Rules for Revolutionaries Quotes

“It will be hard to dispel the myth that spending big money on advertising is the path to electoral victory, but we do know that if people organize, we can go up against big money and win.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“If it is not led by people of color and immigrants, if it is doesn’t have fighting racism and xenophobia at its core, and if it is not mobilizing white people to lead other whites to choose multiracial solidarity over fear and hate—then it’s not a revolution.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“If you have such an intense workload that you feel like you don’t have time to take care of yourself in a basic way on a continual basis, talk to your manager.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“With this we were working against history. The mass meeting was traditionally seen as what we would call a “low-bar ask” on the ladder of engagement, and the organizing outcome was usually a list of interested people who a staffer would then follow up with individually in the weeks following the meeting. To make Zack’s plan work, we needed at least 10 percent of the people at the meeting to commit to holding phone banks and more than half of the remaining people to sign up to be the core attendees for these events, which we would also then promote to other area supporters online.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“She began by doing the work herself. Then she trained some volunteers. When the team grew to the point of becoming unwieldy, she created roles and gave volunteers responsibility and, with that responsibility, titles. The live chat team soon had live chat volunteers (LCVs) and point of contacts (PCs).”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“Grow complexity by solving practical problems as they arise”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“You will then have to keep changing until you connect with and finally communicate in a meaningful way with the people you are proposing to serve.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“The people running the nonprofits participating in the coalition are not going to support you when you try to blow everything up.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“Create a centralized strategic plan using whatever process is right for your movement. Make sure the plan has tasks that can be repeated by volunteers that add up to progress on the plan. Then delegate chunks of work from your plan to a distributed network of volunteer leaders who can work across space and time, and in the numbers necessary, to meet concrete goals and make change possible.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“It’s important to recognize that a revolution won’t be launched by consensus.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“Instead of letting a thousand flowers bloom, build a networked flower factory.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“Those are personal acts of solidarity, but they do not excuse us from the need to anchor our political analysis in a critique of structural racism.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“We also need to understand that white supremacy is at the heart of the problem—not just a racially associated economic inequality.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“But whether someone is willing and able to do the work, follows through on important tasks, and is willing to be held accountable.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“The good news for organizers who want to help build the political revolution is that people really are just waiting for you to ask them to do something big.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“The ask should never be for volunteers to add their names to a list so that organizers might call them back later; it needs to be immediate and crucial.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“The big organizing model that can fuel revolutions believes that communities are filled with talented and intelligent people who understand what is broken and, when given material and strategic resources, can wrest power from elites and make lasting change. A political revolution is different from community organizing as we know it today.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“proved themselves to be effective and accountable through work.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“When organizers figure out how to integrate the huge opportunities that new, social technology provides with effective peer-to-peer organizing principles and practices as part of a smart, centralized plan—that’s big organizing.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything

“The result is that too many elected officials are basing important decisions not on what would be best for all Americans but on what they imagine would appeal to a small number of swing voters usually at the center-right of the political debate.”
― Becky Bond, Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything