[This post is part of a series on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.]

For those who get really involved in union activism or political activism, there are different ways that such activists use their time. There are what I call the “floater” activists. Floaters go to all the meetings, go to all the protests and rallies, and spend a lot of time socializing with other activists. I call them floaters because they float around to everything, but this floating happens without being social rooted or having deeper political designs. Floaters will often think they have the most influence on social change because they do everything and go to everything, but I think this detracts from a more grounded approach that is more than the sum of its parts.

In contrast to the floaters, there are the activist “builders.” There are two things that builders do: 1) they build and cohere networks of people who are affected by a problem, and 2) they organize these networks in a particular direction to address that problem.

At the workplace level, this looks like talking to coworkers about a shared grievance, bringing those coworkers together to discuss what to do about it, and then taking action against the boss to solve the problem. I discuss how to do this in my intro post on 1-on-1 organizing conversations.

For this post I want to zoom out and show how a similar approach is effective when organizing more broadly in a larger political space around longer-term and bigger-picture goals. Such larger political spaces might include everyone in a city working on a particular issue like police brutality or it might be everyone taking a particular approach on a national issue such as those in the US doing direct action organizing around Palestine. For my presentation here, the larger political space I’ll use to illustrate is a large union with many thousands of members spread across many job sites.

Say I belonged to such a union and wanted to make our contract campaigns stronger to address a range of big issues like cost of health insurance, workplace safety, and wages. If I were to take a floater approach, I’d sign up for a bunch of union committees and go to all the meetings and go to all the union events. However, floating around like this between all of these things won’t really add a new dimension or base of people to a cause.

In contrast, a builder would approach the goal of strengthening a contract campaign in a large union totally differently. They’d seek out those people in the union who care a lot and also want a stronger campaign. Rather than just seeing fellow union members at meetings and events, the builder uses 1-on-1 conversations outside of work and meetings to build relationships with those who are active (and who want to become active) in the campaign. In the process of building these relationships, the builder also seeks to find common ground around two key questions: 1) what do we want this campaign to look like? 2) And how are we going to make that happen?

At the scale of a large contract campaign, there’s no one way to go about this. As you have conversations with fellow unionists, you’ll have to listen carefully and think through complex social dynamics for what is strategic in bringing people together and organizing with them in a unified direction. Maybe a particular contract demand, like health care costs, is agitating and unifying. Maybe it’s a structural issue of the campaign, such as lack of transparency in contract negotiations. 

Whatever it is, the builder looks for what brings people together and motivates them to want to fight for a stronger contract campaign. At a certain point, the builder brings those who they’ve been having 1-on-1 conversations with into group discussions and meetings to further discover shared interests, craft goals, co-create strategy, and take concrete steps forward.

In my own experience in activism and in watching how others move through political space, the distinction between floaters and builders makes all the difference between those who are effective in giving shape and force to organizing and those who blend in with the organizational wallpaper.

Relationships Are the Engine of Social Change

The central difference is how builders take time to build relationships using 1-on-1 conversations instead of just spending all of one’s time in meetings. The kind of relationships you build with people who you only see at meetings can often be shallow and one-dimensional. Rather, the kind of relationships you build in 1-on-1 conversations enable you to connect with someone more thoroughly in a non-political space AND give you the time to explore activist ideas and goals more deeply.

In a recent presentation I gave to a group of fellow union activists from different industries, I emphasized the importance of 1-on-1 conversations in building networks and political unity. A few months later, one of the union activists who was there and was involved in a large-scale union contract fight came up to me to thank me. He said he was now prioritizing 1-on-1s in his organizing and it had made all the difference. 

I asked him what had changed since he started focusing more on 1-on-1s. He said that people he had had a 1-on-1 with were much more willing to get involved and put serious time into various projects related to the campaign. This mirrored my own experience. A campaign can be a far more welcoming place to commit to when everyone feels like they have trusting relationships and understand the overall vision, both of which are particularly explored and developed in 1-on-1 conversations.

Identify Who to Talk to

When you organize around a particular problem at work, such as lack of safety equipment in a particular department, then it’s often fairly obvious that you need to talk to everyone in that department. In a larger space like the contract campaign of a very large union, there’s thousands of people you could ask to have a 1-on-1 conversation with and it’s not always obvious who you should reach out to.

While having occasional 1-on-1s with floaters can help you navigate organizational dynamics, floaters are mostly not a group that builders should invest lots of time in. Most floaters tend to get stuck in their ways. Occasionally a floater will get disillusioned with their more formal bureaucratic surroundings and will become a passionate builder, but in my years in the movement that is relatively rare.

