Member Statements on PCR05: Make the Member Engagement Department a Chapter Priority Campaign for 2025

Member Statements
1

Statement IN FAVOR

Vee B.

I’m really glad to see the Member Engagement Department’s proposal for becoming a Priority Campaign. I think this is a great opportunity for our chapter to focus on building a more inclusive and supportive community for all members.

I’ve had the chance to work with the MED team, and I’m impressed by their dedication to empowering our members and building a more inclusive chapter. Their plans for 2025, including introducing in-person new member orientations and starting a Welcome Committee, are exciting and ambitious. I think these initiatives will make a real difference in helping us build a stronger and more sustainable chapter.

I’m particularly enthusiastic about the MED team’s focus on creating a more welcoming and inclusive environment for new members. I believe that this is essential for building a strong and vibrant chapter, and I’m excited to see the MED team’s efforts in this area.

As a member of the Street Team Working Group, I’m looking forward to working with the MED team to support their efforts. We’ll be collaborating on outreach and recruitment efforts, and I think this will be a great opportunity for us to work together and build on each other’s strengths.

Overall, I think this is a great development for our chapter, and I’m excited to see how the MED team’s work will unfold. I’m confident that their efforts will make a real difference in helping us build a stronger and more inclusive chapter.

2

Statement IN FAVOR

Samuel G.

Hello comrades, I am in support of making MED a priority campaign, with respect to its Community Builders formation.

The Community builders group within MED is one of many other chapter formations helping lead the way in building a multiracial, multilingual base. The demographics of our city shows us that if we want to build a mass movement, we must build a strong community with our neighbors. Through socials at a public pool, a recent Friendsgiving event, and an upcoming collaboration with SOS and the predominately immigrant tenants associations they work with, Community Builders’ external work has already modeled a desire to expand our chapters’ base to comprise more of the community in which we live.

Additionally, community builders has an intention to strengthen Bilingualism within the chapter. I see this as especially important, because I regularly have to speak Spanish in my workplaces, I’ve had to translate with my suboptimal Spanish between coworkers who cannot speak together. Accurate and accessible translation is vitally important, and it requires resources and proper support.

Ultimately, I hope that more working class DMV residents, will connect with other Working Groups and chapter formations and eventually make DSA their political home. But first we must create more spaces to meet and connect with our neighbors who have yet to learn about DSA.

If selected as a priority campaign, I look forward to seeing what MED can do to both consolidate our current members and expand our base within the working class communities of the DMV.

3

Statement IN FAVOR

Kaela B.

Considering this resolution you may be thinking: a Department as a priority campaign? That doesn’t make sense. A department is a standing body serving an ongoing function, while a campaign is time sensitive and goal driven.

Well this year we’ve got goals, and they are time sensitive.

After Trump was elected the first time, DSA experienced a swell of membership. And based on the numbers since November 3rd I can say that we’re going to see another one. What we want and what we NEED is to make this more than a temporary swell. To win we must scale.

And to scale, we must understand how to grow the active membership in each campaign and formation. It is my belief that if we do not frontload the ability to develop leaders in our chapter, we will continue to tap out at 300 active members as we have roughly had for the last 8 years. And this year we have a real incentive, with the expected balloon in membership under the Trump Administration.

For the last 6 months, the Member Engagement Dept has been removing the barriers to access when people join the chapter. We have been expanding our new member orientations, new member cohorts, and the processes to direct people to their formations of interest. We also have a new team, Community Builders, which give people a low stress entry point to meet people in our chapter.

Member Engagement is also developing tools and trainings, such as a new member absorption workshop, meant to support other formations in their own ability to design successful new member experiences. Beyond just getting people in the door, we want to work across the chapter to support processes that over time, and graduate members into increasing rungs of responsibility in order to systematically develop new leaders across campaigns and internal formations.

To accomplish all this, we would benefit from the funds that come with priority status. Right now we have no resources allocated for renting event space, providing food or even for texts to new members. A few months ago we were capped out on renting library space for the new member cohort, a new welcome series to orient new folks to the chapter, and we were scrambling among us to pay out of pocket for event space.

There is no need to condemn new members to the experiences many of us had when we joined: in the words of one new member “being thrown into a cold lake.” For 2025 to be more than a 2017 blip, we should prioritize building the core infrastructure for converting momentary interest into a real mass political organization in the DMV that could serve us for years to come.

4

Statement IN FAVOR

Kenneth B.

