People Got to Know Their Neighbors

” secured one of the strongest social safety nets in the country for Minnesota families, made possible through a suite of ambitious policies passed during Tim Walz’s term as governor — despite Democrats having only a one-vote majority in the State Senate. None of it would have been possible without years of organizing that built a multiracial constituency prepared to stand together to fight for a bold agenda, despite counterattacks designed to divide their support. How did that multiracial constituency develop, cultivate, and exercise its power in the policymaking process? In this interview, Doran Schrantz, the former executive director of the statewide faith coalition ISAIAH and current chair of Faith in Minnesota Action PAC, describes what Ella Baker called the “spadework” needed to form such a constituency. It depended on developing a group of organizers equipped to navigate the complexity of building and holding together a truly multiracial coalition in one of the most divisive moments in American history. What does it take to cultivate the kind of leadership needed to negotiate power laterally among different constituencies, and then to use that power to build a shared governing agenda with elected officials? When we talk about the craft of organizing, we often spend so much time on processes of individual leadership development to build power that we are not able to spend as much time on what it takes to wield power. This interview bucks that trend, articulating the core questions and capacities we should be thinking about to wield authentic, multiracial governing power for America.

 Can you start by giving us some context on Minnesota and ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, the organization you led for many years?

 For a long time in Minnesota, the big question at the center of politics and movement building has been the question of how we build multiracial democratic power — which has to include white, Black, and brown people. What is the nature of both the practice of politics and the strategy of how we move this state through a dramatic demographic change to embrace multiracial democracy during a period of pretty extreme asymmetric polarization?

Minnesota historically has been a very white state, known for high investments in public education, and, basically, common-good public investments in people being happy. The actual history isn’t that romantic, of course. But over the past 20 years, there has been an influx of mostly immigrants of color, particularly East African, Liberian, Hmong, Vietnamese. There is a historic African American population in Minnesota, but it’s small compared with other states. There is a significant history of Native and Indigenous people in the state. But the state went from probably 90 percent white around the year 2000 to closer to 72 percent now. It happened pretty quickly. Then a conservative reaction seeking to pull up the ramparts of public investments emerged. All of a sudden, people don’t want to invest in public transit or education or any of these things. And I think it has everything to do with race. In 2016, Donald Trump almost won Minnesota.

When I first got to ISAIAH, it reflected the state. It was never a completely white organization, but it reflected Minnesota: it was mostly churches, it was small, it was mostly mainline Protestant and Catholic. There had historically been Black church participation, but there was no practice in place around what it means to do truly multiracial politics.

There was a set of moves from 2013 to 2023 that made our organization into what it is now. Now, ISAIAH and the Faith in Minnesota Action PAC, ISAIAH’s electoral arm, are the most robust, left-of-center political force in the state that’s not a labor union. It’s equivalent to a medium-size labor union in terms of the amount of power that it can wield. And it has a very significant amount of power in the Democratic Party.

Within ISAIAH, we have the Muslim coalition, which is 46 Islamic centers and neighborhood and community organizations that are Muslim, predominantly East African. There is the Rural Organizing Project, which is organizing working-class white rural people in key places around the state. There’s Kids Count On Us, which is 500 community-based child-care centers organizing child-care providers, workers, and parents — kind of a union-type, proto labor formation for child care in the state of Minnesota. We have the church base, with church clusters all over the state and anchored in the suburbs and the cities. We have the young adult coalition, which is 10 college campus configurations along with young adult apartment organizing. It’s become an intergenerational, multiracial, multifaith, cross-geographical coalition.

What holds ISAIAH together is a set of principles that we all agree to. Number one is the rigorous focus on agency-oriented organizing practice, a north star of building multiracial, democratic governing power. We have a majoritarian orientation — we want progressive 

 popular power. We built a strategy together around how we understand what it means to unequivocally be East African and Muslim. Or rural with a rural perspective. No one’s asking you to change any of those things. We are explicitly posing the question about how we can publicly demonstrate, over and over again, the critical importance of multiracial democratic power. We center this question partially to model but partially to protect our movements from being distracted and divided by identitarian or weaponized racialized attacks.

