This is a basic guide on how and why to build structures for decision
making and collective action at the neighborhood level, what we callpopular assemblies. We emphasize the need for popular assemblies to be
rooted in a defined geographic area and aimed at organizing the people
who live, work, or stay there to develop the power to confront social
problems together. ---- This guide draws directly on knowledge and
experience of past experiments in building apopular assemblies. ---- by
Members of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Housing and Territorial Committee
Introduction
Scroll social media or a 24-hour news service, and what do you see?
Assaults on too-meager social safety nets. Rollbacks of civil rights.
Crumbling infrastructure. Immigration police grabbing people off the
street. Politicians casually promising to eradicate entire peoples.
It's a bleak moment in history, and there seem to be few avenues to
escape it.
How did we get here? Elite politicians and businesspeople built their
power over us, in part, by battering us with beliefs about our
powerlessness. Isolation from each other internalizes those beliefs
inside us. We encounter what feels like an unending crisis-alone.
We can catch each other, though-but only with the requisite nets of mass
organizations.
Mass organizations can bring us together to identify, address, confront,
and one day replace the ruling classes' power over us in our backyards.
Stunned by Trump's first election in 2017, communities across the United
States turned to each other to figure out how to survive-and resist-the
incoming administration. Long-time organizers and newly activated
residents gathered in neighborhood and sometimes citywide meetings to
share their fears about the promised federal attacks and what they were
going to do about them-together.1 These meetings became the foundations
of popular assemblies.
As one organizer with the central Los Angeles-based Koreatown Popular
Assembly put it, a popular assembly is "an open decision-making space in
a neighborhood where people can come together[to]talk about their
problems and how they are going to solve the problems together as a
group, not just by lobbying the government."
Despite widespread interest in popular assemblies as a strategy for
resistance and revolutionary struggle, few materials answer why these
mechanism can get us there and how to organize a group of people to
assemble one.
Drawn from conversations with organizers and related literature about
these participatory experiments, this introductory article outlines some
step-by-step instructions and general considerations to start building
neighborhood democracy from the ground up.
Fundamental Building Blocks
A popular assembly strategy for social change is built on a few
fundamental assumptions.
Building Block 1: Structures of domination, like capitalism and the
state, exist at numerous levels, but ultimately exercise their power locally
National administrations, transnational firms, and international
governmental bodies shape on-the-ground social reality in outsized ways.
With signatures and declarations, their decisions reverberate
devastating consequences in far-off places. Ultimately, though,
on-the-ground agencies, firms, and individuals must execute those
decisions in specific locations like office space, governmental
buildings, and hotel conference rooms.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary can set a
policy from Washington, D.C. to increase migrant deportations across the
country. Ultimately, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field
offices deploy agents to snatch people from their communities. These
operations continue in part because we do not see them unfold from our
backyards.
It's imperative, then, as one news service once put it, we know the
facts and name the names. If we understand those facts and names, their
patterns and addresses, we can disrupt them.
Building Block 2: Confronting these structures and their consequences
requires organizing people, motivating them to build and wield
collective power they otherwise wouldn't have as individuals
What do we mean by "organizing people?" Here's an answer taken from
"Survival of the Organized: Critical Reflections on Organizing and
Mutual Aid":
"Organizing[means]working with ordinary people to shape ourselves into a
fighting force that is capable of standing up to and eventually
dismantling capitalism, the state, and other structures of domination.
...[It]is a question of power: building the power of our coworkers,
neighbors, classmates, and other "actors of struggle" (i.e. people who
share common problems and social locations) to dismantle the ruling
class's dominating, atomizing power over us. To do so, we build people's
confidence to make demands and directly act against bosses, politicians,
landlords, administrators, and other class enemies in order to win
specific goals and shift relations of power in our workplaces,
neighborhoods, schools, and other arenas of social life. We encourage
everyday people to run these struggles with formal, directly-democratic
bodies-what we call mass organizations-that we can one day use to run
all of society."2
Ultimately, a popular assembly is a place-based, directly democratic
body that brings together people who live, eat, and sleep near one
another to collectively agree about the problems they face, their shared
interests that are threatened, and actions they can take to address
their problems.
