The global scale of the fight, organizing as truth-telling, and what personal transformation’s got to do with it
Perspective from organizers at 50
In September, my partner, Patti, turned 50. She didn’t want a big celebration, and so we marked this milestone birthday with a special dinner in a greenhouse (!) and a visit to the ocean with her sisters and family.
I reflected on the many experiences Patti has gathered in her life. An organizer through and through, she has been part of social justice movements and organizations all of her adult life. And in the past several years, I’ve seen her go through remarkable transformations. I’ve been inspired and moved by her willingness and ability to reexamine some of her core beliefs about organizing. And I’ve been inspired to see how she is shifting both her own approach and understanding as well as the approach and culture—including white supremacy culture—of the organization she now directs, Corporate Accountability.
I wondered if she’d be open to talking about how she sees organizing now with some of her comrades with whom she’s been in decades-long relationships with. Sarah Hodgdon and Bobby Ramakant share a birthday month and year with Patti; she often jokes that they are the “class of 71.” They also all work together on the board of directors at Corporate Accountability. The three of them kindly agreed to engage in a Starlight-and-Strategy-themed discussion.
It was a beautiful, rich, conversation about what they’ve learned, what they’re unlearning, and how personal transformation and spirituality is part of their organizing in this moment. I’ve captured some of the highlights below. There was much more that I wish I could have included, so I’m also making the full conversation available here. (Content note if you watch the video: there is brief mention of sexual assault and trafficking in minutes 28-30.)
Here’s just a little context about who they are, as related to the conversation that follows:
Bobby Ramakant lives in Lucknow, India. He is part of Citizen News Service (CNS) and Asha Parivar, a people’s organization. He is also on the board of directors of Corporate Accountability. He and Patti met in the early 2000s while they were both organizing on the World Health Organization’s global tobacco treaty. About 6 years ago, he sold his car and committed to bicycling as his primary mode of transportation.
Patti Lynn lives in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the executive director of Corporate Accountability, which stops transnational corporations from devastating democracy, trampling human rights, and destroying our planet. She and Sarah met in their mid-20s as young environmental organizers.
Sarah Hodgdon lives in the metro D.C. area. She is a partner at the Management Center and the chair of Corporate Accountabilty’s board of directors. For many years, she organized with the Sierra Club, most recently as the national program director.
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Tamiko: What is your organizing lineage? This could be how you were trained, or the people and theories that influenced you as an organizer. How does this inform your organizing?
Patti Lynn: Spending a year and a half in Johannesburg in 1993 and ‘94 when Nelson Mandela was being elected left a really big imprint on me. Studying the South African liberation movement led me to pursue something where I felt like we really can achieve what seems impossible if we organize together. That's been a guiding light for me.
Also, there's a really strong lineage at Corporate Accountability of organizing coming out of the United Farmworkers movement. Early leaders in the organization were trained by Cesar Chavez, Fred Ross, and Delores Huerta. So the approach of person-to-person organizing, taking on big power, building relationships, and building power in that way influenced how I learned to organize.
There's also an approach to organizing and a work ethic that I internalized that is actually something that I've had to really challenge within myself and some of the people I was trained with and work with, too. So with all of the lineage that I've absorbed, there’s real wisdom, and also some things that we carry forward that really haven’t strengthened our movements.
Sarah Hodgdon: My identity has changed so much. At 50, I find that the way I'm approaching it is so different. When I saw your questions, it stirred up a lot of emotions in me because my thinking has changed so much.
When I was a young organizer, I believed that there was one way to do it. And that was the way that I would always do it, and I would do it perfectly, eventually, if I practiced and practiced. And now my approach to it is so different, and it is still evolving. And so as I was preparing for this conversation this morning, I thought that the conversation itself will be a source of discovery for me about who I am as an organizer at 50. And that the way for me to show up today is not with a clear set of answers that I already know, but to tell my truth. And that's what organizing is: organizing is telling the truth.
Bobby Ramaknat: In the early 90s, I was not thinking of being an organizer. I was just in the university, but I ended up getting involved with the tobacco control movement. It was led by a number of people who felt there was so much peer pressure to use tobacco products. But it was also about other things, for example, using abusive languages, being violent, etc., which was making us question ourselves about gender. And that is how I got more involved with bringing people together around issues and trying to find our own way.