There are lots of ways you can have power in the world, but the currency of our power is organized people — we hold that at the center of our organization. That regulates things internally. Each constituency has its own source of power, and they have to laterally align and negotiate that power with one another. So if you have no base, you’re not going to have that much to say. We’re not going to pretend that a base exists that doesn’t. Our power is collective; we’re all interdependent on one another’s power.

 Can you describe what that coalition has accomplished in relationship to Gov. Tim Walz?

 We built out a very robust political program focused on grassroots organizing in the context of politics rather than just tactical electoral domains — and I think it has been extremely agenda shaping. In 2017 and 2018, Faith in Minnesota took a whole bunch of policies with demonstrable support behind them and made them the center of the Democratic Party agenda in the governor’s race.

In that race, you couldn’t get endorsed as a legislator without having some relationship to Faith in Minnesota’s platform. Often, organizations endorse candidates based on where they’re at on the issues on a questionnaire. We didn’t do that at all. We used the levers in the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party endorsing process — it starts with precinct caucuses, electing delegates to State Senate conventions, where they elect delegates to a state endorsing convention. We sent thousands of people connected to our organization to participate actively in precinct caucuses with the intention of becoming delegates at the Senate and state-level conventions — this made them actors in state legislative and statewide endorsements. This process incentivizes a candidate to win delegates and incentivizes delegates to win over one another. In other words, it is real in-person retail politics. Our members had to learn to deliberate with candidates and other delegates about their positions and get themselves elected as delegates. Our strategy was not to focus solely on issues or litmus tests around ideology or platform; what also mattered was relationships, power, partnership, and governing orientation. Are they responsive to a constituency in their district? Do they evolve? Do they imagine their role as a public official as 

I use you, and you elect me, and then I do what I want

Together we could get a bunch of things done, and I need you, and you need me

? It’s not like everyone was magically like that. It was a process in which we all had to learn how to develop those relationships. And yes, we absolutely pushed an agenda. We stood for paid family leave, 100 percent clean energy, restoring the vote, driver’s licenses for immigrants, down payment assistance for new homeowners, including interest-free capital for Muslims. We summed it up as: We need an agenda that is bold enough to meet the crisis in people’s lives.

Walz was not who we initially endorsed. But I was not very married to any of the candidates. I wanted to shape how they did their campaigns and their governing orientation in the state, and I wanted them to go on the offense against white nationalist authoritarianism. I systematically had built a relationship with Education Minnesota, the teachers union, which endorsed Tim Walz early. We had a backroom space where we strategized on getting all of these candidates to adopt a race/class narrative that went on offense against racialized division and wedge issues. So, once Walz won the nomination, they could help us build a relationship with him. Then the question becomes: How are we going to collectively wield our power?

When his administration came to us to say they wanted universal school meals, we were responsive. We’re going to partner. We brought paid family leave to the table; they’re bringing universal school meals and the child tax credit to the table. So it became a shared agenda. By the time we got into the 2019 legislative session, we still had a divided government. A couple of people who came from the organizing sector were elected and facilitated an internal organizing strategy in the legislature that explicitly partnered with organizations. We used the 2019 legislative session to rehearse a mode of governance where we tried to pass the bills together. Previously, the governing orientation had been that if you’re the House, you shouldn’t send anything over the Senate that you know they won’t pass — why bother? It makes you look like a loser. But the speaker of the House, Melissa Hortman, was like, 

Yeah, let’s shove everything over there, and if they don’t pass it, then that’s on them

. So we negotiated bills, sent people to the Capitol, and participated in district strategy sessions with our legislators.

We have lots and lots of people on the ground that we have to constantly invest in to sustain our power. What is the most strategic way we can navigate and shape conditions on the ground so that we’re sharing responsibility for the governing conditions we need to maintain and wield our collective power?

