Can Youth Lead The Democracy Movement? [10-31-19]

Welcome to another episode of the third season of the podcast Another Way. This is Adam Icahn, campaigns manager for Equal Citizens. Today I'll be speaking to Joan Mandel, executive director of Democracy Matters, an organization dedicated to mobilizing students for democracy reform. Joan is an associate professor of sociology and anthropology emerita at Colgate University, where she directed the college's women's studies program. She also cut her teeth in the civil rights movement as a participant in the Freedom Rides and the early women's liberation movement. Joan was, moreover, my first mentor in this fight to fix our democracy. In fact, it's fair to say that I would never have worked on reform if not for her. Back in 2012, she gave a speech in Kingston, New York, at a union hall. If I remember correctly, at the time, I was a sophomore at Vassar College, and through a series of strange circumstances, I had just become a member of my college's Democracy Matters chapter. Though I knew nothing at the time about democracy policy, at Joan's urging, I attended her lecture, and in this talk that she gave, she argued that until we tackle our broken democracy, change on any issue just would not be possible. We had to fix democracy first. The road to a better future went right through citizens equality. And so for the next three years, I was her intern, and I've been in the fight for democracy reform ever since. Joan, it's a pleasure to have you on this podcast.

It's great to talk with you, Adam, as always.

As always. So, Joan, you've been on the front lines of democracy your whole life, from the civil rights movement to running political campaigns, to educating students at college and to running an advocacy organization. So I wanted to just start this conversation off with a simple question. What are you thinking right now about American democracy?

That's a really good question, Adam. And right now, I am really mixed. I have sometimes feeling extraordinarily optimistic, and other times at this moment, feeling extraordinarily unhappy about what's going on. So let me start with the downside of this. Clearly, we have an administration and a president who has enormous disdain for democracy, and we can obviously talk about some of the ways in which that has manifested itself. But right now, I think that's probably hardly anybody who would disagree with that view. And so that's very disturbing. You know, I've lived through a lot of presidents and a lot of presidents that I have not been particularly fond of. You know, the impeachment hearing and conviction. Well, the actual resignation of Richard Nixon and certainly some of the Bush years. You know, with the wars in Iraq. But I have never been as worried about a president's competency and belief in democracy as I have with this president. So that's extraordinarily disturbing. The positive side, the reason that I'm feeling so optimistic right now, is a couple of things. First of all, in terms of the pushback and the resistance against the kinds of things that I was just talking about is very, very exciting for me. I don't think that people have been as energized and as excited and as determined, and this is a very important point. Determined to create a sustained social movement, as I've seen in the resistance that is bubbling up all over this country. Determined to take back our democracy and find a way to elect a president who believes in democracy and will stand up for it. But if we push back a little bit, and we're not just talking about this exact moment, the optimism that I feel about democracy has to do with the fact that I've been in this fight, as you point out, a long time. And in particular, I started, as you know, Democracy matters almost 20 years ago, talking about the incredibly problematic and threatening role of big money in politics, in. In our democracy. And there were not a whole lot of people that really thought about that much or felt that democracy was immediately threatened by the role of money in politics. Fast forward 20 years to today, and we have the beginnings of a very strong and resilient democracy movement, because over 80%, if you look at the polling of the American people, believe that there's too much money in politics. They believe that wealthy people have more say than they do. They're pretty mad at that, and they want something done about the dominating role of very small elite, very wealthy small elite in our political system. So I think there's an appetite for change in the deep structure of democracy, as well as certainly an appetite for change in the immediate circumstances that we find ourselves with this president.

Right. And I think one of the reasons why I love talking to you so much is that with the history that you have in fighting for democracy, you have some great stories, and I want to go back a bit to your time working on political campaigns. You ran a campaign in Pennsylvania. I was wondering if you could hope or you could talk a little bit about the role that money and politics played in this campaign in the 80s, am I correct?

