Agora + P3 Case Study: Building ISAIAH’s Multiracial House

THIS CASE STUDY EXPLORES a transformation within a faith-based organization that resulted in a renovation of its organizational structure and growth in its membership, particularly in communities of color.

ISAIAH is a faith-based organization in Minnesota fighting for a multi-issue “faith agenda,” which includes progressive policies around immigration, labor, housing, education, criminal justice, healthcare, and more. ISAIAH organizers use deep relationship building to cultivate trust with member leaders in affiliated institutions, aligning member’s individual interest and motivation to a collective mission for social change through the faith agenda. At its founding, these affiliated institutions were mostly white churches, but as ISAIAH has grown, it is now an organizational home for diverse affiliates, ranging from Muslim mosques to Black barbershops to childcare centers. These each make up a constituency, based either in geography (like churches in a specific part of the state) or on identity (like the Latinx coalition).

ISAIAH organizes this coalition of affiliates as a “house”: each constituency has its own “room” and each room works together to create a “symphony” where rooms/constituencies align on shared campaigns. This house was in disarray, however, in the mid 2010’s. A growth in ISAIAH’s membership had paradoxical effects: while it gave the organization more people power, it also led to confusion among staff. The growth enabled the organization to hire staff with policy and communications expertise and expand beyond its original team, who were all organizers doing face-to-face relationship building with members. But these new additions led to some mission drift within the organization. An organization once clearly focused on organizing members now had the option to focus on drafting and lobbying for policy, or on communicating a new worldview for its faith agenda. Organizing and developing member leadership became sidelined, and staff grew more competitive. Executive Director Doran Schrantz faced a “dark night of the soul” when she found out how much discord there was among staff and how excluded members felt from meaningful participation in the organization. Correcting ISAIAH’s course required soul searching about the organization’s true source of power. The organization’s choice about the foundation of its power (for example, in narrative change, financial influence, votes for candidates, or people power) would influence how it decided to architect its staff and member house in a moment of change.

Schrantz faced a decision about how to organize her staff and who to give greatest decision-making power to. Would ISAIAH be best served by creating a senior leadership team with various kinds of expertise (in organizing, policy, and communications, for instance), as non-profit management consultants suggested? Or would the organization be more successful if it centered organizers and their member constituents as the core decision-makers, returning the organization to its earlier mission as an “organizing organization” despite its recent growth in numbers and complexity? This decision on how to reorient the organization’s structure towards its source of power ultimately transformed the organization’s culture and approach to multiracial solidarity. By pivoting in 2015, ISAIAH was able to renovate and revitalize its house to time to meet the challenges of the Trump era and make significant wins on its faith agenda over the last decade.

Learning Objectives

After reading this case study, you should be able to:

• Understand ISAIAH’s definition of power, through both an individual and a collective lens.
• Describe different ways that organizations can structure their staff, and analyze the benefits and challenges of each.
• Understand how different understandings of power influence how organizations make choices about their structures.
• Discuss how ISAIAH’s understanding of power influenced its choices about organizational structure, culture, and multiracial solidarity.