Building Block 3: Direct decisions must also mean direct actions
Once we directly decide how to solve our problem, we don't push that
solution onto some other body like the government, a nonprofit, or a
corporation to do it for us; we do it ourselves.
However we decide to fight, we must prepare ourselves to take it on.
That might mean learning new skills, developing new techniques, and
committing to what can sometimes be boring work. We don't need to-nor
should we-reinvent wheels and learn everything by ourselves; we should
draw from existing pools of knowledge, skills, and services to help get
us off the ground.
We can't expect to do all the work of these decisions ourselves, either;
we should make sure to spread it among the people who decide them.
However we distribute that work, we must commit to actively building the
new world together, one task at a time.
Building Block 4: Trust-in each other, the project, and in the
possibilities of a better world-motivates action
Often, strong emotions are seen as what moves people to act: injustice
ignites anger to upend the world; sorrow motivates action to bring
relief; we promise each other joy in fighting together.
In our experience, emotional appeals may initially motivate people's
interest in struggle. What keeps them in it is trust: trust in reliable
co-organizers and comrades who have their back when it's time to act;
trust that their efforts plausibly build to something better; trust that
they can change the world.
Popular assembly organizers must cultivate trust among people who live
near each other so they have the potential to make their slice of the
world better. Even more, popular assemblies help lay the foundations for
a social revolution that can completely transform it.3
Getting Started
Stemming from a post-war boom in single-family housing designed to boost
capitalist productivity4, increased churn in employment and living
situations spurred by economic instability5, and cultural warnings that
danger lurks behind every corner6, we in the United States rarely know
the people who live next door to us.7
To make a popular assembly successful, you'll want to know the people
you're organizing, especially what can motivate their interest and trust
to continually come together, make decisions, and execute them.
For many encountering these practices for the first time, these steps
might seem irrelevant, dull, or not worth the effort. Alternatively,
momentary upsurges sometime sweep lots of people into the streets,
opening them up to forcefully challenge the status quo. Indeed, that's
what happened in 2017, but as one Koreatown Popular Assembly organizer
put it, "that was a unique moment when we could just flyer the streets
and random strangers who had never come to an organizing meeting before
would show up."
We don't recommend waiting for that kind of popular swell because 1) we
can't predict when it will happen and 2) when the temperature turns up
you can more sharply strike-proverbially and literally-with the trusting
relationships you've already built. At some point, you're going to want
to make and take riskier decisions that are more possible with strong
foundations of trust.
Step 1: Get to Know Your Neighbors
In all organizing, your first step is to meet the people you want to
bring together and better understand their stories. In this case, knock
on your neighbors' doors, shake their hands, and tell them your name and
why you're there.
In these conversations, you're trying to learn what makes them tick and
what they care about so that you can agitate them. That doesn't mean
browbeating or riling them up about the worst aspects of this system,
nor does it mean winning them to a set of values, beliefs, or
revolutionary project right off the bat. It means asking them to think
deeply about their lives and the kinds of social problems that worry
them. Those experiences and that information will get you thinking about
the kind of shared issues that your neighborhood's popular assembly may
aim to solve.8
Don't get us wrong; what seems so self-evidently simple is not. Even
more, these kinds of conversations are so foreign to our daily lives
that they often feel awkward. Like any other skill, you'll want to
practice them, perhaps by writing some prompts that your friends and
co-organizers can workshop together.
One we've used before is:
Hi, my name is ________ and I live in the neighborhood. We are living in
scary times, so I'm meeting everyone near me to learn how we can look
out for one another. What's your name, and what's on your mind these days?
As you meet your neighbors, you'll find lots of different perspectives
on a range of issues, as well as different levels of interest in doing
something about them. Many will believe there's nothing they can do
about them, some will report that they will act when others do, and
still others are ready to change the world yesterday.
