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Members of the local chapter of Indivisible at Tax March San Francisco, April 15, 2017
This article is part of the Prospect’s series on The Future of Organizing.
During field visits to a very conservative community in 2017 and 2018, I learned about a leader of a local Indivisible group who was fired from her job because her name appeared in a news story about a rally against repeal of the Affordable Care Act. She persisted nonetheless. Her all-volunteer group went on to protest Trump immigration policies, support area high schoolers calling for gun safety, and cooperate with the local NAACP.
I recalled this local story last May after I emailed national Indivisible co-director Ezra Levin to get his input on core research issues. (Contrary to Michael Podhorzer’s claim, we have interacted with D.C. Indivisible directors since 2017 and given them many opportunities to convey facts and interpretations, which we often quote or paraphrase directly.) Inspired by our grassroots interviews, one of my queries to Levin focused on staff rosters over time. He replied that he would not provide such lists, and urged me “to let us know” before we publicly shared a 2019 staff roster we already possessed, because it was “not designed to be shared with the public. Staff have expressed a preference for not being listed on our website due to privacy and safety concerns (some who have become public have received threats).” We have honored Levin’s request not to share names, but it is jarring to think of the publicly courageous local Indivisible leader compared to the hidden D.C. staffers. Who really faces threats?
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The same juxtaposition came to mind again when I read Podhorzer’s accusation that Caroline Tervo and I are “scapegoating” Indivisible’s “leaders” by using their own reports and public issuances to analyze how they have used funds raised for the entire network. In a vast network like Indivisible, who counts as leaders—and whose consequential choices deserve to be analyzed, versus downplayed or hidden? Because he works in Washington, D.C., and convenes advocacy meetings, Podhorzer may find it natural to regard professionals as the true leaders. But as students of U.S. civic engagement overall, we use concepts and collect data encompassing hundreds of thousands of volunteer groups and activists along with paid professionals.
In many intersecting projects, my partners and I study changes on the left and right in U.S. politics—including the rise of elite donor consortia like the Koch network and the eruption of bottom-up and top-down forces in the Tea Party and the anti-Trump resistance. The Indivisible network attracted our attention, not because we care about yet one more D.C. professional advocacy organization added to the crowded field of such entities that already exists, but because we saw the entire Indivisible network as having unique potential in the post-2016 resistance surge—to help overcome the multiply tiered organizational deficits liberals and progressives have faced in recent U.S. politics, above all deficits in the states.
It has not worked out that way so far. After a vibrant first year in which the Indivisible Guide, the website map, and early D.C. Indivisible’s congressional “explainers” helped thousands of local groups resist Trump/GOP initiatives, the top Indivisible officers opted to expand their paid staff enormously and embrace the D.C. advocacy world. In some states (such as Pennsylvania, which Lara Putnam knows well), successful regional and statewide coordination developed anyway. But in other states, lateral associations grounded in local volunteer groups faltered without national support or resources. Our research documents that, from late 2017 into 2018, national Indivisible officers turned down specific subnational proposals outright. They also missed palpable opportunities to nourish lateral ties, as we have learned and as suggested in contributions to this forum from Micah Sifry, from Kansas City–area leader Leslie Mark, and from Roanoke, Virginia, leader Myrna Ivonne Wallace Fuentes.
Going forward, this case study suggests larger lessons and questions for all civic organizers. Here are some of them:
(1) Combining volunteer and paid professional organization-building requires creative planning for complementarities rather than substitutions. Some worthy causes cannot rely on ongoing donations of volunteer citizen time and expertise, but national leaders of those that can need to devolve substantial, predictable shares of their funding to state, regional, and metropolitan associations. Beyond volunteer energy, local groups can also use regular dues to contribute their own funds to such shared endeavors. With modest shared inputs, intermediate associations may be able to use part-time staffing to help sustain local volunteer groups and build much-needed liberal civic clout and strategic coalitions in state politics. Because predictable devolved resources and bottom-up accountability are the keys, national funders and officers have to operate with smaller staffs, surrender some managerial control, and accept varied grassroots choices in different states and localities.