One of the most powerful things which happened in those very early years was the influence of Sandeep Pandey and Arundhati Dhuru. Arundhati came from the anti-dam movement (Narmada Bachao Andolan), which was one of the strongest people's movements after the independence struggle of the country. Their influence made me question what was going around in tobacco control and other spheres I was involved with, trying to see linkages.
HIV activism also was growing at that time, and it was another contrast. It taught me a lot of lessons why it is so important for communities to take center stage, how they are experts in finding rights-based solutions to the problems which affect their own lives.
And Corporate Accountability, or Infact as it was known at the time, was a major influence in helping me put the jigsaw puzzle together. Like, tobacco was not a health issue only; it is essentially a corporate accountability issue.
And the last thing which I want to mention is the development justice framework, which was developed by a lot of activists in Asia-Pacific region, led by a feminist group, Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and also by lots of other groups from different countries. This framework connected different pieces together: if you want health justice, we also need to have gender justice, social justice, economic justice, redistributive justice, climate justice, and accountability to people.
Sarah: I really resonated with what you said Patti. The way that I'm approaching organizing is unlearning so much of what I learned, so much of what I thought to be true about organizing, about being in the world, and about myself and the way that I need to show up. The invitation that I think we're getting from so many young organizers is to unlearn some of the ways that we’re part of the very power structures that were fighting. I’m really interested in that conversation right now in my organizing.
Patti: I am too. And in listening to Bobby, I was thinking that one of the greatest blessings of my organizing work has been connecting very early on with Bobby, Bode [Akinbode Oluwafemi] in Nigeria, and Yul [Francisco Dorado], based in Colombia and organizing across Latin America. I was able to integrate a global perspective by seeing and hearing firsthand the impact of transnational corporations and the U.S. government working with transnational corporations on people all around the world--and the different ways that organizing happens in response. I feel that’s part of my ongoing journey, too: to continue to figure out as an organizer based in the U.S. how best to align with and build power that’s truly global. Because that's the scale of the fight that we're in.
Tamiko: To have been an organizer and part of social justice movements for so long, there has to be something that drives us, right, even when it’s really hard? I would love to hear from you all what sustains you or gives you pleasure in organizing.
Bobby: Right now, I'm more excited to get involved with things which are not in silos. I think it is so important to connect the dots, and also to hit very cross-cutting issues, which often get missed in specific struggles. One of them definitely is corporate capture, corporate accountability, or holding abusive corporations to account. Gender is another, and so many other kinds of inequalities. I'm talking about inequalities right in the locality where I live in, or where you may be living in. We need to address those root causes because there is no way we can have a better, equitable world unless we challenge those. That is extremely motivating for me.
Sarah: The single most important thing to me about organizing, and what gives me pleasure and hope, is relationships. And in particular, the many people who lead different lives than I do, that I've been able to meet, have meaningful relationships with, and organize together. Here I am on this call with Bobby who’s half a world away. And we have shared purpose and shared values and goals that we're working toward together.
The other thing is the last three years have been wildly different than the first 20 or 21 years. I'm no longer working myself to exhaustion. I'm no longer sick and in pain because I'm so stressed out. I’m really approaching the work in a way that's more focused. And ultimately, having more space gives me more time and opportunity to really build meaningful relationships.
As I’m getting older I see organizing less and less as something that's linear, marching a straight path toward a goal. I see it as something that happens in big and small ways and in spurts and slides and leaps. So as I orient myself toward those places where I have shared purpose, I rest more deeply in the shared values and the relationships, and maybe am a little bit less results-oriented or activity based.
Patti: I feel we are in this mode of transforming how we are moving forward together as organizers and movements in the world. There's a lot of forces that have come together to shape that. In this country the Movement for Black Lives has been tremendously powerful in shifting how organizing is conceived of by many of us. I brought my marked-up copy of Emergent Strategies by adrienne maree brown, because there’s this concept that kept coming to mind. She raises the question: what if the connections that we built were--rather than a mile wide and an inch deep--a mile deep and an inch wide? In this conversation, we are here in mile-deep connections.
