Who Owns the Future? Developing the Social and Economic Justice Leaders Project

The views expressed are those of the author and do not represent the views of the SNF Agora Institute or Johns Hopkins University.

Introduction

This case study is about how leaders, donors, and others can encourage and enable activist organizations and their partners to do longer-term planning, which is often hard to do in the midst of the everyday work of advocacy. One key expression of this is considering and preparing for alternate futures—not just advocating for an aspirational future but thinking ahead to scenarios that organizations and more informal groups may face and then preparing for potential threats and opportunities in more strategic ways. The case also highlights the value and forms of cross-group infrastructure for larger civil-society movements and how moments of crisis create opportunities to take new risks and show what uncommon approaches can accomplish. The first part follows the efforts of five respected, member-based national organizations that collaborated, in the wake of Donald Trump’s upset victory in the 2016 presidential election, to launch the Social and Economic Justice Leaders Project (SEJ) and demonstrate its value. The main case narrative ends after the 2020 election of Joe Biden as president, with questions about what role SEJ, born in a historic moment of crisis and resistance, can and should play next, in a very different moment. A brief epilogue, “How It Turned Out,” follows the subsequent action, describing the major decisions on those questions, the reasoning behind them, and the specific projects that reflect them, including the restructuring of SEJ and its effort to address ongoing changes in American society and threats to democracy.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this case study, you should be able to:

• Understand how and why movement organizations and other advocacy organizations struggle to think longer term and to develop resiliency and adaptiveness for possible futures—alternative, and sometimes unwanted, futures that go beyond the future they seek to create. The case describes why that kind of thinking matters and the challenges to actually doing it. It focuses on the arena of advocacy and activism, where scenario-driven strategy-making was little known, and even less used, prior to SEJ’s work.
• Understand the uncommon collaborations and openness to new approaches that Trump’s upset presidential victory created, especially for progressive civic organizations and their constituents. More broadly, the case can be used to explore how major shifts in the external environment can create both risks and opportunities to think and work differently as well as to demonstrate the value of innovation.
• Understand the kinds of strategic choices and pressures that face startup ventures and specifically joint projects meant to serve as “shared infrastructure” for the organizations partnering to create that infrastructure. The case shows how such startups evolve in more and less foreseeable ways.