Rather, as a builder the main people you want to look for are those who really care and want to make things better. You can’t just look at a crowd of people and tell which ones care the most, but there are some signs you can look for. When someone gets mad about whatever the problem is, that means they care. When you go up to someone and ask what they think about the problem or how it makes them feel, people who really care will tend to share. If after a brief conversation you ask someone if they want to get coffee sometime to talk about this more, they say yes, that’s another good sign.

How Builders Approach 1-on-1s

After the aforementioned presentation about these kinds of 1-on-1s, a fellow unionist asked me what I talk about in them. When meeting up with others through larger political spaces, you won’t have as much in common as when you meet up with an immediate coworker who you have the same working conditions and boss as. Without a roadmap these 1-on-1s can lack direction.

When I have a 1-on-1 in the context of a larger political space, I try to balance the more informal relationship-building stuff with exploring organizing ideas and exploring common goals. Here’s a loose framework I use when going into 1-on-1s with others who I share a larger political space with.

First, I just go for small talk. “How’s your week going?”

Second, I focus on the more relationship-building side of the conversation. A good starter question for this I’ve found is asking something about how they got to where they are now. This might be how they got into the job that they are doing union organizing with or how they came to care about a particular issue. I try to leave this open to going off into different tangents or directions, to wherever they might want to go with it. If they bring up something else that’s an important part of who they are I try to ask follow-up questions. I share back to them whatever feels relevant to what they shared with me.

Third, I segue into talking about what’s going on with their activism or our campaign right now. How do they feel about it? What is important to them in their activism at this moment?

Fourth, I zoom out from what’s happening in the moment and ask what we need to do to make our campaign, organization, or social movement stronger. Should we join a particular coalition or start our own? How can we keep building up new activists to take on more leadership? What have other organizations done to address this problem? 

I strive to be clear about what I think about vision and strategy but not in a dogmatic way. “I really think we can be more democratic in determining our campaign strategy, and one way to do that could be XYZ. Do you think that would work? Is there another way to do that?”

Because day-to-day organizing can be so busy, I think many new organizers haven’t thought much independently about the larger political strategy and goals of their organizing. They also don’t have a habit of bringing this up with others. You don’t have to be some expert strategist to have thoughts about this. Rather taking a little time to think about it for oneself and discuss it in 1-on-1s can expand the horizons of your organizing and sharpen your critical thinking. Shared visions and strategies are what holds a network of activists together within the context of larger and often loosely-defined political spaces.

Fifth, I zoom back in on possible next steps. Maybe some next steps become clear from the preceding discussion. Maybe there’s nothing specific that comes out of the discussion, and rather it’s a simpler question about who else should we be having these 1-on-1 conversations with.

I find these initial 1-on-1s with people typically last 60 – 90 minutes, which feels normal for a first coffee conversation with someone. If we really hit it off or this isn’t our first time meeting up, these convos can sometimes go a lot longer. If this is my second or third time meeting up with someone in a context like this, I find that the same framework above tends to be useful.

While I can’t overstate the organizing effectiveness of 1-on-1s, I also find the relationship-building side of 1-on-1s to be much more nourishing than going to meetings all the time. Part of what burns out so many activists is not having an emotionally sustainable way to stay committed to the work in the long term, which is precisely what the human connection of 1-on-1s provides.

How to Balance 1-on-1s with Everything Else

Some people are initially daunted at having 1-on-1s because there are so many people to talk to. The balance that I’ve found to work for me is, no matter how much overall time I’m spending on my activism, I aim to have an equal number of 1-on-1s as I do meetings and actions. So if in a typical month I go to two meetings and one protest, I try to do three 1-on-1s as well. I’ve periodically cut out certain committee and organizational meetings that aren’t as important to me in order to give enough time to having 1-on-1s around the things that are important.

While this balance has been ideal for me, when a campaign gets hot and there’s a big increase in meetings and actions then my 1-on-1s drop off. That’s ok because after a big action or campaign is over then the number of meetings declines. I find this lull period is an ideal time to ask people out for 1-on-1s because recent events will be fresh in people’s minds and they’ll be motivated to think through what they want to see more of.

Conclusion

Recurring 1-on-1s with your closer collaborators keeps the relationships strong and the organizing adaptive and robust. But even if I just have a single 1-on-1 with someone, the bond from that 1-on-1 can last a long time. Even years later that person and I both know that we took time to sit down just the two of us to connect, share, and explore. I trust them and they trust me far more than someone I’ve just seen at meetings over the years, and that trust can be the basis of long-term collaboration and mutual support. 

When you make consistent 1-on-1s a focus of your organizing, the network of people who move together can become expansive. As more collaborators themselves become builders and have their own 1-on-1s, these networks can swell and exercise great leverage when mobilized in service of a unified strategy and vision.