From Despair to Action: Reflections from the CEO

Fighting for Hope

I hate to admit it, but since the election, I’ve struggled to hold onto the hope that fuels my work. I am no stranger to despair. When my parents died when I was a kid, or when my brother went to prison, I had to learn to fight for hope and to hold onto it for dear life.

I am grateful for this ability in times like these.

There are legitimate reasons to feel like we’ve lost hope. All the post-mortems on the election could give us the urge to demonize half the electorate, question the progress we’ve made over the past few decades, and fear what lies ahead for the next four years.

But the reality is, the election results reveal more about elections than they do about people. The disastrous results are due to an multi-million dollar election industrial complex fueled by marketing, messaging, and misinformation that plays on people’s fears and relies on people not engaging in direct democracy.

The temptation, for a lot of us, is to try to find our way by “figuring out” the election. We turn ourselves into pundits and analyze the electorate, criticize the strategies and try to come up with alternate solutions. But we will not discover solutions by focusing on parties and elections. The answer lies in doing the work of democracy. The answer is to organize.

Organizing is not just about winning local policy solutions. Organizing is the everyday practice of democracy. By investing in organizing we strengthen our democracy.

Beyond the Ballot: How Organizing Builds True Democracy

Democracy is the everyday practice of people talking to one another about their problems, their goals, their aspirations, the world they want to live in, and then coming together to make those changes.

Organizing achieves democracy through collective action, shared decision-making, and accountable leadership. It fosters civic skills, community-based institutions, and trusting relationships that give democracy life and health. Organizing brings people who are marginalized by mainstream election machines into the halls of power to advocate for their collective well-being and win.

Through organizing, we create opportunities for people - especially people of color and low income people - to engage in direct democracy. In Los Angeles, this includes ballot measure campaigns, participatory budgeting in the city and county, public comment at legislative sessions, advocacy and lobbying with elected officials, speaking to the media, and much more.

Over the last 40+ years, donor activists and community organizers in LA have built a powerful infrastructure for engaging regular people in movements to win tangible change in our communities. No one can take that away from us. Just because this progress is not always reflected in every election result does not mean it is not real and improving material conditions on the ground for millions of Angelenos every day.

Take one especially challenging result, California’s Proposition 36, which toughens penalties for low-level theft and drug offenses, and which passed with overwhelming support. Many believe this result means that Californians have gone backward on criminal justice reform and it’s the fault of the reformers for not doing a better job with messaging and election campaigns.

I believe this result reveals a lot about elections, not so much about people.

The measure is expected to cost the state $100 billion over the next decade, expand incarceration, and increase recidivism and homelessness. It passed thanks to powerful corporate interests (i.e. Target, Walmart) and law enforcement organizations, who spent $17 million to support it. They built on years of fear-based narratives and corporate-backed misinformation campaigns, amplified by complicit media. It was everything that ails our democracy rolled into one terrible loss.

So how does the work of democracy bring us back from that? It brings the people back into the equation. It provides the deep civic and policy education, empathy, hope, and collective action that elections do not.

The Answers Live in the Work

Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simple — even if it isn’t easy.

The whole point of democracy is not just the right to engage in it but the act of engaging in it to advance economic and racial justice. The answer to threats to democracy is more democracy. The answer is more organizing. And it’s the answer to our hopelessness.

As the organizer Mariame Kaba puts it, “Hope is a discipline.” It’s the decision we make to act towards what we want rather than fear that it is impossible. The meaning of the work lies in doing the work, in taking responsibility for our own part in moving the world in the direction we wish.

Organizing forces us to ask: What should we do next to get to where we want to go?

From Despair to Action

To see the victory of Proposition 36, or any other electoral setback, as the doom of progressive politics is to misunderstand how we got here. People want to be safe. They voted out of fear. It’s right to ask how we can create real safety.

But it’s wrong to conclude that the politics of fear will always triumph.

We know this because we’ve done the work. Years of community-led efforts have developed approaches that reduce crime, violence and recidivism. People who participate in these programs are much more likely to graduate from high school, attend a four-year university, get quality jobs, and avoid becoming victims of crime.

These programs were developed and implemented through long, deliberate organizing. Liberty Hill has supported these programs with funding, training, coalition building, advocacy, communications and research, and government partnerships. These programs, and the philosophy that produced them, flew in the face of decades of “tough on crime” politics and messaging, but they have succeeded so much that they are routinely adopted by local schools, and governments and even law-enforcement agencies.

They didn’t come from utopian thinking or armchair punditry. They came from the work of organizing: of gathering, listening, working together, and building power.

That work isn’t done, although Prop 36 set it back. We need to implement these solutions faster and wider, and we need to communicate to the public how these solutions make all of us safer.

Even amid setbacks, the organizing infrastructure that Liberty Hill and our partners have developed in LA is doing more than “stopping the bad.” Across our Agenda for a Just Future, we are poised to “build the good” in ways that can weather any election cycle: building the nation’s largest youth development system, federally-funded (non-rescindable!) green infrastructure, and the next generation of affordable homes.

I don’t do this work because a just and equal utopia is around the corner. I do it because the work is how I hold onto my hope and do my part to make the world a better place, today.

So, Liberty Hill will continue to invest in long-term transformative fights while protecting our gains, defending our communities, and building the good.

I hope you’ll join us in 2025 and beyond.