We are in a time of chaos and flux. Since the election, thousands have flocked to DSA, including hundreds to our chapter alone. In addition, inactive members are seeking us out and looking to get engaged. The masses are looking for hope and political leadership, and DSA must take the reigns of history in this pivotal moment, and in order to do that, we need to be able to engage and retain our new membership, giving them a political home, and sense of identity with and pride in the organization, channeling them into our outward facing campaigns, and using those campaigns to build DSA into the mass party it needs to become to meet the moment.

Member Engagement has been a historical weak point of DSA. While we saw significant bumps in 2016 and 2020, we have ultimately failed to capitalize on them in the last four years, falling short of the 100,000 members goal and ultimately shrinking to about half that size. We are good at gaining new members, but we need to be better at keeping them engaged and active. Now, poised as we are to experience another burst of momentum, we cannot afford to let it go to waste.

While the chapter does provide funding for outreach in its budget, this funding is shared between numerous other working groups and chapter formations. The Member Engagement Department, in particular the Community Builders Team, could use dedicated funding to do frequent social events, including daytime, family friendly events, which are often more expensive and take more dedicated resources than night time socials at bars, to pay for event space, food, and child-friendly activities. MED will also hold more New Member Cohorts and start holding in-person new member orientations.

I believe the Community Builders team is critical to the effort of keeping members engaged as we orient ourselves to resist the Trump administration and absorb new members. Building a sense of community, identity, and pride in DSA is a key task of our chapter, and a vibrant community and social culture is critical to the goal of becoming a mass party, which is what we must become in order to resist fascism and build socialism. Community events are also a key point of outreach to plug new and disengaged community members into our outward campaigns. One of the first things I did that got me integrated into the Metro DC Chapter when I joined DSA at the beginning of this year was electoral canvassing for Janeese Lewis George. I would never have found out about that canvassing, however, if I hadn’t been told about it at a Final Fridays chapter happy hour. While this worked well for me, there are many working people who cannot or do not wish to attend happy hours and similar events, and I believe providing welcoming spaces for all members of the working class is essential to our political project. Another advantage of community events is to help build ties with our coalition partners, such as tenant unions and other socialist organizations. For example at our family friendly fall cookout in Malcolm X Park, we engaged members of the Sunrise Movement, community members on their way to the regular drum circle, and members of Freedom Road Socialist Organization who happened to be tabling in the park the same day.

In summary, a Member Engagement priority will enable us to absorb and retain the thousands of working people looking for a way to get politically engaged in the face of the Trump administration, build a cohesive sense of culture and identity within DSA, and act as a force multiplier for our other campaigns by effectively plugging new members into our outward facing work. I hope you will join me in voting to make the Member Engagement Department a priority campaign.

5

Statement IN FAVOR

Jake H.

Dear comrades, I urge you to vote for the Member Engagement Department as a priority campaign. Priority funds will help us ensure that the people who are currently joining DSA in a fit of post-election frustration become long-term active contributors to chapter work.

Engaging new (and old but inactive) members is a difficult and delicate process. It’s not always enough to send them to a working group meeting, or ask them to fill out an interest form. Many new people have no idea what it means to participate in an organizing meeting or get active in politics. Some have volunteered for staff-driven nonprofits, but few have been part of a democratic membership organization where they’re able and expected to take on real responsibility. Others mistakenly believe they have to know everything about socialism before joining a working group, or worry that the chapter’s culture will be acrimonious and adversarial like social media. For these and other reasons, it’s intimidating for new people to get involved, and the chapter has struggled to sustain previous membership bumps.

Our work in the Member Engagement Department aims to fix all that. We take curious, often timid people and put them on the path to becoming hardened organizers. We have new member orientations twice a month. We run new member cohorts where we train people in the basics of organizing, socialism, and chapter activities in a collegial, non-judgemental setting. We do one-on-one conversations with DSA-curious people. Our community builders put on a wide range of events where people find the social networks that sustain their organizing and enrich their lives. These are not frivolous recreational outings. We run these events because new people constantly tell us they’re looking for a political home that provides community–and those who build meaningful relationships with other members are more likely to actively join our campaigns.

The Member Engagement Department needs priority funds to run more in-person events; hire interpreters and child-care workers; and much else. If you think we need more people to win the world we deserve, and that your working group would benefit from fresh blood, then please vote for us. –Jake H

6

Statement IN FAVOR

Gabby C.

