A Culture of Care: The Secret to Building Organizations People Want to Stay In

What we learned about organizing white folks away from the racist right.

Cover: Someone trying to leave a left ghetto microcult without having their name run through the mud.

“I am very lucky. I have two wonderful buddies that took me by my little baby activist hands and supported me and showed me how to organize. In their different ways, they showed me that I already had the skills. They encouraged my ideas, and they deepened my analysis. They challenged me to expand my views and perspectives. They showed me care and supported me. Before I even realized it–they were and are my mentors.” – SURJ-Toronto organizer Jenny

Tom Malleson and Chanelle Gallant || We have been organizing for the last 20+ years across Canada and the US in anti-racist, sex worker, migrant justice, labour, and anti-poverty movements. The radical left is our home, and always will be, but the grim truth is that many radical left spaces have often felt pretty shitty to be in. After Trump’s first election in 2016, we started the first chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice outside the US (SURJ-Toronto), determined to do things differently. In many ways, it worked; so we’re sharing how we created an organization that people wanted to join and stay in, because we know that authoritarian regimes take direct aim at our relationships and work to break our trust for each other.

Of course it’s far from perfect, but eight years later, SURJ-Toronto is thriving; a crucial part of racial justice resistance in Toronto. The chapter has recruited and trained hundreds of new organizers, helped to build activist infrastructure (such as a network of Palestine solidarity neighbourhood groups and an activist legal defense fund), been part of a successful campaign to get the cops out of the largest school system in Canada, provided political education to over 10,000 people, and moved over $600,000 to grassroots movements.

Our secret? A culture of care.

A culture of care is the recognition that building relationships is the heart and soul of organizing. Relationship building is not a waste of time, nor peripheral to the “real work;” it is the real work. A culture of care means centering relationship-building in everything we do: striving to be kind, supportive, welcoming, and compassionate. A culture of care is the glue of relationships; the mortar between the bricks that binds us together in beloved community, recognizing people’s needs for many kinds of care, such as with family, housing, or employment.

People stick around when they are welcomed and respected. SURJ-Toronto works by deeply building care into our organizing model. “Care” does not mean keeping white people comfortable. By “care,” we mean “anything that supports life and nurtures personal relationships–the life of a person, an organization, or a movement.” Care is complex, emergent, sometimes difficult–and it is real work. Taking care of each other is a crucial and winning strategy, but it is mistrusted, often because of concerns about coddling white folks, and because under patriarchy, care is assigned to women and feminine people, and is devalued.

As the US and Canada continue to move to the hard right, we want to share one of the most important things we learned: how to organize white folks to join in, and stay in, the fight for racial and economic justice. It may not be what you think.

“[My mentors] spent their time and care in developing my skills. They called me to debrief and they celebrated me when I tried new things. They encouraged my leadership and supported me through taking on new and different roles. And when I said I was scared and put up a boundary, they celebrated that too. They encouraged and wanted me to be my full self – all of my parts, my big bubbly personality coupled with a deeply held need for justice and action” –Jenny

Why Build a Culture of Care?

We understand why organizers have a bad reputation for being so humourless and critical. One of us organized in an anti-poverty organization where no one ever smiled. The leaders were suspicious of newcomers, and friendliness was seen as “liberal bullshit.” One of us organized in a migrant justice organization where we were told that taking time to have hang-outs or potlucks was “privileged nonsense.” One of us was accused of being a “dumb slut” in a meeting; it was considered acceptable.

The most important reason we need a culture of care in our organizations is that we won’t win without it. Winning requires growth. Growth requires building community. Community requires genuine caring relationships. We will build powerful movements only when large numbers of people are deeply committed to activist organizations. That will only happen when people feel loved, respected, recognized, and cared for. When there’s enough trust and goodwill so that minor disagreements don’t lead to major explosions, people will want to keep coming back to meetings, week after week, month after month.

What if the thousands of people who come to one or two activist meetings kept showing up instead of never coming back? Movements become vastly more powerful. We could begin to transform our societies. Instead, too many of our activist spaces act like sieves; our movements hemorrhaging away good people. Our organizations are living things. Without care, they wither.

How Do We Build a Culture of Care?

