{"id":469,"date":"2026-08-13T13:04:32","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T13:04:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pastandsup.org\/lancaster\/?p=469"},"modified":"2026-08-13T13:04:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T13:04:32","slug":"reflections-in-organizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pastandsup.org\/lancaster\/2026\/08\/13\/reflections-in-organizing\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflections in Organizing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bryan Nelson <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I graduated college in 2024 \u2014 a year later than I’d planned. A quiet failure I hadn’t accounted for. And if you know me, you know that degree cost more than the number now sitting in my debt column. I had a planned trajectory: graduate on schedule, apply to law schools. Here’s the thing about plans: what you want and what you need are not always compatible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t graduate on time. I had to take a year-long leave of absence in 2022 for my mental health. And that LOA was only possible because Millersville University didn\u2019t give up on a student who already had given up on themselves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After I graduated, I took a tiny volunteer role with Trex Proffitt, the Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania State Senate, on a whim and an email. After the election, I watched Donald Trump regain the presidency, and watched Congress become a puppet for his worst tendencies. Throughout college I’d only been minimally involved with the College Democrats, did no internships, and took no fellowships. I was so busy creating the conditions for my own downward spiral that I mistook my missed opportunities for further evidence of my incompetence, not for what they actually were \u2014 a necessary detour to learn how to survive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I became fueled by a desire to do the things I had put off for years. I wanted to fight for change, and was driven by a desire to channel my struggles into a tangible outlet to help others. When I started volunteering with Lancaster Stands Up in April of 2025, I had no idea the impact someone like me could have. I joined LSU’s Electoral Team after I started attending city council meetings about police conduct. Around the same time, the city allowed a shady data center company to quietly claim two locations within city limits. We were also supporting a number of candidates in local municipal elections that would show their impact this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s a lot of work. My degree didn’t prepare me for what I\u2019d learn from it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The First Lesson I Learned<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When people hear about organizing, they think about knocking doors and making phone calls. That’s true for the front-facing part of the work, but I’d argue that’s the easiest part. The harder work is getting others to show up with you. And harder still \u2014 figuring out for yourself if you were successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In electoral work, you get to see the results of your efforts on election night, watching the votes get tallied. By all accounts, last year was incredibly successful for our Electoral Team. But even then, success isn\u2019t always about the wins and losses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Issue-based work is different. You may never get a concrete read on what success looks like for any particular issue. For us in Lancaster, success on data centers meant ending the project entirely \u2014 and we didn’t. When we pivoted, we kept building a base, doing the unglamorous work, so that we could win a community benefits agreement the city would never have offered without that pressure behind it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can make 500 phone calls, but if no one from those calls attends the event, votes for the candidate, or shows up to canvass, then all you did was make 500 phone calls. I learned to measure success in connections, not numbers.<\/strong> Don’t count the inputs. Count the outputs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And look at what came from our “loss” in Lancaster. It mobilized people throughout Lancaster County to start looking at ways they could protect themselves from something the city residents didn\u2019t get a chance to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It turned into a definitive win in Columbia Borough. The success wasn’t the number of calls we made or doors we knocked from Lancaster City. It was the 300 people who showed up to a borough council meeting because someone from their own community took the time to talk to them. The metric is doors knocked and calls made; the connection is who actually shows up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Second Lesson I Learned<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my first tasks on the Electoral Team was serving as liaison to Matt Rodriguez\u2019s Borough Council campaign in Elizabethtown. Looking back, I had no real idea what I was doing. The freedom I had to find my own way in that role gave me a lot to sit with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At first, we planned phone banking. Giving up an hour or two on a Wednesday was easy, so that’s what I did. I also reached out to people I’d made connections with in the past to mobilize them for canvassing. It took me a while to get past the discomfort of just texting or calling someone if I had their number. What struck me was that some of those people showed up \u2014 and brought people of their own. That’s when I learned that every connection we make is an extension of our own power, and it empowers our connections as well.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That lesson took longer to land than the others. Even during LSU’s endorsement process this year, reaching out to candidates and staffers, nothing felt more uncomfortable than messaging someone I hadn’t talked to in a while.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Third Lesson I Learned<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It isn’t about you. But it isn’t <\/strong>not<\/em><\/strong> about you, either.<\/strong> I’d spent the better part of four years shedding my ego \u2014 the very thing that led to my personal struggles to begin with. We all have something to gain by organizing our neighbors. Defining my own self-interest was one of the hardest parts of this work, because I’d confused self-interest with selfishness. Wanting affordable healthcare because I carry a diagnosis that costs thousands of dollars isn’t selfish \u2014 it’s a common experience for millions of Americans. Wanting protection as a renter from no-fault evictions isn’t selfishness either, for the same reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What separates you in organizing isn’t why<\/em> you organize. It’s what you’re willing to carry, to protect, to build \u2014 and whether you’re willing to find others to carry, protect, and build it with you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going into organizing, I carried years of personal struggle, fear, and frustration: mental health struggles, high medical costs, crippling tuition debt, rising housing costs. Fear that I’d never reach real financial independence. Frustration at a system built to make fighting back both financially and emotionally exhausting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today I’m willing to protect not only myself from that struggle, but others. Because I’ve watched millions of Americans, and tens of thousands in my own backyard, carry the same weight. I found a vehicle to fight back. In doing so, I’m not just protecting myself and them. I’m building a society that says no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building is hard. It takes strategy, vision, a willingness to fail, and support. That’s why finding others to carry those same burdens, protect each other, and build together is the single most important skill in organizing. It means stepping outside your comfort zone to meet strangers who are also looking to fight back. That willingness is what turns passion into a movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fourth Lesson I Learned<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compromise on an issue does not mean a compromise of your values. Sometimes an NFL offense throws a deep shot 60 yards to the end zone. Other times it takes the check-down to keep the drive alive. If we all lock in on the big play, swing for it, and miss, we forfeit the very conditions under which real progress happens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Power is not won easily. But it is easily lost.