Stephanie Klein-Davis/The Roanoke Times via AP
Members of Charlottesville Indivisible attended a demonstration in Moneta, Virginia, May 9, 2017, before a town hall event with Republican Rep. Tom Garrett.
This article is part of the Prospect’s series on The Future of Organizing.
On a cold January day in 2017, my group of friends and activists delivered New Year’s cards to the office of Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), the powerful House Judiciary Committee chair. It was a surreal afternoon—we were never allowed in his office and talked to his chief of staff in a hallway. It was my first-ever congressional office visit.
Afterward, three of us documented our action as recommended by the Indivisible Guide I had avidly read and on whose new website I had registered our group just days before. Huddled in a library foyer, we euphorically described our first action and sent it to Indivisible volunteers. Hours later, Rachel Maddow featured that video, and our little group, Roanoke Indivisible, exploded with new members.
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Our early action meant our group was entangled with the Indivisible movement’s growth from the start and with the volunteers who became Indivisible National, giving us front-row seats to Indivisible’s relationship with its grassroots over the past four years. We agree with Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo’s central recommendation that creating state and regional-level organizations, accountable to local groups, would strengthen the Indivisible movement. We wonder, however, how feasible it would have been for Indivisible to do so in 2017 without first building organizational capacity and establishing itself as a premier national “resistance” organization, the movement that had improbably defended the ACA in the first year of a Trump administration determined to kill it.
Neither the Indivisible Guide nor the organization’s brilliantly effective map built the 2017 resistance movement wave, but they were absolutely critical in allowing our group to conceive of ourselves as powerful political agents commensurate to the mammoth tasks at hand and to see our local organizing efforts, however modest, as part of a cresting national response of inspiring political possibility. From our vantage point, Indivisible and the Women’s March, with its massive show of force, shaped the movement, in tandem with national progressive media, especially The Rachel Maddow Show.
Skocpol and Tervo’s counterfactual posits a choice in 2017 between building a “resistance” by investing in mid-tier infrastructure or building Indivisible National as an organization. But could young volunteers have fanned out throughout the country, sussing out which groups had robust networks, identifying promising local leaders, convincing them of Indivisible’s future potential among new resistance organizations, and persuading them to take on additional administrative labor, all while these leaders were organizing their own groups? Building early organizational capacity as Indivisible National was not a lamentable opportunity cost but the necessary precondition for Indivisible’s success as a credible, durable, and national movement.
We instead compare Indivisible to its sister mass digital resistance movements. Pantsuit Nation imploded even before the inauguration over a brand dispute, and the national Women’s March attempt at sustaining local “huddles” petered out in 2017. In Roanoke, their leaders and activists are still fighting—in Indivisible.
Indivisible is a movement built on a theory of change with a leftist vision. It built a “permission structure” we use to hold Republicans—and Democrats—accountable to us, their constituents. Concerns about Indivisible’s national impact, informed by numerical metrics, also scale down to our own worries about our group. Just as National Indivisible cannot assume groups will follow particular policy recommendations, we can’t assume our loosely digitally affiliated fellow travelers will show up for an office visit.
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Our 20 to 30 strongly affiliated members choose among actions spanning progressive concerns: refugee rights, climate, economic, and racial justice. We support National coordinated actions when we can, but we have also joined and now lead the local Dems, elected progressives to the city council and pressed them on our legislative agenda, held our police chief accountable for reprehensible comments about rape and gun violence, and now advocate for a “Virginia Marshall Plan for Moms.” For us, this flexibility is not an operational weakness but one of Indivisible’s strengths: We feel empowered to use the Indivisible movement to pivot to local causes that matter to us.
Our group hunts for the sweet spot between just enough organizational capacity to retain the “muscle memory” to mobilize hundreds to large actions like die-ins protesting family separation, but not so much that maintaining our infrastructure burns through activist goodwill with the thanklessness of organizing in this digital-first moment—monitoring Facebook groups, amplifying actions on social media platforms, handling email lists. It’s not an easy spot to find.
But this is where National’s investments in capacity help. We don’t see our group as an “asset” National deploys; National is our back office. More than policy explainers, they provide media assistance and amplification; an ActBlue platform for local group fundraising allowing political expenditures we direct; access to voter files; and training through calls, online sessions, and in person. These last have been pivotal. Our group leadership transformed our own capacity as organizers through training opportunities at Indivisible state organizing summits, regional training institutes, and the national convention. We made lasting state and regional connections on which we still rely, connections that helped us turn Virginia blue in 2017.
Of course, things can improve. Having worked with spectacular field organizers, we know just how critical continuity is when entry-level field organizers find their excellence rewarded with promotion out of the field. We would love to see funding and staffing devolve to robust regional offices coordinating local groups and providing staff support as groups continue their work balancing local activism and national calls to action. But Robert Kuttner’s analysis of the headwinds against long-term organizing on the left suggests that Indivisible itself could not have willed into existence an elegant Koch-like ecosystem in 2017. Taking stock as a historian, I am gratified that our group leadership, while decimated by pandemic attacks on women’s employment and crisis child care demands, is still here. We rely—daily—on the effective ties we built in the 2017 Indivisible trenches. We will rise again, as grassroots do. We will look to our partners at National to scaffold where they can as we wield the movement we forged together for the future our children deserve.
