Jane Frances McAlevey, a fierce labor organizer and renowned teacher of rigorous whole-worker organizing, died on July 7 at age fifty-nine. No American of the past fifty years has had a greater impact on how people think about social change.
In No Shortcuts and other books, she argued that the only reliable way to improve working conditions and create a more just society is for people to build their power to strike. Her thinking about why and how to build strong worker-led unions is critical to understanding the halting revival of the U.S. labor movement today. But she also had a profound impact on community organizing, including faith-based organizing, which has not received the attention it deserves.
In the introduction to No Shortcuts, McAlevey wrote about workplaces and faith communities as two settings that lend themselves especially well to structure-based organizing. In both cases, the goal of an organizing process is to “win over a majority of participants in the given structure to a cause or an issue.” When organizers talk about base-building, this is what they mean: the painstaking, person-by-person conversations and networking needed to turn a group of individuals into a majority that is willing to act collectively on its own behalf.
A faith-based organizer or activist who defaults to working with a small group of a congregation’s more progressive members—the so-called social-justice junkies—is not base-building. The same is true for community organizers who gather a small clique of activists. In the tradition of civil-rights leaders Bob Moses and Ella Baker, McAlevey challenged organizers to find the people in any community who are respected enough to influence others. Spend time with these organic leaders, even if they seem skeptical of the cause. Challenge them to see the need to build an organization they can use to make their own lives and the lives the people around them better.
McAlevey was rigorous in distinguishing between advocacy, activism, and organizing. In her view, organizing was unique in relying on the power of people to systematically build the ability to negotiate change. She emphasized that people power is a muscle built through actions that test a group’s unity and resolve. People gain an understanding of their own power and what they can accomplish in the world by making demands and directly engaging with decision-makers. Just as Moses and Aaron started by asking Pharaoh for three days to pray in the desert, demands for liberation begin with small steps that test the power structure people are up against and the organizing structures they are building.
Like base-building and structure tests, the idea that organizations are people in motion rather than third parties is fundamental to understanding Jane McAlevey’s approach. If a union presents itself as a third party, then people will feel as if they have to negotiate with both their employer and the union. The same is true for community organizations. In El Salvador, members of Communities of Faith Organizing for Action (COFOA) wear t-shirts that say: SOMOS COFOA—“WE ARE COFOA.” In 2023, they were in a meeting with the National Housing Minister trying to win land rights for themselves and 350,000 other Salvadoran families who’d been defrauded by developers. In frustration, the housing minister instructed them to refer to themselves as residents of their communities rather than as COFOA leaders. They replied, “No, somos COFOA,” because being the organization gave them power to negotiate their own future. When a union or a faith-based organization shows up as a third party there to help others, it’s all too easy for people in positions of power to divide and conquer.
The influence of McAlevey’s approach to labor organizing can be seen in the most successful faith-based community-organizing efforts in the United States. Through organizations such as ISAIAH in Minnesota, POWER Interfaith in Pennsylvania, and PICO California, people of faith are using versions of whole-person, structure-based organizing to transform their communities and states.
I never had the chance to meet Jane. But we exchanged emails in 2016 when I was preparing for a book tour for my own book on organizing. She sent me a long, kind, and encouraging email about how caring for her family after the loss of her niece, who had been a human-rights lawyer, had taken her away from her work for two months. I’m sad that I didn’t follow up on her offer to have tea. The following year, I ended up spending almost as much time at my book events promoting her book as mine. When people ask me where to start reading about organizing, I send them to the introduction to No Shortcuts.
Jane’s breakthrough as an organizer came in Connecticut, when she led the Stamford Organizing Project from 1997 to 2001. She and other organizers united four local unions, ministers, and community organizations to work together to bring four thousand new workers into union membership, win $15 million in funding for public housing, and make Stamford accountable to working people of color. Jane understood how faith gives people courage and believed passionately in breaking down the walls between labor and community power-building. As community leaders, faith-based organizers, and people of faith, we should remember her as one of our own heroes and teachers.
