Issue: Organizational Development

The first chapter of the Washington State Environmental Justice Task Force (EJTF)’s Fall 2020 report provides context for what environmental justice (EJ) is, how to build on existing EJ work in Washington, and why state government must prioritize addressing EJ issues and environmental health disparities. The second chapter focuses on the EJTF’s process for developing recommendations, a statewide EJ definition, and EJ principles. The final chapter of the report includes all EJTF recommendations. The report appendices include additional resources, including guidance developed by the EJTF’s Community Engagement Subcommittee for how state agencies can develop their own community engagement plans. 

Multiracial organizing (MRO) can easily be siloed in culture, but it needs to be integrated in all parts of your DNA: story, strategy, structure and culture. MRO is hard work, and if your movement or organization is struggling to navigate how to do it well, you are in the majority. Representation and tokenization are easy traps to fall into. If your movement cannot clearly articulate why building multi-racial movement is important for winning, you may find it hard to organize with integrity, and conflicts will arise in your organization about who is leading and who is in your base. “Ideological grounding” is an important first step. Different kinds of MRO will be best in different kinds of contexts: majority white spaces, majority Black spaces, versus majority POC, non-Black spaces. Historic organizational memory matters, and there are different “levels of intervention” that can help strengthen MRO organizing. This report details those kinds of interventions and other aspects of successful MRO.

American’s external political efficacy – the belief that one can influence government decisions – has been on the decline over the last several decades. Greater involvement in civic associations may help to reverse this. Analyzing a panel dataset of several hundred environmental association members, this study found that as members got to know their association’s chapter leaders, external efficacy increased.

Successful movements must be able to analyze the political conditions and determine a course of action—all while balancing the pull of “inside game” electoral politics with “outside game” movement building. Organizers often jump into this in moments of crisis and are given few tools to understand what they are doing and how to best do it. This is why Momentum asked the organizing veteran Alexandra Flores-Quilty—former president of the U.S. Student Association and cofounder of By the People—to craft this report packed with tools and concrete advice to address all of these complexities. In the early stages of a movement, where the public and base need to align on the problem and popular demand. As the movement progresses into the stages of institutionalizing wins and consolidating political hegemony, then there will be more need for the other parts of the ecology to be built out including in particular inside game, organizing within political parties, and even structure-based organizing. These and other lessons are broken down in this 50-page report. This report quotes other experienced organizers.

The environmental movement must find ways of representing the hopes and aspirations not only of our traditional base, not only of our actual, quite diverse electoral base, but also of Indigenous and Black diaspora communities and communities of color already on our side, whom we have so far been unable to serve effectively.  In this spirit, the Green Leadership Trust offers the following guidance to align the performance of our leader towards equity and inclusion aimed at building the power we need to win.

As the founding Director of the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (a non-profit) transitions out of leadership, he shares reflections and resources related to cultural strategy and responding to the question, how might we build creative people-power to respond to the social and ecological crises of our times and to advance practices, narratives, and policies for a more liberatory world?