Community organising in the United States is often hailed for its ability to enhance the public visibility and political influence of marginalised social actors. This article contends that discreet. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Chicago, the article demonstrates that discretion is a core element in community organisers’ professional ethos of stepping back behind the volunteer, often low-income community spokespersons that they select, train and advise. The article then shows how organisers’ professionally-powered fermentation work unfolds through state-level grassroots lobbying, in a complex dialectic between discretion and visibility, between accommodating with the rules of the game and subverting them.

Over the past several decades in the United States community organising practices been hailed by academics and the general public for their abilities to enhance the public visibility and political influence of marginalised social actors, in the context of long-standing, deeply ingrained social and political inequality (Carnes, 2018; Schlozman et al., 2012). While a fully-fledged public engagement industry (Lee, 2015; Lee et al., 2015) has emerged since the 1970s to counter these effects and engage underrepresented groups, it has been dominated by civic-engagement-oriented groups that ‘avoid politics’ altogether (Eliasoph, 1998) or highly professionalised organisations that focus their efforts on policy-making arenas through advocacy (Andrews & Edwards, 2004; Bherer et al., 2017; Skocpol, 2004). Community organising has typically been understood as distinct from such advocacy and inside lobbying practices (Jenkins, 2002; Minkoff, 1994). Advocacy uses communication campaigns and appeals to the public and policy-makers to publicise and legitimise its cause; it favours ‘technical expertise and encounters with decision-makers over more protest-oriented forms of collective action’ (Ollion, 2015, p. 20). In stark contrast with these discreet forms of collective action, community organising uses contentious action repertoires (public meetings and gatherings, press conferences, demonstrations, and civil disobedience) to give voice to the underrepresented and legitimise their presence in the arenas of power. These efforts translate into campaigns that are skilfully prepared and orchestrated by paid staffers called organisers. Organisers also perform another crucial task: they select and train unpaid, volunteer neighbourhood residents, called ‘leaders’, to hold leadership positions and speak on behalf both of the organisation as a whole and the larger marginalised groups it claims to represent (Montanaro, 2012; Saward, 2009). At first glance, therefore, such mobilisation work seems to be the antithesis of discretion.

In this article, I contend that discretion is actually a fruitful conceptual tool to account for key elements of community organising work. As the articles in this issue show, discreet mobilisations are undergirded by different logics. As Nada and Purenne et al in this issue show, struggles for publicisation rely on a less visible logic of fermentation, where most of the mobilisation processes take shape under the radar. The particularity of community organising vis-à-vis other articles in this issue is that such fermentation work is performed by people who see themselves and act as professionals (the community organisers).

Looking at organisers as professionals implies two core propositions. First, as professionals, organisers collectively make a claim on controlling the production and management of organised, rationalised citizen participation (Abbott, 1988; Petitjean, 2019). Norms of professional excellence revolve around an ethos of stepping back behind the poor and low-income spokespersons that they select, train and advise to become the community’s legitimate representatives. In other words, community organisers claim to be experts in ‘managing the distance to the “rank-and-file”’ (Mischi, 2011). Being discreet is a core component of the specific control organisers claim over their work territory, of the particular work tasks they claim and how they perform it, and of the professional standards governing the work. Using a common word-formation operation that creates the name of an occupation out of a verb, I want to argue that community organisers act as discreet, professional fermenters of minority mobilisations. The second core proposition is that organising is not an interpersonal relationship between rational actors but a fundamentally social one. The roles of organiser and leaders are governed by scripts and prescriptions; they impose constraints and create practical opportunities over which individuals have little control; they are bound together by a complex nexus of interdependence and power, which leaders do not mechanically consent to.

To test the validity of this argument, the article looks at an aspect of contemporary community organising practices which has received little scholarly attention: state-level grassroots lobbying, also called ‘people’s lobbying’ in emic language.1 For the past several decades local community organising groups have ‘scaled up’ (Rusch, 2012) and turned to regional or national institutional arenas to make legislators transform their demands into policy (Kleidman, 2004). In the process, they have adopted new organisational repertoires, embedding themselves within the broader organisational field of outside lobbying and public interest group strategies (Kollman, 1998). More particularly, they have resorted to grassroots lobbying techniques, where non-lobbyist citizens contact directly government officials about policy issues to influence decision-making and demonstrate the salience of the issues (Cluverius, 2021; Kollman, 1998). Grassroots lobbying efforts have consolidated into a competitive social site where a variety of public and private actors encourage and shape citizen participation (Walker, 2009). It is therefore all the more interesting to analyse the organiser-leader relation in a social scene where discretion and moderation are expected standard behaviour.

After presenting the data and method that I use in the article, I show why a community organiser’s work is best analysed as professional work and identify the ability to step back while exerting control over the production of lay participation and representation as a key component of their professional ethos. I then turn to state-level grassroots lobbying practices to see how the organising social relation between organiser and leader and the visible/invisible dialectic play out in such a context. I emphasise how leaders respond differently both to grassroots lobbying efforts and to the scripted role that organisers try to make them fit into. I conclude by showing how these findings are relevant to other fields of study.

