Our sector, and progressives in general, has a problem with excessive intellectualization. We’ve become really good at it. There’s nothing we love more than summits, white papers, theories of change, data, coming up with new terminologies (*cough, solutions privilege), and voting with sticky dots.

The problem is that the intellectualizing becomes self-reinforcing. Summits beget committees, committees beget white papers, white papers beget summits, etc. And after exhausting bouts of thinking and talking about stuff, we feel really good about ourselves, believing and getting people to believe we actually accomplished something.

We need to bring balance back. Working in the field of education inequity, I was told that “If you can get 20 angry parents to dress in the same T-shirts and pack the school board meeting, you can get whatever you want.” This is sad, but unfortunately this is also how most of the world works nowadays, that the loudest voices tend to win, and they are often from those of privilege. And our sector, founded to help lift up the voices of those who don’t always get heard, have in many ways lost sight of that.

Many of us are starting to lose our community organizing skills, and some of us are not even learning or teaching them anymore. I studied community organizing as part of my MSW and have lost these skills, barely able to remember the last time I called up people on the phone, explaining urgent issues and why they should care, and helping to coordinate transportation, and rallying funders to help pay for bus tokens and childcare so that people from marginalized communities could pack the school board or City Council meeting.

Read the full article about community organizing by Vu Le at Nonprofit AF.