We’d like to introduce you to “Organizing Graffiti” (OG), our website that aims to share what we have learned and, sadly, failed to learn in time.  We hope to entertain you, educate you just a little bit, and get you thinking about an even better way of getting people together to get things done in your community, workplace, or government.

The goal of OG is to introduce you to the drama, excitement, and life-changing power of organizing in a way that is sometimes serious, sometimes funny, hopefully entertaining, and even occasionally useful.

We hope you’ll like OG as much as we like producing it and being involved in these organizing campaigns that sometimes managed to bring more power to working people in their communities, workplaces, and politics.

And we hope you’ll want to write or speak about your own experience with organizing because each of us is learning as we go. What matters is that we reach out to some people and invite them over to get started, together.

Even though we built unions of tens of thousands of members and helped to bring 750,000 homecare and childcare workers into unions, we never rebuilt the labor movement as we’d hoped. Why?

We were able to build powerful statewide community organizations run by Black and Brown women, but could not build an organization that lasted through the attacks and day-to-day difficulties.

The challenge—and the promise—of OG is to explain through entertaining real-life stories grounded in grass-roots organizing experimentation and practice some of our victories and defeats and the how’s and why’s along the way.

But we don’t want this just to be a collection of entertaining old war stories, we hope it will spark discussion of not only what we did, but what we failed to do.