building a movement

In a previous career, the organization I worked for distributed food to people who needed it. We understood that we would never achieve that if all we did was hand out food to people. We needed a culture shift that recognized a true human right to food. Our C-suite decided to launch a new workgroup they called Building A Movement. They invited me and other directors to join. At the first meeting the bosses showed us the now-cliché video of the guy who starts a dance party at a concert. One guy starts dancing, alone, and then more people follow. And now we were going to be that dancing guy! But the name of the workgroup caught some of us by surprised. We weren't building a movement. We were late to the movement.

My peers and I were already learning from people who were doing this work long before our meeting. Food security within communities is not a new concept. Sure, it may have been new to our organization. We were at risk of Columbusing a long tradition of food sovereignty and personal self-determination. Food justice advocates have been speaking on this for years. And food banks are at least somewhat complicit in the system these advocates are fighting against. We want to treat people with dignity while giving them food we had, not necessarily the food they want. Food banks did need a movement away from those policies, but we were the ones who created and benefitted from them. Why were we so confident that only we knew the best way out?

I was lucky that I was not the only person in the room who pushed back on the idea that this was a brand new thing. A few of us spoke up to ask that we bring a sense of humility to these grand new plans. Yes, we were a huge player in the region for food insecurity. That guaranteed us a space at the table—pretty much any table. But we didn't have the right to claim that this movement belonged to us, or that we alone could do the work it demanded.

This story came back to me this week. Hamilton Nolan wrote an essay about David Brooks' article, "America Needs a Mass Movement - NOW." Nolan writes,

"[H]is sense of dread in the face of onrushing fascism pushes him to the conclusion that, as our institutions fail, only a mass movement will be capable of saving us—something many of us have concluded! In this sense, Brooks is an unlikely everyman in this moment; just another alarmed American frantically yelling, “Why don’t people do something???"

[...]

You want a movement? Brother, there are people who have been neck-deep in social and political movements for their whole lives, right here in America. Ask them what to do! They know!"

Whatever cause we support, it's likely that people have already started the work. A lot of people crying "do something!!!" might feel like nobody is doing anything. Or that they would do something better. People with power love the idea that they're the ones who can solve a problem. But the reality is that no one person can do everything. And starting individual movements is hard. As the brilliant Mariame Kaba notes, "75 million people voted for Harris. About 6 million people attended the last No Kings mobilization. That's 8%. Just a reminder of how difficult it is to mobilize people for rallies, protests, any sort of direct action."

At the same time, it can be dangerous to have one person or organization leading a movement. One group alone risks being a target so large that it destabilizes the whole project. We need to be more nimble and more diffuse than that. People defending the status quo are eager to play dirty. We can't afford to put a single individual at the center of that. We are all flawed humans; no one should be the sole representative for so many voices. Mass movements drive burnout in people who always want to be at the front. Trump is willing to take on the entire nonprofit world. We need to spread further out into systems he could never even dream of.

What I see in our future is the need for many actions happening in concert. We need to recognize a movement is an ecosystem of resistance. Build new groups, yes, if you must. But also recognize our place in the larger project of liberation. It's a struggle that began long before any of of us were born. It will continue well after we are gone. Until then, I hope to show the humility and respect to any movement I am lucky enough to find. I think that's the least we owe each other as equals.