This October marks the 15th anniversary of Progressive Mass’s launch meeting! We are pleased to share this message from one of our founding members on how it all began and where we go from here.
A message from Harmony Wu
Where we came from / Are we there yet
Progressive Mass at Lasell College in Newton: Hundreds of people in a lecture hall. Name tags, photocopies, breakout rooms, butcher paper. My experience is painted in the sensation of dashing from one room to another table. Excitement and movement.
But did it begin that October in Newton, at Lasell? For me, it began earlier: carpools of strangers meeting at T stations and Dunkin’ Donuts parking lots to knock on doors in New Hampshire. Maybe the Dorchester 2010 Health Care Forum was the beta version; where hundreds organized together for health care reform. The Massachusetts Obama campaign “grasstops” had built a lively prototype in OFAMA, a self-organized statewide infrastructure, before the national campaign launched Organizing for America.
Many people gave their time and labor to this organization, before it was the organization debuting in 2011.
We’d already had a deep history of meetings on conference calls and email discussions, and a year of Saturday bagels and bloody marys meetings in my living room. How could we make a Thing that held the energy, desire, values, and possibility of progressive power in Massachusetts?
Fifteen years is a substantial part of a life—the photos show that—but only a handful of legislative sessions. We’ve had successes, but still have far to go.
In 2011, we set out to build a permanent, statewide grassroots organization that could turn progressive values into political power. A small core group did much of the early work, creating something others could join and showing there was a there there beyond its initial organizers. After Lasell, we had evidence of the need and an audience. Next came the challenge of making a democratic organization effective.
I was politically interested and engaged, but not someone ACTIVE in politics. I wanted an easier entry ramp into the actual stuff of politics. We wanted to make progressive knowledge and labor accessible, whether people wanted to research and organize or find a trusted guide to political issues and elections. We wanted to connect them to work for a fairer economy, better ecological stewardship, institutional justice, and a more perfect, just, equal, and free world.
That raised a question we still face: how do you make room for grassroots participation while setting priorities and acting with purpose? American political culture emphasizes elections, then asks us to trust elected officials to deliver. But policy work is where the rubber meets the road. Political power is built at a human scale—neighbor to neighbor, potluck by potluck—and participation has to fit people’s lives and matter. Who sets priorities, decides what work gets done, and whose interests does it serve?
In 2016, a flood of people suddenly understood that their political voice and work were needed, and new groups sprang up everywhere. I worked my ass off to establish enough grounding to direct that energy toward worthwhile, achievable goals.
I had helped create the entry ramp I’d wanted for myself, just as health and other struggles made my own life more complicated. When progressive power depends on endless unpaid labor, people burn out and we lose their experience, relationships, knowledge, and leadership. We should have nice things: organizations with deep benches, adequate funding, and expertise. When exhausted people leave, their hard-won knowledge, interpersonal, institutional, goes with them.
When our power relies on committed people to supply the labor for free, or assumptions that foundations and “Soros money” (LOL) will pay for it, we lose power, bottom up directive supplanted by the well-meaning grant terms, and people checking out.
Progressive Mass aspires to be funded primarily by the people whose values it represents and whose political work it exists to support.
If we want Progressive Mass to be answerable to us, it needs to be funded by us. Membership dues are an investment in a shared enterprise. Who provides the money and who makes the decisions are connected; the funding model should reinforce accountability.
We’re not there yet, dear reader, dear member, dear new member (I hope). We’re closer than fifteen years ago, but need more members and individual monthly contributions to fund the staff and resources the work requires.
Grassroots funding is one part of lasting political infrastructure: a deep bench of grasstops leaders, growing grassroots participation, and a strong organizing staff. We need to invest in the people doing the work and remain answerable to the people whose power we exist to build.
Harmony Wu
Member and Co-founder, Progressive Mass
