Exponential organizing for bike, transit, and street safety advocates
The wisdom of potluck picnics!
As bike, transit, and street safety advocates the changes we want are typically big, transformational, and out-of-the ordinary for our communities. Yes, the bike or transit improvements you want might be common elsewhere, but it is rare where you are. On top of that, when the changes you want to see do get implemented, they are often done slowly or as half-measures. In short, we want big changes but the rate of positive change is painfully slow. That is a recipe for frustration. One path through this is organizing to increase the rate of positive change via exponential organizing.
For example, let’s say you want a speed bump on your street. You’ll need to get your local government to put it on their to-do list and make it a high enough priority that they install it soon. But being next in line to get what you want doesn’t do you much good if progress takes years or even decades (as is often the case for rail advocates). Organizing to get your speed bump on the to-do list and high on that list isn’t enough, you also need to get the local government to move faster through that list.
There are a few key ingredients for exponential organizing.
Picking targets that enable exponential change:
The most straightforward is picking fights that lead to exponential change. These are fights about budgets, process improvements, and/or culture. In the speedbump example that would be a fight to grow your town’s speed bump installation budget or streamlining the installation process. Those wins ensure that more speed bumps get built and that they get built faster.
Winning a culture shift puts significantly more attention (and thus pressure) on the issue. A culture shift could include getting pro-speed-bump candidates into office, working to change the staffers (or their opinions) within a local government agency, or building out a local speed-bump advocacy movement — or all of those at once! This also helps set the stage for the budgetary and policy shifts.
Acting exponentially:
Once you pick exponential targets, you then need to follow through with intensified action. Bring on lots more people and energy so you can build a pressure cooker. Taking a maximalist approach helps your group wage every campaign at once. Advocacy is a bit like homesteading where you have lots of different projects all going on at once. You can work the culture campaign and the budget fight and the process fight all at the same time. Advocacy isn’t a turn-based game, where you do something and then wait for your opponent to respond. It’s always your turn.
Setting up enabling structure:
Bringing on that level of energy is tough if you put that burden all on yourself. Structure your work so you are not the chokepoint but rather a facilitator or air traffic control. Create a structure where people’s passions can flow into meaningful advocacy, and it will flow.
And by “you,” I mean the collective “you.” You, your allies, your coalition, and your movement. Organizing is a team sport and exponential organizing is especially so. Afterall, you are a finite being with only so many hours in the day and so much energy. Big wins, like new train service, are only achievable collectively. Structure (or de-structure) your organizing to enable greater collaboration with a wider range of allies.
Create more seats at the table so you can welcome in more allies. Keep process and barriers to entry at a minimum so that your “administrative burden” doesn’t multiply in kind. Crucially, while you increase the complexity of the sorts of things you do and who is involved, stay nimble by maintaining simplicity in how you do it.
An example of this is a potluck picnic. Cooking for 50 people is hard. Feeding 50 people at a potluck is much easier. At a potluck picnic, guests are encouraged to bring dishes to share. That means that as your event (and the amount of food) scales exponentially in size, the burden on you as the host only increases linearly. Cleaning up after a 45-person picnic is roughly the same amount of work as cleaning up after a 50-person picnic. Plus, you likely have a lot of people to recruit from to help you with clean-up!
When it comes to better bike infrastructure, safer streets and better transit, there is a world of changes we need to win. Winning what we want at the speed we want takes organizing at an entirely different scale. Fortunately, there are huge wells of people’s passion we can tap into on these subjects. It’s our responsibility as transportation advocates to make it easy, meaningful, and enticing for those folks to put in their energy.
Need help winning transportation changes in your community? I’m here to help! Whether you want a 1-on-1 training session or a group workshop, let’s talk. Email me at Carter@carterlavin.com to set something up. Here’s a bit about what training sessions are like
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