The article is based on an ethnographic study conducted in Chicago between 2015 and 2018. While there are now a multitude of localised spaces of community organising across the United States (Marwell, 2007; Orr, 2007; Talpin, 2016), Chicago is a particularly rich field of enquiry. From a historical point of view, it was in Chicago that Saul Alinsky formed the organisation that would mark the beginning of his career as a political entrepreneur, in the summer of 1939. Secondly, the city is today the headquarters of numerous national federations, nationally recognised training centres, as well as some forty40 organisations specialising in community organising, which employ between 150 and 200 community organisers. It is certainly the city where the community organising fabric is the densest in the country.

The empirical data includes 87 semi-structured interviews with community organisers from several organisations, volunteer leaders, former community organisers who have moved on to other fields (academia, philanthropy) or have retired, as well as union organisers, activists involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, and staff from philanthropic foundations. In addition to these interviews, I also collected data through in situ participant observation: I participated in several door-to-door canvassing efforts for municipal and state elections; I attended public meetings, demonstrations, rallies, and two fundraising events organised each year by a local philanthropic foundation; I took part in an intensive five-day programme on direct action organising held by a national training institute, the Midwest Academy. All these ethnographic experiences informed the analysis as a whole, but one observation yields particular significance for the purposes of this article: a full ‘lobby day’ conducted in March 2017 by Sara,2 one organiser from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH), and three leaders, Corey, Kevin and Roberto, all formerly incarcerated and non-white, whom Sara brought to Springfield, the capital of Illinois (I detail below the reasons for this significance).

The value of the ethnographic approach to studying community organising through the lens of discretion is twofold. Firstly, it reveals everyday practices which can eschew reflexive verbalisation, which are difficult to grasp through statistical objectivation or interviews alone (Bourdieu, 1980/1990; Jerolmack & Khan, 2014). Further, it shows how rapid changes in context can alter how people relationally make sense of these practices. The investigation was conducted during a wave of protest that unfolded in the wake of both the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2016 presidential campaign, marked both by the candidacy of Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination and by the election of Donald Trump. Like other protest episodes, this one helped to break down the symbolic boundaries between social spaces (McAdam et al., 2001), thus highlighting the importance of the distinction between professional organisers and volunteer social movement activists, whose alleged amateurism is a frequent object of criticism on the part of organisers (Petitjean & Talpin, 2022). Secondly, the ethnographic approach allowed me to immerse myself into tightly knit social networks, where everybody knows everybody. These networks both constitute one of the pillars of the production and maintenance of a homogeneous world view and function as structures for validating individuals’ beliefs and belief systems (Desmond, 2014; Laurens, 2018). Quite regularly, at the beginning or end of the interview, the respondents asked me who else I had met. My detailed answers made it possible to substantiate the seriousness of my investigation while allowing me to pinpoint more accurately each person’s relation vis-à-vis other actors.

The work tasks that community organisers claim as a professional territory are largely performed behind the scenes, as is the case for other groups occupying brokerage positions in the division of political labour linking the governors and the governed in a liberal representative democracy configuration (Beauvallet & Michon, 2017; Laurens, 2018; Sheingate, 2016). This ability to step back and not to speak for others is the main element characterising organisers’ professional ethos. As one author points out, ‘one purposive incentive that drives the organisers is the desire to play a democratising role in the political system to give low- and moderate-income Americans a genuine opportunity to influence the political system without being controlled by organisers’ (Russell, 1990, p. 123). However, the originality of this brokerage role is that the organisers are not, in the strict sense, professional representatives: the representatives of the group, who speak on its behalf and, in so doing, make it exist (Bourdieu, 2001; Brubaker, 2002), are the leaders.

According to indigenous categories, a leader fulfils two complementary criteria. First, they belong to the group of ‘people most impacted by the issue’, to quote an often-used expression. In practice, this means that the leaders are drawn from the relatively less dispossessed sections of the urban working classes. In community organising parlance, leaders are not just socially representative. They are also expected to wield a natural authority and ability to influence other people’s behaviours, a belief reflecting an imaginary where political activity is defined in terms of command and authority (Cohen, 2013). If leaders commit to the organisation, the assumption goes, they will bring other residents with them. Organisers therefore seek to align the leaders’ interests with those of the organisation so that the organisation benefits, practically and symbolically, from their ‘following’.

These two selection criteria correspond to two sets of work tasks carried out by organisers, which reveal two analytically distinct but in practice inseparable facets of the job. The first set consists in organising mobilisation campaigns, which often start from everyday issues converted into causes that are likely to obtain majority support; the campaigns are punctuated by actions that showcase the mobilised group. The second set, referred to in indigenous language as ‘leadership development’, consists in training leaders or potential leaders in their role. While such training involves passing on certain technical or oratory skills, at its core leadership development is about making the leaders believe in their competence and legitimacy. In some respects, organisers act as the community leaders’ executive coaches, except that they harness the services they provide to civic participation goals rather than profit-driven ones. Working in the shadows to transform individual feelings of injustice into collective action, organisers, like the cause entrepreneurs analysed by Purenne et al. in France, act as discreet fermenters of social discontent.

