What Community Organizing Taught Me

By Erwin Figueroa, Director of Organizing, Transportation Alternatives

Five years ago, I was in a situation familiar to other millennials who graduated college in the Great Recession: I had multiple jobs, hadn’t been able to establish a career, and I was broke — so broke that riding a bike was my preferred method of transportation since every MetroCard swipe cut into my rent money.

Despite the distraction of my economic situation, I noticed a recurring problem on my commutes: bicycle lanes that ended abruptly, with no rhyme or reason as to why they did.

Looking for answers, I searched for “bicycle group nyc,” and came across the website for Transportation Alternatives (TA) — a New York City nonprofit that advocates for biking and walking. And amazingly, they were hiring. I applied and was hired to be a TA Ambassador, essentially a street canvassing job, for the summer of 2015.

At the time, I had zero experience in community organizing, let alone canvassing. In fact, I was pretty apolitical. That did not last long.

My new employer quickly taught me the basics of grassroots organizing: petitioning, the role decision-makers have in creating safe street infrastructure, and the great art of explaining an issue in less than a minute before whoever you’re talking to walks away.

Since that first summer, I worked my way up to become the lead organizer for the whole borough of the Bronx in 2016, and then Senior Organizer in 2018, and recently Director of Organizing. Community organizing has taught me a lot about how to be part of a community, how to be a New Yorker, and how to be a person in the world — but especially how to be effective working in a direct action organizing model. Here’s what I’ve learned.

Lift Others Up

Two months after I became TA’s Bronx Organizer, a 26-year-old Bronx resident named Giovanni Nin was killed riding his bike home from work. He and I were the same age. The street where he was killed, East Tremont Avenue, was known for being unsafe for walking and biking. There had been plans for a street redesign on the stretch of road where Giovanni was killed, but the local community board had voted against the plan and the City of New York declined to go forward.

An active TA volunteer in the Bronx lived a couple of blocks from the crash. With help from Giovanni’s family and other neighbors, he organized a bike ride in Giovanni’s memory, and to demand the implementation of the redesign.

My job was not “organizer” anymore, but megaphone. I did not need to speak, I needed to help Giovanni’s neighbors be heard. I scheduled meetings for them with elected officials, connected them to the press for interviews, and helped them promote the events that they were organizing. I empowered them to own the issue and for them to serve as the driving force on the campaign. By elevating the voices of a few neighbors, Giovanni’s death brought about a large local conversation about East Tremont Avenue — enough that the local Council Member and the Mayor ordered the implementation of the redesign that could have saved Giovanni’s life.

Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

The organization I work for is very effective. We win campaigns a lot, so much so that a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board once called us “the all-powerful bike lobby” on live TV. While I work with some of the best community organizers in the business, we are in no way an island. Nothing is accomplished all by ourselves.

Virtually everything TA has accomplished has been done alongside other organizations. While our greatest strength may be the number of New Yorkers who are supportive of TA, we need coalition partners that can both reflect the intersectionality between transportation issues and other issues faced by any given community, and to demonstrate support for a campaign in the community where the campaign is set.

For example, an especially ambitious campaign we launched in the Bronx to install a Complete Street on the historic Grand Concourse succeeded because we built a coalition that represented the vast constituencies impacted by an unsafe Grand Concourse. With a local coalition of health equity organizations, faith groups, schools, and businesses, we were able to demonstrate that the problem was widely felt, and that support for our solution was strong enough to make the issue non-controversial enough for even the most recalcitrant local elected officials.

Photo by Stephanie Keith

Strategize First

A common mistake by people new to direct action organizing is immediately jumping to tackle the issues they feel most passionate about. While it’s always good to have someone excited about enacting change in their community, without proactive planning, your campaign can feel like cycling on the wrong gear: a high amount of work is being done, but very little progress is being made.

I learned early on to never dive into a campaign without a strategy. I use a chart like this one. It helps me visualize what resources I have, who my opposition and allies might be, who I am trying to influence, and what I can do to directly influence those people. A bit of strategy at the start, and you ensure that your work will be as efficient as possible.

Prepare for Opposition

There is one saying that my organizing mentor told me, and that always stuck with me: “Do you want to be right?” he would ask, “Or do you want to win?”

Before I became an organizer, I had a hard time understanding why certain transportation projects were not being implemented or approved. For example, there’s a pair of bike lanes on Brooklyn and Kingston avenues in Crown Heights that come to a halt at Eastern Parkway. All the data pointed to serious safety benefits. It seemed like a no brainer!

What I did not know was there was a small, but politically well-connected group of residents in the local community board dead-set against any type of bike infrastructure being implemented, and it so happened that the border of that community board was Eastern Parkway.

In politics, like in life, opposition to good ideas backed by data is all too common. Every single campaign I have ever led has met some type of opposition — even campaigns centered on seemingly unopposable ideas, like protecting school children from speeding.

That’s the lesson: It doesn’t matter if you’re right. To enact change in your community, you can’t just be the most correct person in the room. You need to identify your opposition, research them, and build overwhelming support for your campaign, so your influence is bigger than your opposition.

I’ve learned a lot on the journey from being an out-of-work millennial to a career in politics. But these lessons are applicable to anything you want to get done. Lift up others. Build your team. Make a plan. And anticipate the haters. I use these lessons to change the streets of New York City. You should use them for something great, too.