Sarah Jaffe

The Chingford Assembly Hall is on the far northeast outskirts of London. The Underground doesn’t run there, so it’s taken a winding bus ride past green spaces to arrive in time to run into John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer from the Labour Party, on the doorstep.

McDonnell is in Chingford with Faiza Shaheen, Labour’s candidate for the district, and over 100 local activists, party members, and curious newcomers for an event with Labour’s community organizing unit (COU). These events have taken place around the country, over 100 of them in the 20 months since the unit was founded as part of Jeremy Corbyn and his leftist allies’ attempt to remake the party into something it has not been in decades, if ever: a grassroots fighting force to bring socialism to Britain.

While the media focuses on personality conflicts among party leaders and the interminable Brexit showdown, the effort by Labour to rebuild on the ground has gone almost entirely unnoticed. Brexit, to be sure, is big news, from the bombshell of the original vote, the downfall of two Conservative prime ministers, and the shambles of the current one, who has lost every parliamentary vote he’s tried. With Parliament prorogued, Britain is in a holding pattern, but this almost certainly ends with a snap election in the coming months.

Labour has been behind in the polls for a while, struggling to put together a coherent Brexit policy that can straddle two sides of the issue, which divides its base. Its success in 2017 was found in turning the public’s eye toward issues that had nothing to do with the European Union—most importantly, bold economic policies that captured the imagination of Remainers and Brexiteers alike. Labour is counting on the fact that nobody else has tried anything like what’s going on in Chingford, and what has been going on in cities and towns across the country all year long: bringing local people together to talk to one another about the policies that they want to see enacted, both by a hypothetical future Labour government and right now, in their constituencies, by local councils or through grassroots campaigns.

Labour is hoping that the base it has been growing, slowly, in communities around the country might be its secret weapon. Maybe that won’t be enough in an election dominated by the looming specter of Brexit, a right-wing media devoted to slagging off Corbyn, and a chunk of Labour MPs helping in that effort. But it’s the only way the Labour party can truly succeed in changing Britain, by building lasting bonds with voters, and speaking to their needs, which have been neglected by the political system.

SHAHEEN TELLS THE AUDIENCE in Chingford that she grew up in the district she’s now running to represent. Tall and graceful, she’s a hit with the crowd as she talks about learning to “kill it with kindness” as a service employee and how she puts that skill to use as a candidate. “I haven’t come to politics to tinker,” she announces. Local coffee shop owner Afshan Ahmed also speaks from the stage, getting a big cheer with the line “I come from a family of socialists.” In her coffee shop, she explains, she employs young mothers, and makes sure to make their schedules around the school day.

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It’s a diverse crowd in age as much as race and gender; there are women in hijab and typical hipsters of the sort assumed to be Labour’s base, and a teenager in an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (to whom Shaheen bears some resemblance) T-shirt. The table I’ve sat at is filled mostly though not exclusively with older women, who all seem to know one another. One of them describes McDonnell as “orgasmic,” while her friend says that she likes him because he seems like the most “pragmatic” member of the Shadow Cabinet.

Shaheen and McDonnell hop from table to table, sitting and listening to their constituents. At each table, a facilitator keeps the conversation flowing and, I will learn at future events, much hinges on good facilitation. The vibe in the room is overwhelmingly wholesome. There’s some anger about growing homelessness—one woman says that the U.K. is “normalizing homelessness, like the U.S.”—and the cascading effects of austerity, but in this room anyway, Brexit is an afterthought. One man, halfway seated after giving his table’s report-back, straightens up to say, “Oh, and we have to stop Brexit.”

The concerns that people have brought to the event, though, are mostly about commuting and unreliable work, about local parking and small-business tax rates, free child care and Universal Credit. They want local jobs so that everyone doesn’t have to commute to central London, and affordable housing so that longtime residents aren’t squeezed further and further into the outer zones. One woman comments, “We’ve got to stop treating teenagers as if they’re packs of feral animals,” and a former police officer says of knife crime, “We can’t arrest our way out of the problem and we can’t stop and search our way out of the problem, as a police officer I know.” Another notes that air pollution is more deadly than knife crime.

