And we’re off

A few weeks ago I sat down with the Kairos Organizing Team to talk to them about why Kairos decided to run a Fellowship this year, what the team is excited about in the next 6 months, and how digital organizing means winning for our communities now and in the future.

But before we dig into that, here’s some stats so you get an idea of where this year’s fellows are coming from:

There are 150+ fellows from 40+ organizations participating in this year’s fellowship. 15+ states are represented. This includes groups from the Southeast, Midwest, and West Coast and groups addressing specific issue-areas such as reproductive justice and climate justice, among others.

Talking to the Organizing team was not only a really exciting look into all of the work Kairos is putting into the fellowship but also all of the intention. As a Fellowship alum, I know how impactful Kairos programming is to a person, an organization, and a movement. This is just the kick off to the storytelling I’ll be doing around this year’s Fellowship. You’ll hear more from me and Fellows during the next six months.

You can also read the interview below. And as always, I’d love to know what you think. Feel free to respond or leave a comment.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

I'm really excited to chat with you all about this massive program that you're leading this year, the 2024 State Fellowship. So I wanted to just jump right in for our ReOrganized online audience. Can each of you introduce yourself, name, pronouns, and what brought you to this work?

Kelvin: Hey, all, my name is Kelvin Green II. Pronouns are he/him/his. And I got into this work, honestly, because I was so agitated by what was happening to Black people in this country and wanted to help Black people. And over time that has expanded to all marginalized people and oppressed people and trying to support them. So yep, I was agitated or rather, radicalized in 2014/15.

Joe: Hey, everybody. My name's Joe Delgado, he/him pronouns. Back in the mid-2000s during the ramp up of the foreclosure crisis, when my family was one of thousands of families that lost their home in foreclosure, I was just feeling that feeling of not knowing how or what to do to support my family. Which ended up leading me to joining movements that were fighting for homeowners that were facing foreclosure and that then eventually got me into the organizing that I do now.

I'm so curious about how people's organizing paths lead them into this work. So thank you all for sharing. Jumping right into the fellowship stuff. I want to know why now in 2024? Of all the years, to run a fellowship program and its state based? Which is something a lot different than what this organization has done in the past. What is the “why” behind this fellowship?

Kelvin: Prior to my time here, I know we were known for our Fellowship. We were known for the work that we did building and training up Black and brown organizers into really strong digital organizers. That Fellowship practice, which was done for three to four years, really taught us how to effectively train people and get them the skills that they need.

In 2023 we did two Learning Labs, which are six week boot camp type sessions with participants learning digital organizing tools. That really taught us a lot about doing that type of training for organizations and building capacity for organizations. I think we got into this fellowship because we've been doing this work for some years now where we can now expand it and bring more people into it and really meet people where they are to support them in the work that they have to do in a year like 2024. There's so much at stake.

Joe: Thinking back to the chaos that was kicked off after Trump's election — so much has been invested since then into states to try to fight for democracy, in states that are eliminating the rights of folks that all of us work with and organize with leading into this year.

We knew that the election was going to be an important point to focus on because maybe folks are not participating in the election per se in their work, but the residual effect of Trump being on the ballot means that there's a number of state legislative pieces of policy that are going to move. There's a number of down ballot candidates that are in the flavor of Trump that are going to be attempted to put into office. And all of that equals a need to make sure that organizations that are doing the work in states and are working as part of a center of gravity to fight for democracy are ready for that moment and to scale up to be ready for that moment.

What the fellowship intends to do is to make sure that as movement partners, we give people a place to learn skills that help them contest for power in the digital realm and ultimately begin to move people in a direction to understand how tech is present in all of the work that we do and how it influences the issues that we were working on.

A little side note: I was a part of the fellowship in 2018 when it was such a different scope. We were placed at national organizations who were working at this level, organizing sometimes millions of people (or really mobilizing millions of people). The shift into state based, I think what you were saying Joe, was very strategic based on the moment. So I'm really curious too about what your expected reach is going to be? How many states? How many regions? Who’s working on what? Are you in the South?

Joe: I'm gonna kick this one to Kelvin because I think the lion's share of what this looks like across the map has been a lot of the great work that Kelvin has been doing to get us ready for the fellowship.