When you find people who are eager to do something about the issues, you
should consider recruiting them to help launch the popular assembly.
Hosting and organizing something as time-intensive as a community-wide
meeting has lots of moving parts, and we can't do it alone. We'll also
eventually want to organize ourselves out of a job (you'll learn more
about that in Step #7). Recruiting people to develop the assembly early
on will lighten your load while nurturing wider investment in its success.
Step 2: Meet Potential Supporters
"There were people who had a lot of connections in the neighborhood,
but[KPA]was put together without much background, without much
reorganizing. We built connections to the church later. If you have that
kind of history and those kinds of connections, then you can build
something like this. Otherwise, I think it's quite hard in our political
context and in a context where people aren't very used to neighborhood
assemblies."
- Organizer, Koreatown Popular Assembly
Alongside building relationships with the people who live near you, you
also want to build them with already existing popular neighborhood
organizations.
By popular neighborhood organizations, we mean any group in an area that
brings together people who might not otherwise have a relationship with
each other. These connections will help spread the word about the
meetings you want to call and encourage their members' participation.
They might also be able to provide resources that will make meetings
more accessible like physical infrastructure or translation services
(see Steps #3 and #4 below for more considerations).
Examples might look like:
Cultural centers
Labor unions
Local churches
Parent meetups
Reading groups
Student clubs
Sports leagues
Knitting circles
Not all organizations are equal, though. Some are unequivocally opposed
to our principles, like collective self-management, mutual aid, and
direct action, and may be barriers to trying to solve our social
problems through means that are bottom-up, directly-democratic, and
collective.
For example, you'll notice we didn't say political parties or
nonprofits. The most important reasons we do not advocate outreaching to
these "usual suspects" are 1) these organizations typically aim to solve
the problem on behalf of the people seeking solutions, 2) they often aim
to absorb organic efforts into their programming, and 3) they rarely
have deep pull in communities.9
As you make contact with these organizations, keep a list of their
affiliations, the organic leaders in them who can help you, and the kind
of support they might be able to provide (e.g., meeting space; sound
equipment; financial support). We also recommend keeping a list of those
neighborhood organizations which hesitate or are outright hostile, in
order to minimize backtracking on your future outreach. Organizational
interest can and might change, so this kind of list should be always up
for revisions.
Neighbors, Assemble!
Now that you've started to get a picture about what troubles your
neighbors, especially where there might be alignment among them, you can
help them understand they're not alone with their concerns and they can
do something about them.
In this section, we discuss the nuts and bolts of planning,
facilitating, and executing decisions made at the primary building block
of a popular assembly, the neighborhood meeting.
Step 3: Schedule a meeting and spread the word
When you have a sense of your neighbors' concerns, it's time to bring
them together to discuss.
Logistics are an important consideration, most pressing of which is
space to meet. Keep in mind the following to find somewhere that can
accommodate your needs:
Size: A rough estimate of how many people you anticipate will attend the
meeting helps identify the size of the space you'll need.
Proximity: We recommend finding a place that is nearest to people you're
trying to organize. A meeting place that is far away from the
neighborhood will make accessibility difficult for people without cars
or reliable public transportation. If access is in question, we
recommend coordinating carpools to the meeting 1) to ensure people can
join and 2) deepen trust among and strengthen relationships with each other.
Accessibility: We'll discuss more of these considerations for running a
meeting in Step #4, but for now we'll say that you should keep at the
front of your mind accessibility to all your neighbors.
That looks like considering a space's ability to accommodate people with
different physical abilities (e.g., Is it wheelchair accessible? How
difficult will it be for people to share and receive feedback in it?)
and schedules (e.g., Is the space only available for people who work
specific kinds of hours like 9-to-5 schedules? How long can you be in it
and will that give you enough time to accomplish what you intend for the
meeting?). Planning for everyone's diverse needs beforehand decreases
the likelihood that the assembly will leave out anyone.