Sarah Jaffe

The crowd also comes with solutions. People wonder if a universal basic income trial could be run in their area, and they discuss sustainable local farming and business tax breaks that could be linked to environmentally sustainable practices. One woman suggests giving local councils the power to reclaim vacant storefronts in order to house the homeless; later in the summer, Labour proposes such a policy, under which local authorities could take properties which have been vacant for 12 months and offer them to startups, cooperative businesses, and community projects. Another participant suggests training green mechanics, which, Shaheen tells me, sticks out to her because her father was a car mechanic and it had become hard for him to work with new engines. She points out a group of young people talking to one another across the room. This is one of the major goals of these events and of the COU in general: to build Labour’s policy manifesto from the grassroots.

“This isn’t just us saying, ‘It is grassroots led,’” Shaheen tells me. “We all are working together, and when I go in [to Parliament] I am not just going in as myself. I am going in with everyone that has come and supported me and this community. That is why it has been so important to me to run where I grew up. I am someone that is part of the community, not someone that is parachuted in just because it is a good area to stand in.”

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Chatting to my tablemates afterward, I ask what they thought of the event. One comments that it’s been nice to see people coming together who normally might not have spent time together and to learn what others cared about. “I think it is so important to have members come from Parliament and make the link between policy that is going to be in the manifesto and the community and how policy affects community and changes for good. The Labour Party is all about the community and I think this has been exemplified in the most amazing way today.”

As we wrap up, someone walks up and tells Shaheen that a woman named Nicole left an envelope for her. Shaheen immediately remembers the woman, whose door she’d knocked last weekend, who had told her that she was angry at Labour over Brexit and had voted for the Liberal Democrats in the recent European elections. Shaheen had invited her to the event, saying it would be an opportunity for her to share her views with the party. Finishing the story, she tore open the envelope. Inside was a £250 donation.

IN NEWCASTLE, in England’s northeast, the football team, Newcastle United, is deeply loved. Callum Bell, Labour’s community organizer in the area, has watched the team go downhill under the ownership of Mike Ashley, the billionaire owner of Sports Direct, a retail company often in the news for its shoddy labor practices. A parliamentary inquiry once described conditions at Sports Direct as like a “Victorian workhouse,” and Bell sees a connection between the retail stores and the football team. “He treats [the team] how he treats his businesses, buy cheap sell high,” Bell says. He saw an opportunity to organize angry fans, and to push forward the conversation about inequality in Britain.

“It’s that lack of control over something that we love,” Bell says, that motivated fans to get involved. He’s now got a core group of 8 or 9 deeply organized fans, 35 to 40 who come to meetings, and a reach of hundreds of thousands on social media. They’ve dropped banners at games and protested outside of them—unlike many sports arenas, the Newcastle stadium is in the center of town, making the actions quite visible—and even organized a Newcastle United boycott, no small feat when you’re dealing with passionate sports fans.

One fan Bell began organizing with, he recalls, was a Conservative voter who had supported Brexit “in order to take back control.” But now, Bell says, the same person is agitating for unions for Sports Direct workers, and he’s thinking about “taking back control” from billionaires like Ashley. The fans knew Bell worked for the Labour party, but his first goal wasn’t to convert them as voters—it was to teach them to organize.

“The opportunity for us, in terms of organizing of Newcastle United fans is you turn that into a campaign that is not only about the workforce [at Sports Direct], but it is actually about a cultural institution at the heart of the community that far more people are involved in,” explains Dan Firth, the director of the community organizing unit. “It is the thing that everyone talks and breathes about literally every day.” If thousands of football fans begin to question who owns the team they love, and how that person made his money, it can not only bring more pressure to bear on Sports Direct as an employer, but transform the way people think about the economy.

At least, that’s what Labour is hoping for. Firth, who has been organizing for years, first with Citizens UK and then his own organization called We Can Win, came in to lead the community organizing unit after the 2017 general election. It was proposed as part of Corbyn’s second leadership campaign in 2016, after a move to pull him from power by members of the party in Parliament, and builds on the idea central to Corbynism: that the party must be a social movement.

The 2017 election, which saw Corbyn’s surge in the polls at the end erasing the majority then-Prime Minister Theresa May called the election to enlarge, appeared to validate that vision. But Labour has been in a rocky place lately, with near-constant battering in the press and the Brexit chaos highlighting contradictions within the party. A group of MPs split from the party earlier this year, citing Brexit and concerns about Corbyn’s leadership as reasons, though that splinter group almost immediately split and split again.

