Over 3,000 Bernie Sanders sup­port­ers con­vened in Chica­go for the People’s Sum­mit last week­end. ​“That we have come togeth­er is not a coin­ci­dence,” said Sum­mit host and exec­u­tive direc­tor of Nation­al Nurs­es Unit­ed (NNU) RoseAnn DeMoro in her open­ing remarks. ​“How we stay togeth­er is the chal­lenge before us at the People’s Summit.”

'We also have to remember that movements produced this moment,' said Naomi Klein. 'There would be no Bernie moment without the Fight For 15, Keystone XL, the movement against fracking, Black Lives Matter, the immigrant rights movement, all of it.'

Peo­ple filed in from across the coun­try. Atten­dees includ­ed vol­un­teers from local Sanders groups, stu­dent orga­niz­ers, cur­rent and recent­ly laid off Sanders staffers, Sanders sur­ro­gates like Sen. Nina Turn­er, pro­gres­sive non-prof­its, hun­dreds of nurs­es, Peo­ple for Bernie, Brand New Con­gress and more.

Many said they were politi­cized by the Sanders can­di­da­cy. Oth­ers, like the dozens of People’s Action orga­niz­ers attend­ing the sum­mit, said they have been doing the work of build­ing inde­pen­dent pro­gres­sive polit­i­cal pow­er for years.

“A move­ment to build insti­tu­tions that are ground­ed in a world view and a set of peo­ple, not a polit­i­cal par­ty, and to do down bal­lot can­di­date devel­op­ment,” has been in motion for years, says People’s Action co-direc­tor George Goehl. People’s Action is the result of this year’s mam­moth merg­er between Nation­al People’s Action, U.S. Action and Alliance for a Just Society.

Not just anoth­er email list organiztion

I came from New York City, where Team Bernie NY — inde­pen­dent of the Sanders cam­paign — has amassed a list of 50,000 Sanders sup­port­ers and 5,000 vol­un­teers in the state. Team Bernie NY is now sup­port­ing Deb­bie Med­i­na for State Sen­ate, work­ing with Democ­ra­cy at Work to sup­port work­er co-ops, and some in their net­work are work­ing on Paul Newell and Robert Car­rol­l’s cam­paigns for State Assembly.

“Whether it’s a cam­paign or an orga­ni­za­tion we’re work­ing with to pass a piece of leg­is­la­tion, it’s a col­lab­o­ra­tive rela­tion­ship,” says Tascha Van Auken, a co-founder of Team Bernie NY and for­mer Oba­ma for Amer­i­ca orga­niz­er. ​“So we’re main­tain­ing the auton­o­my as the grass­roots, we’re main­tain­ing the pow­er we’ve been able to built up togeth­er over the last 11 months.”

A People’s Sum­mit break­out ses­sion on ​“Build­ing Inde­pen­dent Polit­i­cal Pow­er” brought Sanders’ deputy polit­i­cal direc­tor and Lati­no out­reach direc­tor Arturo Car­mona and Sanders’ speech writer Richard Eskow togeth­er with Work­ing Fam­i­lies Par­ty nation­al co-chair Bob Mas­ter and state-based People’s Action affil­i­ates from Mary­land, Maine, Michi­gan and Chicago.

In intro­duc­ing the con­ver­sa­tion, Miles Mogules­cu of the Huff­in­g­ton Post said he hoped ​“the Sanders cam­paign doesn’t go the way of Occu­py, which had an impact but dis­ap­peared. We need per­ma­nent orga­ni­za­tion to dri­ve a per­ma­nent revolution.”

Genevieve Lysen, of Maine People’s Alliance, spoke of recent­ly win­ning a major­i­ty of Alliance-backed can­di­dates on the Lewis­ton City Coun­cil, where they are now push­ing a pro­gres­sive bud­get, and immi­grant and ten­ant pro­tec­tions. ​“We are learn­ing now what it is to gov­ern,” Lysen said. This year, she said, the group — thanks in part to ener­gy from the Sanders cam­paign — is run­ning 40 can­di­dates for local office across the state.

“I don’t want to see anoth­er nation­al email list orga­ni­za­tion,” she told the audi­ence. ​“The ques­tion is how to direct all the Bernie ener­gy to orga­ni­za­tions with real staff and vol­un­teers on the ground.”

Reclaim Chica­go, which helped oust Cook Coun­ty State’s Attor­ney Ani­ta Alvarez — who had tried to cov­er up details of the the police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDon­ald — com­bined their 2016 cam­paigns for local pro­gres­sives with an influx of Sanders sup­port­ers, who helped dou­ble the group’s vol­un­teer base and the num­ber of peo­ple in the orga­ni­za­tion now will­ing to run for office. ​“Our orga­ni­za­tion was there to receive them,” said Reclaim Chicago’s new exec­u­tive direc­tor Aman­da Weaver.

Since launch­ing in Novem­ber 2014 the group says they have helped elect three pro­gres­sive alder­men in Chica­go and defend­ed the eight incum­bent mem­bers of the City Council’s Pro­gres­sive Reform Cau­cus. And in 2016 they played a large role in five state leg­is­la­ture cam­paigns includ­ing the first Asian-Amer­i­can woman to win a demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry in state history.

Michi­gan United’s Eli­she­va John­son spoke of sim­i­lar tac­tics, and how they’re being used to elect school board mem­bers and pros­e­cut­ing attor­neys to slow the school-to-prison pipeline.

