As a rising leader in the Democratic Socialists of America, you could be forgiven for feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. You weren’t sure what to expect when you first started attending meetings, but you were excited about DSA’s goals and glad to be among like-minded people. You took on some low-stakes projects like flyering or phone banking, and became a regular face in the crowd at your branch or working group meetings. You still felt like the ‘new kid’, but you were starting to get your bearings and develop an understanding of how and why the organization operates.
But something felt a bit unbalanced. The steering committee of your branch or working group was clearly juggling a ton of work—planning meetings, doing outreach, onboarding new members, and trying to figure out how to carry out the work they were tasked with doing for the chapter. The leadership and longtime members all seemed to know each other well, but they didn’t appear to have much time to get to know the revolving cast of newcomers at their meetings, let alone engage with them one-on-one outside of group settings. They rarely made concrete asks of general members beyond attending more meetings or basic agitprop. At times, they even appeared to be on a different page from other parts of the chapter, or to lack clear goals beyond maintaining the structure of their organizing body.
But you believed in the work, so you kept showing up to do whatever was asked of you. Then, one day, you were approached by a member of leadership: Someone had stepped down from the steering committee for whatever reason, and they wondered if you’d be interested in filling the seat. You said yes, of course—you were eager to take on a higher level of responsibility, but hadn’t been able to find a clear path to doing so.
Fast-forward a month or two later, and you’re running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off: Zoom meetings are multiplying across your calendar like spores, you’re getting dragged into leadership debates about internal stuff you barely understand, and your sense of your steering committee’s medium- and long-term goals is somehow not that much clearer to you than before you entered leadership. The most maddening part, however, is that you feel alone in a crowd. Plenty of new members are showing up to your meetings each month, looking for work to do. But you can’t seem to offload major tasks, because doing so would require you to engage, train, and mentor these new members—which you don’t have time to do. Eventually, you step away, burnt out, and one of the more engaged members takes your place, like a fresh-faced actor stepping into the superhero costume.
Many of our current and former chapter leaders, myself included, have reported feeling caught in this cycle of organizational burnout. As our membership has continued to grow, the chapter has elected to take on more and more work. As a result, our base workload never feels sustainable no matter how many new members sign up each month. It’s a vicious cycle. Leaders are spread too thin to develop new members into future leaders, so they struggle to carry the burden all by themselves. Meanwhile, all but the most industrious general members watch from the sidelines, waiting to be directed and developed. The membership continues to grow, but the organization doesn’t. How do you break the cycle?
I found myself asking this question throughout my tenure as a leader of the North Side Red Line (NSRL) branch. At the time I was appointed to fill a vacancy on NSRL’s steering committee, the branch didn’t have nearly as deep a pool of engaged general members to recruit from. This was in part due to high leadership turnover and structural disadvantages that date back to the split of the former North Side Branch’s split into Red and Blue Line groups in 2020. As a result, we lacked close working relationships with other leaders across the chapter, and we weren’t facilitating nearly as much activity as other branches.
Since then, NSRL has taken great strides to break the cycle of “middlelessness.” Our monthly branch meeting attendance has nearly doubled. We’ve developed a reliable organizing committee open to all branch members that focuses on logistics and operations. We’ve grown a kick-ass agitprop team and a crew of neighborhood leaders, and we’ve built effective working relationships across different parts of the chapter.
The process of getting there as a group was at once painstaking and revelatory. And it has led me to view “middlelessness” as one of our most crucial organizing challenges across the chapter – one we ought to make a central focus of internal conversations as we approach the chapter’s June convention and look toward the next year of organizing.
I’ve outlined here a road map of sorts based on my experience in NSRL leadership, in the hope that these insights might be helpful for other leaders across the chapter, both new and established.
1: Clarify Your Goals
Because of DSA’s significant membership and leadership turnover, new leaders sometimes end up inheriting a position of responsibility for an organizational body or initiative whose founding leaders are no longer active cadre. If these organizers have been “rocketshipped” into leadership from general membership before they have a chance to be integrated into the organizational culture, they’re likely to lack a sense of institutional history. In some cases, they may be unclear on the medium- and long-term goals of the entities they serve. Multiply that across several cycles of turnover, and you might end up with a steering committee whose members may unknowingly have different ideas about our basic goals.
As a newer leader, I recall feeling nervous asking my fellow branch steering committee members for clarity on our goals and priorities. I worried it might come across as a criticism, or even just a stupid question. But as it turns out, I didn’t need to be worried at all! My comrades were extremely supportive, and we met soon after to discuss what work needed to be done to thrive as a branch, per the priorities set for us by the chapter. How could we best divide work between us to handle the ongoing workload while also leaving ourselves with enough time and energy to develop new members into middle-level leaders?
If there’s one thing this past year has taught me as an organizer both inside and outside of DSA, it’s that these types of purposeful resets, when initiated with a positive spirit and genuine curiosity about others’ experiences, can be really transformational. They lead not only to clearer goals, but also to stronger working relationships and more deliberative processes.
2: Get Connected!
Chicago DSA is a large chapter in a geographically vast municipality, and the neighborhoods with the densest DSA membership are scattered across the city from one another. This alone makes it very difficult for members who don’t live near one another to get enough face-to-face interaction to form enduring organizing relationships. Add to that the fragmentation of our capacity across different bodies—branches, working groups, committees, etc.—and it’s not hard to see why it takes a conscious effort to avoid disconnection and siloing between different parts of the chapter.
