, because you can just like walk up the stairs right and you just put them on the walls and you know, we had this flyer, this flyer had information this flyer said okay, we're starting a tenants union if you have tenant if you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff like come here at this time. We had an email.

You can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call. Yeah. You know, and so, okay. And so parallel to this, we like, I forget if it was a church or if it was some building, some center or something, we booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people who we sort of knew. And this is another useful, like knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill

because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people, is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're finding like the first tenants union in this place, right? Yeah. And, you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night But people still came like people still came in the blizzard like a lot of people showed up for this But what are things we do we also like, you know, we just we just started talking to people, right?

We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just you know, we talked to our friends We talked to the people they knew we ended up talking to someone, you know And this is the thing that just happens as it spreads by word of mouth Right people start contacting you we ran into a really long time tenants organizer in the city You had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers, right? And like I said, everything is yeah, you know Another thing that happens in projects is you'll you'll sometimes you'll just you'll just pick up someone who's you know Has been doing this since like the 60s yeah and it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they they want to go they want to do stuff we plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting you know

we were going to do some political education we were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff and we were going to you know get get people to understand what we were doing how they can start organizing and then we it. And I unfortunately don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about, but like, you know, but like,

all of those things, right? All of those steps from the start of, you get five of your friends to go eat dinner and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in like Microsoft or whatever you make it in like PowerPoint publisher. What's the one I'm blanking I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in I really don't. There's like an actual program that I forgot what it is. You see this in my Christmas cards,

but like you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made it. We made an email, you know, we got a space together. We figured out what we wanted to do. And then we did it. And, you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right? But like we had started the thing and you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah, you just have to go out there

and do it. Yeah. You can have faith. Yeah. And this has been It Could Happen Here. Go organize. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedmedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed

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