Yes, it was. It was. Actually, I ran three campaigns for an incumbent member of Congress in Pennsylv, right outside of Philadelphia. And the role of money in that campaign was so clear, and that wasn't very much money. I think we raised about $250,000, which sounds like, you know, peanuts today compared to what it takes to be elected to a member of Congress, not to mention the senate, to the U.S. senate. But in those days, the person that I worked for, who was Congressman Bob Edgar, who's now deceased, he was a Methodist minister, actually. He had no money and he didn't have any wealthy friends. So we had to spend enormous amount of time dialing for dollars, even though, as I said, Bob was able to win having raised $250,000. But every one of those dollars, you know, he had to be on the phone, he had to be calling people, and it took up an enormous amount of time and energy in the campaign. And he hated it. I hated it. Everyone hates dialing for dollars when they have to do it. It's very humiliating to have to beg people for money. And so Even then, in 1982, I was very much aware that the role of money was very important, even though we didn't have very many big donors at all. But nonetheless, the consuming focus on having to raise that money when we could have been talking about things like environment or women's right to choose or the funding for education, which is the things that we wanted to be talking about, was very depressing, frankly, and to most of us who were working at that time in politics. And of course, it's only gotten worse now when the amount of money that one has to raise is so enormous.

Right. And I think that's the important historical context, one that you've given me through the entire time I've known you, is that this is not a new problem. And, you know, we're going to be talking a lot about organizing with students, and it's consistently one of the things that we have to keep returning to, which is that the crises in our democracy are not new. Money and politics has played an outsized role for many, many decades. The history of racism in our democracy goes back to our nation's founding. And that's one of the important grounding principles that we always have to remember, is that this fight is not new, that we stand on the the shoulders of those who came before us, and that that makes our struggle both a legacy of former struggles, but it also reminds us that, you know, we may never see the perfect democracy, but we're just pushing that ball a little bit forward.

Yeah, I think that's really important. I mean, we are going to talk about students, but I think one of the really important advantages that students today have Is that they have become more and more aware of the movements that have gone before that. Telling them about the civil rights movement, telling them about the union struggles, telling them about the women's movement, really gives hope that change can happen. And, you know, I mean, I teach social movements, and I teach lots about social change as a sociologist. And people have to have hope. People have to believe that if they actually act for change, that it's possible to actually succeed. You're not going to get a lot of people who are going to say, well, I know I'm going to fail, but I'm going to still do it. That's important. But there really is a lot of difficulty building a mass movement if people basically have no hope. So I think you're right that understanding how not just how long these problems have existed, which can make you feel very unhappy about that, but there has actually been progress. There's been on every single one of these issues. It may not be the progress that we'd like to see, it may not be as much as we'd like to see, but if you look in the long run, you really do see that the arc of justice is bending toward progress. And we have made a great deal of progress.

Right. So we started with your kind of original activism. We went into your days as a political operative. I want to transition into your days as an academic before we get into your role as executive director of Democracy Matters in your academic interests. You were sociologists and anthropologists, and one of the things that you have written and thought a lot about is the ways in which our broken democracy particularly affects women. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Sure. Talking about things that are optimistic, this is one of the things that actually is changing now. When I was writing about women and the women's movement, this was a time when women basically were pretty much absent from, or at least invisible from politics. Women voted, but there wasn't the sense that women could run for office and succeed in large numbers. There were so many obstacles, particularly in terms of the ability to raise money. People who are incumbents who've already run for office and won have a much easier time. That's true today. It's always been true. Much easier time raising money than people who are new to it. And women were newcomers. Women had not been in the political system, elected as officials very much so as they began to enter into races as candidates, they had a much more difficult time raising money than did men. And women also did not give very much money. Most women were not in the labor force and didn't have their own money. All of that has changed over time. We're still not where we need to be. But as you know, in 2018, we had enormous numbers of women running at the congressional level and even more running at the local level or the county level. So that women have really stepped up and said, you know, why not? I think Hillary Clinton's candidacy helped a great deal. I think that a lot of women saw that sexism played a role in why she had such a difficult time as a candidate. We have to remember that she actually won the election in terms of the popular vote. But it was clear that there was enormous pushback against her because she was a woman. I mean, so many people said, I don't like her. I can't stand her. And they weren't talking about policies. They were talking about her personality somehow. So I think that. That her ability to be a candidate and when women saw that, not only was she a candidate, but that she was met with this sort of enormous pushback because she was a woman. And when you added that to the MeToo movement, when women started speaking out and standing up, in addition to the enormous sexism that Donald Trump has in so many ways evidenced, I think women have finally said, we've had it, you know, and we are going to run for office, too. And so you see enormous outpouring of women doing that now, and I find that very exciting.

