In this op-ed, Charlene Carruthers, a Chicago-based author, political strategist, and founding national director of BYP100, explains what she wishes she would’ve known as a young organizer.

I wasn’t born a leader; I was agitated into choosing leadership by growing up on the South Side of Chicago. I didn’t wake up at 18 understanding what white supremacy, patriarchy, anti-blackness, and capitalism meant. Self-study, comrades, elders, and people I met in the streets taught me how to understand the world and gave me the room to imagine a radically different future.

Building powerful movements is difficult, heartbreaking and — if we do it well — joyful. When I look back on the past 14 years of activism, community organizing, and movement building for racial, economic, and gender justice, there are many more things that I wish the younger me understood.

I was 24 years old the first time a more experienced organizer took me to the side and gave me honest feedback on my leadership. We’d spent three days together at a training for community organizers in the Washington, D.C., area. She and I were two of the few black women in the room. Unbeknownst to me, she watched my interactions with other participants. I openly disagreed, debated with other participants, and at times spoke over people. I was consistently agitating others and agitated by other people in the room who were mostly white and older. At the end of the day, she asked if she could speak with me about the training privately in her room.

I didn’t know what to expect. She sat me down and talked to me. She asked questions. She was honest and compassionate. By the end of the conversation, it was clear to me that I had the power to choose how to extend my energy, who was worth it, and to determine how I wanted to build relationships with people who had opposing views and different experiences. It wasn’t a callout, and her goal wasn’t to embarrass me; it was to make me a sharper community organizer and more effective leader.

I knew then that I wanted to build power and create transformative change with other people. I connected that with my growing understanding of how oppression is systemic and that my commitment to movement building had to be for the long haul. The instant gratification of winning an argument or embarrassing someone wouldn’t help me get to where I wanted to be as a leader. She reminded me of the value of discernment. Not every battle is mine to fight. Without that one conversation, I wouldn’t have developed the skills or relationships I needed to contribute to building today’s movement for black lives. Her approach and what I understood about her expertise allowed me to trust her enough to listen.

Quality relationships that are grounded in honesty, direct conversation, and compassion are essential to effective movement building and leadership development. Strong movements require many strong leaders.

I wish I’d met her earlier when I was 18 years old and became an activist on my college campus in 2004. I would’ve asked her what to do when a group of us decided to organize.

I remember the night that I was in my dorm room and got a call from a friend saying, “Charlene, they’re trying to take away our seats in the Student Senate.”

The friend was a fellow student at my predominantly white university in central Illinois. The Student Senate, like most student-government groups at colleges and universities, controls how money from student fees are spent. At that time, our senate, like the broader university, was led by white men and women who were on sports teams, fraternities, and sororities. Groups led by black, brown, and LGBTQ students had very little representation outside of the single seats we held in the senate.