Kelvin: Yes, we're in the South! I want to highlight a few states: Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Arkansas, all jumping in. We have Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania jumping in. And then we even have some groups in Texas in the Rio Grande Valley and also in California. So we're spread out across the map.

And these groups range in scale from organizations that have had to come back from hard losses and sort of rethink how they're approaching their work to groups that have been doing this for 30, 40, 50 years as their theory of change has modified with time. And then we also have C3 orgs and C4 orgs. There are groups that are that are jumping into this because they're going heavy on the partisan side of of the work, but also folks that do year round organizing around their issue and they're going to take advantage, like Joe said earlier, of how much attention is going to be in the field because of the election that's coming up.

So that's a range of states and kinds of organizations. In terms of issues: it's climate, it's repo, it's Black liberation, it's housing. These are key issues that are coming up for us. It's labor, it's workers. There's a lot of labor wins that have been happening and a lot of groups are jumping in with that capacity. So we're kind of meeting the moment in that sense. Our range of groups that we're bringing in are really working on the issues that you've probably been hearing about in the news.

That sort of spread of groups makes this fellowship also so unique. Like not only is it state-based, but it's different issues, different regions. It's people who are going to be in the cities and in rural areas. And so all of those different organizers learning the skills of digital organizing from y'all can apply them to such different issue areas that then also intersect. I think that's something that's really special about Kairos training spaces. We oftentimes try to get people to see the similarities of the work and how digital organizing and strong online presence can help that. So what else is unique about a training space?

Joe: What I think has really come through in the conversations with allies and their organizations is that the level of engagement that happens in session is just supercharged. There's an expectation set for folks that are coming into the training to not sit idle because by participating, you're increasing what you're taking away from each session because you're hearing about the experimentation that this organization in Florida is doing, for example. And it's maybe it's in a rural place and you're organizing in a rural place in the Midwest.

And there might be something that translates in, in those efforts. And I think, you know, what's unique is that part of the learning space is, it's not just like a nice extra thing. It's actually an intent that the team goes into each session with, making sure that we're encouraging that kind of cross-pollination of tactics and experimentation to encourage people to look at what they're doing and try to pull as much out of the digital experimentation that they're attempting by learning from what other folks are doing. And another thing that I think Kairos brings to the training that is unique and it's kind of the secret sauce is that across the board, the people that participate in the training come from different walks of, of the movement.

When I was a kid, there was a cartoon called Voltron and each had a different kid that made up this big gigantic robot. I think that's kind of like the secret sauce of Kairos is each one of the different organizers that come into a facilitation role on the Kairos team, brings a piece of knowledge that they incorporated to this larger vision of what the Learning Lab was and what the fellowship is. The orientation of the organizers that are coming in are largely people that are on the ground and traditionally have not had a lot of background in their work around how to integrate digital.

And these sessions, the fellowship Learning Lab is an intent to encourage those organizers to integrate digital and then to develop their membership base to, to include [digital organizing] so that what we call the one-two punch happens, which is the organizer has their stuff that is happening in real life. And then also the same team that they're working with is incorporating these digital skill sets that they've learned to increase the impact that they have towards the deliverables of their campaigns and ultimately the quality of life of the membership that they're organizing.

Thank you for doing the behind the scenes. I think it's so important with not only just the amount of work that has been put into this program, but it's interesting for folks who are listening and reading this to know what goes into a program like this is intentional. The uniqueness of the space, the engagement around the space is one of my favorite things. And the level of rigor that y'all set for these organizers. And when they surpass that it’s incredible to see too. Kelvin, do you have anything to add on this?

Kelvin: Another thing that really makes us special and unique is that Kairos is really a team of organizers. We all have come from that world and have done work in that space. And I think we bring that to the training. Many times you can go to a training and someone's an expert or a veteran and you can't really connect. But in our Kairos training, being an expert doesn't mean you can't be authentic. Being a veteran doesn't mean you're not going to be relatable. And I think a lot of these people, based on the culture we set at Kairos, jump in very authentically. And I think that's what makes the space feel fun. And it bridges those virtual aspects or really makes people kind of have that feeling like when you're in the room with someone.

