Saying I support BLMs direction is empty talk. Instead, I am offering my reasons for supporting and applauding BLM’s direction.

Experience tells me that BLM has landed on solid ground. Building of a network of locally led grassroots organizations is essential. Every neighborhood, city and rural landscape is unique – no two are the same. There is no one-size fits all solutions.

I can’t tell you how many times, our community organizers have confronted the same losing situation. We’d show up with overwhelming community support behind us – and our locally elected officials would cite national figures to justify their decisions against us. Elected officials justifying their decisions based on the opinions of people who lived in other cities, counties, even states was so exhausting, it felt like defeat.

It took a while, but we finally found strategies that worked in our community. Instead of finding people to fill roles in our organizations, we built our organizations around people. People have all kinds of talents, skills and resources. The key to success was letting people do what they do best.

For example, our research team included housewives, attorneys, gardeners, accountants, engineers, farmworkers, fighter pilots, janitors, artists, fast food workers, business owners, musicians and ex-felons. The more varied the team’s backgrounds, the more solid their work.

By law, every jurisdictional entity, big and small, are required to maintain written policies, budgets, meeting agendas and minutes and procedures. Our research team loved dissecting and analyzing these massive public documents.

It’s impossible to describe how much power is gained by knowing how these entities work.

To protect their work, our research team built a separate team of parliamentarians whose sole purpose was to keep elected officials in order during meetings.

Understanding a school district budget is so frigging hard, a whopping 90% of elected school board members can’t do it. Same with city and county budgets. Our research team understood those budgets – forward and backwards.

So too, 90% of =city council members and county supervisors cannot understand a General Plan (the document that controls land-use). As a result, the General Plan is vulnerable, and developers easily turn it into weaponized tools that enable gentrification (funded by local taxpayer money).

Our research team understood General Plans – inside out. As a result, our city and county are two of the few places in America that eliminated zoning and stopped gentrification in its tracks.

Our community begged our research team to help stop the state from building a prison in our community. Believe it or not, that prison was designed to house between 3,500 – 5,000 sexually violent predators – only. SVPs are largely white men who rape and torture. For example, a white man who raped a 16 year old girl, cut off both her arms and threw her off the side of a mountain (the child survived). Like pedophiles, SVPs are killed by other inmates so often, they are separated from the general population. That prison was not built in our community.

Some people join organizations for the sole purpose of becoming their spokesperson. People are horrified when a self-appointed spokesperson stands up and speaks on behalf of their entire organization. If organizations don’t confront this problem, it destroys them. We learned to confront these antics the hard way. When someone did that to our organization, one of us went to the microphone and responded… Hey, reporters make sure you get this straight – Donna James does not represent our organization or our supporters, she was speaking for herself and no one else! You cannot imagine how hard that is to do – in public.

Surprisingly enough, the best speakers are the researchers. Somehow really knowing a subject washes the fear of public speaking away and these otherwise, studious, quiet people speak with conviction.

Our region benefitted from an organization that focused on capacity building of small, local, grassroots organizations. They shortened our learning curve and provided never ending resources. Success rates skyrocketed. If I understand BLM correctly, they are building this kind of organization.

Oh dear, I went on too long.