From the shores of the St. Croix, to the winding dirt roads of the valley, people are starting to realize that they can make positive change in our community. We get a lot of opportunities to work with members from across Western WI to build power. GROWW’s Organizing Director, Bill Hogseth, gets to experience this all the time. “Every single day we get to see light bulbs going off for people. People choosing to step out of their comfort zone and do something that they know is important. That’s not easy, and people like making a commitment that’s beyond just doing one thing and being done.” Bill works with organizers and members on community projects ranging from stopping CAFO expansion to advocating for more affordable housing to bringing Final Five Voting to Wisconsin. At the heart of our work is organizing, and the radical belief that anyone can do it.

Each of our projects has a leadership team made up of members who are passionate about their community. Members can work to create positive change by not only developing their own leadership skills but by lifting up and supporting the people around them. This includes supporting those on their own organizing journey.

This past January, we held our first organizing workshop; GrassRoots School. This gave us the chance to support those who wanted to obtain the skills needed to make a change through community power. Many of those members are still working with us now. “Sometimes the training is like the first step on a longer journey for them and watching where they go after, that is really beautiful,” Bill says. “We’ve got people who were in GrassRoots School who are now in our leadership teams.” We get to watch people come into their own power and use it.

To truly make a change in our communities, we need power.

Power-less

Most people think of power as a bad thing. There are countless negative connotations with power; that the people in power tend to abuse it or the idea that power corrupts. “Most people’s experiences with power are negative,” says Bill. “Where they’re being deprived of something or manipulated or exploited or not seen or not heard or not taken seriously.” When the people who have the power are irresponsibly causing more harm than good, it is easy to see power as something evil. “We don’t get many experiences to see ourselves or our family or our community as being powerful. The world lacks examples of ordinary people being powerful.”

For a time, Bill was a wildlife biologist at the DNR. He wanted to make a change in conservation and protect the places, habitats, and animals that make Wisconsin so beautiful. As a very data-oriented person, this seemed like the place to be – he had all the facts and now he had access to the people who had the authority and power to make change.

But it became increasingly apparent to him that the change he wanted to make was not possible through his position. Even with all his facts, there seemed to always be bureaucratic obstacles in the way. “It was a lot of experiences of realizing the problems that I wanted to solve couldn’t be solved by collecting data and having all the information to make the best decision because usually, the decisions came down to power of politics.”

It is common to feel that power is something only a few have in top-floor corporate offices, in the backrooms of Madison, and in the halls out in Washington D.C.. Even up the ladder of the DNR. That to have power one needs an official title on their business card declaring such. That the changemakers with real influence live outside the scope of our day-to-day life.

That is what those who are misusing their power want us to believe – that power is a finite resource only a few of us have. That power is for greedy and corrupt politicians, CEOs, or lobbyists. We have to choose not to believe the lies that we’ve been told about ourselves by these institutions. We know that in reality, we have power and can use it to benefit the communities we care about.

Power is… good, actually?

When the places where power is supposed to be the most effective aren’t, we have to look for examples of power elsewhere. Looking back on history, we find instances where power is working through the people. In the labor movement, the civil rights movement, in the farm workers’ movement, people used their power to create the changes they saw needed to happen. It is easy to see these moments in history as one big moment. But it was many moments. Many moments of people choosing to march, to boycott, to go on strike, or to talk to their neighbors about the issues impacting them. Those people undeniably had power and used it.

Rev. Martin Luther King described power as the “ability to achieve purpose.” It is the capacity we can create by combining our resources and using them creatively to achieve a common purpose. Power is nothing more than the relationships between what one group wants and what another group has. When those groups work together, they are building power.

After having spent time in places where power was not being used effectively, Bill started thinking about where he did see people’s power in action. “It was when I was in situations where I was seeing people doing things together that they couldn’t do by themselves, and doing it in a way where they were intentionally aligning on the things they cared about, and choosing to work together in a way that was bridging their differences and getting some really serious stuff done.” We are building power by strengthening our communities through collective action.

If we are to create change in our community, we have to go through a shift in our perspective. We can’t see power as a bad thing, we have to see it as the strength of the relationships we have with each other. Power has to be what drives us towards our goals, together. Bill says we have to start “thinking of power as a way you behave. Us being powerful is all of us choosing to behave powerfully together, and getting past those things that keep us from believing in ourselves.”

Create Meaningful Change in our Communities

Right now, we are seeing examples of people taking action with their own power in our community. The residents of Salem Township and Pierce County are working to protect their air, water, and land by enacting a moratorium on CAFO expansion and passing an operating ordinance in the county. Neighbors in River Falls are coming together to create more affordable housing options. Folks from across Western WI are working to bring Final Five Voting to our elections and bridge the partisan divide that keeps us separated on the issues that impact us all. Even members who have worked on projects in the past have been inspired to build power through local government.

“It starts with all of us realizing that there are things that we deserve in our community,” says Bill. “And that we have a right to those things, we deserve those things.”

Interested in building power to make a positive change in our community? Reach out, connect with an organizer, and discover opportunities to take action.