Labour’s and the Tories’ vote shares both collapsed in the European elections as the Brexit Party consolidated the Leave vote and the Greens and Liberal Democrats picked off Remain voters. With Boris Johnson’s relentless focus on leaving the EU no matter what, and rumors of a deal with Nigel Farage, the Conservatives may recover the Brexit Party losses, leaving Labour trying to bridge the divide between its Remain base and a sizable chunk of its voters who opted for Leave.

Sarah Jaffe

The community organizing unit attempts to bring Labour back to its roots. “The party, obviously, emerged out of the trade union movement and out of organizing,” Firth says. “That tradition kind of hollowed out when we started to basically recruit more and more politicians from think tanks and from Ivy League or top universities. The journey of bringing through people from working class backgrounds kind of disappeared.”

It wasn’t just Labour, of course, that hollowed out what a party used to be. The turn to neoliberalism among traditional social democratic parties, points out Paolo Gerbaudo, political sociologist and author of The Digital Party, came hand in hand with the “disempowering of the base of the parties, with a very clear political end in mind—which was freeing the leadership from any control from the rank and file.” Activists within Labour, Gerbaudo tells me, were treated with suspicion in the Tony Blair/New Labour years because they tended to be to the left of the leadership, and so even as Labour held the reins of government, its mass base shrank.

These days, even newer left formations often skip the base-building part of the process. Rather, parties like Podemos in Spain are more like tech startups, Gerbaudo explains, allowing activists to engage digitally and feel connected to what is often a charismatic leader. Momentum, the organization which emerged out of Corbyn’s first leadership campaign, operates as a sort of annex to the Labour Party, activating the left wing of Corbyn’s base. Here in the U.S., successful and unsuccessful candidates have spun off organizations from their campaigns—like Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution—but those organizations are often mostly an email list.

What most of the new parties are missing, Gerbaudo notes, is the intermediate layers, those activists or party staffers who made up the party’s presence in widespread cities and towns. “There is a lack of a social element in online discussions, a lack of social integration, the community element that was a key element, in fact, a key function of political parties,” Gerbaudo explains. “[Which was] to act as a sort of secular church, allowing people to be part of a collective, to feel involved, providing people with services, even with a place where to meet kindred souls.” Unions used to provide such a cadre—and still do, on an attenuated level—but their capacity has been diminished by the destruction of industry itself.

“When Thatcher closed down the pits and the steelworks, it was not only those jobs that went, but it was also the kind of collective political community culture and institutions,” Firth says. “Part of what we are trying to do is to rebuild that culture and to put the Labour Party back in the center of communities which it hasn’t been part of for some time.” In doing that, he hopes to build trust among voters who see politicians preening for TV cameras and little else. He also hopes to find people in those communities who can lead organizing campaigns and become the party’s candidates themselves.

“There is a huge detachment between the middle class, which is where a lot of activists hail from, and the kind of working-class electorate that Labour needs to attract,” Gerbaudo says. It’s the door-knocking in council homes, the base-building in communities that feel abandoned by parties in general and Labour in particular, whether they are migrant communities in London or white voters in the deindustrialized North, that is “the really revolutionary activity,” he points out. “That is the gap that needs to be breached through organizing. That is where community integration, the community function of political organizations needs to come back.”

Nonprofit community organizations, Firth notes, mostly get funded through charitable trusts that require a certain level of detachment from party politics. Embedding a community organizing project within the party offers the freedom to talk about political issues all you want. It means seeing each campaign—to boycott Newcastle United, to challenge slum conditions in social housing or to stop the demolition of existing flats, or against a privatized water utility—as part of the broader project of transforming the British economy.

"I’M VERY CLEAR, I say, look I work for the Labour Party but I’m not here to ask for your vote, I’ll do that when there’s an election,” explains Aydin Dikerdem, an organizer (and local Labour councilor) who is working to stop the demolition of two apartment buildings in Westminster. “For me it’s about justice.”

When an election happens, Dikerdem says, he will probably be asking for a vote. But over the summer, the fight was to save the homes, some of which are council homes, others private flats. The land is owned by the 28-year-old Duke of Westminster, a multibillionaire, and his company plans to bulldoze the buildings to build luxury housing there; while he’s promised to include some council housing, residents are committed to stopping the demolition entirely.