Right? Absolutely. And one of the difficulties that many women have when running for office is that the donor network under the current system is largely white, male, and wealthy. And so if, you know, if you're a woman running, you're structurally disadvantaged in the current system, you know, if you're not a white male, woman, wealthy individual from running for office. And so that's another, you know, that's a great reason why something like public financing is. You know, you've often framed this to me as, like, very much a women's issue.

It is a women's issue. And if you look at places that have a public financing system, like Connecticut, for example, or New York City, what you find is that women run more frequently and win more frequently in places with public financing. And again, you know, there is this barrier that they have that women have in terms of being able to raise money. As you point out, one of the things that is changing, interestingly enough, is that women are contributing more also partially because they are now in the labor force. And women have. Many women are able to give of their own money, but we are seeing that change. They tend to be small dollar donors, however. So we have this problem with the fact that the big money donors are still, as you say, they tend to be white, they tend to be male, they tend to be conservative. So this is a very fluid time. And we are making progress in so many ways with women running and women contributing, but we're still locked into this system where the biggest money matters a lot. And without public financing, that's going to really continue.

Right. And I think as a reform community, we need to be better at talking about the way in which these democracy issues are women's issues. The same can apply to, you know, racial justice, you know, the same. A lot of the same barriers apply to people of color. And public financing, for example, fixes many

of those same barriers, make exactly the same argument.

Right, right.

You know, people of color now, as we see in the last Congress, for example, in the House of Representatives have done better in terms of being elected than ever before. But they do have, as do women, severe disadvantage in terms of raising money. And I don't have to tell you, Adam, that over 90% of the races in this country are won by whoever raises the most money. So money really does matter. There are, of course, exceptions, but the exception to the rule means that there is a rule. And that means that in most cases, whoever raises the most money wins. And people of color, women, young people too, have a structural disadvantage in that way.

Right? Exactly. Exactly. All right, now let's get into democracy matters. I want to start with. Give us the story about democracy matters as founding, because I think this is such a fascinating story, and it involves a former NBA player.

Yeah, my favorite subject, this was 1997 when I lived in California at the time, and my husband and I went to California because our adopted son had just been drafted into the NBA. Our adopted son's name is Adonis Foil, and He was the eighth pick in the first round of the draft of the NBA draft in 1997. And after a couple of years in California with O', Donnell, where I was involved in working on public financing, we sat down with o' Donnell and said, okay, we're a family. That's very political. He's very political. We care a lot about issues. How are you going to use your very large salary in the NBA to make a difference? And a Donald Trump said, well, one thing is I want to work with students. Adal graduated from Colgate University as a proud mother. I'll tell you that. He graduated with honors from Colgate University. And he said, when I went to Colgate, students Were working on all kinds of different issues, the environment, they were working to tutor at risk kids, they were involved in all kinds of charity work. But not very many people were understanding that they needed to be thinking politically, number one. And number two, they need to be thinking about democracy and the problems of democracy. So he told us that he wanted to start an organization that would focus on students and work on democracy issues. Now, when o' Donnell was talking about democracy issues, he was largely talking about what I had been involved in in the three years that we lived with him in the Bay Area after he had been drafted and that was working on public financing of election campaigns. We were able to pass public financing in Oakland, California, and we were able to pass public financing in San Francisco, in two cities at the time that were able to say, look, we want a real democracy, and we want to make sure that the people who are elected in these cities, in Oakland and in San Francisco, are not just enthralled to big money, to real estate, to the people that traditionally have funded campaigns in large cities. And so they passed public financing because they wanted to give everybody a chance to run for office. And o' Donnell had been part of this with me. We as a family, spend a lot of time talking about politics, not too surprising. And he had gotten really excited about public financing. So that's what he mostly was focused on in wanting to start Democracy Matters and wanting to get students to understand the really important role of money in politics and the important role of creating a democracy that really did represent them and everyone else in society, not just big donors.

Right. And, you know, one of the things that I now it becomes so evident, but at the time wasn't, at least from your retelling of it, is that you really saw democracy matters as a means of spurring a social movement. I mean, listeners who are currently listening to this interview surely can know by now that Joan is very passionate about social movements, especially from her participation in many of them early in her career. Joan, why a social movement? Why? Well, one. What is a social movement? And why did democracy need a social movement? And how does democracy matters fit into this whole. This whole space?

