Moving Forward, Part 5: One Final Critique of No on 8

Never again should our EDs run our political campaigns!  Next time, let’s engage our community’s nonprofit leaders as grass roots leaders, mobilizing their membership, staff and constituencies, and NOT as professional political campaign operatives.  I’m a four-time former Executive Director and I believe in longterm institution-building and the need for excellence in EDs.  But as one who was also Southern CA Campaign Coordinator for No on 64 (the 1986 AIDS quarantine struggle), believe me, the skill-set of a  nonprofit executive is NOT the same as that required to run a political campaign. We need to hire the best, toughest political campaign consultant and let them go, not constrain them with a web of bureaucracy: No on 8 had a big committee of 93, then a smaller committee of 25 and, finally, an “executive committee” of seven representatives of nonprofit groups.  The tragedy is that this unwieldy structure precluded BOTH a topflight political campaign and a powerful grassroots campaign – that is, the campaign structure itself diverted energies from a real organizing campaign.

API Equality: Effective Grassroots Organizing

There was one standout model of effective grassroots community organizing in the LGBT community this year; it was part of the No on 8 campaign, but it began autonomously and was a three-year effort: “API Equality.”  This campaign should be closely studied as a template for future efforts.  Volunteer driven, collaborative, muscular, inclusive and savvy, it engaged and leveraged community-based nonprofits trusted in their neighborhoods and ethnic communities, political allies, diverse ethnic media, and fearlessly confronted homophobic religious groups.  API Equality reached their ‘moveable middle’ through engaging allies and putting the human face of LGBT Asian Pacific Islanders front and center.  The result? 51% NO vote despite fierce homophobic resistance. Let’s celebrate this success and learn from it!  

Comments

[LKitsch]

This all makes a lot of sense. If we listen to this advice, next time we will win.