—Tristan Bavol-Marques: former co-chair, treasurer
Written debriefs are useful in organizing both as a medium to organize one's thoughts in the present as well as something that can be revisited in the future to see how an organization has grown. I hope to set down here what I believe to have been the successes and limitations of my time on Steering Committee and provide whatever useful insight I can to the chapter.
Successes
Building a Unified Chapter
My foremost goal when I ran for co-chair two years ago was to centralize NC Triangle DSA into a coherent chapter that coordinates its efforts as one body. Some newer members may not know this, but until relatively recently, we did very little as a chapter—instead, we acted as three very loosely coordinated branches (Chapelboro, Durham, Raleigh), had four separate Discord servers, four steering committees, and smaller working groups separately housed in each branch that didn't really coordinate between branches even if they were doing the same kind of work. It was this baroque and unwieldy structure that I sought to transform into a coherent political body that could channel our energy in a unified direction. This reform was slow and delicate work because of inertia as well as concerns about branches retaining autonomy, but I was able to build chapter-wide buy-in first by building/supporting building chapter-wide structures such as our Comms Committee and the first working groups that decided to become chapter-level groups, for example, when the Chapelboro Electoral Working Group became our Chapter Electoral Working Group. I believe patience and demonstrating the utility of these reforms initially in a piece-meal, voluntary manner was crucial for the success of these centralizing reforms more broadly. I do not believe I would have been successful in achieving these reforms if I tried to do them all at once from the get-go. But although the desire was there to be a more unified chapter, it took someone actively organizing that constituency and pushing along that process for it to actually happen. I am proud that my dream which seemed quasi-utopian at the time of a unified, centralized chapter has been realized, and I think a lot of our recent successes have been made possible by the increased capacity and ability to coordinate organizing that being a coherent and unified chapter has brought us.
Chapter Shirts: A Test Case
The chapter's “White Whale” according to the outgoing leadership when I was starting as co-chair, was chapter shirts. They had been desired and talked about for a long time without any real progress. I made it my goal to secure chapter shirts quickly as a sign of the vigor of the new chapter leadership to members. I spearheaded the effort and sought to get it done within a month of being co-chair, which our Steering Committee succeeded in doing. In hindsight, it turned out not everyone was happy with how the design was chosen, but I believe the result was a net positive for the chapter. Oftentimes, getting things done quickly (or at all) and doing so with the overt consensus of members are priorities that come into conflict with one another; I have tended to favor the former for the less politically-charged aspects of running the chapter. And we got shirts!
NOTE: I know other members are working on getting another batch of shirts made and that that process seems to have stalled out. I am happy to help provide insight on moving that along if desired.
Our Chapter's BDS Resolution
The first major challenge faced by Steering Committee while I was co-chair was brought on by the proposing of the first draft of what would become our chapter's BDS resolution. At the time, I was a relatively new member, and I got my first real taste of some of the internal factionalism and also personal drama that existed within the chapter. This resolution was controversial (in my opinion) because of some of the specific mechanisms it employed, the manner in which it was presented to the chapter, and the overarching context of the Jamaal Bowman affair—as opposed to there being any constituency in the chapter opposed to the real substance of the resolution. I want to thank the group that proposed the resolution for taking the initiative to write what would become such an important document for our chapter. I spent a LOT of time working with the people in favor and opposed to the first draft of the BDS resolution, saw that regardless of ideological tendency differences, there wasn't that much daylight between language that would be amenable to both groups, and was able to get both groups to support a revised draft that passed with nearly unanimous consent and has become a model for Palestinian solidarity to other chapters across the country.
Here, the major lessons for me were that working together across ideological tendencies is not only possible, but a necessary precondition for us successfully organizing the Left and not just splitting off into ineffective splinter groups. I believe it is imperative that DSA unite the left and the working class into a party that can articulate, organize, and fight for its demands. This requires being able to compromise with our comrades, and I believe this was a successful example of debate and compromise leading to a very effective document. Another lesson was the importance of structural clarity as an organization. The initial post introducing the resolution declared it would be voted on at the next general meeting even though that wasn't how the resolution process in our bylaws worked. This led to difficulties because it was easy (especially in the charged atmosphere of the time) to conflate the need to follow the bylaws as it relates to resolutions with attempting to squash the resolution. This led to us as a Steering Committee seeking to increase knowledge of how resolutions and the bylaws work, which I hope has been helpful. Nonetheless, as an avid supporter of Palestinian solidarity, especially in this time of genocide by the zionist entity in Gaza, I am supremely proud that our chapter was able to pass a robust BDS resolution with near unanimous support.
Growth of the Internacional and Electoral Working Groups
Since I've been on Steering Committee, the lightning rod of the chapter has certainly been our electoral work, which makes sense in light of some particularly poor endorsements/candidate relationships at both the national level and by other DSA chapters. By the time I got involved in the leadership of our Electoral Working Group, the group had experienced three major failures (failure to follow up meaningfully on the Danny Nowell win due to Electoral WG leadership at the time not having the capacity to run the group effectively; failure to gain chapter consensus with a voter guide put out by the Electoral WG—and self-crit approved by Steering Committee; and unmitigated failure in our Joshua Bradley endorsement) and was floundering.
