Introduction
Have you started a campaign? Do you have a campaign goal or goals? Does it fulfil basic criteria? Learn from past campaigns how they chose their goals. This book excerpt about choosing a campaign goal is from Daniel Hunter’s book, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow: An Organizing Guide.
Book Excerpt
Choosing a Campaign Goal – Basic Criteria
Choose a campaign goal, don’t forget some basic criteria to consider:
- The goal includes tangible benefits that impact people’s lives;
- The goal is specific and may be achieved in an appropriate period of time;
- The people who will do the work feel motivated by the issue;
- The goal resonates with current and potential allies;
- The campaign has clear, identifiable targets—the people who can implement the needed change;
- The campaign helps connect the single-issue with other issues, movements, and seeing the bigger objectives of the movement.
Revolutionary Reforms to Storm the Castle
As people think about goals, they often ask the question: How can we make sure our movement addresses core, structural issues as opposed to merely making the current system a little more humane? How do we shift and transform public consciousness?
There are no simple answers to these questions. If we had enough organized power to win our ultimate demands for change, it would be easy. But we don’t.
We don’t have the power right now to make the massive changes needed to overturn the prison system, demilitarize and rebuild public schools, build a comprehensive health care system including support for mental health and addiction recovery services, provide affordable housing options to everyone, and rebuild our criminal justice system on the basis of reconciliation and restorative justice. But we have to start somewhere.
Gandhi’s Salt March
We can learn about this challenging aspect of campaigning from Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi’s aim for the Indian independence movement included kicking out the largest empire the world had ever seen. Yet one of his campaigns included a relatively minor goal. At the time, Britain held a monopoly on India’s salt, keeping its production and distribution under strict control and taxing it heavily. In response, Gandhi led a 24-day, 240-mile march to the seashore, where he made salt in defiance of British law.
That action kicked off a massive national civil disobedience campaign during which thousands of Indians made their own salt, all with a goal of forcing the British to surrender its unjust monopoly.
On the face of it, the campaign goal appeared relatively tame: How could making salt kick out the British empire? But Gandhi knew that the campaign would touch the Indian people. Everyone needed salt.
Winning the campaign would build Indians’ self-confidence and their sense of self-reliance, which the British empire had undermined for over a century by promoting dependency and a sense of helplessness.
Gandhi during the Salt March, 1930. Wikimedia Commons.
Gandhi sought goals that would build people’s personal sense of power, their sense of control over their lives, their self-respect— and the people responded with a massive movement that ultimately broke British control of India.
This process of picking smaller campaigns that lead to bigger ones has been likened to storming a castle. Castles are surrounded and protected by moats and military outposts. A system as complex and robust as mass incarceration has many, many moats and outposts protecting it. If our goal is to dismantle it, we have to start by crossing moats and removing outposts as we make our way toward the castle.
Such campaign goals might be called “outposts of reform.” Winning them does not bring upheaval to the entire system. But it does build energy and strengthen our belief that we can make change.
And, importantly, tackling outposts of reform gets us closer to the castle—especially when we help people see the issues so deeply that they join the quest for taking on the castle and not only the outpost right in front of them.
The poetry committee at Tamms made that switch, moving from service to working for reforms, and ultimately fighting for the abolition of the prison itself. Because they focus on smaller outposts of reform, campaigns tend to start at the local level, building up to bigger and bigger levels as the movement strengthens.
This means that national organizations can hamper the efforts of local campaigns when they try to forcefully impose a strategy or ideological framework.
Strong, healthy campaigns create spaces where people get to challenge each other on important movement questions:
- Do we focus on the elimination of the worst prisons first, or target “average” prisons and expose how fundamentally wrong all of them are?
- Do we focus on slowing down the growth of prisons—for example, halting the massive expansion of detention centers for immigrants—or do we pour our efforts primarily into closing ones already in existence?
- Do we focus on prison abuse like solitary confinement or prison alternatives like restorative justice practices?
Thinking about storming the castle helps keep us from merely looking at what is politically “realistic” and so only focusing narrowly on “achievable wins” in the immediate. Of course, some of our goals will seem politically unrealistic (if not, then we need bigger goals). Only by challenging the political realism of today are we going to transform it.