<\/strong> Act on an issue with power imagined rather than power actually held, and you risk the movement itself \u2014 and that costs far more than a simple compromise. It doesn’t just cost the organization doing the work. It costs the community a pathway toward improving its own conditions. Everyone loses except the people who already hold the power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A community benefits agreement in Lancaster was not the deep throw we wanted. But it was the check-down we needed. Accepting a battle lost is not waving the white flag of surrender when it results in millions of dollars for community organizations. The recently passed zoning amendment was not the moratorium we fought hard for, but it does ensure the data centers waiting in the wings could not take advantage of a weakness in our community zoning, providing us time to look towards our next course of action.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fifth Lesson I Learned<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Modern organizing can appear to be fueled by a volatile cocktail of righteous rage and hyper-vigilance, underwritten by an unspoken and crushing assumption: if we don’t fix this entire broken world through sheer political will, right now, the world is doomed. <\/em>I once mistook my urgency for power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That assumption is the seed of a savior complex. And a savior complex is followed, reliably, by cynicism, infighting, and burnout. Rage is an excellent ignition switch. It is a terrible furnace. It burns hot, it burns fast, and eventually it burns up the person holding the match.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I understand the impulse. I\u2019ve done it myself. But the movement doesn’t need me to burn. It needs me to last. That’s the compromise worth making \u2014 not of values, but of timeline. Not concession. Just patience, fueled by intention and strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Being loud, and speaking eloquently at a city council meeting, can move a vote, and in Columbia, it did. But a filled room and a relationship are two different kinds of power. LSU had strongly supported Jeanne Cooper and Ethan Byers for Columbia Borough Council the previous year. Their election meant the people of Columbia held real power in that room. That led to a sit-down with a Republican councilor. This gave us what Gigi Barsoum (a policy consultant who has studied power building in areas like Cook County<\/a>, and New York\u2019s Stop and Frisk reform<\/a>) calls visible power<\/a>: increased access to the room where decisions actually get made. It resulted in a unanimous vote against the data center proposal for McGinnis Airport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Filling that same room with 300 people is a demonstration of capacity, not influence. It can intimidate a council into a vote, but it has to build towards something durable or the win is fleeting and the loss feels deflating. It can\u2019t tell you whether that councilor sides with you on the next issue, because power like that is nascent until it\u2019s leveraged again, and leveraging it again is exactly what a filled room, on its own, doesn\u2019t do. We filled the room in Lancaster City, yet the council unanimously voted for something the room didn\u2019t want. What changed? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rage doesn\u2019t have a strategy. It has a target. The rage comes from the same place the impatience does: wanting the win now, on your terms, rather than building toward the win that’s actually available and builds towards the next cycle. It cannot by itself overcome the structural barriers of a council who believes that they can afford voting against the people who packed the chamber. The passion in both communities was real. What was different was the power surrounding it: Columbia had local relationships and elected officials who understood that their decisions were accountable to the people in the room. Lancaster had demonstrated capacity, but not yet enough durable influence to make that capacity consequential. But we\u2019re getting there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Final Lesson I Learned<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could write a book on what I’ve learned in my first year in organizing. But the final lesson I want to share is the one I think gets forgotten most often:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Organizing people is meant to give them power \u2014 not you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Me, organizing in Elizabethtown from Lancaster City, is probably the last thing people in Elizabethtown want. I don’t share their values by default, I don’t know their neighbors the way a neighbor does, and even where our struggles are similar, our relationships to that community aren’t. LSU didn’t have any allies in Elizabethtown \u2014 not until the win. What we had was an electoral team, working alongside someone from Elizabethtown, working to give the agency to organize that town to them and not to a team primarily based in Lancaster City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s why the win matters. Not because Lancaster County now has a reliable, talented voice on Elizabethtown’s council in Matt Rodriguez, but because Elizabethtown has its own voice there \u2014 one that answers to its own neighbors, and can fight for them on their terms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It wasn’t people from Lancaster City who defeated the data centers in Columbia. It was the people of Columbia organizing through the base LSU volunteers there had already built with their own neighbors, long before I was ever in the room. It wasn’t Lancaster City that elected Matt Rodriguez to Elizabethtown Borough Council. It was Elizabethtown. The people of Lancaster elected Amos Stoltzfus. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It goes straight back to power imagined versus power held. As I’ve grown within Lancaster Stands Up, I’ve come to realize that the most powerful organizer is the one who gives people the tools to exercise agency for themselves, and become the directors of their own story. Often people don’t know where to begin, I didn\u2019t. But once they start, there’s no telling what progress they can make on their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My role is clear: build leaders, and step aside. Coach new volunteers, don’t tell them what to do \u2014 because they know better than I do what needs to be done in their own communities. Our job is to simply get them started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Join the movement<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Lancaster Stands Up is the kind of organization that builds others up to exercise their own agency and realize their own power. And if you want to get involved in a movement and turn your passion into something durable for yourself and your community, there\u2019s few organizations that do it better. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, we\u2019re working on electing four candidates who can help us achieve our goals at giving power back to working class people. And there\u2019s never been a better time to volunteer, become a member, and join the fight to create a Lancaster County, and Pennsylvania, that works for all of us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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