Don’t just resist: #AlwaysForward.

Quick summary: check out and share alwaysforwardus.com, a new multi-issue organizing hub for research, meeting with elected representatives, and replacing the ones that refuse to act on climate, strengthening the safety net, fair economics, gun safety, privacy, and other issues. Read on for more details!

How This All Started

Two summers ago, I had one of those conversations that leaves you with an idea you can’t quite get out of your head…

“You know what would really scare Congress to move on climate? If ordinary people started showing up at their offices to talk about it, not just activists.”

The idea came from Bruce Buckheit, a former top EPA lawyer with a long history of speaking truth to power. He’d been at EPA for decades until the negligence of the GW Bush Administration forced him out. This was a big enough deal at the time that 60 minutes did a story on it. Bruce’s wife had a similarly long career working in Senator John Glenn’s DC office, so this was genuine distilled expertise on how this stuff works.

Bruce described to me the process he’d seen representatives use to make decisions again and again: they had strong incentives to take what the activists and lobbyists are saying on their sides of an issue, set them aside, and figure out what ordinary people in the district do or do not care about. Which in most cases means exactly what you think: the lobbyists win.

I recall having a stack of objections to this particular idea, mostly around the generalized level of apathy being too great to overcome. “But the only people who care enough to say something are the activists!” I think I said.

Then on a dark Tuesday in early November of 2016, that all changed.

Trump’s election has put a great many things in process, but one of them has been a remarkable easing of the challenge of getting more engaged in the processes of American democracy. My wife Jenifer and I are long time activists; we first got involved in the run up to the second Gulf War, an idea that exactly 2 national Democrats were opposed to when we first got involved. She’s been professionally involved since then, I’ve dipped in and out of professional work but have never been able to quit all the way.

That whole time, we have been praying for more Americans to get interested in and involved in politics.

This wasn’t exactly what we had in mind. Yet another reminder to be careful what you pray for! But whatever. We’ll take it!

So I Built a Thing

Late last summer, I started playing around with another iteration of Bruce’s idea. My case for Hillary partially involved that I thought her presidency was going to require a strengthened progressive movement, maybe even one that could deliver her a better Congress in 2018. So I wanted to start tracking who in Congress was good and who was rotten on certain issues. I put together a little spreadsheet based on data from the Reflective Democracy Campaign and start recruiting friends to help do the research.

At the time, people’s reaction to this idea was along the lines of “sure, seems like it’s worth trying.” Since the election, most reactions have been more like, “YES WE NEED THIS YESTERDAY HOW CAN I HELP??”

Over the holidays I put together a very quick demo site based on this idea and the data we’ve collected so far. It’s very much a work in progress, but here are some screenshots, and please visit the Always Forward site and have a look around:

Screenshots from the first version of the Always Forward site: the Congress Grid, the representative detail page, and a first take on What We Want. And yeah, purple and bright green. I don’t know. I kind of like it!

The rough outline of the strategy we have in mind so far has three stages:

Research into where representatives are on issues and ideasMeetings with those representatives, andElections, where we are going to drive as much support as we can to replacing representatives of both parties who are not with us and defending those who are

Our first focus is on supporting efforts to drive local meetings with staff of Congressional Representatives and Senators around the issues coming at us fast, like the repeal of Obamacare.

We’re non-partisan: we’re convinced it’s helpful to talk to leaders that are with us (so they know we’re here, and because a lot of them are probably as scared about where things are going as we are!) as well as ones that disagree with us. But we are unabashedly pro-partisan. My wife and I were deeply involved in local Democratic party politics when we met in Southern California, and it was an absolutely incredible experience. You meet the BEST people, you understand your community in a completely different way, and you’d be surprised at how easy it is to build relationships and have a big impact if you keep showing up.

And yet, since moving to the Bay Area, we’ve noticed that with kids and day jobs and long commutes, it’s a LOT harder to rally at night to make it out to all the meetings. On principle, we believe deeper engagement shouldn’t be limited just to people who can make it to these things. We’re already talking to one of the architects of the Bernie campaign that built a large, effective organization without meetings. We’re going to try lots of creative tactics. The best of movements for justice have always included art at their core, so that will be a big part of it.