One of my first priorities as a branch leader was to get in touch with at least one leader from each chapter body, ideally someone who was also a member of our branch, to talk about what we could do in branch meetings to better facilitate their work. Forming those connections not only gave us a clear picture of how the entire chapter was operating at any given point in time, but it also made other chapter leaders feel invested in the growth of our branch, and eager to lend a hand to help us figure out organizing and logistics challenges as they popped up.
3: Get to Know Your Members
Generally speaking, spending your downtime doing unpaid organizing work for a socialist party is a pretty unusual thing to do, and one without much precedent for most people. Nearly everyone who comes through our doors—even the most outgoing and enthusiastic folks—will arrive with some uncertainty as to whether there’s a place in this project for them. That’s why it’s so important that we meet people as people, rather than mere numbers or pairs of ears to listen to us talk about our politics and program.
Regular social events have helped us facilitate this work by allowing us to learn about our new members as people: their jobs, their interests, their pets, and so on. It might not feel like important work—there are no pragmatic goals to be set or immediate indicators of success. But by putting in the time to get to know your comrades well enough that you can have a real, non-DSA-related conversation with them, you build trust in each other and in the institution.
4: Set Up Shop
If you want to determine who among your general membership is interested in taking on a higher level of involvement, carving out a dedicated space for those members to opt into is crucial. Create opportunities to get people involved at a slightly deeper level than a canvas or volunteer shift. Name a time, name a place, and invite the members—but don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t take off right away. In NSRL, for example, we knew we wanted to form an organizing committee (OC) to take on some of the administrative and logistical work of running the branch, so we started advertising a weekly Zoom call for general members to join for just that purpose. At first, there were many weeks in which no one outside of the steering committee showed up. But we kept having them every week, until one or two people started consistently showing up—and then more people joined from there.
5: Make Small Asks
Putting people together in a room doesn’t magically make delegation start happening. You need to build habits that support thoughtful task delegation, no matter what space you’re in. Don’t be afraid to start small—in fact, that’s the ideal place to start. At an in-person general membership meeting, for example, there are myriad opportunities to make small asks: you need someone to keep time, someone else to greet new members when they walk in, a third person to take notes, another to bring snacks, and so on.
It’s possible that leadership has the capacity in the moment to do all of these tasks themselves, but that doesn’t matter. The point of delegating them is much less about their completion than about letting members step up to take responsibility within the space in a way that feels safe and approachable. By doing so, you help these members feel more confident, and establish a space that feels cooperatively operated by members, rather than managed solely by leadership. And when you see a member consistently stepping up for small tasks, you can eventually try making a larger ask of them; they may even step up and offer to help with an unfilled need themselves.
6: It Just Takes Some Time
Some members will be confident and enthusiastic right from the jump, and they will quickly find a niche within the operations of your organizing body. Others will be trickier. Perhaps they’re friendly and consistent about showing up to things, but you can’t quite figure out how to encourage them to step into the middle layer of leadership no matter how much you chat with them after meetings or at socials. This is normal, and typically not a poor reflection on them (or you). Everyone moves at their own pace, for their own reasons. The most important thing is to foster people’s curiosity and recognize their consistency, no matter what stage of development they’re at.
It’s also important to remember that you cannot be all things to all people. Your background, personality, and interests will enable you to mobilize and develop some kinds of people, but perhaps not others. The beauty of relational organizing, in fact, is that you and your fellow chapter leaders don’t have to carry the weight of middle-layer development alone.
For example: let’s you’ve seen Wanda at nearly every general meeting and social event for months. She seems to really enjoy being a member, but she hasn’t stepped up to take on any tasks and you can’t seem to figure out how to encourage her. Meanwhile, you’ve formed a strong working relationship with a newer member named Suzanne, who’s on your OC. Lo and behold, Wanda and Suzanne totally click, and before you know it, Suzanne’s convinced Wanda to help schedule calendar events for the OC.
The fact that you couldn’t figure out how to empower Wanda isn’t a failure on your part. You just weren’t the right person to develop Wanda. Suzanne was the right person to develop Wanda, and you were the right person to develop Suzanne. Trust between members builds organically, but not randomly. It takes intention, self-awareness, and a willingness to be approachable and listen to your members with care and curiosity.
Trust the Process
A few weeks ago, I mentioned to a fellow branch member that I was planning to attend an OC meeting for the first time since I took a break from leadership two months prior. He suggested I swing by a meeting the week after next—next week’s meeting, he told me, would be a “heads down” work session where they’d be hammering out final logistics for an upcoming town hall event hosted by the branch.
When he told me this, I nearly wept from joy. There was no way we could have gotten nine or ten people in a room together to plan an event like that a year ago. Organizational growth and replication isn’t easy—in all honesty, I took a break from leadership earlier this year in part because the stress of this process had caught up to me. I needed time to recharge. But watching new members find their niche in the organization and grow into leadership in a more sustainable and supported way than I and others could is an indescribable honor and blessing.
This is why middle layer organizing is of such profound importance to me, and why I want to see our chapter embrace it as a core internal priority. In the next year, our chapter will attempt to build on the momentum of Byron Sigcho Lopez’s congressional campaign to grow our membership and fight for big external wins. As we do this, however, we need to focus as much as possible on our capacity to grow as an institution made up of people. We must work to slow member attrition, encourage a healthy and sustainable pace of work, and build meaningful working relationships that can stand the test of time and the inevitable stresses of building a working-class party together.