That’s what happened between us, between actors at the legislature. So when people talk about the Minnesota miracle, part of me thinks about all the layers and layers of infrastructure and work and practice and orientation that made it happen. In addition to Faith in Minnesota, there was SEIU, Education Minnesota, all these amazing legislators, the 100% Campaign, UnidosMN, Restore the Vote coalition, lots and lots and lots of actors. But over time, we did build a really robust shared orientation and practice across all these sectors that I would directly connect to the ethos we’ve built inside our multiracial Democratic power-building practice. It’s relational, it’s experience-based, it’s human centered, it’s about navigating and adapting, it’s about shared responsibility for stewarding our collective power to make more possible. It’s about being honest and transparent and having high integrity — you do what you say you’re going to do, and you’re a reliable actor with others to be constructive while also creating the tension that you need to create and to move change. It’s all the layers of leadership and containers and infrastructure that made it possible to pass that insane agenda in 2023 with a one-vote Senate majority.

 How did the protests following the murder of George Floyd impact the situation?

 Governor Walz had, perhaps, the most eventful first term of a governor in recent history. Trump was president, then there was Covid-19, George Floyd’s murder and mass protests and civil unrest that sporadically erupted over the course of a year. In 2021, Walz worked with state legislators to pass some police reform, and some very good things happened under the radar around criminal justice reform and collateral sanctions and sentencing. The 2023 public safety bill has a lot of extremely progressive stuff in it, such as free phone calls for all incarcerated people, the end of many collateral sanctions, reform of minimum sentencing laws, and expungement of records connected to cannabis use. However, Walz took a beating from both the right and the left on addressing the power of police. It was extremely challenging all around. There’s a risk of losing ground to the right after periods of mass protest and, especially, civil unrest, but that didn’t happen at the state level because of the robust movement infrastructure, which was able to help navigate and share responsibility in that moment. The door to further action on racial justice writ large and police reform, including issues and viewpoints coming from the abolition movement, is still open and being moved forward by organizing and advocacy organizations across the state.

More than 200 ISAIAH leaders, joined by Gov. Tim Walz and Rep. Liz Olson, attend a Clergy and Faith Leader Legislative Summit during the 2023 Minnesota legislative session, Feb. 7, 2023. Photograph courtesy of ISAIAH.

 Let’s back up to your story. How did you get into organizing and how did you end up in Minnesota?

 I grew up in a small town in Iowa. I did theater for seven years after I graduated from the University of Chicago. I was a professional actor in the Chicago theater scene. I was always really interested in politics — not necessarily electoral politics, but political questions, like 

What does it mean to be a citizen or a person?

 or different theories about how people think of organizing society. But I didn’t really get involved in politics until after college. I knew I wanted to do something tangible that was connected to people and democracy, and I thought maybe I’d do labor organizing. My hometown was a labor town, and one of my formative experiences was a massive labor strike that went on for three years while I was in elementary school. But then I kind of serendipitously met a community organizer and started doing community-based, neighborhood-based organizing. My parents moved back to Minnesota after my dad retired. And I was really looking for someplace serious that was going to teach and train me in the craft of organizing.

 How did you know it was a craft? I think a lot of people think, 

Oh, yeah, I’ve knocked on some doors. I’m an organizer

 The organizers I was introduced to in Chicago came at it from a craft-based perspective. My boss, a Black pastor in Gary, Ind., had done faith-based organizing. I wasn’t working for a faith-based organization, but he sent me to a weeklong training with 

, a national network of faith-based organizing organizations, working to develop leadership in faith-based organizations around the country. Two things struck me there. First, it was absolutely multiracial and working-class. Second, I could have conversations about faith, politics, and leadership in ways that helped me grow. I watched people change so much over the course of one week. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but essentially it was modeling a kind of political community. I was like, 

If we can make this happen, we will change America. This is what people need. I need it.

That was how I ended up at ISAIAH, which was a partner or an affiliate of the Gamaliel Foundation. Long story short, my partner Chris and I moved here and I loved it. I had a profound experience of change in my first year at ISAIAH. My own trauma, my own story, my oppression, my own fears, my own anxieties, my own defense mechanisms were all things preventing me from being the free, public person I needed to be to be able to build and wield power.

