Anat calls Doran Schrantz — the longtime former leader of ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, and the current founder and project director of the Organizing Lab — “your favorite organizer’s favorite organizer.” Our conversation with her on this week’s “Meeting the Moment” reveals why.
We had a rich discussion about the life experiences that led Doran to become a community organizer in Minnesota — from her upbringing in an Iowa town devastated by corporate greed in the wake of a defeated meatpacking plant strike (which was documented in the 1990 film American Dream), to her theatre career in Chicago, to her life-altering experience learning about faith-based organizing (despite not growing up as a practicing person of faith) — and about the philosophies and practices she brings to community organizing today.
Doran powerfully argued that the job of organizing is to identity and develop leadership, network it at the human scale (in real relationships with 25 or 30 other people at a time), and sustain it over time with organizations that help people channel and exercise their collective power. Unfortunately, not all organizations actually do this; as Doran also noted, we've spent decades systematically hollowing out the actual experience of political agency for ordinary people, replacing the hard work of building relationships with lists and email blasts. And into that vacuum, authoritarianism rushes in — because at least it offers people something to be part of.
She walked through how these theories played out concretely in Minnesota this spring, when her network helped organize the state's first general strike in 46 years in about ten days flat — proof of what's possible when you've already built the infrastructure for people to lead before the crisis hits.
We also began by discussing the final disastrous rulings of this Roberts Court term — and why, as I put it, our side needs to stop trying to find silver linings in shit clouds. A 5-4 ruling just barely upholding the obvious legitimacy of birthright citizenship is not a victory, and treating it as one just allows the opposition to keep moving the Overton window in disastrous directions.
Make sure to read Anat’s messaging guidance on the Roberts Court in general, and specifically on birthright citizenship and the horrendous TPS ruling stripping protections from Haitian and Syrian people who have built lives in this country.
