How to scale up

An article from the movement WV Can't Wait that shares what they learned in scaling up, how they brought new people in, and how they created meaningful roles for each person that served the whole.

In three years time, WV Can’t Wait built out the largest electoral organizing infrastructure our state has seen in decades. With county teams in all but one of our 55 counties, 39 constituency groups representing seniors, veterans, and so on, and 101 candidates running under the WV Can’t Wait banner, our movement, three years in, was massive.

This is an article about what we learned in scaling up. It’s about how we brought new people in and how we created meaningful roles for each person that served the whole.

Like any organizing project, our ability to grow in scale was due in part to investing in a brilliant, balanced team, to experimentation, to luck, and to sweat. And yet, there were several key organizing principles that we honed and utilized. This article is about those.

Source: Do Rural Organizing by WV Can’t Wait
Author information: Katey Lauer

Year of publication: 2021