I and my co-chair Gabe F were able to rebuild the working group into the powerhouse it is today through direct asks and actively onboarding the new members we did gain. We would make sure to reach out to people who expressed interest in the working group via dm, and we would take time at the end of our meetings to talk with first-time working group attendees to explain what we were working on and answer any questions they might have. That latter point is huge since there is such a high barrier to entry in terms of terminology, campaigns, strategy, and structure that it is a miracle anybody stays with a working group barring some kind of onboarding. These two tools in our organizing bucket—direct asks and onboarding—were how we were able to defeat some of the strongest political machines in Carrboro/Chapel Hill and Durham. Another key aspect of our success was taking the time to put together effective campaigns, which I will elaborate on in the relevant section under insights.
The Internacional Working Group is another working group I am proud to have helped grow. Originally two separate groups: International Solidarity Working Group and Spanish-Language Infrastructure and Outreach Committee, these two groups both struggled with capacity issues and were moribund. Combining the two into one group has spurred new life and vigor into the newly unified group. Now the group has grown past this, but the initial difference between getting 3 people in a meeting versus getting 6 feels huge and is a big boost to morale. Nobody wants to stick around in a group that feels moribund, and this consolidation played a big part in improving the vitality of that work.
Speaking of that work, some of the most fun I've had in DSA is connecting International Committee (the National DSA body) work to our chapter, such as with my trip to Venezuela, the Venezuelan Feminist Tour's stop here (they still say our stop was their favorite and best organized—huge point of pride for the chapter in my opinion!), the Venezuela-DSA event Housing: An International Struggle our chapter organized, the Demystifying Korea event, and our stop on the Mexico Solidarity Project tour. A lot of this work has been made possible because I am also on the International Committee and have been able to connect the right people, so it'll be important for other members from our chapter to join the International Committee (which you can do here!) as I take some time off to parent. And I am very proud of our strident support for Palestine and Palestinians during this ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Getting our Dues Share
Dues Share is a percentage of dues our chapter’s members pay to National DSA that are supposed to be given to our chapter. However, our chapter had not received our dues share until April 2023 because it had not been successfully set up yet. I made it my goal to set up our dues share no matter how hard it would be. It actually turned out to be pretty easy to get set up; it really just required emailing people in National DSA and confirming our bank account. It may be that people at the national-level were less easy to work with in the past, but in all honesty, this should have been done years ago and we have missed out on a lot of money because it wasn't. Regardless, I got this done within about a month of taking office as treasurer, and as a result, we have about doubled our income. This is my chief accomplishment as treasurer, but I hope people have also found me a prompt and efficient treasurer to work with on other things.
Limitations
Growth of other Working Groups
Unfortunately, I have not been able to be involved with every working group to the same degree as I have for Internacional and Electoral. I've tried to share some of the strategies that have worked in those groups at chapter trainings, but there's a difference between me saying what has been effective in other groups versus me actively spending the capacity to put those practices in place within a working group. Direct asks and working group onboarding, plus doing meeting announcements several days ahead of time, plus choosing effective campaigns are my recommendations to other groups. Another possibility to consider is consolidation if there is a group similar enough, which played a huge role in Internacional WG becoming a robust and healthy group.
Building the Spanish-Language Capacity of our Chapter
This dovetails a bit with the previous discussion about consolidating International Solidarity Working Group and Spanish-Language Infrastructure and Outreach Committee (SLIO). I started SLIO with lofty goals of increasing our bilingual capacity, and we did not achieve those goals. We do have greater bilingual capacity now than our mostly just relying on Sebastian FG in the past, but the initial goals set out in that committee were not achieved. I attribute this to my own lack of capacity for the project and the difficulty in mobilizing an already small number of competent members to achieve a pretty big goal. This work is not dead, but it is a smaller part of the larger goal of Internacional Working Group, and I hope as we grow and have more Spanish speakers, we can revisit some of these goals again.
Delegating
A huge deficiency of mine that I have sought to improve upon is ability to delegate. I think I have improved at delegating, but I still find it scary and historically, not delegating work has led to me getting over capacity. The difficulty with me and delegating likely stems from the fear that the person being delegated to won't end up doing the thing in question, which is sometimes the outcome. But, I think I have learned the key is to delegate but check up ahead of time on the progress of the task in question. That and feeling greater and greater trust for my comrades has helped me with this deficiency, but I’m still not great at it.
Mission: Red Triangle
Credit goes to Robert W for the name of this project. I initiated what would be named Mission: Red Triangle because at the time, there was a sense of aimlessness in the chapter, and I sought to bring us all together as a chapter to chart a path forward. I believe the reflection period of Mission: Red Triangle was incredibly useful since we hadn’t really taken time to look at our previous campaigns and what about them was successful and what limitations they had. In that spirit, I am writing this document, and I believe a greater sense of the need for debrief and retrospection has been cultivated in the chapter from Mission: Red Triangle. That being said, I think more could and can still be done to support the priority campaign we decided upon as the culmination of that project, and I believe the priority campaign could use more support from the chapter as a whole. This lack of support is something I could have done more about and for that and some of the other organizational hurdles the Mission: Red Triangle process faced, I definitely take some part of the blame.