The start of any organizing work starts with relationship building on a “defined turf — this means it is scoped. I do not organize people of faith in Minnesota — that is a useless idea unless it is scoped and defined. I was directed to organize five member churches in Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center. To start, an organizer does one-to-ones, an intentional conversation rooted in listening and uncovering another person’s purpose and interest. As a new organizer, I did 15 one-to-ones a week with people who attended or who were connected to those congregations and I had to write reports on each one focused on: What is the self-interest and the story of another person? What risks did I take? And most importantly, what did I learn about myself as a public person? I went to my first mentorship meeting after having done 15 or 20. Pamela Twiss, ISAIAH’s then co-director, walked into the room, and she had a file folder with every single one of my reports printed out. Then she started going through them. She had highlighted, she had made notes, and she came in with a set of questions. It was ultimately about me. A labor organizer in Chicago, Kathy Devine, said to me, 

Look, artists paint with paints, and the medium is the paint to the canvas. As an organizer, it’s yourself and people — you’re using yourself as the vessel.

 So if you don’t understand yourself, you cannot channel the practices, skills, rituals, and processes needed to facilitate the cultivation of agency and power of other people. What your politics are, how much you have integrated and made sense out of your own story, integrated what your self-interest is — all those are decisions you have to make before you can have that conversation with anybody else.

I call this process of development crossing the bridge. What are the interventions and experiences a person has to have to move into a place of integrated agency that allows you to be a public leader in the world with others?

 And just to make the implicit explicit here: why is it so important for organizers to understand and experience their own freedom before they can organize?

 Because we’re inviting people into a process of relating to power. Agency starts with me not being in reaction to myself. I have to get into the driver’s seat myself about my own purpose, free from what I have experienced that taught me that I should be powerless. We’ve all had experiences that say to us, 

You should be small, you have to defend yourself

. That means you’re not in the driver’s seat of your life, and your life becomes about protecting yourself instead of living out your free creative purpose. To be clear, there are extremely rational reasons for people to defend themselves emotionally. People have experienced racism, sexism, classism, etc. But an organizer is focused on building individual and collective agency and preparing people to wield power in the real world.

It’s not just self-referential, though. Practically speaking, imagine if I’m in a situation where the mayor yells at me. If my instinct is to appease him to protect myself, then (A) I’m not clearly seeing the actual power dynamic or what’s happening in the world around me, and (B) I’m not able to make public decisions for myself or the collective focused on the power that we’re trying to move. I have to be free enough from my own trauma to be able to take risks that shape power.

I remember Imam Mohamed Omar, director of Dar Al-Farooq Islamic Center, once told me, 

Well, being quiet and letting the public officials sometimes come to the mosque, that’s how we stay safe

Did them liking you stop your mosque from 

 There’s a perfectly rational reason why he’s trying to be safe. Black Muslims are the majority of Muslims in Minnesota. Somali Americans are used as a political weapon by many politicians and conservative media outlets. After 9/11, the FBI infiltrated mosques and community spaces, sowing distrust and division. His mosque became a target online in right-wing blogs, resulting in an overt hate crime committed against his mosque, and, from their account, the first questions asked by authorities indicated they thought it could be an inside job. That is his experience and his context. His sense of uncertainty, fear, and distrust is rational. But as an organizer, I want him to get to a place where he can see that he has the option to make a different decision, that maybe safety depends on building and having power. I have no ability to offer any guarantees or assurance that nothing bad will happen to him or his community. But regardless, I didn’t nurse his sense of victimhood at that moment. In fact, I amplified an agentic choice he could make. Imam Mohamed decided to found the Muslim Coalition of ISAIAH and went public.

A chronic mistake organizers make is basically organizing people around their 

 This is going to become controversial. Do you imagine a leader’s role is to tell and retell their story of trauma in public places, implicitly asking for pity? That sometimes looks like moral suasion, as if we’re going to make these people feel guilty and get what we want by using and exploiting someone’s story of victimhood. It makes me uncomfortable for the person who’s telling that story. The question I ask is: What is being cultivated in that person around their own experience of power and freedom in the world?