“It’s a profitable site, the buildings are beautiful, but this is a ten-minute walk from Sloane Square, really valuable land,” Dikerdem explains. “This is pure housing capitalism. Given that it’s already a profitable place and people love where they live, does the richest man in the entire world under 30 need to do this?” When he was tipped off to the coming demolitions by a neighborhood resident he’d met doing one-on-one chats, Dikerdem began a door-knocking campaign, organized a meeting, and 50 people turned up. The coalition is “a really interesting class alliance,” he says. “We’re very used to social housing being demolished, but this is both working-class and middle-class and in some cases upper-class residents who are facing the same trouble.”

The housing crisis also motivates Beth Foster-Ogg’s organizing in Putney, another section of London. Foster-Ogg reached out to a woman on Twitter, after seeing her tweeting about fearing her building becoming the next Grenfell—a social-housing tower that burned in 2017. When she went to the building, Foster-Ogg says, she found more problems than expected—water near wires as the woman had complained, but also mold, broken lifts leaving disabled residents stranded, and residents who had been trying to deal with management individually repeatedly stonewalled.

When the residents began to talk to one another, they were able to magnify their reach, use social media to pressure the landlord to sit down with them, and win repairs. “They’ve formed an amazing community, which is really beautiful to watch,” Foster-Ogg says. “They look after each other’s kids, they support their neighbors, they’ve been able to develop a community which is obviously what the community organizing is about, bringing people together, giving them a say in their local communities.”

When she tells people she works for the Labour Party, their response can be mixed, Foster-Ogg says. “We say we’re community organizers and we are there because we believe communities are being ripped apart by austerity, that we want to support people in campaigning and winning on local issues and understanding the system and this is important to the Labour party.” Often, she says, these people have approached politicians for help before and not gotten much—meeting an organizer can be the first positive experience of political engagement that they’ve had.

The campaign in Westminster and the campaign in Putney are the starting grounds for a London-wide campaign around housing, Firth explains, bringing together both sides of the problem: the conditions people are living in now, and the lack of affordable housing even as luxury accommodations continue to go up. It doesn’t hurt that Putney is in a constituency that Labour is aiming to win next election, either. “The majority of the people in that campaign are women of color, working-class women of color, have never seen themselves as political, and they are now at the forefront of leading a housing campaign to get their block fixed up, but also to link up with other people fighting for good housing across London,” Firth says. “They could stand as councilors. There are people there that you think, ‘Actually, with a bit of support, they would be amazing parliamentary candidates.’”

A WEEK LATER, in Redruth, Cornwall, at the southwestern tip of the U.K., where many people go for summer vacations, a similar crowd has gathered to join Rebecca Long-Bailey, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, in planning the Green Industrial Revolution—Labour’s version of the Green New Deal. Again, the crowd is diverse but skews middle-aged. The building we are in used to be part of a tin mining complex when Cornwall was a mining center. Bright yellow posters calling for “Green Unionized Jobs” and “Invest In Our Towns” dot the room.

The event begins with a 10-year-old climate striker telling the room, “We do not have a Planet B.” Long-Bailey tells the crowd, “It’s not in conferences where we find our driving force, that only comes from bottom up.” She is joined onstage by the Shadow Secretary of State for Trade Barry Gardiner, in a bright floral shirt with honeybees on it. Gardiner jokes that “this shirt is a vision of the future we could have,” and argues that a winning campaign to fight climate change “can’t all be hair shirts, doom and gloom.” You win a political campaign, he says, by giving people hope.

For the past year, John McDonnell tells me, the community organizing unit has been putting together these events around the country. “The idea is we turn out the town. We invite local members, trade unionists, local councilors, civic leaders, community organizations, local business, as well, and anyone who wants to come along. The idea this time around is that we develop our manifesto from the grassroots up.”

The previous party manifesto—the one that generated surprise success in 2017—was written, he explains, on the fly for a snap general election in which no one expected Labour to do well. It included renationalizations of rail, utilities, and mail services; wage hikes and new rights for workers; free university tuition; and new taxes on the rich to pay for everything. For the next election, Labour aims to build on this radicalism, and do so with input from its members.