Okay, Adam, you asked the very best question. A social movement is a group of people that self consciously act to create change in the society. Their goal is to convince large numbers of other people and elected officials and pundits and experts in various areas that there's a serious problem and that it affects large parts of the society, that there are solutions to that problem. This is not something that is irreparable there are solutions to that problem and that they work to convince people that those solutions are practical and reasonable. And finally, that other people also should act using tactics of letter writing or demonstrations. There's a whole range of tactics, of course, to try to change the institutions and the laws that relate to this problem. So for democracy, the problem, I mean, there are many different problems, but the underlying problem that we thought was so important was this role of big money. What it did was really suppress the voices of other people of ordinary citizens who were not themselves rich. Democracy, to me, is definitely a place. The only definition of democracy that makes sense is a place where every citizen has an equal opportunity to influence the institutions and the laws that they live under. And this was clearly lacking. And from our point of view, it was lacking because very wealthy donors took political campaigns, wanted to and were able to shape legislation and shape institutions to their own benefit rather than the benefit for the society. So that's sort of the model of how a social movement works. This was very early in the year 2000 when we started Democracies Matters. There really was only a very embryonic social movement. There were a couple of national organizations that were worked like Common Cause that were working on this issue, but there wasn't a clear awareness in the society of the problem or of the solutions. And certainly there were not a lot of people who were willing to act, to think of this as a priority in their own lives, and become activists on that issue. So Democracy Matters was set up really to do the early educational work with a particular population that we thought could give rise to or help jumpstart a social movement. We chose students because students have always been a critical and important component of social change and social movements in this country. So we felt that that would be a way that we could contribute to this broader emergence of a social movement by getting students to be understanding the issue, understanding the solution, and then themselves becoming activists, teaching them the skills of grassroots organizing and activism.

Right. And so 20 years later, I mean, through the work of Democracy Matters, as well as many other organizations out there, and as well as structural changes like the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United and a plethora of other struct changes that have really raised public awareness about how broken our democracy is, I would argue that there is a democracy movement now 20 years later. So in many ways, I would say that original vision of yours, Joan, yours, Donald's, Jay's, your husband has been vindicated. Would you agree?

Well, I would agree, and I do want to say that we are not where we need to be yet. I would say that there is definitely a democracy movement in this country. There's enormous awareness of the role of money in politics. There's a broader democracy movement that we are now involved in as well, in terms of voting rights. And people are aware that the vote has been suppressed in various places, that students often are discouraged from voting, that poor people and people of color are discouraged from voting, and that there is that awareness and a huge appetite for change and resolution. What I don't think is happening yet is that we have been able to effectively enough overcome the opposition that we have. This issue has a very strong set of opponents, and it's the same people, obviously, who have been contributing all that money to campaigns. They do not want to lose that power. And they have pushed back against the democracy movement in ways that are pretty frightening. Since we are a democracy in the United States and these people don't seem to believe in democracy. They don't really want people to have the power that we should have in a democracy. So I certainly think we have moved incredibly that there's enormous awareness that large numbers of people agree that there's a problem and want change. What I don't think is that we've been as successful as we need to be in pushing back against the opposition. One of the bellwethers of how well a social movement is doing is whether there's actually legislation that they've been able to not just advocate for, but to actually get passed by various bodies of elected officials. And we have seen great progress in public financing at the state level, at the county level, at the city level. There are many more places in the United States where you can run for office without depending on big donors. And of course, as you know, this year, for the first time, the House of representatives passed HR1 for the people act, which includes voting rights and public financing for election campaigns for members of Congress. So, you know, in that sense, we've been incredibly successful. We are still blocked because Mitch McConnell in the Senate. Senator McConnell will not allow the Senate to vote on these issues. But we have hopefully set up a structure and a set of aspirations Such that in 2020, we will see progress at the congressional level, as well as continued progress in the states and the cities. Right.