Getting ready

Fermentation work unfolds through three main moments: preparation, performance and assessment. Because the leader’s performance is the moment when all the underground work comes into the light and because it is also the most studied aspect in the extant literature. I want to focus more closely on the two moments that precede and follow it.

In the build-up to the performance, organisers work behind the scenes. Like stage directors, they prepare the members of the group, and the leaders in particular, to their roles; they rehearse behaviour patterns or scripts. Like conductors, they are responsible for setting the tempo of the campaigns and for beating the beat, so to speak, throughout the performance of popular representation. In this perspective, any opportunity is good to prepare the troops. The periods of latency immediately preceding the execution of an action, such as moments of collective transport, are particularly crucial. They can last from 10 minutes to several hours, depending on the distance to be covered, and are used by community organising groups as moments of rehearsal and militant socialisation (Chauvin, 2007b).

Catarina is a Latina organiser born in 1987 in an immigrant middle-class family who worked for the organisation Action Now from 2010 to 2012, the former branch of the powerful national federation ACORN. In interview, she explains that the way to ‘run a bus’ is very methodical.

We have to sit right in the front, like the supplies are in the front. In Action Now you pray, everyone prays before the bus leaves. You have to make sure everyone’s signed in, because we might leave someone. And there’s like a ‘why are we here’. And someone reads it out loud. You practice chants, or whatever. (…) And then you’re passing out the food. (In a sigh) And even for the food, you start from the back. (…) And as we’re getting closer to the location, you know, then you repeat about like why are we here, you try to turn up. Getting people excited. And then, instructions of what we’re going to do, making sure everyone has their phone numbers. We get off the bus first. And someone’s passing out signs right when we get off the bus. We have the bus driver’s phone number. It’s just a very clock-worked thing. (Interview with Catarina, 21 February 2017)

Beyond the ‘very clock-worked’ logistical dimension, preparation work involves a lot of individual coaching. The aim is to help the leaders, who are often members of the racialised working classes, to overcome a strong feeling of social illegitimacy and political incompetence by giving them the tools to resist the symbolic violence that underlies their interactions with members of the dominant classes. Speaking about the preparation work she does with CCH leaders when they meet with elected officials, Sara, a senior organiser born in 1990 in a lower-middle-class family, explains that

I always prepare them for this. I’m like ‘When you go in there, people are going to try to cut you off. (pause) Are you going to let them cut you off? What is your business? Why are we going?’ Right? So no, we’re not going to let them cut you off. (Interview with Sara, 14 February 2017)

For Komozi, the 44-year-old African American director of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organisation (KOCO), one of the city’s oldest Black community organisations, leadership development at KOCO is essentially a realisation of African Americans’ collective power and value, which comes through awareness of the structural racism they experience.

We’re talking about people who have been marginalised in society. People who’ve been told that they don’t matter. (Pausing) By word and deed. And so … to work with somebody who has believed through decades that they don’t have any worth, that not only they have worth, but they have the power to change their lives, and the lives of people that they don’t even know, is …  a huge feat to achieve. (Interview with Komozi, 20 February 2015).

Negotiating with elected officials or business actors represents a decisive opportunity where leaders can express this collective dignity, as Michelle, a retired black volunteer and leader at Southside Together Organising for Power (STOP), points out:

And usually when we come to the table, they always thinking (in a contemptuous voice) ‘Oh, they just the tenants, they just the … ’ But we start signing the CFRs, so they go like … (she makes a funny face and bursts out laughing) Yeah, we know all of that! And we put some project managers to shame, because they didn’t know they CFRs, you know? Which is the Code of Federal Regulations. We go through all that, we go classes for that. We don’t play! (Interview with Michelle, 6 February 2015)

As Michelle suggests, the work of preparing for a spokesperson’s role involves first of all learning precise knowledge about specific topics, such as particular public policies or the functioning of schools, hospitals, or administrative institutions, as well as more general knowledge on the history of racism or U.S. democracy. In Chicago as in other cities, various actors play a part in this process: the community organisations themselves, as well as external institutions such as private training centres, or conferences bringing together a plurality of institutional actors. For example, Michelle and other city leaders attended a ten-month training course called the Community Empowerment Workshop Series, organised by the Chicago Rehab Network (CRN), a citywide network of some 40 organisations specialising in urban renewal and social housing. During these trainings, participants ‘learn a lot about real estate, how they put the buildings together, you learn about acoustics for the floors, you learn about they do the reserves’ (Interview with Michelle).

Thanks to their newly gained technical knowledge, leaders like Michelle are better equipped to resist being awed and impressed by the landlords’ rhetorical sleights-of-hand and their symbolic violence. The learning process does not solely focus on acquiring detailed knowledge, however. It also includes the inculcation of practical skills associated with the role of spokesperson: drawing up an agenda, organising a meeting, distributing speaking turns, writing minutes, speaking in public (rallies, public meetings, hearings with elected representatives), negotiating on behalf of the group. This learning can take place through role-playing, during seminars or specialised conferences, but also during face-to-face interactions supervised by the organiser. The prevailing pedagogical frame is one of ‘modelling’, where an organiser can temporarily take centre stage before the leader steps in. This is what Sara says when she talks about ‘lobby days’ in Springfield:

Modelling means like showing them what do to, by doing it. If we want to meet with the legislator, you have to talk to their secretary. So maybe the first time I’ll do it to show them how to do it. Because there’s some little tricks in doing that. And the other trick is that when you are with a group of people that do not look like lobbyists, lobbyists themselves often don’t respect you very much. So while you’re up trying to talk with the secretary about meeting with the legislator, these lobbyists will like come and cut in front of you. So I have to model some things about how to be assertive and really – I’m showing them that this is our place too. Because a lot of times, new leaders, especially, arrive in Springfield like ‘Holy crap, this place is scary, I don’t fit in here’, all that stuff. (Interview with Sara)

What Sara and her fellow organisers pass down blends the teaching of practical skills and ‘little tricks’, a reassuring tone and an empowering rhetoric, and the debunking of certain aspects of power relations – in terms of race, particularly.

Stepping back and assessing the performance

The leader’s performance itself can take a range of different forms. It can be someone taking on a specific task during a meeting; it can be one or several leaders negotiating for hours with elected officials to push for a piece of legislation; it can be a group of residents shutting down traffic in the city centre. Regardless of the nature or duration of the action, there is always a debriefing moment afterwards. The organisers encourage the volunteers to reflect on their participation in order to fuel their commitment. Rooted in a pragmatist conception of action, which makes experience the primary source of learning, debriefing practices aim at identifying any mistakes made during collective action so that people can stop repeating them in the future. Their goal is to improve the effectiveness of individual and collective performance (Schön, 1983/1983/2013).

The observation day in Springfield with Sara and Corey, Kevin and Roberto, is particularly enlightening in this respect. During the day, each interaction or attempted interaction, however brief, between a state representative (called a ‘rep’) and one of the three leaders – especially Roberto or Kevin – is quickly debriefed by Sara. Addressing one leader in front of the rest of the group or in a face-to-face setting, she asks him to analyse the process and gives a set of general recommendations and practical advice. The journey back, on the other hand, provides an opportunity for a collective debriefing on the whole day.

We get into the car. It is about 2.40 pm. We take the same seats as on our way in. Sara sits behind the wheel. She starts. ‘We had a good day’s work. Congrats, you guys! Lobby day, that’s officially it! Before we pull out I want to mention how it was a pleasure and honour to work with you. Take time to learn lessons. Debrief the day.’ Sara asks everyone to ‘say something that you think went well, and then say what do you think we could do better next time’. (Field notes, 29 March 2017)

Once Sara has set the scene, everyone (including the ethnographer) gives their assessment, with Sara intervening regularly to ask a follow-up question or draw more general conclusions. Two types of assessments then emerge. The first type insists on the difficulties of speaking and being heard. Expressing a sense of disappointment with himself (‘I was angry with myself’), speaking little, Corey verbalises a visible resignation and bewilderment during the day: ‘I don’t know how to get them to listen to us, when I think they should listen.’ The other type offers more optimistic analyses that point out conjunctural errors and structural difficulties but insist on the possibility of making adjustments in the future. Kevin, for example, who has already been on a lobby day before, felt comfortable and was able to talk about his personal experience even though he was unable to speak directly to the elected representatives. When he explains that we should have gone to see the elected representatives at the end of the parliamentary session, at the end of the morning, instead of meeting up with the rest of the coalition members, Sara agrees with him and adds: ‘Maybe in the future we should keep this in mind and not leave at that time’.

This example illustrates the circulation of a ‘discourse of permanent mobilisation’ (Lefèvre, 2011, p. 167) marked by carefully worded benevolence. Sara distributes symbolic rewards for engagement, which she presents not only as a source of learning but as a means of regaining individual dignity. Sara’s interventions throughout the day seek to show the leaders that they are not doomed to powerlessness and that their ever-increasing involvement is the path towards individual and collective salvation. In doing so, she accomplishes a ‘micromobilisation’ of members as she strives to align their interpretative frameworks with the organisation’s to maintain their commitments (Snow et al., 1986). At the time of the collective debriefing, this diffuse but active work seemed to bear fruit. Roberto and Kevin, the two leaders whose assessments were the most positive, took up Sara’s main points. Emphasising the self-affirming, therapeutic aspect of his participation, Roberto clearly expressed his satisfaction at having taken part in this experience:

It’s teaching me that I’m actually trying to become a better person, for myself. (…) Because it shows me that I went outside my comfort zone. And I’m doing something not only to better myself mentally, but in the future as well, educationally, job-wise, or anything like that. It felt good, I felt good. I actually was Roberto today, and not that other guy from the boulevard. (Field notes, 29 March 2017).

Sara’s subtle but constant supervision prevented me from getting to know Corey, Kevin and Roberto better and understand their different reactions, but it is possible that Corey was less permeable to Sara’s micromobilisation throughout the day because of his social properties and trajectory. Like Kevin, Corey is African American, but he looked older than the other two leaders (he was probably in his fifties, Kevin and Roberto, in their thirties); his educational or professional opportunities were probably far more reduced than Kevin’s or Roberto’s, which increased his exclusion and self-exclusion. Because of his highly dominated position, during the day Corey did not confront Sara’s authority heads-on. Rather, he circumvented it. For instance, he stuck to a literal understanding of his role (‘I only do that part right here’, he said pointing to the testimony guide handed out by Sara in the morning). At times he even opted out of the role altogether, dozing off during certain conversations about what legislators to meet.