I am voting in favor of making MED a priority campaign because member engagement is not only important for the success of every campaign and working group, but also for the health of the overall Chapter culture. By onboarding new members into working groups, a robust member engagement program helps prevent burnout for the organizers already working hard by connecting newer and less active members to working groups and campaigns that align with their interests and are in need of support. An effective MED program requires organizing many in-person events, and our goal for 2025 is to expand to monthly in-person membership orientations and bi-monthly in-person Community Builders events. This requires renting spaces, arranging programming and/or entertainment, and (sometimes) hiring language interpreters/translators. Currently, we do not have access to enough of our own resources to meet this goal.

The Community Builders team within MED would like to expand beyond internally-focused events that mainly appeal to demographics that are already engaged in the chapter, like happy hours. Happy hours are inexpensive and easy to arrange because they typically do not require any chapter funds, but we have shown we are capable of organizing family-friendly events such as potlucks and other daytime social events. We also want to be a resource for the working groups to build, deepen, and embed connections with working class communities in the DMV. We have recently started collaborating with Stomp Out Slumlords to aid their WATU project by building stronger connections with tenant associations in different buildings to help build cross-building solidarity and foster community around their shared struggle against their landlords. We are also planning events to create closer connections between the organic community leaders that SOS works with and the rest of the MDC-DSA chapter. We need priority campaign status for the resources and capacity to regularly organize events (like the MDC-DSA/Oaklawn Tenants’ Association/Woodner Tenants’ Union social event we are hoping to organize for the end of January) that coordinate closer connections between working groups across the chapter.

If you want this vision of MED and Community Builders to be realized, please vote for MED to be a priority campaign so that we can have the resources and capacity to make it possible.

In Solidarity,
Gabby C.

7

Statement IN FAVOR

Alex Y.

For too long our chapter has undervalued building a shared community and prioritizing holding regular in person events. Over the past year, the MED has made great efforts to rectify that. I fear many of you will choose to vote against priority status for this group since it is an internal fixture and has money in the outreach budget. That shouldn’t be why you vote against this if you are going to. The sponsors of this have made it clear that the outreach budget is not enough for their ambitious plans for the next year. We have an unprecedented number of people joining our chapter and I fear we will lose them without proper onboarding and early and consistent engagement that the MED plans to provide. They need priority status and funding for this year to handle this wave of new members, otherwise we will lose many of our new members unnecessarily. Going forward after one year as a priority campaign, it would be good to see a better approach to the outreach fund and access to it so the MED won’t need to have priority status again.

8

Statement IN FAVOR

Nate M.

I encourage MDCDSA members to vote for the Member Engagement proposal as a priority campaign. As someone who joined the chapter in 2020 with the pandemic upon us, it was challenging to get involved beyond specific actions like canvassing for my first few years as a member. Only in the last 1-2 years have I gotten to know comrades and working groups in other parts of the chapter beyond the ones I met through specific actions I was engaged in. I’ve heard similar stories from other members who’ve joined more recently. As a chapter, I think it’s important that we create as many low-barrier options for people to meet and get to know us, and for us to get to know each other. Some new or potential members might be motivated to jump right in via canvassing or other activities, but there aren’t always issues to canvas for, and others will be more cautious about their level of commitment until they get to know others in the chapter. We need to engage members and potential new members on a regular basis and in a variety of ways that will make it easier for those from a variety of backgrounds and interests to find a home in DSA. Without doing this, we will struggle to recruit and retain members, and we will not be able to meet the challenges ahead for the working class in 2025 and beyond.

9

Statement AGAINST

Claire M.

Member engagement must always be a priority of the chapter. All of the goals outlined in MED’s application for priority status are strategic and valuable goals. The Department’s work is vital to our chapter, and the organizers who put forward this application do incredibly important work that supports all of our organizing by bringing in new members, developing pipelines to our external campaigns, and building up the social fabric of the chapter through community events.

While this work is valuable and must be prioritized, receiving priority campaign status is not an appropriate way to achieve the goals the proposers of this resolution set out. Priority campaign status is practically about giving specific campaigns two main things: dedicated funding and priority access to resources. MED already has both of these things, and so it would be a mistake to give these resources to an internal formation that frankly has other options, especially if the decision to do so takes these resources from any of the five working groups that applied for priority status and have no other avenue to these benefits.

First – funding. The Membership Engagement Department is given special preference to the Outreach Fund, funded with $3,000 dollars in the 2025 approved budget. This is more funding than in previous years and is allocated specifically to support the chapter outreach efforts listed in the MED’s priority campaign application. This means the Department already receives dedicated funding every year specifically because it is a chapter-wide priority. If members of the MED have questions about how to receive this money from the chapter and the steps to get Steering Committee or general body approval, those can certainly be resolved. In contrast, non-priority campaign working groups have no other dedicated fund in the budget, and rely on approval from Steering to spend out of our discretionary fund (which is also $3,000 and has to cover basically anything not specifically budgeted for already, including the purchase of chapter resources like our hybrid equipment or speaker, space rentals for events like our GBMs, and printing of chapter-wide recruitment lit).