And in some respects, this is where the social movement work actually becomes fun because we've laid the groundwork, we were gaining momentum, and now there's a clear piece of legislation nationally, and it's our job to push, like hec. So back to students Though, Joan, people will often say to me as a young person that, well, students just don't care. They're apathetic. And my response is often they're not apathetic. They're just hopeless. And quite frankly, they don't really know how to organize. The art of organizing is lost. We don't have organizing schools.

I think that's right.

And part of what you do is provide that for these young people.

Well, we do try to do that, and frankly, we're quite successful in that. Students with Democracy Matters are eager to learn what those skills are. And you're right, there are not clear models of organizing that students are exposed to, you know, as undergraduates or in high school. That's again beginning to change. We saw a climate strike just recently that was organized by young people. We saw the March for your lives. March for our lives, sorry, which high school students were doing organizing. And the young people that are coming into Democracy Matters now are much more aware, number one, that they need to have the skills and experience of doing grassroots organizing. And number two, that that kind of face to face grassroots organizing is absolutely necessary in terms of building the kind of move, successful movement that we need to build.

Right. And young people across the country, I really want to emphasize this, really do understand the role of movements, which is different than when I was in college, Joan. I mean, I, you know, graduated in 2015. It wasn't that long ago. And when I was doing this work with you, you know, in college, people didn't understand movements. There were. There was no collective consciousness about we need a movement, and it's not just a democracy movement. But you think of the sunrise movement, right? It's in the name that these, these young individuals fighting for a cause see themselves as part of a longer legacy, a group of people with common demands. That shift in consciousness is so important.

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. And, you know, the other knock that students get is, well, they only care about the Internet. And the Internet is in many ways a wonderful organizing tool because it gives lots of information, but it's not sufficient in itself. By far. You do not have the sustained, and I'm emphasizing sustained work of activism over time unless you have personal face to face connections with other people. And that's what these movements now are doing in terms of guns, in terms of the environment and in terms of democracy, that people are getting a sense of themselves and understanding that you just can't, you know, sort of click a mouse or, you know, do something on the Internet that makes you feel like you're Being an activist, when you're not really being an activist, that is just too epiphenomenal. It just disappears. It's when people are invested in each other and are working together over time to make change that you really get the kind of progress that we, we are hoping for and that I believe we're going to see.

Right, and the model that you use to organize is really effective. I mean, certainly for me, but I think for many, many of the, you know, young students who are out there, which is, you know, that the model of democracy matters really comes from the idea that you give students the ability to be creative in the work that they do, in the events that they want to organize. But every week they have to check in with either you or someone else on staff to make sure that, yeah, you can be creative, but you just have to also be accountable to somebody at the national team, because otherwise your activism can very easily fall through the cracks of your job, your schoolwork, the extracurriculars, or whatever else college students have, which we, we know college students are very busy. So I think that model is really good to make sure you're fostering a sense of mentorship for these young individuals.

Yeah, and this, this is something that I think was. Was really, really important because lots of other people have tried to organize with students. And the problem is that students are only on their campuses for four years. And nowadays, when a lot of students go away for their junior year someplace, you know, abroad or to another city, the four years is very split up. So you get enormous turnover on college campuses. And unless you have an organization that has some kind of sustainability over time at a university, you're not going to be able to build the momentum that you need to build with the social movement. So, you know, one of the things that we've been able to do is to have the organization of Democracy Matters be that glue across time with students. So we have interns, and when they get off campus, when they leave or they go away abroad, you still have the staff working with the next group of students on that campus. So it gives a kind of continuity that being an undergraduate doesn't often provide. But at the same time, what we've made really clear is that this is their organization on their campus, and they are the ones that decide what the best way is to convince people, what the best way is to mobilize and activate people. And, you know, you unleash students that they're very, very creative people. They come up with all kinds of wild and crazy ideas about what they can do in order to raise consciousness and to make people more aware and to reinforce the activism that needs to be done as well.

Especially because activism and doing this work can be grueling and filled with so many failures that sometimes it helps to just talk to somebody. If you're 18, 19, 20, 21, just talk to you and say, I failed. This just didn't work. The number of times I had to call you and say, I had three people show up to this movie screening about money and politics, I feel like a failure. And then you having to tell me, you're not a failure. This is just part of organizing. Part of organizing is failure. And sometimes, you know, just having that dialogue, you know, I just. I always think of people who like to just criticize young people. But this is a scary process. Organizing is scary. Especially when you're young and doing it.