Recognize that taking care of people is skilled work, and like any other skill it requires intention, practice, and feedback. You probably know more about taking care of people than you realize. Think about the people in your life who have taken the best care of you. What did you learn from them?

There’s no one right way to care for people, but here are some things that have worked for us:

Value care

Care is an organizing strategy that is as important to your external work as preparing for the next campaign or action. Talk about it: proudly and loudly celebrate feminized care labour as the fundamentally important, but often invisibilized, background work that keeps everything else afloat.

Institutionalize care

Don’t leave talking about care to chance! Put care on the agenda. Set up systems for doing check-ins and setting up one-on-one coffee dates with new members. Coordinate social time. Set up a “care committee,” a team dedicated to making your members feel valued and included. We start meetings with a fun, personal check-in question, enabling us to laugh together and get to know each other better. Instead of a regular “check-out,” we use an “appreciation circle” where we share something we appreciate about the person seated next to us. Folks leave feeling connected and fired up. We onboard new members through one-on-one meetings, structured to build relationships right from the start. We send each other supportive messages: “Just thinking about all the labour you did to make yesterday happen and appreciating you so much!” or “You’re so solid and dependable and I’m in awe of how you continue to do such great Palestine solidarity work week after week, with such humility and grace. You’re so awesome, and I’m so grateful you’re a part of SURJ.”

Have fun together

We’ve organized ice skating, potlucks, holiday parties, movie nights, dance parties, bowling parties.

Be trustworthy and help others out in conflict

A SURJ-Toronto member recently said, “I had a conflict [with a new member] and I wanted to demand an apology/reparations. Tom reminded me to have a second conversation with the person I was in conflict with and really try to listen to each other–that worked like a charm.”

Practice mentorship across the organization

Skill each other and newer members in organizing, but also build skills in supporting people in conflict, simple ways to regulate your nervous system, how to listen, how to give and receive feedback. It’s hard to build a sturdy organization when people are talking shit about each other, being dishonest, acting competitive, or spreading rumours. Navigating relationships within organizations is easier said than done! Dean Spade’s book Mutual Aid provides practical advice on being in movement relationships together.

Help each other out in hard times

Chanelle calls this approach “support the whole leader.” Show up for each other in times of need, sickness, and despair. This has looked like showing up to friend’s homes with meals, caring for pets, helping with errands, lending cars and offering rides, opening up homes for people to stay, and so on.

Don’t talk down to people or use insider jargon

Break down strategies, targets, and tactics with clear language that you’d use to talk to someone on the bus. When we speak over people’s heads, it undermines confidence. People who are not veteran activists will think they just don’t understand the situation or the solutions. We want our members to see themselves as important organizers and as leaders.

Celebrate and normalize fluctuating capacity

…due to our changing bodies, caretaking responsibilities, burnout. Taking breaks and vacations are great and don’t make you a “failure” or a worse activist. Do consider that if people frequently need a break from your organization, you might have a problem with the culture of your organization.

Work towards repair

Embrace transformative and restorative justice practices by seeing conflicts as an opportunity to re-tie, re-bond, and actually deepen a relationship that has been torn. (Of course it doesn’t always work!) This means being explicit about how you handle conflict: giving each other the benefit of the doubt, privately calling-in over publicly calling-out, and naming impact without blaming or shaming.

Model humility

A caring space creates so much more room for us to talk through our confusion and mistakes. We do not have all the answers. If we did, the left would be much stronger than it is. We’ve both made mistakes that we regret. As long as we’re doing this work, we’ll continue to make mistakes; acknowledging this invites others to also be humans who make mistakes. As Malcolm X said, “Don’t be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.

Why is Care so Difficult?

It often feels like we don’t have time for care. Care is slow and the world is literally on fire: genocide, environmental breakdown, mass deportations, crushing poverty. Activists are witness–or even subject–to these devastating, heart-rending truths, and it can fuel a sense that there is no time for warmth or celebration, for singing or dancing. No time to waste talking about our feelings. No time to find an interpreter, nor time to recharge. This is the “urgency trap.”

In our experience, those on the front lines of surviving multiple crises are the first to recognize that care, connection, and celebration are an important part of how we get through it together. Organizing with working class women in particular means organizing people with significant caregiving responsibilities, multiple jobs, and chronic pain or disability. If your organization can’t support people navigating those realities, they will simply leave. The remainder will be a handful of hardcores in their own little exclusive and insular club.