Supportive popular neighborhood organizations can usually help you
secure physical space to meet. If not, think creatively: public parks,
schools, and libraries can often be rented for small fees, and employees
at those institutions might be able to access them after hours for free
or at low cost.
Once you've scheduled the time and place of the meeting, you'll want to
get out the word about it. Social media can be a relatively low-lift way
to widely spread information about the meeting, but not everyone who you
want to reach is tapped into it. Even more importantly, you'll want to
leverage the trusting relationships you've begun to build to turn them
out to these meetings where they can make real impacts on their lives.
We strongly encourage distributing details about your first meeting with
a brief, inviting flier online and in person. Here are a few tips for
key ways to share the information:
Online
Post an event page with clear information on a web based events board
such as EventBrite
Advertise on a local newspaper's online events page
Ask popular local social media accounts to share a flier
In Person
Revisit each neighbor you previously contacted
Ask each person to bring someone else to the meeting
Hang up posters around restaurants, grocery stores, and laundromats
Like with logistics, lean on existing popular neighborhood organizations
to get out the word and invite their people to the upcoming meeting.
Mailing lists, phone trees, and event announcements can be great ways to
reach people you might not otherwise contact.
Set your Agenda, Set Your Goals
Next, we review some important tips for running a successful meeting of
your popular assembly, including developing goals, facilitating
inclusively, and moving to make decisions.
Step 4: Clear goals, inclusive facilitation, and collective
decision-making empower people
Put together an agenda with clear goals and objectives to accomplish
during your meeting.
Goals should be clear enough and given enough time within the meeting to
accomplish. Using action verbs to describe what you plan to do can
encourage widespread involvement among meeting attendees. When you write
the goals, you should ask yourself whether you could ask participants at
the end of the meeting whether they felt they accomplished them.
An example set of goals might look like:
By the end of this meeting we will,
Discuss with our neighbors our concerns about ________.
Share ideas with each other about how we can do something about it.
Decide one step that we, together, can take to address it.
To give your meeting cohesion, your goals should flow directly into
draft agenda items and activities.
We often hear concerns that setting the first agenda means we set the
terms of the discussion and therefore "impose" readymade perspectives,
issues, and solutions onto people. While we understand the concern, we
take issue with it. First, we are also members of these communities and
should thus bring our ideas for what to do about the issues that worry
us. Second, we do not demand everyone follow our lead; instead, we
should present the goals, items, and activities that we have put
together as preliminary. Asking questions like "Does anyone want to
change anything in the agenda?" and "Can anyone not live with it?"
invite participants to shape it and then take a vote to approve the
agenda before beginning.
Include Everyone
Ensuring your meetings are places where everyone can contribute is
paramount for participants to directly decide their futures.
Language is a primary consideration for ensuring full participation: if
you can't understand what each other is sharing, how can you arrive at a
decision to do something about them? You should preemptively plan to
meet your neighbors' language needs by making available translated
written information and real-time interpretation during meetings.
Koreatown Popular Assembly organizers chalk up the project's success
largely thanks to planning early for Spanish and English participation.
Don't just consider spoken languages, either. Sign language interpreters
can better ensure that our neighbors who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can
fully participate.
Skilled facilitators who keep the engagement rolling while focused on
the agenda item will ensure that participants' time and contributions
are respected. Anyone can learn how to artfully navigate discussions,
but it may take some time and hands-on support to learn (see Step #7
about the importance of mentorship). Adopting a mechanism like
progressive stack-prioritizing contributions from people who have not
shared yet or are from marginalized backgrounds-is one way to address
how some people feel more comfortable and willing to share.
Similarly, people draw energy differently from and have different levels
of comfort with individual, small group, and large group ways to
generate and share input. Creating multiple ways to contribute to the
discussion can provide opportunities that work best for everyone.