At every moment of the fermentation work, the organisers act in a discreet but decisive way. Although they are not the ones making the community’s voices heard, without them it is doubtful that any voicing could have happened at all. But as the day in Springfield demonstrates, such work does not unfold solely in visible protest actions in the public space that seek the greatest possible publicity. Many community organising groups in Chicago and elsewhere resort to more institutionalised advocacy practices, actively participating in the process of public policy-making at the state level.

Doussard and Fulton emphasise that

state-level organizing brings many distinct costs, ranging from the hard costs of traveling to remote state capitals to the complexity of adjusting messages, tactics, and campaign goals to state-level political bodies whose electorates differ from the urban electorates with which community organizations are familiar (2020, p. 59).

Not all community organising groups in the city can meet such costs, however. Like other contexts of collective action, community organising as a relatively autonomous social space is structured around an opposition between interconnected poles which are themselves embedded into other social fields (Bereni, 2021; Dufour, 2021; Mathieu, 2021). My research in Chicago suggests that the space of community organising is structured around two major poles: an institutional, policy-oriented pole, and a social movement, protest-oriented one. The organisations positioned around the institutional pole, which can employ dozens of full-time staff, are more likely to mobilise the traditional channels of action associated with advocacy, such as expertise and lobbying, or to combine them with other repertoires of action, such as service provision, direct action organising or legal services. Conversely, organisations on the protest side, who often operate with more limited financial resources and fewer employees, are more likely to engage with social movement organisations, mobilise more contentious repertoires, and voice a more systemic critique of the established order. Beyond the opposition between these two poles, there is one fundamental principle which unites all community organising group into a common field of practice: the discreet, controlled production of popular participation and representation. To make this case I now turn to the analysis of grassroots lobbying practices and the underlying dialectic of discretion and ostentation.

‘Educating the legislators and holding them accountable’

During the survey, several organisers reported – often in a jaded tone – frequent trips to Springfield, the capital of Illinois, for what they call ‘lobby days’. During these time-consuming trips they take groups of leaders, small or large, to ‘educate the legislators’, as they put it. Community leaders meet with their representatives, present their demands and introduce reforms or bills that the organisations they represent are advocating for. These day trips take place while the legislature is in session, from January to late May. Because Springfield is nearly 200 miles from Chicago, the three-to-four-hour drive to get there is an opportunity to rehearse roles or make last-minute adjustments. For both organisers and leaders, the challenge is twofold: they want elected officials to hear and listen to them, and they want to remind them who their constituents are. As Salma, an organiser for the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, born in 1989 to parents of Palestinian origin, puts it:

Sometimes, because it’s a smaller cohort of us, it will be the organisers and maybe a leader or two. But other times we mobilise an entire bus and we take folks down. Because I think that … there’s so much more power when you have … this representation from the community, getting in legislators’ faces and holding them accountable. (Interview with Salma, 30 March 2017)

The community organisations projecting their presence into Springfield are thus part of the long history of conflict and cooperation between political parties and voluntary associations to ‘mobilise a democratic citizenry’ (Skocpol, 2004, p. 37), maintaining the myth of an American political exception. Although it can be traced back to the myriad of associations that fascinated Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s, this dialectic of citizen vigilance only really became institutionalised between the 1890s and the 1920s, when interest groups emerged in response to repeated scandals of political corruption (Clemens, 1997). The community organising groups in Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston are the direct heirs of these people’s lobbies, to use Elizabeth Clemens’ formula. In this respect, they are reminiscent of the settlement houses of the early twentieth century, which combined local, direct service provision and lobbying work to push through social and economic reforms at the state and federal levels. To support their policy claims, settlement houses put forward their in-depth knowledge of local problems and their proximity to the population (McGerr, 2005). Peter, the director of a large organisation combining organising, service delivery and advocacy in the southwest of Chicago, echoes this long tradition when he states: ‘We’re just concerned citizens talking to our elected representatives. (pause) It’s our   …  rights to do that. […] We’re bringing constituents to talk to their elected officials. (pause) That’s it’. (Interview with Peter, 23 February 2017).

More is at stake in lobby days than what Peter suggests, however. The trips to Springfield are not just a matter of casual conversations. Much more happens than simply ‘bringing constituents to talk to their elected officials’, as the lobby day I participated in March 2017 with Sara, Corey, Kevin, and Roberto, perfectly illustrates. As former convicts, Corey, Kevin and Roberto were asked to raise awareness among elected officials in the Illinois House of Representatives about HB 2373, a bill on increasing the number of convictions that can be removed from criminal records to facilitate the reintegration of former prisoners. The bill is sponsored by two elected officials and the Restoring Rights and Opportunities Coalition of Illinois (RROCI, pronounced ‘rocky’). Created in 2015, it brings together CCH, the Community Renewal Society, a leading faith-based organising group in Chicago, and two advocacy and legal support organisations for prisoners, Cabrini Green Legal Aid and Heartland Alliance for Human Needs and Human Rights. Similar coalitions bridging social, spatial, sectoral, and scalar boundaries have proliferated since the 1990s to address a number of policy issues, even if community organisations often occupy subaltern positions (Doussard & Fulton, 2020; Doussard & Lesniewski, 2017; Sites et al., 2007). For the particular lobby day I participated in, the coalition flagged upfront the legislators whose vote they need and split up the work across member organisations. In the minivan, Sara explains that she hopes getting 17 more pledges to support the bill. She shows us small pictures of the people we need to identify and talk to.