Joe: You know, I almost forgot one very important part of all of this, which is that we learn and we teach in the, in the manner that most of us learned how to organize, which is somebody took us out where we shadowed and then showed us the skill. And then they had us do it on our own. We bring in a case study that models this in action from an organization, from any number of different issue areas and different parts of the country. We bring them in as a way to say, here's what it looks like in real life with organizers moving people. And then we pull back and we take a step back from that. We look at that case study with the people in the session and we begin to probe and challenge the organizers to think about their priority campaigns. What does it look like to take what this organization and the case study is doing with their membership and scale up their or strengthen their campaigns. That’s such an important part. And I think that's what people will experience in the fellowship. The case studies are an impactful part of the learning process.

So it's not just somebody up on a screen telling you what you should do. And then maybe you go home and try it without having asked any questions or haven't had any experience in this at all. So it sounds like the fellows are going to be learning a lot. There's going to be a lot of takeaways. I know that when we put programs together, you put all sorts of outcomes, but I'm wondering for you, Joe and Kelvin, what do you hope fellows learn from this fellowship this year?

Joe: What I hope fellows take away from this is finding their entry point in understanding the role that tech plays in their campaigns and how in the same way that we look at on the ground organizing, digital is as influenced by people power. Digital is a place to build power just like we do on the ground. And here are a set of skills that you can use to strengthen the digital side of the work that you do. So that when you come around to the next campaign, you're looking at, at the full scope of places that your members are contesting for power.

Kelvin: One thing that keeps coming back to me when I think about this question is that I really hope that fellows walk away with a refined, renewed, and revived definition of organizing. My goal being that when they have to organize, they're thinking about what Joe is saying. This one-two punch. They're thinking offline, they're thinking online, like they're thinking about the array of options they have to move an issue. And it's not siloed as like, either I'm doing this on the ground or I'm doing this online. Why not both? The goal is by the end of the six months, people are not just understanding that, but they're demonstrating it in their work and their campaigns. They're finding these connections and ways to reach new people to move them. And they're not thinking about it siloed. They're thinking about both of these realms — physical and digital working together.

And my last question for y'all, because, you know, learning goes both ways as facilitators.As, you know, people who are putting together this program, what are you excited to learn from the fellows this year?

Joe: As an organizer who spent my entire experience in California, in dense parts of Northern California and Southern California, my experience in rural organizing has been very limited. And what I'm really excited to learn from the fellows is how they answer this question that rural organizers bump into. If they're organizing on the ground, there's so many challenges that present themselves in that regional nuance. And they figure out ways to overcome that. From a perspective of somebody who hasn't done a lot of rural organizing, it seems like to me more so than in any other regional nuance, organizers who successfully integrate digital, just give themselves a real increase in aspects of their organizing, whether that's scaling the base or scaling to increase the impact of their campaigns. I'm excited to learn from the rural organizers, especially through their experimentation, what that looks like so that we, as folks that do capacity building training, can really strengthen that part of our training as we move forward.

Kelvin: Yes, I am. I'm excited to learn about two things. One is the South. I think that there is the organizing economy of the South, if I can call it that. There's a lot that is going on. There's a lot of opposition and the ways that the opposition has transformed not by using hot new tactics, but by being very bold around what's moving. And I think that I'm really interested to learn from all the Southern organizers, like how they're navigating that, how they're winning. And that leads me to another thing I'm excited to learn, which is just that I feel like I'll become a better organizer from working with these fellows. Just being able to see how different people are navigating the opposition. I'm looking forward to learning ways that they look at problems. I'm excited to not just approach this work as someone who's helping to administer the fellowship, but I'm also a student in the space learning alongside organizers.

Beautiful, I'm so excited for this fellowship, y'all. For real, not even on being biased and working here and working with y'all. I'm genuinely excited for this fellowship to kick off. I'm excited to do the storytelling throughout and it sounds like y'all are too. So I just want to thank y'all again for allowing me to interview about this program. I hope it gave you a little bit of a step-back moment and to see this big thing that we're working towards. Before we head out, is there anything else that you'd want, you know, the outside world to know about the fellowship this year?

Joe: The work that we're doing is a long-term effort that Kairos has towards getting the movement to a place where we agree on a need for co-governance of the internet and in online spaces. And these steps that we're taking now with comrades in different parts of the country begin to move us in that direction. And I feel like this is like an important step for Kairos that we're taking. We're moving into this place that you identified, Jelani, a shift in what the fellowship was before and where it's going now to influence that path that Kairos is on.