After the Victory: Engaging Obama Volunteers.   

By Randy Shaw

TENS OF THOUSANDS OF young people worked tirelessly for Barack Obama, and they deserve major credit for his historic victory. Not since George McGovern in 1972 has a presidential candidacy been so identified with the young. Obama's racially diverse campaign mobilized many more young supporters, even though, due to the earlier primary schedule, it required a longer time commitment than McGovern's. Obama defied the conventional wisdom that downplayed young people's interest in politics, rejecting the notion that young people are too preoccupied with personal issues to engage in a national campaign.

But now what happens to these thousands of young Obama fellows, volunteers, and campaign staffers? Electing Barack Obama was only the beginning", and many of these young people are eager to continue working for change. Moreover, their participation in the struggles ahead is critical for implementing a new vision for the nation. Members of victorious campaigns often want to keep the commitment and spirit of togetherness going; this is truer than ever with Barack Obama's historic campaign.

Labor union members, environmentalists, faith-based activists, and those whose good works are carried out through community groups have organizational vehicles for continuing their work; many of Obama's young supporters do not. This means that a new organization, likely connected to those who coordinated Obama's grassroots field campaign, must be created to accommodate this huge influx of potential full-time activists.

This organization would perform two critical tasks. First, it would provide the organizing support for the Obama administration's main initiatives on alternative energy, health care, labor rights, educations and employment. Second, through the door-to-door canvassing that brought Barack Obama electoral success, these organizers would build support for a new vision for America, one that transcends specific legislation and instead addresses a new set of values based on sharing and compassion rather than the "greed is good" principle that has dominated the national landscape for nearly thirty years.

The organization would be entirely distinct from President Obama, and would not be under his control. Led by those who were energized by Obama's campaign, the organization would seek societal transformations in line with the agenda that he espoused on the campaign trail. This independent organization would also help keep Obama accountable. Recall that last July, thousands of Obama activists used the campaign's own social networking tools to protest his reversal on telecom immunity for wiretapping, forcing him to defend his actions to them, even though he did not accede to their wishes. Obama has frequently stated that he welcomes strong pressure from the grass roots to keep his agenda on track, and this new organization would enable activists to counteract pressure on the new president from less progressive constituencies.

A new organization that is spun off from the successful Obama campaign would begin with a large group of activists with demonstrated organizing skills and a commitment to work for the greater good. The advantage of transitioning existing staff to a new organization, rather than starting entirely from scratch, cannot be underestimated. This would be true even absent the series of crises facing the country; in the current climate, advancing the project of social transformation at the start of 2009 is imperative.

The UFW Model

THE FOUNDERS OF THIS NEW ORGANIZATION MAY WANT TO MODEL IT AFTER THE UNITED Farmworkers of America (UFW) of the 1960s and 1970s. Begun by a young Chicano organizer named Cesar Chavez in 1962, the UFWs capacity to enlist talented young activists in socially meaningful work on a long-term basis remains unmatched. Among the astonishing array of young talent attracted to the UFW was the now legendary Dolores Huerta; Eliseo Medina, who is now executive vice president of SEIU; Stephen Lerner, the founder of Justice for Janitors; Fred Ross Jr., whose Neighbor to Neighbor coffee boycott in the 1980s helped end El Salvador's civil war; Marshall Ganz, who helped develop the "Camp Obama" organizing model; and Jessica Govea, a key leader in the UFWs battle against pesticides. These are but a few of the many UFW activists who have spent decades working for justice.

I think there were three crucial factors that enabled the UFW to attract, train, and sustain such talent:

1. The UFW built community. One of the most distinctive features of the UFW was that it provided more than an activist experience: It offered volunteers a sense of community. UFW activists entered into a network of close relationships that approximated family. Many lived in "boycott houses," collective households in low-income communities throughout the country for those working on the grape or lettuce boycotts.

The UFW provided a sense of common spirit and a pervasive feeling of oneness that few organizations achieve. As a result, the UFW created such strong bonds among volunteers that many continued working together in progressive movements decades later. True, the pay received by UFW volunteers was not the best--they received a stipend of $5 plus room and board for working over 100 hours per week--but there were few complaints. UFW volunteers became part of a national movement for social and economic justice, and obtained a sense of community often lost in large-scale movements.

2. The UFW instilled a transformative consciousness. The UFW took people with lit the or no activist experience and transformed them into lifelong workers for justice. This occurred because the UFW defined its struggle in deeply spiritual terms, rather than as a typical legislative, activist, or political campaign. Cesar Chavez first came to national attention with his 1966 "Perigrinacion, Penitencia, and Revolucion" 300-mile march from the Central Valley town of Delano to the state capital of Sacramento. The march ended on Easter Sunday with Chavez leading 10,000 others in a procession headed by a large Virgin of Guadalupe banner. Some UFW activists were uncomfortable with Chavez's framing of the struggle in religious terms, and they left the movement when Chavez began what would become a 25-day religious fast for nonviolence in 1968. But Chavez understood the power of identifying the UFW struggle as a moral and religious duty, and both his pilgrimage and fast greatly boosted the movement.

