By: Diego Gerena-Quiones
Sustainable Communities Organizer, Community Voices Heard
June 1, 2010
Ground Breaking Experience: Lessons from Mass Base Organizing
By visiting with our brothers and sisters in Albuquerque NM with the South West Organizing Project, I gained valuable insights into the model of organizing they call MASS BASE WORK. In preparation for our own election cycle in NY, I got to see first hand how SWOP approaches electoral work separate from ongoing campaign development, membership recruitment, and leadership development.
What they have is a separate track that acknowledges the opportunities for civic engagement that elections bring with them, while also recognizing the limitations of peoples lives that is not always conducive to becoming active members. In this sense, they have developed a whole strategy (MASS BASE), that seeks to develop shallower, but broader relations, with a much wider constituency of people that are not being engaged to be members. Rather, the goals of the mass base work seeks to build a collective of people that on some level, recognize SWOP and the image of the Campaign For A Better New Mexico, share the same progressive values, and are moveable to a small action step – usually voting, making a phone call, writing a letter, etc.
In order to effectively achieve the goals of mass base organizing work, SWOP has mastered the use of voter technology so that they can with laser like precision identify super specific constituencies to engage in a campaign cycle. They use the Voter Activation Network, and have additional layers from which to identify specific demographics of people, and fuse the data with consumer reports that they subjectively I.D in terms of political inclinations. The goal is not simply increasing voter turnout; rather it is about turnout among bases of people that share progressive values while influencing political culture towards participation and affecting outcomes around elections and policy. They limit their communications to mailings and phone calls, no face to face door knocking. By doing so, they focus capacity on a wider spread of people to engage as oppose to having fewer conversations. Over time they hope to establish themselves as a counter point to the dominant two party system by having enough recognition in their target areas to sway elections and policy.