From Deliberations to Decisions
Facilitating conversations among your neighbors is a major part of this
process. As we explained above, we and our neighbors often barely know
each other, let alone talk about major social issues. Discussing the
issues is only part of the task. Our popular assemblies must be
committed places to make decisions and later execute them.
One way we prepare meeting attendees to get in decision-making mindsets
and practices is by approving the agenda at the top of the meeting.
Asking attendees to vote on whether to accept and move forward with the
agenda shows our commitment to making this space all of ours.
You'll also want to develop criteria for when your popular assembly
adopts a decision. Voting thresholds can range from unanimous or
modified consensus to supermajority (e.g., 66%+ or 75%+ agreement) or
majority-plus-one votes. Like setting an agenda, you might recommend a
set of rules to the assembly's participants, encouraging input before
adopting and codifying your protocol for decision making.
Democracy, Consensus, or Something Else?
Consensus decision making-the practice of discussing and debating a
proposal until all participants are in agreement-is often the preferred
decision making mechanism of radicals.
While consensus has its merits, we encourage readers to consider its
drawbacks and limitations in the context of a neighborhood popular
assembly. For example, many of those participating in a neighborhood
popular assembly will not be able or willing to regularly devote hours
of their limited free time to prolonged discussions. While deliberation
is critical, so too is the ability to actually arrive at a decision.
While it should ultimately be left up to the assembly itself to
determine what decision making practice makes the most sense for its
specific context, we encourage a balance between discussion, opportunity
to dissent, and efficiency. In our experience, we've found that a simple
majority voting mechanism is often the most conducive to achieving our
immediate objectives, while remaining consistent with our dedication to
the principle of direct democracy.
Whatever voting arrangements you decide, encourage the popular assembly
to regularly make decisions together. Direct decision-making is the
bedrock of collective self-management, a principle of libertarian
socialism that popular assemblies can help bring into existence. Doing
it regularly helps the popular assembly fulfill its key function.
Be sure to keep notes that track what you discussed and, hopefully,
decide in the first and subsequent meetings. Running notes in descending
chronological order makes it easier to follow collective discussions as
they develop and to revisit or catch up with what happened at the most
recent meeting. It will also help keep track of the action items to
complete between meetings.
Step 5: "Find the Cracks" in the system and figure out how your leverage
can widen them
In a popular assembly, an organizer's two immediate goals are 1) getting
our neighbors to see that we have shared interests and problems caused
by powerful institutions, agencies, and individuals and 2) finding ways
to do something about them.
Especially at the first meeting, at least one agenda item should include
discussing the shared issues and interests that you heard from your
neighbors. You might report some of the issues that you heard during
outreach and ask people to raise their hands if it worries them or ask
neighbors to speak to them. You might also open the floor for attendees
to bring any issues to it. No matter how you do it, getting neighbors to
hear, see, and experience that they are not alone in their concerns is
integral to building a shared sense of what the neighbors want to challenge.
As the popular assembly narrows on an issue plaguing the community-fear
of ICE raids, neighborhood displacement and gentrification, police
harassment, disaster relief, or anything else in between-you'll want to,
in the words of the KPA volunteer cited in this sub-header, "find the
cracks" in the system.10 Where are the holes you can poke in the system?
Where can communitywide pressure be put and action taken against them?
You'll likely need to learn about how these systems operate to do
something about them, so finding resources, research, or bringing in
experts can be a good next step.
Once you find those cracks, find ways to exploit them and offer
potential solutions with collective action. Consider what short, medium,
and long-term structures and practices can directly challenge them, and
get to work taking the action. Any specific solution might require
multiple people-packed teams to make it work. Don't be afraid of
starting subcommittees to complete work between big meetings, but always
document what you did, what worked, what didn't, and any lessons learned
you can pass down to future participants.
The Koreatown Popular Assembly Offers an Example by Confronting ICE Terror
Assembly participants understood they wanted to protect themselves and
their neighbors from ICE, actively and directly. They decided three
primary ways to do it: share information about their rights with their
neighbors; train educators and hospital workers on how to make their
workplaces "sanctuary sites" that refuse ICE entry into them; and
develop a rapid response network to document and ultimately mobilize
community members to disrupt ICE activity.