Yeah. And especially if you're on a campus where, you know, you're worried about what everybody else thinks of you and you are sticking out like a sore thumb because you have taken a stand on something and you're being a leader and you're not being a leader in some of the more acceptable ways of being a leader on campus, like student government or sororities or fraternities, you are saying, you know, I'm going to be a political activist. I'm going to stand up on issues that are controversial, and I'm going to talk to people that disagree with me. And that is. I mean, I think that's scary for all of us. And you're right, failure is definitely part of organizing. If you haven't called a meeting and had, you know, three people or two people or one person come, you haven't really been organizing on something that's worth organizing about because it's tough. And, you know, I think that especially in a country like this, where people don't say they don't like politics, they say they don't like politicians, they often say that politics doesn't matter to them. Now, I think that has changed with Donald Trump. Trump and the presidency. I think that everyone understands how important politics can be. But this is something that you really need to remind people about all the time.

And this is a very different type of political work for a college student in relation to something like. Or in contrast to something like the college Republicans or Democrats, where really the role of that is maybe to canvas once in a while, but really just to talk, talk politics. Whereas what you're proposing here and have done over the course of 20 years is really a deeper form of activism that is organizing, as we were saying, and that involves not just on campus educational work, you know, holding lectures, movie screenings, trying to convince other students that the root problem is our broken democracy, but also doing off campus work. So going to lobby local officials, state officials, national figures. You know, that's a core part of this is actually getting young people to experience and learn how to effectively lobby representatives, which is again, is an art that we don't really have in this country. And I concede that things have changed in the last couple years, but, you know, doing a visit to your representative or writing a letter to the editor or any of these things, generally speaking, over the last 20 years has not been core activity among college students.

Sure, absolutely. And what's amazing is how much they like this. You know, they, they go in and talk to representatives and those representatives, you know, really do listen. And of course we train them ahead of time that if the representative doesn't want to listen, there are techniques of saying, you know, we're here and we, we're happy that you're talking, you know, whatever politician you're talking to, but we really have some questions we want to ask you. So we train students to go into these lobby meetings with things to say and with techniques that make sure that they get to say them. And that's extraordinarily empowering for students. We do petition campaigns on campus. For some students, they've never signed a petition that goes to their member of Congress or to their state representative saying what they want. So all of this is a learning experience about what democracy looks like. And you know, we strongly believe, and actually there's plenty of data that shows this as well, that if students are engaged as undergraduates, either just by voting or by doing more than that, becoming active, that that does persist throughout their lifetime. This is something that does not go away. And if they aren't involved in college, it's much more difficult to get them energized and engaged later on.

Yeah, this really is a long term project. There are a lot of short term projects like advocating for HR1 or democracy matters has been very active in the campaign for public financing of elections in New York State in places across the country. But this really is also a long term movement building exercise, something that social movements need, need long term thinking that educating young people early, teaching them how to organize, teaching them how to even understand the political system. And we don't live in a country where our political system is necessarily easy to understand. Our federalized system is actually pretty complicated. If you're not, you know, someone who's deeply entrenched in it. It's not always clear who has authority over what, who to contact for what issue. And so this is, this is about teaching young people how to engage in the political process instead of just criticizing them for not doing it automatically. As if you wake up one day and you just become an organizer as an. But a long term process.

Exactly. And the other thing is that you give them something to do besides criticize. You know, it's pretty easy to criticize. There's a lot of stuff out there to criticize. But what we really try to stress is if you're criticizing something, you have the responsibility to think about what could replace it, what is an alternative? And you have the responsibility to try to achieve that alternative. And I think that's very empowering for people because, I mean, who wants to just sort of sit around and say, oh, this doesn't work and that doesn't work. If you give them something positive to do and something positive to think about and the hope that there can be an alternative, you energize people and they begin to see themselves as active citizens, which is, of course, what we're all about in terms of democracy.

And giving people a sense of agency is quite the powerful tool.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. And people ask me why I do this, you know, and how wonderful it is that I do this. It's not wonderful. What gives my life meaning, you know, I have spent a large number of years involved in social movements and social change and had plenty of failures. But I look back and I say, well, you know, I was really part of something that was important and that really made, you know, it sounds very corny, but made this world a slightly better place. And I think that the feeling of students being able to act in a positive way is. Gives them that feeling too, and that pride which all of us deserve, right?