We don’t have funding or a legal organization. At this point it’s just me building the site, a small group of friends helping me cook the strategy and a larger group helping out with the research. I’m not sure it even needs funding or legal organization. As a Lean Organizing true believer, I’d like to see how far we can get without lawyers and money. But I’m not putting limits on it, either. If white nationalists can raise $8–10M for a PAC, maybe we’ll need a PAC too.

This is Already Working

There’s at least one other group working on a similar strategy, around the Indivisible Guide. We’re in conversation with them, we love what they’re doing, and it’s clearly working like gangbusters given the crowds showing up at representatives’ offices already. We certainly expect (and hope!) thatthere will be other groups pursuing similar strategies. It’s all part of the patchwork quilt strategy that Jesse Jackson laid out so eloquently in 1998. And the research we’ve done has already proven super interesting. We’ll have more to say about this soon.

Someone’s probably going to ask if going on offense on our ideas is a good idea in this moment. The honest answer is that we have no idea. My hunch is that we have to keep an eye on the real prize here, which is getting the Congress and Senate back in 2018 or 2020, even though it’s going to be bloody difficult. While there are clearly a lot of immediate policies it’s important to just stop, when it comes to elections, it’s tough to beat somethin’ with nuthin’. There are already some very strong case for how this is a crucial to making the case to both Trump voters and the gargantuan numbers of eligible Americans who either don’t vote at all, or who only vote in presidential year elections.

What you can do right now

The very first thing you can do, of course, is to share either this post or the site.

(Maybe you’re not the kind of person who shares political things. We get it, but if you care about what’s happening in this country, it might be time to re-evaluate that decision. And if you still don’t feel comfortable sharing this, we’d love to know why — or better yet ,what your ideas are for campaigns that you would share.)

The next thing you can do is start thinking about the communities you can reach out to. We understand the risk involved in this. Before the election, my wife and I put together a list of parents from our kids’ elementary school and asked them to get involved with GOTV. It was a little scary reaching out to people whose politics we could only guess at! But that’s the kind of thing we’re all going to need to be doing more of.

The other thing you can do is help with is the data collection. Use the Get Local link on the site to get involved, or you can reach out to us any time at facebook.com/AlwaysForwardUS, on the Twitters at @AlwaysForwardUS (or use the #AlwaysForward hashtag), or by email, or carrier pigeons, or, hey, drop some stone tablets or papyrus scrolls and we’ll figure something out. If your reps are being awful — or if they’re being great — we want to hear about it and keep track of it. Also, if you’ve got a good argument for or against any of the issues listed on What We Want, let us know that too. Over time, we’re going to be building the best, most persuasive arguments to arm activists with.

What’s it going to take?

Since the election there have been a lot of “easy things you can do a for a few minutes a day” type sites. Maybe that’s a good start, but my hunch is saying we’re going to need more than that: we are going to need a lot of people making a deeper, soul-level commitment to improving our democracy. My wife and I made that decision 15 years ago almost in spite of ourselves. Once you get in, it can be a little hard to get out. Being this involved has definitely had its ups and downs; I won’t lie, I wasn’t prepared for the effect seeing millions of people vote for someone like Trump was going to have on me, let alone his victory.

But I’m convinced that being part of democracy needs to be part of our lives right now. It’s part of engaging fully with reality. One of the long-term challenges the US left honestly hasn’t made much progress on is how to make starting out on the path to deeper engagement easier and more clear. It’s still vague, but our hope is that the strategy that’s emerging right now, from Always Forward and the other groups springing up, are going to solve that problem. But if something isn’t working for you, please, let us know.

Maybe in our lifetimes we’ll see politics get boring again. But it certainly isn’t right now. We know it’s daunting at the outset, but the only way to solve that problem is by connecting with allies and working together. We have a lot of fun, challenging and interesting work to do. The future isn’t going to build itself. Always forward!

p.s. Make sure you don’t miss wee dumpster fire mode and emoji mode !