When participants learned that ICE were staging raids in a grocery
store's parking lot, they started patrolling the area and tapping
workers and nearby businessowners to share tips about the agency's
movements, then later shared confirmed evidence with the public about
the ICE hotspot. Eventually, the agency had to find a new location to
launch operations.
Its rapid response network required three teams with dozens to hundreds
of volunteers: trainers to onboard new participants; dispatchers to take
in tips about ICE activity; and first responders to visit the areas of
reported activity to confirm reports. Eventually, the massive effort
required to run the rapid response network became KPA's primary focus.11
Deciding Our Future, Together
A popular assembly is not just intended to solve one discrete problem
with a group of neighbors. It is a building block of a new world; one
where everyday people collectively take control over their communities
and lives.
In this final set of steps, we describe two longer-term considerations
to keep a popular assembly meeting, planning, deciding, and acting:
recruiting and retaining new organizers and making space for addressing
new widespread concerns.
Step 6: Build for today-and tomorrow
As any organizer will tell you, they're trying to organize themselves
out of their role. We're not building leaderless movements, mass
organizations, or popular assemblies; we're building leaderful ones
where everyone feels empowered to practically contribute and guide their
development.12
The lone organizer, or small handful of them, can be a death knell for a
popular assembly. Not only does it put lots of pressure on them to keep
the project running, but it means they can quickly burn out. Even more,
small groups of organizers can hold lots of tacit knowledge about the
ins and outs of an assembly. In an extreme scenario, an assembly can
stop operating altogether when those core organizers step back. Indeed,
core organizers with Koreatown Popular Assembly stated the number one
reason they eventually wound down the project after six years was due to
them stepping back from it for life reasons-marriages, births, moves,
promotions at work-and their inability to recruit and retain other
participants to keep it running.
Consciously recruit and build up the confidence, skills, and investment
of newly activated organizers throughout the assembly's development.
Create accessible on-ramps for participation: gently delegate tasks to
complete; offer support to see them through it; congratulate them when
they accomplish it; and debrief with them when it doesn't go according
to plan. That will develop an organizing practice that demonstrates 1)
none of us can do this alone and 2) we must support each other to
accomplish our goals.
Step 7: Listen for new concerns and experiment flexibly
In the best-case scenario, the neighbors who create a popular assembly
will take collective, organized action against an institution, its
policies, and the people who execute them and those actions halt harmful
practices or win gains that improve our lives.
But organizing campaigns often run into walls. Sometimes they're created
by the systems: there really are few opportunities to resist its
particulars at a given moment or administrative and policy shifts change
the emergency to address. Other times it's driven by waning interest:
neighbors lose excitement to do something about the issue as other
commitments or concerns take precedence. Oftentimes, the two are bound
together.
In a popular assembly, we're not just building a single campaign; we're
building new structures to run a future world where we no longer center
corporate profits and political control, but each other's needs,
aspirations, and well-being alongside sustainable life on the planet.
That means that we need to recognize when we are hitting those walls or
hearing new predominant concerns and facilitate discussions among each
other about where or what to do about them. Don't be afraid to broach
new topics and issues to address encourage the neighborhood to keep its
concerns, suggested solutions, and collective action at the center of
the popular assembly.
Building Popular Power, One Neighborhood at a Time
In this short article, we introduced seven steps for meeting your
neighbors and changing the world with them. As we explained in it, we
begin to confront the social terror and our isolating experience of it
by knocking on our neighbor's front door and inviting them to discuss
the issues together. When we decide to and ultimately act against them,
we build the popular power we need to transform this world, once and for
all.
Popular assemblies are not about any one organizer or even group of
organizers; they are about developing within neighbors the beliefs,
confidence, and organizational structures to challenge and ultimately
replace capitalism, the state, and other structures of domination that
dictate the conditions of our lives with ones that we control.
