The Socialists Everywhere Project began in the now-defunct Organizing Committee for the North Side Blue Line (NSBL) branch. It arose out of conversations about how to learn more about the employers, landlords, and community organizations in the branch territory. The name, which was coined by former branch steering committee officer Ramsin Canon, originally encompassed an ever larger project involving both member engagement and a broader continuous research effort to do power mapping throughout the branch. This element was still present in the initial resolution authorizing the Project, which was presented to the Executive Committee, along with the part of the Project that would become the focus of work over the next year.
The initial proposal was brought at the November 2024 Executive Committee retreat and formally passed in 2025. It described a program in which local civic meetings would be cataloged and presented to branch membership. Members would be invited to attend these meetings and then submit a report to the Project leaders on what happened there. There are a lot of meetings in Chicago that fit the above description, including ward nights, local school council meetings, park advisory council meetings, and Community Alternative Policing meetings. The report back form asked members to describe what happened at the meeting, what kinds of people were in attendance, and to call out any issues that could serve as opportunities for Chicago DSA to organize in the community.
In practice, this is what the Project looked like with varying results: Ahead of NSBL branch meetings, a list would be compiled of three meetings happening within the branch territory in the next couple of weeks, in tabulated format with space for written names and phone numbers. Branch officers would then explain the Socialists Everywhere Project to the members in attendance, with the list being passed around for members to fill out if they could make the listed meeting times. Later, those members who signed up would receive a message via WhatsApp (sent manually) reminding them to attend the meeting, as well as a link to submit the report back form via Google Forms.
Word of the Project spread rapidly through the chapter, prompting a meeting between leaders in the North Side Blue Line, North Side Red Line, and South Side branches to discuss how the Project should be coordinated between the three geographic branches. For example, the leadership in the North Side Red Line branch prioritized monthly research meetings to add items on the Socialists Everywhere calendar, while classifying members by neighborhood during the branch meeting to decide how to coordinate meeting attendance. With specific goals to expand and automate the Project, research meetings began to produce a full catalog of meetings for members to attend. These research meetings proved popular among certain tech-savvy groups of members who were happy to help DSA by doing something they already knew how to do – work with computers to conduct research via spreadsheet work.
This work continued smoothly among the branches throughout the year. But after the DSA National Convention in August 2025, difficult questions arose during reauthorization. Namely: What has the Project accomplished? Though organizers set goals to build more participation using an automated calendar system rather than through a representative of the Project, only two members documented their attendance of a public, civic meetings after reauthorization, far below any reasonable goal.
What exactly was the goal of all of this work? The immediate goal was to engage new members in their communities, but the larger ambitions of the Project were never fully defined. The Project was envisioned at various times to be a research project, membership engagement, a left-wing answer to Moms for Liberty, and the initial stages of an intelligence network on community issues. If there was one definitive thing that the Project did, it gave new members something to do. Chicago DSA is full of newly minted activists who have just moved to the city and are light on experience and local knowledge, and Socialists Everywhere was ideal for giving them an opportunity to see what was happening in their local neighborhood. The loftier goals for the Project, to give Chicago DSA a foothold in local communities that could be used to organize as socialists on behalf of community members, never came to fruition. Finding a way to bridge the divide between individual volunteer action and a bigger project should be the core of any revival of the Project.
There is no particular shame in the Project’s performance, and not just because it only cost the chapter the price of a small button order. In many ways, the Project came and went at exactly the right time for the chapter. When it began, the chapter was coming out of a nadir of activity, with no significant large-scale work – labor, electoral, or otherwise – for members to jump into. But once the chapter’s campaigns kicked off, it became harder to justify pushing members elsewhere into this more piecemeal work. And once federal agents began their terror campaign in Chicagoland, it became hard not to see the Project as superfluous in the face of the higher degree of organization present in existing local groups that are leading the city’s response to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). Perhaps if the Project had the capacity, infrastructure, and messaging to connect itself to the broader struggle, it could have justified its continued existence.
In January 2026, the Project was ended by a vote of the Executive Committee. It has been placed respectfully in the limbo of interesting but nascent ideas. It may one day be dug up and integrated into a more focused and effective project. Until then, it lives on as one of Chicago DSA’s political priorities: Be Socialists Everywhere.