In that spirit, it’s helpful to remember that not all campaigns are successful. But even unsuccessful campaigns can be immensely valuable.
Montgomery Bus Boycott
A good reminder about this comes from a near breaking point during the Montgomery bus boycott. Because of high participation in the boycott, organizers needed to find rides for upwards of 30,000 to 40,000 bus boycotters. It was a massive logistical operation held together largely through the determination of a core group of women.
Montgomery city bus where Rosa Parks defied the city’s segregated bus transport policy. Courtesy of the National Civil Rights Museum
To complicate matters, Montgomery city leaders dusted off a law against “private taxis” such as those used during the boycott—threatening to destroy the entire movement. To solve the dilemma, Dr. King sought advice from T. J. Jemison, a leader in the ultimately unsuccessful Baton Rouge, Louisiana bus boycott of 1953. That boycott lasted only two weeks. But in the process, Jemison had faced this problem and found a way to skirt the law. They did this by running a citywide car pool in which people would “donate” to the movement organization per ride, which in turn would “donate” money to car owners and drivers.
This is a powerful reminder of the importance of campaigns learning from each other – and of recognizing that we stand on the shoulders of past campaigns, even if they weren’t successful.
The campaign that you run might be the Montgomery bus boycott, filled with historical glamor and garnering national and even international attention. Or your campaign might be the ill-fated 1953 bus boycott in Baton Rouge.
But if other campaigns can learn lessons from your successes and failures, and if you can spawn leaders who carry on the struggle, then it wasn’t in vain. We don’t get a Montgomery success without the “failures” of past campaigns.
The struggle in Montgomery highlights another important strategic principle: don’t shy away from boldness in your campaign—or escalating if your apparently tame goal doesn’t work out.
In Montgomery the original goals were very minor:
- respect on the buses,
- hiring black drivers for black routes, and
- a fixed dividing line between the black and white sections on the buses.
There was nothing about the end of segregation. It wasn’t until virulent opposition made the chances of such modest goals seem bleak that the movement decided to escalate.
In a stroke of both desperation and strategic insight, they expanded their demands to include full integration on the buses. If they couldn’t get their compromise, they might as well fight for what they really wanted.
This kind of shift requires boldness. It takes courage for a group to move from minor objectives—like holding a public event or a book club—to objectives embedded with the possibility of head-on confrontation with authority. We can be reminded of the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s words,
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted. – Frederick Douglass
Once a group has selected an outpost of reform, it is ready to turn its attention to running an actual campaign. We of course hope the campaign wins.
But whether a “success” or “failure,” if the campaign helps people raise their eyes toward “the castle” and gets people ready to storm it, the group and its campaign have made a valuable contribution to the struggle.
Access Full Book
This booklet is for people who want to act for change. It offers tools and activities you can use in groups. It’s filled with practical tips and strategic principles, with real-life examples of campaigns around the country. Each section ends with guiding questions to help think about next steps.
- Chapter 1: Roles in Movement-Building
Looks at different roles played in movements, examining our own strengths and those of others. - Chapter 2: Building Strong Groups
Focusses on building strong groups. Groups generate social power and are a building block of movement work. - Chapter 3: Creating Effective Campaigns
Examines creating change through campaigns.Campaigns harness the power of groups and direct that power toward a single goal. With intention and focus, campaigns create pressure to enact specific, concrete changes. By making these changes, we can chip away at the larger oppressive system and hone our ability to transform society.
The book also comes with a Study Guide – The New Jim Crow Study Guide and Call to Action. This study guide provides a launching pad for groups wishing to engage in deep, meaningful dialogue about race, racism, and structural inequality in the age of mass incarceration.
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About the Author
Daniel Hunter is an organizer and strategist with Training for Change, an activist training organization. He’s sought all over the globe for his expertise at organizing and direct action, having trained tens of thousands of activists in over a dozen countries.
He has previously authored a compelling narrative bringing to life the vibrancy of direct action campaigning in Strategy and Soul. He is also a contributor to the books Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution and We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America. More about the author at: www.DanielHunter.org.