And I'm obviously biased here since I went through the Democracy Matters program. But another exciting thing about being a Democracy Matters alumni is, is, you know, one, there are people in this reform movement now who professionally got their start on, on their college campus as a member or an intern of Democracy Matters. But then there are countless other people, whether they were their chapter leaders or just members of the group or maybe went to an event that Democracy Matters put on at their time at college, that there are, there are thousands of people who have been influenced by this work on college campuses throughout the past 20 years who are now in their public sector job, private sector job, or Whatever they're doing right now, they have a little bit of it, having had an interaction with this movement that maybe they, you know, they're thinking critically about democracy in a way that they would not have before.

Right. I mean, basically, I'm a teacher. I mean, I was a professor for very many years before I retired. And what you do is you're planting seeds. You're planting seeds and you believe and often you get the evidence that they really do flower later on. And I, you know, I don't mean to embarrass you, Adam, but, you know, the commitment that you have developed to this work and to democracy is enormously gratifying for me and for the rest of the staff at Democracy Matters. And we know that there are lots of other people as well who have been in touch with us who have said, you know, this really mattered to me. It made me see the world slightly differently. It made me think of a career slightly differently. Not everybody have to become full time activists, but everybody does have to take responsibility for the world that they live in and for being citizens, active citizens of a democracy.

And this is something that any of our listeners can take something away from because they can learn from this. Because any conversation that you have about reform, any moment of education you can create, whether it's with family, friends, people you don't know, you never know where that, you know, that conversation will lead somebody. And it's not enough. You know, we need to have a mass movement. We need to have people organizing, visiting their representatives, doing things like civil disobedience on the Capitol steps, a wide range of tactics. But there's no act that's too small to begin the process of developing a much larger mass mobilization for democracy. Because we're really going to need all hands on deck to do a structural overhaul of our undemocratic democracy. This is a really tough fight, and the only way to win is by doing long term as well as short term organizers.

That's correct. And I think one of the important things is to understand that these big, big issues of social change and democracy sound very abstract. But what a social movement really involves is lots of local groups doing this. At the same time, if you think about union organizing, there's separate factories that had unions doing the organizing, but as a whole, that was able to build a union movement in this country in the 30s. If you think of the civil rights movement too, there were lots of pockets in the south that were able to build a broad movement, but really it starts locally. Really, it starts with the people you know, with the people that you work with or the people that you go to school with. And creating that kind of, as I said before, face to face, linked, personal, really intimate organizing with those people that are around you, that really, really matters. Without that, you just don't have and you can't build a big social movement. And I think that's hard for students to not think about the sort of grandiose changes. Yes, we want to end climate change, of course we want to end climate change. But if we don't organize at the local level in small groups that begin, the process will never get there. And I think that teaching people about the small gains that you need to make in order to get to that larger goal, keeping the goal in mind, but being happy about and being excited about the small changes, change one person's mind. You talk to one person and they said, gee, I never thought of it that way. Those are very, very important. And I think that they're essential in order to build the kind of movement that we want to build and that we are building.

And I would just add to that, and I want you to talk a little bit about this, is that if you think of each chapter on each college, each college chapter as a different seed, you do more than just kind of plant those seeds, water them. But once a year you bring all the chapters together in Albany, New York. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about these annual summits, because I've always found the summits to be the most gratifying part about democracy matters, that you, you bring all these students together who have different ideas, different struggles, successes on their campuses, and you put them in a room together and they all of a sudden see that every action they've done has been multiplied across the country.