“Yes, we’ll end austerity and rebuild public services but it’ll go beyond that,” says James Meadway, former economic adviser to John McDonnell and author of a forthcoming book on Corbynomics. “That means serious investment in jobs and infrastructure in places that have been ignored by government for 40 years, and a big new promise on shifting company ownership directly to workers.” He’s referring to the “inclusive ownership fund” plan, recently caricatured in the Financial Times but more accurately described as a plan to requirecompanies to turn over a number of shares to the workers who make the profits. (Bernie Sanders has recently proposed a similar idea.) There’s also a plan to radically change the ownership of land in Britain, introduced in a recent report on “Land for the Many.”

“Johnson and his advisers want the next election to be all about Brexit,” Meadway continues. “But everyone knows the problems in Britain are much bigger than that, from underfunded hospitals to rampant inequality, and it’s Labour who can offer the radical and popular solutions to them.” And this time, Labour has involved the membership in the process. Rather than being a surprise, the ideas will be familiar to local activists, because they’re already involved in fighting to make them a reality.

Many of the events, like the one in Cornwall, have taken place in areas that voted for Brexit. Labour’s struggle on the Brexit question has been to bring together two sides of a base that voted on opposite sides of the referendum, but have more similar class interests than it at first might appear. The Green Industrial Revolution in particular is an attempt to develop ideas to rebuild local areas around green jobs, to have a promise of something better that doesn’t hinge on the EU. In Liverpool, McDonnell says, people proposed a wave power project on the River Mersey, one that could provide energy through a publicly owned utility for the local community. “People are just buzzing with ideas,” he says.

Long-Bailey is one of Labour’s younger voices in leadership. She became an MP in 2015 and at first, she laughs, expected to be “agitating from the backbenches trying to make us more socialist.” Her background as a campaigner and agitator serves her well, now, and is why she appreciates the community organizing unit. “Normally, when you have events like this, people come to listen to the speakers,” she says, but at these events she’s mostly listening. “It is great to see people having disagreements at the tables about what type of energy technology we should be taking forward. These are the kinds of discussions that we should be having in communities about what it is they want to see, what kind of jobs they want to have in the future, what they want their homes to look like rather than everything being top-down policymaking.”

Danielle Rowley, MP from Midlothian in Scotland and Shadow Minister for Climate Justice and Green Jobs, spoke at another event in Motherwell, outside Glasgow, of her history as an organizer. “That was a key priority for Jeremy, to make sure that we are connecting with those movements, but in a meaningful way,” she tells me. “Not just saying, ‘We are the Labour Party and this is what we think,’ but actually listening to them and joining with them.”

The Green Industrial Revolution framework, like the climate justice analysis, is one that Labour sees as a way to bring people into the climate fight who might be more concerned with their immediate economic well-being. “If you knock on a door, most people are bothered about climate change, but they are more bothered about how much money they have got and whether they can feed their kids and what their kids are going to be when their kids grow up,” Long-Bailey says. “We have got to have the discussions within communities about the options that are on the table and what it is they want to see.”

At the end of each event, the community organizing team passes out sign-up sheets to bring the participants back for organizing training and campaign building. “We get about 40 percent of people who are not Labour members coming to those so they are not all just the usual suspects,” Dan Firth says. “We are bringing new people in, constantly thinking about ‘How can we continue to build the movement?’”

At the Cornwall event, Kathrine See, Labour’s community organizer for the area, kept hearing one name mentioned: South West Water, the private water utility. People had complaints about water quality, brown water coming from the taps, and Labour’s candidate in the area, Paul Farmer, said that he’d met a woman whose house had begun to sink because of a broken pipe underground. See got together with residents and went canvassing in neighborhoods, asking the community about the water company, and composed an open letter to the CEO of South West Water, asking for clarification about what turned out to be an underground pipe system that might date back hundreds of years. The community is rallying around the campaign, which aims next to call for a meeting with South West Water.

“Generally community organizing has been brilliant for Cornwall,” See says. “The southwest generally has been pretty untouched by Labour.” For years it’s been the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives who dominated, so it was a shock, See says, that in 2017 two seats came within a hair’s breadth of Labour winning. The local party, she says, had never really tried. “People generally don’t see connections between what’s happening in their daily lives and stuffy politicians in Westminster.” But now with her presence and the events in Cornwall, Labour is a real presence in the area, and there are now four local councilors in the region who came in through community organizing.

