My evolving role in the European organizing movement
When I came to Europe I didn’t know what I was going to do…
This is going to be a bit more personal of a post than I am used to writing, but I am in the process of a life-transition that bears some explanation.
I moved to Europe six years ago. After 36 years of living in the United States (save for one spent as an exchange student when I was 18) I was leaving the country of my birth. The reason for this change? A government-induced mid-life crisis.
You see, my wife (who, btw, I first met as that 18-year-old exchange student) had been living in the United States thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship, but as her teaching role in the States was wrapping up, her visa status required her to leave the US.
At the time I was working as the state director of the Working Families Party in the state of Oregon. We managed to extend my wife’s visa to get through one more election cycle in the United States, but a week after the election was over I was on a plane to join our 8-month-old son and my wife who were staying at her family home in the Czech Republic, right on the border with Poland. The weather was cold, but the reunion warm. In the pre-holiday period the world slowed down, and the excitement I felt about a new path for my life colors my memories of those early days.
In January we settled into an apartment in Prague. We were living on savings, and we furnished the place with a combination of free appliances, and other people’s furniture starting a second life on the internet. Whether or not it was advisable to sleep on a used mattress picked up from the liquidation of a Prague youth hostel — we did. And we slept on that rickety thing for five years!
In the early days of that spring, when the brightness of the sun does not match the warmth of the day, I began thinking about the big question: “what am I actually going to do over here?” It was in those early days that I had my first contact with the European Community Organizing Network. I had learned about ECON through contacts in the US community organizing sector, and I had read about the organization online. Through my early contacts I learned about the ECON Assembly that was taking place that year in Berlin. I joined the event as a guest, and met for the first time a number of the folks with whom I would end up collaborating over the years that would follow.
Attending the ECON Assembly led to an invitation to attend the Citizen Participation University that summer in Hungary. I was quickly struck with the potential for the CPU to serve as an important convening hub for organizers, movement activists, and civil society actors working in Central and Eastern Europe. I had not long been in Europe, but it was already clear to me by that time that movement infrastructure was still fairly few and far between in this region, especially compared to what I was used to in the United States, but even compared to what I was seeing in Western Europe. Before I left Hungary, I had joined the volunteer planning committee for the next year’s CPU.
Those first couple years in Europe were marked with a lot of online one-on-one meetings. (I was doing it before COVID made it cool!) I was hungry to find a niche, to find “my people.” And as I did so, I was also inspired to put the people I was meeting in Europe together with like-minded movement-makers in the United States. In 2015 I organized an early exchange between the people of my political home in the United States — the Working Families Party — with activists in Germany and Spain/Catalunya. Those experiments have led to continuing collaborations, including trainings, mutual aid, and further exchanges.
But this story is about my work with the people who have, for the last several years, been taking an informal network of organizers in places like Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, and Romania, and “willing into existence” an organization called the European Community Organizing Network. This once-all-volunteer organization now has a small staff, its footprint continues to grow with new partners in Western and Southeast Europe, and it is building infrastructure and developing a set of relationships that will support scaled-up organizing in Europe in the years to come.
“…organizers [within ECON] have taken seriously their roles as actors in this movement — to experiment, to innovate, to make mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes.”
For me it is also a story about how my role with ECON will be transforming. For the last three years I have been occupying the role of Network Coordinator for ECON. It is a role that has given me the privilege to partner with organizers who are working in some of the most challenging conditions you will find anywhere — with authoritarian government crackdowns made real, or always a looming threat. These organizers have stepped forward with the self-confidence to say that “community organizing” is not a mechanical practice. It is not frozen under glass and unchanging. It is not something that we must “import” to Europe. Rather, these organizers have taken seriously their roles as actors in this movement — to experiment, to innovate, to make mistakes, and to learn from those mistakes.
My time with ECON has been one in which we have sharpened our strategic orientations. We now often say there are “three buckets” of ECON’s work: 1) acting as a training space for organizers to learn their craft, 2) a hub for cross-movement alignment that can position regional and national organizing initiatives to operate at a European level, and 3) to increase and improve the financial resources that are coming into the still small (but growing!) European community organizing sector.
In this last year we have walked with organizers who are finding ways to respond to crisis. Like everyone, I too felt a sense of profound disorientation in the early days of COVID. But I found strength in the organizers around me, and in April we convened two sessions for organizers to connect, and also to think about the strategic openings that the pandemic was creating for our work.
Every good organizing story has tension, but also a resolution that points to lessons that we can learn about the work ahead. Here is mine: in 2021 my role with ECON will be shifting. I feel compelled to make room for someone else to take over the role of Network Coordinator. It is out of love for this thing that we have built together that I recognize that ECON needs a full-time network coordinator who wakes up every day thinking about what it will take for ECON to grow. This is a role I have played in a part-time (sometimes VERY part time!) capacity for the last few years. ECON needs a leader who will help it grow to the next level of its potential.
But you are not getting rid of me quite so easily! I have already discussed this with the board of ECON, and I very much intend to play a key role in ECON in the years to come. I don’t know what we will call that role quite yet, but I can tell you that my focus will be on developing the “strategic practice” of ECON. This is a concept I carry with me from my close work with the Grassroots Policy Project in the United States, and I am highly influenced by GPP’s model of deep embededness and accompaniment with movement-building organizations. I will continue to hold and manage key ECON projects, but the difference is that I intend to make room for a new leader to step up and to run this organization — full-time — towards the promise I very much believe it has.
As an organizer with part of his heart on two continents, my work will continue to straddle both these worlds. The challenge ahead is that the forces of radical right reaction are ascendent in both of my organizing homes. The world is on fire, and both the United States and Europe shoulder an outsized responsibility to take action to extinguish the flames. I very much hope that my work with ECON in the coming years will allow me to continue to contribute to the historic mission that stands before us all. |||