When care isn’t built into organizational structure and strategy, all of the care work may wind up being held down by a few women and femmes who push the organization to show up for each other, build relationships, improve communication, and introduce healing practices. They may be relied on to fix everything; at the same time other members won’t share the work, don’t respect it, and don’t offer them care. They burn out and quit and then people wonder why the organization didn’t last.

Organizing with working class women in particular means organizing people with significant caregiving responsibilities, multiple jobs, and chronic pain or disability. If your organization can’t support people navigating those realities, they will simply leave. The remainder will be a handful of hardcores in their own little exclusive and insular club.

Finally, some of the aversion to care also comes from “the purity trap”: that being a leftist means being perfect, and if we offer care to new organizers, we might be associated with people who are messed up and have shitty politics. This is the desire to prove that we are “one of the good ones,” innocent and righteous. It is commonplace, even if it’s rarely explicit.

We understand the sense of urgency and the desire to be recognized as “one of the good ones.” In reality, moving too fast or focusing on perfection and self-critique doesn’t build organizations with resilience: it builds ego and self-righteousness. Both urgency and purity are acidic. They are toxic to trust and corrosive to community-building. It takes humility to welcome folks we disagree with from a place of curiosity and respect. It takes compassion to not give up on people and instead take the easy road of urgency and superiority. It takes confidence and self-love to know that we can withstand being associated with people who might make us look bad.

Organizing white people in a culture of care

We tried our best to minimize the urge that many white folks have to perform being the “best anti-racist in the room” by raking other white folks over the coals for saying dumb shit. Instead, by focussing on taking care of our membershi, we built, trained, and grew into a strong organizing body that can get things done. When we came together to start SURJ-Toronto, we started with the SURJ value of “calling-in” not “calling-out,” which quickly flourished into a culture of care.

In choosing a culture of care, we went against one of the biggest misconceptions about organizing–especially about “ally organizing”–that the job of an organizer is to essentially become someone who always does and says the right thing. We found that to be effective, we needed to focus not on being “perfect white people,” but on welcoming people into the organization and then developing their leadership so they become bold, principled, and strategic activists who are willing to take risks to confront racist institutions.

We have all been on the miserable receiving end of those who confuse being “perfect” with organizing. This will probably be familiar to you, too: we’ve been in many meetings where a new person said something awkward, or low-key racist or sexist, and instead of being developed, they were pounced on by a more senior member (usually a white person) who called them out, told them how awful they are; that they must not understand oppression, and they should be ashamed. This public demonstration of “rightness” is followed by an all-too-familiar shoulder slump and head drop. The newbie’s eyes may fill with tears, or with anger and defiance. The meeting ends, the newbie leaves, and no one reaches out to them. They never come back.

This newbie may well have said something messed up. But they also came in with love, a passion to change something, and a desire to learn. They’re a complex, real, imperfect human being like the rest of us. And now they’ve left and won’t come back. Now they feel burnt. Now they feel the radical left is not for them. We have lost them. Maybe the Right will recruit them, or maybe they’ll just remain “apolitical,” which comes to much the same thing.

Of course, we didn’t invent any of this. We’re just one of many activist groups trying our best to rediscover the lessons taught by a long line of movement ancestors who centred care–such as Ella Baker, Myles Horton and the Highlander School, and generations of Indigenous elders. Today this legacy is being carried forward by the inspiring mentorship of people like adrienne maree brown, Kazu Haga, Carla Wallace, Chris Crass, and many, many others.

We’re not a perfect organization by any stretch of the imagination. Nor are we unique. What we’re doing we learned from others, especially our Indigenous and Black partners. We’re not alone in celebrating care. Rather we’re one small part of a new and growing wave of organizing which is focused politically on intersectionality–constantly connecting and interweaving an analysis of racism with capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, ableism, and environmental destruction. Culturally, it’s focused on care and beloved community. Every year, thousands and thousands of good people dip their toe into the radical left. With Trump in the White House, many more will be moved to step into our meetings. They will come because they share our vision of a better world for all, but they will stay–or they will leave–because of the relationships. At the end of the day, to quote adrienne maree brown, “relationships are everything.”