Equality Camp

Meet in the Middle is this Saturday May the 30th in Fresno. 1pm. City Hall. We’ll be there. Join us.

There are an awful lot of groups you can join or work with to help.

Matt has a pretty complete list at stop8.org

This is a decentralized movement. A first as far as I know. There are many groups you can help.
I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know what’s going on in this new movement. Here are some personal thoughts about what I view as the most critical organizations to getting a successful ballot initiative. Please help them or any of the other groups listed at stop8.org or begin your own to meet an unmet need.

Courage Campaign is very agile and entrepreneurial new group. It is dedicated to a general progressive movement in CA. Marriage equality is one issue they care about, and what they are focussed on right now. CC has done effective grassroots training via
Camp Courage which was inspired in part by Camp Obama and, I believe, even Equality Camp. I’ve been through the training and they are very well run. CC is good at listening and communicating appreciation and inclusion to people who want to get involved with them.

Courage Campaign has a small paid staff and is the most Net savvy (aside from our Equality Camp crew + JointheImpact). It has done a nice job of community management thus far and I get the impression it is committed to sharing voter data during a signature drive or initiative.

Marriage Equality USAhas been fighting on this issue forever. it has institutional wisdom without being institutional because it seems to be a federation of local grassroots groups across the country. MEUSA’s fearless and very visible leader Molly McKay (though she’s very overworked and underpaid -or perhaps completely volunteer. People donate some money. If anyone would benefit the movement by having some serious salary help, it’s Molly).

MEUSA is as grassroots as it comes. It’s in all 50 CA counties I believe. It could use a lot of help in the Net department but that seems to be an issue of money and people. Savvy strategy geeks who can do pro bono work could have a huge impact with MEUSA. Contact us if you’d like to be of help.

EQCA is the 800 lb gorilla in the CA marriage equality movement. It has far and away the most money. It also has the most baggage. That’s because the group and its leader Geoff Kors were in a key position during the failed and troubled Noon8 campaign. Geoff did publicly make some mea culpa during the Equality Summit and I give him points for that. For example he vowed never again to turn over our community’s well-being to outside consultants who are not part of the community.

I believe EQCA was begun as a lobby and it sure seemed to know how to do that, because it helped get marriage equality passed through the CA Legislature (it was vetoed by Arnold both times). I was surprised to see EQCA engage in a full fledged grassroots plan but it seems to have gone out and bought instead of built a grassroots team (Marc Solomon and Amy Mello from Massachusetts about whom I hear great things). It also has Andrea Shorter who runs coalitions and partnerships I believe.

No one has been more dubious than I about EQCA and the No on 8 committee groups. You can listen to the talk show I did on what went wrong with Prop 8. But EQCA has the same end goal as everyone else: winning. And it seems to have been learning from its mistakes. The first ads it has made have gay families in them. They’re exactly the kinds of spots that I wish we had seen during the Prop 8 campaign but am happy to see now. It’s trying to connect with faith groups and be more mindful of the many ethnic, racial and faith communities in California.

My recent and first conversation with Amy left me hopeful. She seemed to really understand the kind of interpersonal work EQCA has to do to play nicely with the many other grassroots groups. She told me verbally that EQCA would share its voter data and that it’s being audited and would post fundraising information. All of these things, if done, will go a long way to helping the movement work well and find advantage in its decentralized nature. I believe many others organizers are dubious about these things happening but, frankly, I don’t see us all succeeding without them occurring. We all want equality and we need to do whatever we can to help EQCA make these shifts.

EQCA has an online community manager beginning work shortly but community management, the Net and Net strategy is definitely its biggest blind spot. EQCA has a lot of work to do to tap into the strong grassroots groups (there are so many I can’t list them all here) run by people with a lot of heart and a little budget. EQCA is similar to most larger organizations who are used to a pre-Net operational mode of claiming credit in the press and asking people for their money but not necessarily their ideas or input. I’ve been around the Net long enough to know that this is a culture shift that can take a very long time. We don’t have a very long time but the motivations for winning are very high. At this point I’m going to presume the best. This is new territory. They are moving faster than the record labels did (how is it that Hilary Rosen ends up in these situations? ie.Board member of HRC former head RIAA)

We need more open data, sharing and geeks with the right skills to help these many groups in order for this movement to coalesce as effectively as it can. So any geeks with open source project management experience would be very valuable help for the civil rights movement of our time.

There is valuable work being done by many groups, but these seem to be the highest profile now in terms of grassroots ballot initiative organizing with the breadth to oversee the initiative.

-heather