What happens during these lobby days followed a well-oiled process. Organisers define and assign the leaders’ roles beforehand. They help them rehearse in advance, sometimes weeks or months in advance. During this preparation period, organisers work to convince leaders to make the trip with them and to overcome their fears of being in unfamiliar social spaces to negotiate with the dominant. For Sara, who works with homeless people, issues of access to housing and criminal justice are paramount.

A lot of the work we do is in advance of the actual … (laughing) showtime, right? So in advance is mostly when I’m … Every time I go to a shelter, meeting people, and identifying people that want to get involved, meeting with them one-on-one, meeting with them again to … prepare for Springfield, having coalition meetings and bringing leaders so that they can meet each other and prepare further. And then finally going. (Interview with Sara)

When the organisers arrive in Springfield, they break the leaders out into small groups to meet with elected officials. They move from group to group to check on morale and solve any problems while remaining in the background. Sara describes her professional goals in the following terms: ‘When we go down, it’s all about the leaders. And them being the advocates.’ The centring of leaders does not happen spontaneously, however. It is in large part produced by the organisers’ discreet but constant micromobilisation work. And such work is framed by particular standards of what a genuine, legitimate advocate should do – and be. This is illustrated by the following extract from my field diary:

Around 2 pm, we venture into the individual offices of several elected officials, located behind one of the countless doors in the Capitol maze, to present the details of the bill. Each office is manned by a secretary, so leaders who try their hand at this exercise have to get around this first hurdle. Twice, Kevin makes the technical case, with figures, for voting for the bill. The secretaries respond with weary, disembodied ‘okays’ and refuse to let him pass. After these two failures, taking Kevin aside, Sara asks him what he has noticed about the secretaries. Faced with Kevin’s inconclusive answer, Sara explains the reasons for his failure: ‘Personal things are more effective. They don’t care about the mechanics of the bills’. She then concludes that this is ‘another situation, with the secretaries, where real testimonies are important’. (Field notes, 29 March 2017)

In this excerpt, which dovetails with other narratives that organisers reported in interview, Sara makes clear what her professional expectations are: leaders should give personal testimonies to show how the reforms contained in the bills which the organisations or coalitions they belong to support would improve their concrete living conditions. What Sara calls ‘real testimonies’ is where the supposed effectiveness of their speaking lies, not in their attempts to explain the details of bills.

These interactions point toward an important aspect of the type of fermentation work that organisers perform. The organiser–leader combination functions as an inseparable and complementary pair. One cannot exist without the other. It would be unthinkable for Sara to meet elected representatives alone, for instance, as she herself states:

(Smiling) Why would I do that when the leaders could so much better represent the issue, because they go through it? But sometimes, if I’m in a team, or I’m accompanying a team to a meeting … (sighing slightly) If necessary, I’ll … (pause) offer, contribute something to the meeting. But I try to be selective about doing that. You know? And there’s also times when for various reasons – so a lot of the leaders we have are African American. And if we’re meeting with a white Republican guy, having me in there can be helpful. And I see my role as  …  breaking the ice, or making space for the leaders. So we get in there, and the Republican guy, whatever he wants to talk about something, he looks at me. Right? Because I’m the only non-black person in the room. And a lot of people have so many deep-seated issues with that. So he’s talking to me. And my role is to say: ‘Thanks for having this meeting with us. I want to introduce you to So-and-so, he can tell you why we’re here’. (Interview with Sara)

The daughter of a Colombia-born pipe fitter and a white nurse from the Chicago area, Sara experienced important upward mobility through an education in highly selective elite institutions. As a result of her social background and complex racial identity, Sara possesses social attributes, a trajectory and a general hexis which clearly sets her apart from CCH leaders, most of whom are African American. But as she points out in this extract, the organiser’s discreet presence can be decisive in countering the implicit social logics of recognising someone’s legitimacy to speak. In two subtle sentences, she brings to the fore the community leaders and focuses the conversation on them. Making physical and symbolic space for the leaders does not just imply a direct engagement with elected officials, however. There are more structural factors shaping these interactions. I want to focus on one of them in particular: the jurisdictional disputes that organisers engage in with other professional brokers who go to Springfield to make the interests of the groups they represent prevail.

‘We’re not a bunch of lobbyists’

Chasing away other figures who also make claims on the production of collective interests is at the heart of how community organisers define their collective identity as a professional group and try to assert their jurisdiction over the production of legitimate community representation. Such figures include social movement activists and social workers (Chauvin, 2007a; Petitjean, 2019), but also professional lobbyists. Since the 1970s professional lobbying practices have played an increased role in shaping US public policy at the state and federal levels (Grossmann, 2012; Waterhouse, 2014). The distancing of the figure of the professional lobbyist is evident in the following interview extract with Rosanne, an African American woman in her thirties who serves as Action Now’s executive director:

Interviewer: And what do you think is the next step after the bill?

