We talk a lot about out-organizing,
but what about reorganizing?
We help activist leaders who want to build and maintain a healthy community by shining a light on the “Activist Bubble” and creating the opportunity to stop it from bursting.
The Activist Bubble Podcast
The Activist Bubble Podcast seeks to create a space for Democratic Activists to engage in a new type of conversation. We already have plenty of spaces to talk about how many postcards we’ve written or how many poll watchers we’ve recruited. We also have lots of spaces to talk about how many postcards we need to write and how many poll watchers we need to recruit. But, we don’t always create space to express how all of that – how all of this hard work – makes us feel. And thus, we don’t talk about what to do about it. So Meg and Sarah aim to do just that – join them every week as they talk about what they’ve learned from their years of studying the Democratic Activist Community. Hopefully this will help us all feel less isolated and will surely help us stay in this fight to save Democracy!!
Listen on: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
The Activist Bubble Presents!
“The Activist Bubble Presents!” is a complementary video series to the podcast. Blue Tent Leadership understands that Democratic Activists are busy saving Democracy and don’t always have time to listen to a whole ass podcast. But Blue Tent Leadership also knows that despite the relentless activism, Democratic Activists can’t help scrolling on Twitter either! So these weekly videos are here to take some of Meg and Sarah’s key learnings that they discuss on the podcast and visually synthesize these ideas down into something quick and fun that can be easily shared with fellow activists!
Like and Subscribe: YouTube
After 2016 we both took bold action: Meg founded Playtime at the Polls to expand voter turnout by helping alleviate the “childcare barrier” on Election Day. Sarah co-founded Trip-to-Flip to help flip the House in 2018 by sending folks in deep blue states to canvass in key swing districts. After 2018, we were both working separately on growing our activism further, but the pandemic squashed each of our efforts in 2020. Playtime at the Polls was designed for in-person voting and Trip-to-Flip focused on volunteers flying to swing districts and canvassing door-to-door, so both of these efforts suddenly became too risky from a public health standpoint.
Instead of trying to shove square pegs into a round hole, we pivoted. We detached from those leadership roles, decided to look at the Democratic Activist Community from a new altitude, and started researching. We interviewed a wide array of voices: Democratic organization leaders, activists, volunteers, journalists, people who hold political office, and leaders who wanted to help but didn’t find volunteering accessible. We got involved with as many Democratic organizations as we could, we phone banked, text banked, wrote letters, took classes, and attended webinars and trainings, so we could see first hand how organizations leveraged and thought about their activists. And boy! Did we learn some things!!
Importantly, we found that Democratic Activists are so busy trying to out-organize the GOP in the short term, there’s not enough effort to reorganize for the long term. The conventional wisdom of the Democratic Activist Community is to support tactical idealism as the only approach to activism. This creates an incredible amount of pressure on activists to tirelessly show up without seeing enough progress (either politically or personally) to justify their efforts. The truth is: there is not an endless supply of activists. This current system is pushing activists too far to continue the necessary work, creating a “bubble” – and at some point, it will burst.
But we’ve also learned that if there was ever a community that could deflate this “bubble” before it bursts, it’s Democratic Activists. So, as full on interlopers at this point, we want to share all this knowledge of the Democratic Activist Community with… the Democratic Activist Community. So come join us at The Activist Bubble Podcast, we’re really excited to show you what we’ve learned!