And part of what I find really challenging, and also most rewarding, is seeing the relationship between that and personal transformation. Over the last few years the work of my own personal transformation and how that relates to the transformation of how we work together in our organizations and our movements, is so much more clear to me.
Tamiko: I feel the truth of that really deeply. And it actually brings me to the last question. I would love to hear anything you want to say about the intersection between your spiritual life and your organizing life, or how you think about it, if you do at all.
Sarah: I think they’re deeply connected. I could start with either one, activism or spirituality, to say the same thing, which is that we are all connected. Spirituality is one avenue in my life for understanding myself to be one with everything. And activism is another way that I understand that, and that I am trying to live a life that contributes to society by having a deeper understanding that we’re all connected and making decisions that benefit the collective.
Bobby: Yeah, I totally echo what Sarah said. And I think if you had asked this question 25 years back, I might have said, no, no, this is what we do, and this is less to do with spirituality. But now I see a greater connection between personal transformations and how it is influencing our organizing life. For example, using a bicycle as transport has helped me see a lot more. It helps me connect with the kind of work which we do, and also helps me be better and deeply rooted in situations, communities, realities that we need to understand and try to do our best to respond more effectively.
I'm trying to learn from Buddhism. I think about short term attractions or sensual pleasures which often distracts us from what we are trying to pursue for a longer goal. And we often see this in our organizing. There could be those moments which may give us more of a high or feel great organizationally, but may not necessarily be helping take us towards the longer vision or longer goal.
Also Sandeep told me very early on about Gandhi’s Talisman. It has always been a guiding light whenever I needed it. It’s a great way to course correct, and have a better perspective, and so deeply spiritual.
Patti: Organizing grounded in spirituality and faith is one of the reasons that I feel like I can keep going. I’m looking forward to the next couple of decades and hope that I have the strength and wits about me to keep on learning and growing as an organizer. And my spiritual journey and my organizing journey are completely woven together. One of the beliefs that I hold most dear is that every person comes into this world with a light and a gift, and a spark. Part of our job is to create a world where everybody can thrive. And I think that’s grounded in a sense of faith and spirituality: a spark of the divine in each person.
And the faith tradition that I come out of, the teachings that I internalized from Jesus early on and Catholic social teaching are actually pretty radical. If you actually believe that we need to lead with love in the world, then it really causes us to question structures that marginalize people and harm the planet. So love as a revolutionary force is part of my spirituality and part of what drives me forward.
Sarah: I’ve thought a lot about how part of my responsibility is healing my ancestral line, in particular from racism that has been part of my family’s history on both sides. But one of the most powerful spiritual experiences I’ve had in the last couple of years is also thinking that I can have a relationship with the people who are to come, for whom I will be an ancestor. And thinking about how the actions I take in the world right now are creating the world that they will live in. And so that’s the way that I see activism and spirituality connected: this ability to be in relationship with ancestors backwards and forwards and to think about how we contribute and heal through time and space.
Prompting
Writer and healing justice practitioner Susan Raffo once summarized something an elder in her life said: “You spend your whole life filling your pockets up with experiences and then, at one point, you want to start taking the stories out. Emptying your pockets and giving what you’ve been carrying to someone else. Then maybe, if you’re lucky, when it’s time to go you know it because, when you reach down, your pockets are empty.”
Is there someone in your life who might have some stories they want to give to you? An hour or so of intentional conversation might reveal stories and perspectives you might not otherwise hear.
Storycorps has tips to guide rich conversations. And here are some questions you might ask:
Who or what taught you what you know?
What gives you pleasure right now? How is that different from what gave you pleasure in the past?
What are you finding challenging in this moment?
What do you know now that you wished you knew 5 years ago? 15 years ago? When you were very young?
What perspective do you have that you want to share with folks? Who or what gave you this perspective?
How does your spiritual life relate to the rest of your life?
Engaging
A few things I’ve been reading lately, related to organizing and movement building:
That’s it from me this month! If you liked this issue and would like to see more interviews or conversations, let me know. And I’ll be back in your inbox on the next full moon, December 18, where I’ll be thinking about what it looks like to practice rest.