One of the priorities for organizing within the Boston DSA this year is “Childwatch and Integenerational Organizing”: focusing on ways to help broaden our range of age ranges participating in our organization.
As part of a set of geographic breakouts, we discussed this with a group of folks from Cambridge specifically at our most recent general meeting. I wanted to capture some of the thoughts I had and shared.
First, if you are interested in in integenerational organizing, do not meet in bars. Bars are a noisy environment, which makes interacting with your comrades difficulty. They tend to be crowded: it can be easy for a group to outgrow their tables and be unwelcoming to new folks who arrive. They often have legal restrictions on who can participate – e.g. checking IDs and only allowing people over 21 – and even when they don’t, the activity is focused on drinking, which certainly is. Bars are exactly the kind of social spaces which will tend to quietly exclude a significant part of your demographic from effectively participating.
Second, you need to meet people where they are. The DSA is an organization interested in political activism, but tends to not be particularly present in the existing political circles inside our communities that don’t directly align with the DSA priorities. This is leaving opportunity – for socializing, for finding common ground, and even for simply understanding the local political scene – on the table.
The most obvious place to start in Cambridge is to simply begin attending neighborhood association meetings within Cambridge regularly, even when they aren’t topics that directly align with DSA priorities. The existing Cambridge neighborhood associations are a vastly different set of activists and community organizers than the DSA. They have active engagement with an influence on the City Administration, and have often brought about change in our local community. In particular, these associations work to drive and influence housing policy – and often in ways that the DSA would be well-suited to work to influence.
Another example of meeting people where they are is in the more broad area of city politics. When a topic is of interest to the DSA, members show up – but beyond that, there tends to be no presence. The Cambridge political scene has a core community, yet most DSA members do not know anything about it, because we aren’t engaging with the existing political movement (or if we are, I’m mostly not seeing it). Cambridge routinely builds task forces and committees to study issues that are within the remit of the DSA community, and there is no concentrated effort to either get a foot in the door, nor even engage with the decision-making process as a resident.
The final recommendation I had for expanding our integenerational remit and more broadly expanding our membership in general is simply to engage in more social activities that are focused at being fun social spaces. The most effective way to grow any movement is simply by knowing your neighbors: giving them opportunities to become friends and bring other friends with them. We should be engaging in more social activities that are organized by the DSA, but not with the intent of being explicitly political. Organize a movie night at the local library; get together for a board game night. Encourage people to invite friends along: no political affiliation needed, just an opportunity to hang out and make new friends. As an adult, I have no idea how anyone is supposed to make friends: offering spaces for others to do that would be good! As you build a base of engaging in social activities, expanding those activities to things that attract a broader range of ages is a way to expand your inter-generational reach. Start with a board game night, but expand into an art gallery viewing, or joining in with the local gardening group.
So much of our reach is limited by attempting to make every engagement focused on politics. The last thing anyone wants to hear is “I’m a Socialist Organizer, and I’m Here To Help.” To broaden our demographic reach and social impact, we need to find people where they are and engage with them there.