The community organizing unit hasn’t gotten much coverage in the press, which can be a double-edged sword. Its work flies under the radar, but for people who haven’t encountered it, they can get the impression, Rowley says, that Labour isn’t doing much. At these events, a different side of the story comes out. “With other parties, what you see in terms of what their leader is doing or what senior members are doing, that almost is the whole story for those parties,” she says. “But for Labour, we are a grassroots movement and what you see on the telly is just such a small part of what is going on.”

Since the Brexit vote, right-wingers like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, despite impeccable upper-class pedigrees, have suddenly donned populist clothing, pushing for the hardest of Brexits even as the government admits this may trigger near-term shortages of food and medication. Labour’s challenge, says Firth, in an election, is to reclaim that sense of being a movement.

In the local elections, which were a mixed bag for Labour, though not as bad as the European election, Firth notes, in the areas where community organizers were working, “we won council elections, we got Labour mayors, we increased the votes, we increased councilor seats. We have been organizing in key marginals across the country that are places that, to get into government, we have to win.”

It is those organized people on the ground, too, who will be able to continue to make demands of Labour if it is able to get into government. It will not be enough to sit back and think that Labour can now just flip a switch and turn on socialism. Work will need to be done on the ground, and the organizers who are already there will know what can be done quickly, to keep the support of the base as the leadership fights for longer-term changes. From Cornwall to Scotland to the outskirts of London, the communities’ needs are very different, though certain features recur: Housing is too expensive, public transit too unreliable, jobs scarce. Cornwall, Long-Bailey explains, lost its tin mining base to Thatcherism, and now most of the money comes from tourism. Other areas, like Motherwell, also saw their industrial bases collapse but don’t have the same tourism potential. “A one-size-fits-all approach isn’t going to work,” she says. “It has to be a community-specific approach and every area will be completely different.”

Particularly on green issues, too, bringing people together to think collectively can be the key in getting them to jump from individual solutions like “Recycle more” to political solutions. “When they are together and they are told to think about what policy could change, it does turn a lot more towards ‘Well, actually, I have been recycling for years while these huge companies have been doing this,’” Rowley says. When people get together, Long-Bailey adds, they realize, “We need to have a radical revolution right across technology, right across the economy to actually be able to tackle this.”

IN UXBRIDGE, THE HEART of Boris Johnson’s constituency, Ali Milani is onstage speaking. “What Boris Johnson represents is the archetype of the kind of politician that got us here. He is the definition of the person that was chiseled from birth to be prime minister, the person whose inaction and lack of care is what has caused us to come here,” Milani says.

He’s 25, one of Labour’s youngest candidates, and he’s running for Johnson’s seat, in a constituency outside of Heathrow Airport, where he says the air is some of the worst in Europe. Climate change, Milani says, is now, not in the future. “Boris Johnson, he doesn’t live here. He doesn’t eat where we eat. He doesn’t go to school where we go to school. He literally doesn’t breathe the same air that we do.”

The people breathing that air include Al and Lola, student strikers who introduce this event, yet another Green Industrial Revolution launch where extra tables had to be brought from the back to accommodate all the people. Al calls for Labour to think bigger, saying that being carbon-free by 2050 is “a sign of incompetence,” and Lola calls for internationalism at the heart of Labour’s policies, as a way to push back against the “racist reactionaries” who want to use climate change to tighten borders.

They are people like Vickie and Georgie Warner, a mother and daughter from the district who sit at my table. Georgie is in secondary school, and Vickie works at Mail Boxes Etc. Georgie too is a youth climate activist, and, Vickie says with a smile, “I am kind of led by my daughter. She has made me more active.”

They echo Milani’s theme, noting that there are wealthy people who love Johnson and working-class people struggling to get by. Food bank usage is up, and homelessness visible for the first time in Vickie’s lifetime. They came to the event motivated, Georgie says with a smile, by “hatred for Boris Johnson,” and were surprised both by the turnout and the event’s format.

When I ask if they’re going to get involved with community organizing because of their attendance at the event, both nod emphatically. “I have to put my money where my mouth is and follow words with actions,” Vickie says. “That is what is going to move people. If we want change, we have to do it.”