Second – priority access to resources. In practice, this means a lot of different things – first dibs on physical resources like tables, banners, and tech equipment, higher placement in the Weekly Update, more time for reportbacks at GBMs to attract members, priority access to Spoke, etc. Membership engagement as a chapter-wide project certainly deserves these things. But I can speak in my personal, direct experience that the Department already receives this priority. Chapter-wide socials and events are prioritized in the Weekly Update above campaign-specific events, even from priority campaigns. Chapter-wide events are given access to equipment as needed. New member cohorts and orientations, community builder events, and requests for help with member engagement are regularly plugged at GBMs. This is exactly what should happen, but because it already is happening, MED winning priority campaign status will only serve to keep a working group from being championed in the same way.

In 2025 I sincerely hope we build on the fantastic work of the MED this past year and continue to recruit, onboard, develop, retain, and re-engage members. I hope the Department continues to grow and we figure out ways to get them better resourced to do their critical work. And we should continue to use the priority campaign system to uplift external facing organizing work that wins for the working class. The work of the MED is vital, but our external organizing and campaigns are what will drive us forward to win socialism in our lifetimes, and we need to prioritize this external work now more than ever.

10

Statement AGAINST

Eduarda S.

Comrades, I’d like to express why I will be voting NO on the question of PCR 5 to make the Membership Engagement Department (MED) a priority campaign for 2025. Our chapter and DSA as a whole are facing a concentrated, large influx of new members due to this year’s federal election results. While it is true that our chapter must continue to build up a robust recruitment and engagement operation under MED, it is also true that we must have robust outward facing organizing campaigns and operations to bring new members into. I believe that it would be a mistake to decrease the amount of external organizing campaigns and issues that have priority status for our chapter during this wave of new energy.

The chapter budget for 2025 that we unanimously passed at our recent local convention has a $3,000 line item for Outreach that MED gets preferential access to, along with the Political Education and Training departments. There are other ways that the chapter can support funding the MED, including by 1) having working groups and campaigns with funding access partner on more events with the MED or 2) passing a resolution with support from the chapter Treasurer to earmark an amount of money from the Outreach budget that would go to the MED’s planned activities pre-approved.

In conclusion, there are already other ways for the MED to access a significant amount of chapter resources without needing to have priority campaign status, and there are five other important campaigns and working groups up for consideration that we should make priority campaigns in 2025. So for those reasons I urge my fellow comrades to vote against PCR 5 and to instead throw your support behind PCRs 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6.

11

Statement AGAINST

Carl R.

Comrades, I am asking you to vote AGAINST PCR05 to make the Member Engagement Department a priority campaign.

I firmly believe both in the organizers in the department and the organizing they are doing. I think it’s vital that we have their work - the community space they’ve created in the chapter is both commendable and valuable. As someone whose social life is filled with DSA members at varying levels of activity - I myself am the chair of the chapter as of this writing, and I regularly spend time with members who aren’t active at all - having social spaces where we can bring in folks who are less active and activate them into organizing is extremely important.

But I personally don’t think, as presented, this is what priority campaigns are for. This should be a constant budget item (which it already is!), that we fund appropriately. It should be work the chapter is doing year-in, year-out, because it is work that keeps the social life of the chapter vibrant and fulfilling. But the plan laid out in the priority campaign application, while incredibly important, is not what the priority campaign structure is about: campaigns that take the fight to our class enemies. I encourage members to vote AGAINST PCR05 and support their work through other means.

12

Statement IN FAVOR

Ralph C.

Hello comrades,

I am Ralph C, and I urge you to support making the Member Engagement Department Group a Chapter Priority Campaign for 2025.As we look ahead to the upcoming challenges posed by the return of the Trump regime, it is critical that our chapter prioritizes member engagement in 2025. The far right agenda hyperpolarization, and increasing attacks on marginalized communities will leave many in this area feeling lost and isolated. The liberal powers that be have shown themselves to be incapable and/or unwilling to be a place working class people can turn to as an outlet for their frustration and fear. Therefore it is vital that we build a more resilient and empowered membership. The Member Engagement Department will ensure that we are prepared for an influx of new members, are actively working to bring people back in the fold, and that people feel there is a community they are empowered to be active in.