(2) Transparency is essential, especially in distributed civic networks. Left-leaning professional advocates decry unaccountable big money and bureaucracy. Fine—they should lead by example, by posting public staff lists and by sharing big-donor identities (at least with their own members and chapter networks).
(3) Distributed networks need to include actual grassroots leaders in ongoing advisory groups and/or national decision-making bodies. Surprisingly, the older volunteer women who did the ground work in the Indivisible network have not had visible voice in national operations, where decision-making has been monopolized by three to five directors who control both the board and the staff. The solution for Indivisible and other networks is not plebiscitary democratization—especially in this day and age, directors of organizations must be able to act without constant votes or endless internal meetings. But everyone benefits and midcourse corrections become easier if well-informed groups and leaders in the field can raise questions, vocalize issues (as some have in this forum), and make timely strategic recommendations. Sporadic internal polls or consultant-run artificial focus groups are no substitute for shared authority.
(4) Civic endeavors must make effective choices about political tactics and relationships with parts of the Democratic Party. National Indivisible has gravitated toward outside pressure advocacy—joining many other groups in making leftist primary endorsements and mounting petitions and protests to embarrass and push Democratic officeholders. This approach achieves only modest, sporadic results, and our research shows that state and local groups have turned toward running people for office, engaging with elected officials on policy issues, and looking for ways to help reform and expand participation in year-round Democratic Party affairs. Local groups also prioritize enrolling and keeping in touch with wider circles of voters, even if those voters do not instantly support ideologically progressive politicians or causes. Steve Rosenthal, Bob Kuttner, and Lara Putnam all highlight the possibilities of such approaches to civic organizing on the left. With 2022 and 2024 looming as further make-or-break moments for U.S. democracy, Rosenthal is right that such engagement needs to have started yesterday.
Finally, a word about donors. Several contributors to this forum—and others who have emailed us privately—suggest that national Indivisible’s choices after 2017 were dictated by big contributors. No one can be sure given secrecy about funders, but there are many reasons to believe that both big and small Indivisible donors have always been captivated by the directors’ promises to support and maximize the impact of thousands of local groups. Had the directors devoted $2 million or $3 million a year to renewable grants of $100,000 to $150,000 for each of ten to two dozen state or regional associations, it is hard to believe donors would have objected (or even noticed, if the unpublished staff roster had leveled off at around 50 rather than burgeoning to closer to twice that number).
Big donors on the left are usually not Darth Vader–like Bad Guys giving checks with specific orders. Dysfunctions are more structural, because too many professionally run groups chase funders who think that glossy plans, self-reported activities, and superficial evaluations from outside consultants are enough to make effective decisions. This funding chase promotes imitation, lack of transparency, and tactical rigidity among groups vying to fit whatever fashionable formula big donors are embracing at a given time. Those fashions shift quickly, as Steve Rosenthal points out, undercutting sustained investments in long-term relational organizing. The system also discourages the constructive use of honest academic research to devise midcourse corrections. Organizational heads do not want to engage with studies like ours, because the findings and questions raised might hurt the competition for donors.
These dynamics are largely unintended—and thus very hard to bring into view. Learning cannot happen at all if each group evaluates itself (while worrying about bad publicity) and everyone avoids tough questions. The otherwise astute Marshall Ganz fails to provide much detail on how we might “learn from experience” if we avoid uncomfortable questions about those who do not solve “the whole problem.” Yes, building and sustaining civic engagement across levels in America’s federated system is difficult work, and independent researchers cannot tell involved activists how to address dilemmas. Nevertheless, we do have a role in bringing hard truths into view; and without unafraid factual research about intended and unintended dynamics, no one should presume that direct stakeholders will ever notice missed opportunities or find improved ways forward on the fraught journey to a more robust American democracy.
