Every day when I read the news, I feel outrage. Whether using the language Oligarchy, Autocracy or Facism, there is plenty to be horrified by: the use of the justice department for political retaliation, attacks on free speech, the use of armed forces against us (based on skin color or whether you live in a Democratic city), rewriting the history of slavery with attacks on DEI, trouncing of due process and brutality towards immigrants (or any one who might fit the profile of an immigrant). I could go on, but I won’t because the weight and speed of these attacks are overwhelming, and their success depends on our numbness and paralysis. What I really want to explore with others is what we can do, and in this article, given my background, I am particularly interested in the role of leadership development and network strategies in meeting this moment.

Over the past 8 months, I have been researching who is doing what: attending meetings, mass calls, and small to large mass actions; scouting for good news and signs of resistance; and talking to activists and thought leaders I respect. In my modest research, I found close to 100 local and national organizations doing great work, and organized around a number of strategies that both attempt to block the current attacks and build long-term strategies to realize a more equitable and democratic future. I wanted to highlight some of the key organizing strategies and then talk about what this has to do with leadership:

• Liberatory and Narrative Strategies: Anchoring in values and imagining the future we want to create while experimenting with new ways of working together now.
• Economic Strategies: Building local economies, experimenting with new economies (ways of generating and reallocating existing resources, community wealth building), and boycotts.
• Ecosystem building: Connecting aligned organizations, building multi-racial coalitions for economic and racial justice, funding collaboratives, new partnerships, e.g., labor and immigrant rights organizations, forming alliances among those under attack, e.g., law firms, universities.
• Base Building: Building grassroots power, membership drives, mass calls, and mobilizations.
• Protests: Small and large, issues-focused and global demonstrations in resistance to autocracy.
• Legal Strategies: Challenges to unconstitutional actions of the current government by organizations like ACLU, Democracy Now, and the Legal Defense Fund.
• Electoral Reform: Proposals for representational government, gerrymandering, eliminating the electoral college, exploration of potential third parties, e.g., Working Families Party. 
• State Level Work: Challenging federal authority, e.g., sanctuary cities, subsidized health, resisting the use of troops, and state national guard deployment.
• Fundraising: Grassroots fundraising and foundation coordination to respond to the impact of current cuts, e.g., to support public radio, and rapid response teams.
• Issue-based Organizing: Immigrant rights, trans rights, healthcare, etc.
• Network Building: Self-organizing platforms and rapid response teams.

Network approaches intersect with, and can enhance and connect, many of the strategies mentioned above. Leadership programs have the opportunity to develop the capacity of their participants to effectively use network strategies that are well-suited to take on a number of issues facing activists.

Network values: Key network values are equity and power sharing; relationality, learning by doing, self-organizing, and openness and transparency. These values are expressed in behaviors that challenge Eurocentrism and white supremacy culture at a time when racial equity gains are under assault. Networks are actively experimenting with more democratic governing/decision-making models that center equity and inclusion. By centering relationships and care, networks offer a path to collective resilience and an antidote to despair. The diversity of perspectives and the culture of experimentation in networks also fosters innovation and creativity, sorely needed to help us develop effective strategies for dealing with a scale of attacks unlike what many of us have experienced before. 

Vision: Values are what will anchor a vision of the world we are fighting for, and how we will be with each other in the ways we work and fight for this vision. Please check out LLC’s amazing work on Liberatory Leadership which brings the values of the world we are seeking to create into how we work together now. The current administration is attacking freedom of speech and the free press in efforts to control its message with distortions and lies meant to divide us. Truth telling has become riskier and harder to find. Network connections provide critical spaces for talking to each other to make meaning of what is happening, and to deepen our shared commitment to what we are fighting for and against. There are lots of examples of how networks have been able to amplify our voices and share the risk of speaking up.  

We Don’t Know What to Do: Today’s leaders are facing a roll out of attacks across multiple issues and sectors at an unprecedented speed with a level of repression and threats reminiscent of McCarthyism. I understand why people I talk to feel stuck and overwhelmed trying to figure out what to do given this new territory, and yet, what we really need is to step up our actions and be willing to learn from what is working and not working. We have already seen many legal challenges, protests, state power challenges to federal authority, new coalitions of labor and immigrant rights organizations. Some of these things are having an impact, and others are still unknown, but all of this will contribute to our learning and strategy development. 

Networks support experimentation, in the spirit of ‘learning by doing’ and encourage people to take the initiative to recruit others to try out their ideas. We can be stymied trying to figure out the ‘big thing’ we can do that will make a difference, but in networks, small things that work can be shared and scaled. When I felt overwhelmed, I started mapping my networks, and not just my work/activist networks. I am in many different kinds of networks, and in the current environment, everything is becoming political. This liberated me to organize a neighborhood potluck to share ideas about protecting Latino neighbors, bring together an artist community to paint a neighborhood mural, and to join a zipcode rapid response team. Whether it’s your organization, church, or neighborhood, connecting people is an action that builds power and our capacity to respond. 

We can help leadership program participants become more intentional about building their own networks and connecting with other networks. As an example, in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, hundreds of people self-organized to provide thousands of meals, conduct welfare checks, and get supplies to thousands of people using network strategies. We are currently in the midst of an unnatural disaster. Imagine 40 people in a leadership cohort, mapping their own extensive networks and looking for ways to connect their networks to the networks of others in their cohort. The impact will be exponential!

We are Facing Reprisals and Repression: Centralized strategy is a norm in the non-profit sector, though this is shifting, especially with the contributions of folks like adrienne marie brown, who gave us the gift of “Emergent Strategy.” There are limitations to a centralized strategy at a time like this: we need to respond across multiple issues and sectors, which require different and tailored responses being driven by people closest to the issues. We need to be able to act quickly without having to process proposed action through hierarchies of decision-making that are cumbersome and slow. Most significantly, a central strategy directed by a small group of governing bodies is a target in a period of intense repression. 

Decentralization does not mean that there will not be a time and need for broad collective action. What this will require is strong communication and coordination among many actors and networks, and there are a lot of tools to support this. In fact, given that many social and racial justice organizations have been taking an ecosystem approach to their work over the past couple of years, and these informal communications networks are in place or developing. If universities and law firms that came under attack early in the year had built these relationships and communications channels, they might have been able to mount a unified resistance to an attack on one.

We need to Engage Millions of People to Challenge the Current System: Network strategies first captured my attention with the Arab Spring mass mobilizations that changed a government. Since then, there have been lots of examples of how network strategies have changed engagement in elections, changed the climate conversation and action, exposed police brutality through the work of Black Lives Matters, and use of social media for mobilization. The network activation and weaving we are doing now, and the coordination and communications channels we are growing, are laying the groundwork for scaling mass resistance and the long-term work of building an equitable future in which everyone can lead a life of dignity and respect where their basic needs are met.

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