Rosanne: Well we have to get it passed. We’re doing a retreat of Black Roots Alliance to kind of figure out the strategy, and figure out ways that we can both leverage – because the three organisations are grassroots-building organisations. We care about real people in the community. We want to be able to build power for this legislation from that lens, and not just have it be like a bunch of lobbyists. So really being able to do some direct action and assess who the targets are and … really run a organising campaign around it. (Interview with Rosanne, 15 February 2016)

The Black Roots Alliance which Rosanne refers to is comprised of three organisations which try to push through a criminal justice system reform bill. At the time of the interview, the initiative was stalling. What is particularly striking in Rosanne’s description of the coalition’s current predicament is that she defines ‘being a bunch of lobbyists’ as the road which the coalition should absolutely avoid if they want to remain committed to defending ‘real people in the community’.

While agents who are paid by individual organisations or coalitions to influence legislation must, under Illinois law, comply with legal lobbying registration requirements, this is not the case for Rosanne, Sara and their fellow organisers when they go to Springfield. Such activities are, however, legally constrained. Not all community organising groups that engage in grassroots lobbying have the same legal leeway. Many community organisations have a 501(c)(3) status, referring to the section in the federal Internal Revenue Code that defines the status of nonprofit organisations and regulates their legislative activity. This tax filing status prevents them from devoting a ‘substantial’ amount of their activity to lobbying, which, the IRC defines as defending or opposing specific bills. 501(c)(3) organisations must limit the amount of lobbying in their overall activity and must approach elected officials in a non-partisan manner, i.e. by meeting with both Democrats and Republicans. However, the more established and better-funded community organising groups can create a sister organisation with another tax filing status, called 501(c)(4), which allows them to actively promote public policy related to ‘social welfare’. The Internal Revenue Service website indicates that ‘to be operated exclusively to promote social welfare, an organisation must operate primarily to further the common good and general welfare of the people of the community (such as by bringing about civic betterment and social improvements)’ (Internal Revenue Service, 2019). An organisation representing the tenants of a particular building does not qualify for a c4 status, whereas an organisation representing all the tenants of a particular community does. A c4 status therefore allows community groups to diversify their range of action and make inroads into institutional policy-making, which is probably the reason why an increasing number of groups seem to have adopted it in recent years.

However, even when community groups have a c4 status, they subordinate their lobbying activities to the production of legitimate community representation and their leadership development goals. Community organising groups have developed a particular style of lobbying, which stands in stark contrast with the more discreet and professional forms, as Catarina explains. Before being hired as a community organiser at Action Now, she worked in Washington DC for a national feminist organisation, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), as a public policy and government relations fellow, as part of her political science studies at a public university in Illinois.

The people we were lobbying with are volunteers. And they’re retired white women. They worked at the World Bank, they were retired lawyers, they were these really important people in their lives. (pause) Where Action Now was more hardcore. (…) It was more strategic. Where AAUW is more like, we get these people together, and I have the folder of the issue, and then who we look for. And, you know, whoever meets with us. (…) And Action Now … you hold [the legislator’s] hand and you don’t let go until they fucking agree with what you’re saying! (Laughing) Yeah. It’s very aggressive. And you know who you’re looking for. You just take the office. (Interview with Catarina)

Such an aggressive style is embodied in how community leaders and organisers dress up for lobby days, which contrasts with how lobbyists are clad, thus materialising the boundary between outsiders and insiders. In Chicago, community organising groups and unions print out T-shirts in different colours that organisers distribute to members (Action Now’s T-shirts are azure blue, CCH’s are chick yellow, KOCO’s are maroon, for instance). As a marker of belonging to the organisation, which organisers hand out on arrival in Springfield, the T-shirt not only serves to distinguish one organisation from another: its highly visible colours also affirm the legitimacy of working-class people’s irruption into institutional spaces where they are not expected. Lobbyists, on the other hand, are recognisable not so much by their suits as by the badges around their necks. In interview, Sara unpacks the T-shirt’s civic and political significance:

You’re in a T-shirt, you’re part of a team, and when you’re doing this, it’s not like you are acting like a jerk. You are part of a team that has a mission. Right? And it’s your responsibility whether that’s going to get done. But we all have each other’s backs.

Interviewer: So you never go to Springfield dressed up in suits and … 

No. You know, sometimes … Different organisers have different approaches to that, though. And there have definitely been times where … so, if we’re going on a small lobby day, I’ll go with five people, and we’re in a coalition, so each organiser is bringing like five people. Sometimes, on those days, we will dress a little nicer. Because the tone of what we’re doing is very calculated and focused. We’re not just there to get seen, we want to have longer conversations. So I’ll wear a suit, a jacket over my T-shirt. (Interview with Sara)

Sara insists that the leaders’ disruptive presence, symbolised by the breach of clothing etiquette that is the colourful T-shirt, is not a challenge to the functioning of the institutions. But the strategic wearing of a jacket over the T-shirt also shows a carefully crafted combination of irruption and discretion that depends on the objectives pursued: if the objective is to have longer conversations with elected officials, a dress code that is too ‘noisy’ could be counterproductive.