Insights
How to win campaigns
Having won a few campaigns now, I believe I can make some recommendations on how to organize winning campaigns. The first step is designing the campaign. I believe a good campaign takes a local issue, ties it to our socialist analysis, and has a clear win state. For example, with the Carrboro Greenway Campaign, the local issue was that a small group of rich homeowners was blocking a key piece of green infrastructure everyone else in town wanted. This ties to our socialist analysis because we were able to highlight the inherent class conflict at play and could radicalize people with this local instance of our overall socialist ideology as well as our ecosocialism. The campaign had a clear win state because we specifically were seeking to pressure Carrboro Town Council to vote to approve the greenway over the objections of the rich homeowners, which they did. Having a clear win state is important because it provides a specific goal for people to organize towards and lets you know whether your campaign was successful. Without a clear win state, people don’t feel like they are making progress and get burnt out.
Other recommendations would be to organize campaigns that build ties with other groups and communities in the area, which stems from the local issue recommendation. We were able to do this with both the Carrboro Greenway Campaign—building a good relationship with TriangleBlogBlog in the process as well as demonstrating our political might to the other members of council—and we were able to begin a relationship with the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People with the Nate Baker campaign, which will hopefully result in us building inroads with Durham’s Black community, assuming we are effective in maintaining that relationship in the future.
Demonstrating momentum is another important aspect of effective campaigns. You can demonstrate momentum by publicizing metrics throughout the campaign, like the Carrboro Greenway Campaign did with our petition signature count, and through posting pictures of the turnouts of events. Nothing scared our opponents during the Nate Baker Campaign more than the picture of 25 DSA members volunteering to knock doors. I heard about the photo from other candidates and their staff constantly. Because campaigns take time and a lot of work, demonstrating momentum is key to keeping people engaged through the lifespan of the campaign.
Last but most important is using direct asks. Nothing I’ve ever done while organizing is half as useful as just DMing people and asking them to come out to a meeting or event. The dm is important versus making a general ask on discord because of the bystander effect. If you dm someone, they generally feel more like they need to at least come up with an excuse why the can’t help. Anyone who comes to a meeting or event that you didn’t reach out to is a blessing from God and you ought to treat them as such—beyond that, you need to make direct asks!
Talk to strangers
From my position on Steering Committee and being able to watch our numbers climb, one of the most useful ways of getting new people involved in our chapter—and bringing in fresh faces is critical to the ongoing success of an all volunteer org like ours—is by talking to strangers. The more we table, the more we canvass, and the more we do protest support, the more we grow. As we continue planning new actions and campaigns, I highly, highly, highly recommend we ensure whatever we are doing has an external face to it where we are actively talking to new people outside our existing social circles. This will be key to our continued growth.
Organizing in a multi-tendency chapter
Organizing across tendency can be a challenge sometimes. In my experience, the more grounded in local conditions the work you are doing, the easier it is to work across tendency because usually the differences don’t come up. Where differences do come up, I believe focusing on how to achieve shared goals and framing discussion around that is more productive than hashing out more theoretical ideological differences, which usually is not that productive a line of discussion.
Structure matters
Organizing in a democratic organization like our own requires balancing the principles of democracy with the necessities of action. How we navigate this balance is determined by our structure, and as such, structure matters. I personally favor chapter membership democratically empowering specific members or working groups or committees with a mandate and then giving them the space and trust to do their work. As seen in the retrospectives carried out during Mission: Red Triangle and through my own and I am sure many of y’all’s experience, capacity is the lifeblood of the chapter. Maintaining redundant or obsolete structures costs precious capacity and renders us less well equipped to fight capitalism and the forces of reaction. As such, I have spent a lot of time amending the bylaws and writing resolutions to improve our chapter structurally so as to hopefully improve both our ability to be both democratic and effective while also more efficiently using the capacity we have.
Ceiling is the Roof
Forgive me—it is basketball season. I can very earnestly say that I have never been more hopeful about the future of this chapter and its ability to meaningfully transform the Triangle. I am thrilled at the list of nominees for next Steering Committee and am confident that they will continue to build this chapter and organize the Triangle effectively. I intend on remaining involved in the chapter, albeit at whatever capacity parenthood allows, and I am excited to still help where I can and watch the great work my comrades can achieve together. I want to thank the rest of Steering Committee from both terms—Mika M, Peter T, Robert W, David S, Jason B, Daniel M, Travis S, Cara C, Tim H, Zoe L, and Hwa H. I want to especially thank my indefatigable fellow co-chair Iri Wen for her incredibly hard work these past two years. She has been indispensable to the chapter, and I am so glad she is finally getting a break.