And I think it's very, very empowering, certainly empowering for us as well as for the students. The idea is that when you're doing local organizing, sometimes you can feel very alone and very isolated. So it is important to be able to come together in coalition with other groups that are doing things as well as other people that are part of your organization. So we have a conference, a summit once a year in which we bring our chapter activists together, our interns together, and basically we just sort of unleash them to talk to each other about what's worked, what hasn't worked, what are the problems they've had, what are the successes they've had, as well as some, you know, more hands on workshops about, well, how do you use the media how do you use social media? What's it like to write an op ed? What kind of lobbying do we do? What kind of robbing workshops work best? And I think that's very important. And I think that's the role in social movements also of things like demonstrations. You know, demonstrations are not the end in themselves. They are a means. They're a means of having people understand that they're not alone and that there are lots of other people working as well and energizing people to go back to their local group or organization and continue that work. So, you know, I think that coalescing with other people in larger groups and larger groups in a conference or a demonstration or a rally serves very, very important function. But we can't think that those conferences or demonstrations are actually the social movement, the end of the social movement, the only expression of the social movement. They're not. And they can't be unless that local grassroots organizing goes on at the same time. And in between, when we can sort of get together and celebrate.

Yeah, and it's just so funny thinking back at these conferences, you just generally think students don't care about politics. But you go there and you see just the excitement these young activists have in sharing their experiences and learning from each other. And it's truly a sight to behold. It really is inspiring. And I don't say that lightly. I mean, these kids are really creative and really, they really do want to make a difference in this world. They really do want to improve our democracy. And when you give them a sense of agency and hope, a lot can change.

I think that's absolutely right. And we've seen it happen. And, you know, I have to say that Democracy Matters is not the only group that is doing this, but we need many, many more groups, and we need progressive folks who are not students thinking about working with students. It's magic when students can work with and learn from and teach people who have had a lot of experience doing activism. And it's magic for older people who have been activists for a long time to see younger people who are also engaged. So I think the extent to which you know all of us who are. I mean, I don't know who's listening or how old the people are who are listening. But if you're a student, think about linking up with activists in your community. There's lots of people doing really, really good work on a lot of issues, including democracy. And if you're not a student, think about getting into your high school or getting into your local college and seeing what students are doing there and giving them a hand, because, as you say, it's all hands on deck. It's going to take more than a village. It's going to take all of us to make the kinds of changes that we want to make.

Right. And I should highlight that, you know, right now. And for the past couple years, you've had high school chapters that it's not just exciting.

And some of our high school chapters are almost more active than our college chapters. I think there's been an absolute sea change. We have one chapter this year. I'm not going to say specifically where, but they're in Georgia, which you don't think of as the progressive capital of the world. And this student was first denied by his teachers to do what he wanted to do. He wanted to have a discussion group about current events and then have students think about talking to their elected representatives. And they said, oh, no, no, no, that's political. And many of these schools are worried about having anybody be political. So he just persisted and persisted, and I guess he wore them down until they said, okay, I just got an email from him today that he was approved and he could now hold meetings at his high school. So, you know, I think that they see other students doing things, as I said, they certainly see the organizing that was done by high school students around gun violence and around climate, and they get really energized by it and feel that they, too can do things, which of course they can. Right.

And so, so if anyone is listening, Joan, who may know a college student or a high school student, what's your pitch? What, what, what, what is the internship program and how can they get involved?

Okay, well, first of all, our website is www.DemocracyMatters.org. the internship. Actually, we give internships to one or more students on a college campus, or we give an internship to one or more high school students, and those students are empowered to start a Democracy Matters chapter. They are given a staff person to work with. As Adam said, we talk to our students every single week, checking in with them to see how they're doing, to help them try to figure out what's the best way of going about things, or simply to cheerlead and say, you know, you fell on your face this time, but figure out how we can do better next time. The internship can run for a full year. We like that because it's hard to get these things started. But if students are interested in a semester internship, we do consider that as well. And they can send a short resume, a short description of why they want to get involved with democracy matters to the There's a place on the website that obvious, that's pretty obvious where it says apply for an internship here. And we get great, great students who really, really want to learn, who really want to affect things, who are willing to get out of their comfort zone, really, and reach out to other students to help them to understand what we need to do in terms of really making this a democracy that can function for everybody.

Well, Joan, thank you so much for joining us. And is it fair to say that after this conversation and given everything that's happening in the United States right now in terms of the growing democracy movement, you feel some hope?

I feel a lot of hope. I am, you know, very, very, very gratified and excited with the numbers of people and the range of people who are, for the first time, a lot of them saying, you know, I really need to do something. I really need to get involved. And of course, we're here to help them and to give them as much hope as we have that things are really going to change.

Well, thanks so much for joining us.

Thank you, Adam.

This has been another episode of Another Way. Catch us again next week.

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