Giving Compass' Take:

• Faith in Minnesota (FiMN) shares lessons after scaling political programs and devising a two-year campaign strategy that engaged citizens in building a multiracial democracy. 

• How can donors help support community mobilization and organizational activism in local elections? 

• Learn about funding participatory democracy. 

The continued decline of Americans’ active participation in many aspects of public life is perceived to be common knowledge. Voting rates are one measure of citizen engagement, but there are many others, including campaign donations, volunteer hours, protest participation, online activism, and the density of community groups in a given location. Curiously, many of these numbers have gone up even as the overall health of our democracy—the policies and institutions at work for the people—has decayed.

In this context, many organizations have designed solutions grounded in a belief in the power of mass mobilization in which they equate an increase in civic activity with a stronger democracy. This logic, however, wrongly assumes “scale” and “depth” to be mutually exclusive. “Scale” means the quantitative breadth covered by an activity—numbers of conversations with likely voters, numbers of names on a list, or numbers of “likes” or “engagements” on social media. The assumption is that the greater the scale, the higher the probability of impact—here, the higher probability of electoral victories or policies passed—in the political or policy arena.

In 2018, the community-based organizing organization Faith in Minnesota (FiMN) eschewed the standard, scaled political programs and instead devised a two-year campaign and strategy around the Democratic-Farmer-Labor (DFL) state endorsing convention for governor.

While FiMN was leading this strategy, a team of researchers prospectively tracked the campaign to document, analyze, and learn from how the organization built and wielded people power. Three takeaways crystalized from the interviews, participant and direct observation, and 10 years of leadership and membership data accumulated by FiMN.

  • Sustained “super” leadership
  • Wielding people power: a combination of organizing and mobilizing
  • A multiracial, multiregional, and multifaith base

Read the full article about making multiracial democracy work by Doran Schrantz, Michelle Oyakawa, and Liz McKenna at Stanford Social Innovation Review.