Another example would be a person who has experienced public oppression and is starting on their journey of figuring out what it means to be political, to be a leader or have agency in the world. They might think they can’t do those things because they’ve been wronged or have too much pain. So an organizer has a choice at that moment. You can become overwhelmed by their experience of suffering and say, “I’m so sorry. It is true. You shouldn’t or can’t be a leader given that hardship.” Now, sometimes that is true. But sometimes the organizer nurses a person’s sense of powerlessness as opposed to saying, “Actually, what I see about you is that you have an interest that you want realized in the world. And what I think is going on with you right now is that you’re scared. That is OK. But you have a choice to make. You can either invite everyone around you to let you off the hook because you’re scared or you can decide you’re going to take a risk. And I think you can do it.”

It kind of goes back to that old organizing adage “Don’t do anything for somebody that they could do themselves.” Are you nursing someone’s sense of victimhood or are you cultivating their sense of agency? Sometimes things that look like organizing or speaking truth to power are actually retriggering and reorienting people around the sense that they’re outsiders or victims who can’t have power. It can look like almost the right thing, but it’s actually suppressing people’s sense of agency rather than pushing them toward it. And I think it’s quite counterproductive. It doesn’t develop leaders or produce good organizing in the long term. As somebody who cares about the dignity of people, I don’t think there’s anything free about it whatsoever.

 Let’s connect these reflections on organizing practice back to the work you were doing at ISAIAH. How does the way you form people shape their ability to operate in a multiracial coalition, and how do you nurture those capacities?

 You have to constantly attend to formation at the organizer level and the top leadership level. Inside ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, all of the organizers and lead organizers have a space to meet together for four hours every other Monday. It’s an intensive space — it’s not 

Here’s your task, and here’s your task

. It’s practical skills training. It’s also political formation. In relationship to each other — the Muslim coalition, the Black barbershop coalition, the white churches — we are negotiating questions like 

What are our politics? What is our base? How do we operate with one another? 

Within that space, there’s a whole set of practices that are rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed.

We also have a central leadership team of representatives from each constituency base that meets once a month for three hours. That is a political space in which their strategic orientation is cultivated. In that space, leaders have the experience of negotiation, working through actual problems, resolving differences, asking power questions. 

What would this mean for you? How are we regulating our orientations with each other so that we viscerally experience our sense of shared responsibility face-to-face? 

It’s not abstract. It’s literally people. It’s a space of constant practice where people’s own self-interest is bridged into the collective interest. We’re constantly working to construct a collective common interest.

 Can you describe an example of a conflict between the constituency bases and how you navigated that?

 To move effectively and wield enough power to shape a state legislature and a governor’s administration, we have to be able to hold our own coalition together. The challenge in holding collectives and constituencies together rather than a list of organizations — often when people say “coalition,” they mean a bunch of organizations, but I am talking about aligned, deep constituencies. Holding constituencies is about politics and political work. So the key leaders of these constituencies have to do constant development, relational work to navigate tensions, conflicts, divergent interests. Imagine if you didn’t do all that work well. The first external pressure would cause the base to reduce itself to the most narrow sliver of everyone who agrees and/or would reduce back to silos by identity, faith, geography, etc. For example, in the middle of our election work in 2022, Roe v. Wade was overturned. My first reaction was a visceral reaction as a human being. My second thought was 

How in the hell are we going to hold our base together through this?

 We have a significant suburban base of primarily white women who are normie to progressive Christians — they are going to want to motivate themselves and others around this issue. But I knew that the Muslim coalition, parts of the rural organizing project, and the Black barbershops and Black congregations would not have the same reaction. So I had to step up as a political leader. I called key people across the organization and built a path to unpack it together.

ISAIAH Prophetic Resistance Gathering of more than 1,500 faith and community leaders, January 2017. Photograph courtesy of ISAIAH. 

We brought a very small group of people together who were the most powerful leaders in each constituency. But other organizers and I had conversations with people separately first, to temperature take and understand their impulses. In the meeting, I had to frame the challenge: 

We have a set of choices to make. But I want us all to look at the big picture about what the source of our power is and the strategic moment in front of us. People who come from very different life experiences are having very human reactions. We have to look at that, and we have to look together at how we’re going to operate in these conditions, how we’re going to take responsibility for each other, for our power organization, for our political community to navigate this together.