What are the effects of organisers’ fermentation work in a place like Springfield? Further research is needed on the issue, but what I gathered from my fieldwork in Chicago is that the organisers’ voluntarism does not seem to fundamentally challenge the exclusionary mechanisms underlying the political field. This is what the first minutes of the lobby day in Springfield illustrate.

At 9:20 am, we arrive at a small car park, in front of a modern building with glass doors at the top of a slight incline, which leads to the Capitol. Sara hands out the T-shirts. Kevin puts his on over his shirt and leaves his tie hanging out. We see a few people passing by in suits and tailors. Sara explains to us how to distinguish the categories of people when everyone wears a suit. Those without badges are the reps. Those who have badges are the lobbyists. (…) We go to the entrance and pass through the security checkpoint and the security gate. One of the CCH lobbyists is waiting behind us. He is small, in his thirties, very smiling, wearing a suit and a lobbyist badge. As soon as the introductions begin, he spots one of the elected officials we are to speak to heading for a door in a corridor adjacent to the entrance hall. There is panic and confusion. We almost run towards him (…). The ‘rep’ is about to go to a committee meeting and enters a room. Roberto approaches him and tries to talk to him. He fumbles for words, he stammers. The ‘rep’ is visibly impatient and listens with one ear; his meeting is about to start any minute. We leave as quickly as we entered. In the corridor, Sara debriefs this impromptu meeting: ‘How do you think it went?’ After introducing the short interaction, he concludes that he didn’t have enough time to tell her his personal story and talk about the bill. Sara agrees and enthusiastically recalls: ‘We represent people power’. (Field notes, 29 March 2017)

The feverishness of the collective reaction to the sight of the ‘rep’ about to enter his committee room reveals the central importance of what Sylvain Laurens calls ‘bureaucratic capital’ in his work on lobbyists and bureaucrats in Brussels. Bureaucratic capital is ‘not confined to knowledge of the legal rules but is eminently practical knowledge’ such as ‘knowing how to exploit interdepartmental rivalries, when to go up the hierarchy, when to turn informal relations or long-term working relations to advantage by obtaining the first draft of a directive, and so on’. (Laurens, 2018, p. 209) Although Sara does share a number of social properties and characteristics with lobbyists, and although her graduate studies in public policy at a prestigious elite university in Chicago familiarised her with the intricacies and technicalities of policy-making, without the intervention of the young CCH lobbyist nobody would have immediately recognised the ‘rep’ and Roberto’s attempt to talk with him would never have taken place. The community leaders have neither the practical skills needed to determine the most opportune moment to speak to an elected official nor the expected social resources to be able to choose their moment. Their place in the political division of labour is clear and reaffirmed by Sara as a remedy for this early morning failure: their job is not so much to influence public policy effectively than to ‘represent people power’. And this is what she highlights during her debriefing comments at the end of the day: among the positive aspects of the lobby day, not only did the different groups of the RROCI coalition manage to meet the objective of speaking with 17 elected officials, but the group dynamics were collaborative and participatory: ‘Another positive for me was how we did work together. We made sure that everybody had a role to play and that there was opportunity for everyone to participate’ (Field notes, 29 March 2017).

Through its ethnographic approach, this study has shown how fruitful the concept of discretion can be to analyse concrete community organising work as well as grassroots lobbying practices. In doing so, it contributes to two existing fields of study. It first contributes to the extant literature on the public engagement industry and political brokers by emphasising that the complex professionally powered fermentation work that organisers perform is central to US-style community organising. While many existing accounts of community organising efforts highlight its ability to give voice to the voiceless, I emphasise that, quite ironically, the mobilisation and organisation of marginalised groups to counter the professional, self-enclosing logic at the heart of the political field (Bourdieu, 2001) is actually undertaken by professional fermenters. The article also highlights that the power relation at play is a dynamic one. Volunteer community leaders do not passively obey organisers’ commands and accept the roles they are assigned to. Yet, their different options are in large part determined by their own resources.

The other main insights contribute to the literature on grassroots lobbying by broadening the focus beyond the analysis of its effectiveness (Bergan, 2009; Cluverius, 2017) or the institutional and professional apparatus supporting it (Han et al., 2021; Walker, 2009; Walker, 2014). Building up on studies that focus less on formal-organisational frames than on how collective action works in practice (Lichterman, 2020; Mischi, 2016; Munson, 2009), the article sheds light on some concrete grassroots lobbying practices, such as community leaders’ direct testimonies to legislators, emphasising that they are shaped by multi-layered institutional and symbolic constraints, professional norms, as well as participants’ complex socialisations. The article also invites other researchers of collective action and civic engagement not to take the ‘grassroots’ dimension for granted but to look at the actual practices, actors, processes, and institutions that produce and define such ‘grassrootness’.

1

The articulation of direct-action campaigns and lobbying has been addressed by professional practitioners, however. See for instance (Ben Asher & bat Sarah, 2018).

2

All the informants’ names have been anonymised.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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