3. The UFW had charismatic leadership. Cesar Chavez's charismatic leadership was critical to building the farmworkers movement. Such leadership ultimately had its downside, but the UFWs recruitment success was clearly affected by young people's desire to work with Cesar Chavez.

Enlisting Obama Volunteers

An organization modeled after the UFW could likely enlist Obama volunteers in a long-term movement for change. As noted, the Obama campaign already included many of the UFWs qualities. It built a sense of community, framed Election Day not as an end but as the starting point of a national project for spiritual and moral rejuvenation, and featured a charismatic leader.

Some would suggest that Obama campaign organizers join national service programs, such as Teach for America or Americorps. But these valuable programs are not engaged in a broader struggle for the soul of America, which is how Barack Obama framed his campaign, thereby attracting thousands of young people to his cause. National service projects are designed as short-term; the type of organization I am suggesting has a long-term view, for the moral and social transformation of the United States will take time. Barack Obama always insisted that changing the fundamental values of the United States is a long-term project, and that is the challenge that the idealistic young Obama activists would undertake to achieve.

Is a privately funded offshoot of the Obama campaign the best way to enlist young people as full-time organizers for setting the nation on a new direction? It certainly seems like the most likely vehicle that could emerge. Former Obama campaign staff would have an inside track in obtaining the necessary money, and a project administered by those who ran Obama's highly proficient field campaign would likely prove effective. But this sort of organization does have a downside: It may alienate activists who don't want to be perceived as working too closely with politicians.

Such concern is understandable. Nobody wants to see idealistic young Obama campaign activists become "yes people" for an Obama administration that is not delivering on its commitments. Activists are supposed to keep a critical perspective toward politicians. In fact, I argued in The Activist's Handbook that activists should adopt a "fear and loathing" relationship to elected officials to prevent their constituencies' interests from being subordinated to the politicians' needs.

But Obama volunteers have already made the decision to work for a politician. And just as many left the UFW by 1981 due to disenchantment with the union's direction, activists would soon quit the new organization if President Obama broke his commitment toward meaningful change.

A new organization spun off from the Obama campaign would benefit from the deep admiration and trust these young activists have for the new president--a trust that echoes the reverence that UFW activists once had for Cesar Chavez. Campaign workers have just finished an intense experience that has forged strong bonds and trust among fellow staffers they only met through the campaign. Like the UFW in its heyday, the Obama campaign built a sense of community that activists do not want to see end--and there is no reason that it should end when we have committed young people eager to continue working for change.

Because it would be identified with a popular new president, an Obama spin-off organization could likely raise the money needed to transform campaign activists into full-time workers for justice. A campaign that raised over $600 million, much of it over the Internet, can certainly figure out how to get the resources to enlist a new generation of young people in making a transformative difference in the world.

What alternatives exist for Obama campaign veterans without such a proposed new organizing vehicle? The existing progressive organizations that hire young organizers--such as the PIRGs, ACORN, the IAF, Gamaliel and PICO networks, MoveOn, and labor unions--lack the funding and organizational capacity to suddenly take on huge numbers of new staff. The nation's economic problems could also hamper their ability to increase staffing in order to tap into the new spirit of the times. Howard Dean has done a great job running the Democratic Party, but that entity is too ideologically split and still has too much baggage to become a community-building entity that instills a transformative consciousness in its organizers.

To paraphrase Barack Obama, creating a new entity with such a transformative vision will not be easy. And whereas the Obama campaign understandably had short-term goals of winning the nomination and then the presidency, this proposed new post-election organization must offer activists more than the chance to help pass a particular health care or energy bill. Such legislative victories are important, but in the absence of a broader social vision they appear piecemeal and do not evoke the more systemic need for radical change.

The UFW worked relentlessly for legislative changes and specific goals, but activists always understood that there was a broader goal of social and economic justice that individual victories could not alone address. That's why each UFW success, and even the historic winning of the nation's first Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975, spurred rather than weakened the commitment to La Causa. Sustaining the commitment of Obama campaign volunteers requires an organization that, like the UFW, frames its struggle in moral and spiritual terms. It must instill a broader vision in its activists, so that they see legislative battles as a means to a new type of society, rather than as ends in themselves.

Longtime human rights activist Sister Bernie Galvin often tells a story about a traveler passing a construction site. She asked the first man she saw what he was doing, and the man replied, "laying bricks." She asked another, who replied, "hauling cement." She then asked a third worker involved in similar tasks, who replied proudly, "I am building a cathedral."

UFW volunteers saw their work as building a cathedral. Obama campaign alumni deserve a similar chance to engage in transformative work, and a new organization will, with all hope, emerge to provide this opportunity.

Randy Shaw is the author of the newly released book Beyond the Fields: Cesar Chavez, the UFW and the Struggle for Justice in the 21st Century (University of California Press). He can be reached at randy@thclinic.org.