We have the potential to build a better world-together-in part by
building popular assemblies, one neighborhood at a time.
Notes
Sarah Lazare, "Why Popular Assemblies Sweeping the Country are Building
Blocks of Resistance," AlterNet (blog), March 1, 2017,
https://www.alternet.org/2017/03/why-popular-assemblies-sweeping-country-are-building-blocks-resistance.
Alexandria H., Juan Verala Luz, and Charles W., "Survival of the Most
Organized: Critical Reflections on Organizing and Mutual Aid," Black
Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation (blog), March 25, 2025,
https://www.blackrosefed.org/survival-organized-mutual-aid-2025/.
Popular assemblies are one kind of mass organizations that figure into a
general strategy for social revolution based on the popular power of
everyday people; learn more about it at Black Rose Anarchist Federation,
"General Strategy," Turning the Tide: An Anarchist Program for Popular
Power, https://www.blackrosefed.org/about/program/4-general-strategy/.
You can read more about the state and capital's role in transforming
living arrangements in Maya Gonzales, "Notes on the New Housing
Question," Endnotes 2 (2010),
https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/notes-on-the-new-housing-question.
Matt Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City paint an
especially compelling picture about how economic insecurity and housing
instability prevent people, especially those in poverty, from developing
strong bonds.
For one datapoint of this trend, see Alana Wise, "A quarter of U.S.
Adults Fear Being Attacked in Their Neighborhood, a Poll Finds,"
National Public Radio (blog), September 8, 2022,
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/08/1120099696/americans-fear-attacked-neighborhood-poll.
For evidence of declining contact among neighbors, see Thomas O'Rourke,
"The Decline of Trust and Neighborliness," Institute for Family Studies,
2023, https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-decline-of-trust-and-neighborliness.
Learn more about agitation and the other aspects you should try to
address in organizing conversations at Fire with Fire, "An Introduction
to 1-on-1 Organizing Conversations," 2020,
https://firewithfire.blog/2020/04/19/an-introduction-to-1-on-1-organizing-conversations/.
Sociologist Josh Pacewicz describes how a deindustrialized economy and
so-called political expertise uprooted the Democrats and Republicans'
previous "community leadership" inside-and thus deep on-the-ground
connections within-American heartland communities, with broad
reverberations throughout the rest of the country. Josh Pacewicz,
Partisans and Partners: The Politics of the Post-Keynesian Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
Quote from Armando, a volunteer with Koreatown Popular Assembly, cited
in Charles Davis, "Meet the Grassroots Organizers Who Stood Up Against
ICE's 7-Eleven Raids," In These Times (blog), January 25, 2018,
https://inthesetimes.com/article/grassroots-organizers-ice-7-eleven-raids-immigration-koreatown-deportation.
Descriptions of these practices can be found in Juan Verala Luz,
"Building Neighborhood Power to Defeat ICE: Lessons from KPA," Black
Rose Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation (blog), March, 21, 2025,
https://www.blackrosefed.org/kpa-reflection-2025/.
Juxtaposed with leader-centered leadership, where an organizing project
oscillates around the stature, ego, and efforts of one or a handful of
leaders, Ella Baker's practice of what Charles Payne calls
group-centered leadership puts the people you are organizing-their
capacity to understand and change the world around them-at the center of
social struggle. Discussions about these juxtapositions go beyond the
scope of this summary, but you can learn more about them at Charles
Payne, "Ella Baker and Models of Social Change," Signs 14, no. 4
(Summer, 1989): 885-899.
https://blackwomenintheblackfreedomstruggle.voices.wooster.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/210/2019/01/Charles-Payne_Ella-Baker-and-Models-of-Social-Change.pdf.;
Ella Baker, "Developing Community Leadership," 1970,
https://americanstudies.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/baker_leadership.pdf.
https://www.blackrosefed.org/how-to-organize-a-neighborhood-popular-assembly/
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