Ear to the Ground Project

Ear to the Ground Project

Coordinators

The two coordinators of the Ear to the Ground process are N'Tanya Lee & Steve Williams.

After more than two decades of on-the-ground organizing in distinct organizations, the two of us have spent the last sixteen months on a unique journey together. We conducted more than 150 interviews with movement activists, read the work of movement intellectuals, and spent a lot of time in conversation with each other— in doing so, we pushed ourselves to imagine the world, and our own work, in new ways.

The Ear to the Ground project became a national research effort and a profoundly transformative process for us as individuals. While the project led to this final report, it’s political impact lies less in the words on these pages, but in the relationships and conversations created over the last year, and the ideas for new initiatives that emerged.

It’s been a year of ‘on-the-ground’ study that no book or report can replace or properly represent, but we hope that More than We Imagined, the report from the Ear to the Ground project, conveys the sense of the possibility that we feel.

Like many of you, and in fact alongside you, we have worked to build a movement capable of exerting the power necessary to transform the world. For us, much of that work has taken place through community-based organizing. Each of us built or re-built grassroots organizations in San Francisco— Coleman Advocates and POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) which continue to wage important campaigns to make the City more livable for working class people and people of color. We won important victories around workers’ rights, education reform and expanding public services. Our organizations allowed us to strategize and take action with amazingly talented and courageous people. Yet conditions in our communities and in the world around us were getting worse.

For similar and distinct reasons, we both decided to leave our positions as Executive Directors at the end of 2011. Neither of us knew what was next, but we knew we were hungry for more. Though we were leaving our respective organizations, we knew that our fundamental commitment to social transformation remained. The historic events of 2011 challenged us both to take a leap.

Despite this project’s breadth, ultimately we did not get to connect with all of the important work that we wanted to that is happening across the country. The United States is a big country, and the Ear to the Ground project was by no means a complete assessment of the entire social justice movement. We spoke to 158 people involved in some of the most important social justice struggles today...

"Why mobilize"

Answering why e mobilizations and actions were seen as significant, participants cited these factors:

• Mobilized massive numbers of people for longer than a single day (33%)
• Shifted public discourse to the left (30%)
• Used militant and creative forms of direct action (20%)
• Directly critiqued the ruling elite and/or the capitalist system (18%)
• Emboldened others to take action, created a new sense of what is possible (17%)
• Engaged sectors beyond ‘usual suspects’, like the white working class (15%)