In that moment, we were building on the years of work we had done of constantly rehearsing people’s understanding of how their self-interest is tied to a collective interest. How does that play out when it’s hard? In this moment, these suburban white women felt they had an interest that is somehow being thwarted by this coalition: 

I am part of this thing, and now it is constraining me in acting on my actual interest.

I remember a critical religious leader of color saying, 

You need to understand something. My power will be destroyed if the people who are against us in our own community can weaponize against me the idea that white progressives are using me to get more Democrats elected. What I’m doing is actually harm mitigation. Our job is to make sure that we don’t get polarized or used by MAGA based on our more socially cultural and traditional orientations around abortion or LGBTQ questions. So if you want me to play this role in the ISAIAH coalition, in the big picture of stewarding our collective politics — to get child care, to get paid family leave, to end Islamophobia — we can’t let ISAIAH break apart.

 And then a lead organizer actually went into this thing with a key woman leader and asked people, 

How do you have access to your senators right now? Whose power are you wielding?

 So it was a very explicit conversation about where our power comes from, what we steward, how we borrow and share each other’s power. And then we negotiated. Can we actually have mutual interest in this moment? The group decided that ISAIAH would not make any statement on the fall of Roe v. Wade as an organization. However, we agreed that staff and leaders of Faith in Minnesota, our C4 expression, could organize in their own communities grounded in their own interest. And we shared a political north star. We could not let ourselves be divided in the approaching election — those more conservative on the issue would work to ensure that they did not become single-issue voters (instead voting on child care, voting rights, paid leave, and racial and economic justice broadly) and those who saw protecting reproductive freedom in Minnesota as central to talking to their constituency could do so. But ISAIAH and Faith in Minnesota, which is a critical and shared vehicle for our collective power, would not make public statements or take a public position on the issue. What we discussed in that room came to pass. The Faith in Minnesota coalition were essential actors in flipping the Minnesota State Senate to DFL control, which staunchly supports reproductive freedom. The DFL majority enshrined reproductive freedom in Minnesota in a statute. If we had torn the organization apart at that moment because we were not able or willing to do our own internal politics grounded in our shared power, would that have been the best way to achieve our values in the world?

 But their power is not dependent on each other solely because having the Black leaders, the predominantly Black Muslim coalition, and white suburban women work together gives them more numbers, right?

 No, looking at numbers only is an extremely reductive understanding of how power operates almost in any setting. Obviously, part of how we demonstrate our power is the collective demonstration of large numbers of people in motion. Look, politicians have maximum maneuverability when we’re in siloed categories. But if you have Black Muslims and white Christians in a legislative district, then sometimes they can be moving their own things separately, and sometimes they show up together. It increases our strategic maneuverability even in hostile conditions, so that you can play different positions on the board. You can move a lot more easily if nobody can reduce you to just a category. It’s very confusing to a politician, because usually they like to relate to people in silos, and then they can pit different people against each other.

 It’s particularly important when you’re working in a dynamic, polarized political space. It is precisely because everything is happening on a razor’s edge that you need that maneuverability.

 Some of the distinctions that you’ve drawn over the years have really influenced my thinking about the notion of maneuverability and strategic capacity in uncertain political conditions. What we’re actually building is a leadership that can maneuver in uncertain and sometimes hostile conditions. When we are operating in the context of MAGA and weaponized racial divisions, how do we create an antidote that builds a multiracial democracy that’s as loud as MAGA? We have to have an offensive strategy that exists in relationship to that political reality. We have to create an alternative that offers more of a sense of agency and security than MAGA. I don’t see how you do that without a really robust, strategic, multiracial, democratic organization.

ISAIAH leaders, membership partners, Gov. Tim Walz, and members of the Minnesota legislature gather outside the state Capitol for a historic bill-signing event at the end of the 2023 legislative session, St. Paul, May 24, 2023. Photograph courtesy of ISAIAH.

Hammer&Hope

Doran Schrantz

@DSchrantz

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Doran Schrantz

@DSchrantz

Contributions

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People Got to Know Their Neighbors

Issue

5

Our Power Is Organized People

FREE TO READ

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