Elect­ing the movement

All the groups stressed the impor­tance of main­tain­ing grass­roots inde­pen­dence and devel­op­ing an orga­niz­ing pipeline that begins with focus­ing on con­stituents’ con­cerns and devel­op­ing vol­un­teers into lead­ers that may one day run for office. ​“It’s eas­i­er to get your issues through if it’s your own peo­ple in office,” said Lysen.

Brand New Con­gress, launched by Sanders sup­port­ers this April with the inten­tion of replac­ing the U.S. Con­gress with peo­ple com­mit­ted to Sanders’ plat­form, is grap­pling with a sim­i­lar ques­tion: How to recruit and vet can­di­dates. Right now they are still in their first stage of recruit­ing grass­roots can­di­dates; the group, whose founders include Wiki­me­dia Foundation’s for­mer chief rev­enue offi­cer and lead ​“Bernie Barn­storms” orga­niz­er Zack Exley, came into the week­end with one offi­cial part­ner­ship with a local Bernie group.

At anoth­er break­out, titled ​“Down Bal­lot Rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies,” Weaver and oth­er People’s Action orga­niz­ers from Maine, Michi­gan and Chica­go, and Pro­gres­sive Democ­rats of Amer­i­ca chal­lenged par­tic­i­pants to either run for office or to find some­one who would.

The focus on local and state elec­tions echoed a mes­sage Sanders him­self pushed on the eve of the Sum­mit. ​“We need to start engag­ing at the local and state lev­el in an unprece­dent­ed way,” Sanders said in his address to sup­port­ers on June 16. ​“We need many [of the vol­un­teers that worked on the cam­paign] to start run­ning for school boards, city coun­cils, coun­ty com­mis­sions, state leg­is­la­tures, and gov­er­nor­ships.” Some 6,700 Sanders sup­port­ers have since said they would be inter­est­ed in run­ning for office.

“It is all of our respon­si­bil­i­ty in this room,” said Melis­sa Rubio, polit­i­cal direc­tor for Illi­nois State Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Will Guz­zar­di and orga­niz­er with Reclaim Chica­go, ​“to take the ener­gy from the Bernie cam­paign and place it into local elec­tions, and to chal­lenge our­selves to think, ​‘Am I going to run for office?’ ”

The mes­sage seemed to work. ​“I always make excus­es,” said Cier­ra Pen­ning­ton of West Vir­ginia Cit­i­zen Action Group, ​“that I’m going to run when I’m old­er — in my 30s.” But after meet­ing peo­ple her age and younger at the Sum­mit who are run­ning for office, she said she is now ​“think­ing more seri­ous­ly about run­ning for State House in the next two years.”

One such inspir­ing young can­di­date is Car­los Ramirez-Rosa, 26, a for­mer Illi­nois Coali­tion for Immi­grant and Refugee Rights orga­niz­er who, with the back­ing of Reclaim Chica­go as well as numer­ous oth­er unions and pro­gres­sive groups in the city, became Chicago’s youngest alder­man last year. Or Abel DeMar­cos, 18, who is run­ning for city coun­cil in Flint, Michi­gan. Or the count­less oth­ers who announced their can­di­da­cy in pop­corn style through­out the weekend.

And though the new­found enthu­si­asm for tak­ing over local, state and fed­er­al branch­es of gov­ern­ment has many elec­tri­fied, there was a con­sis­tent cau­tion through­out the con­fer­ence not to for­get the social move­ments that made all this possible.

“It’s impor­tant to remem­ber that elec­tions are not move­ments,” DeMoro said from the out­set, ​“but they can be a moment in a movement.”

“There has been this migra­tion from the streets to form­ing polit­i­cal par­ties,” said pro­gres­sive author and activist Nao­mi Klein, speak­ing of Spain’s Podemos and Greece’s Syriza parties.

“But we also have to remem­ber that move­ments pro­duced this moment. I think we have to do some­thing real­ly com­pli­cat­ed, where we have to build out all of these elec­toral pos­si­bil­i­ties while under­stand­ing that these politi­cians will be noth­ing unless they are backed by social move­ments and account­able to those social move­ments. There would be no Bernie moment with­out the Fight For 15, Key­stone XL, the move­ment against frack­ing, Black Lives Mat­ter, the immi­grant rights move­ment, all of it.”

Speak­ing to some friends in Spain, who went ​“from the squares to Podemos,” she said, there has been a real­iza­tion that the move toward elec­toral pol­i­tics hurt their pow­er in the street. ​“Syriza [in Greece] as well.”

Next steps

On the final morn­ing of the con­fer­ence, par­tic­i­pants split up into groups by state. ​“A lot of them are meet­ing for the first time here,” says Goehl, who facil­i­tat­ed the state-based break­outs. ​“That’s big.”

Jef­fer­ey Spicer, a Detroit res­i­dent work­ing on local ordi­nances to reform employ­er back­ground checks across Michi­gan, said at his break­out ses­sion that Michi­gan Unit­ed, an NPA affil­i­ate, and groups that sprout­ed dur­ing the Sanders cam­paign real­ized they were try­ing to do the same thing. That morn­ing, he said, they began to talk about how to work together.

“We talked about how we can sup­port each oth­er,” said Min­neapo­lis res­i­dent Hamza Mussé of the Minnesota/​Wisconsin com­bined break­out ses­sion, ​“and how we can move into elec­tions.” Mussé, a recent col­lege grad­u­ate, said this sum­mer will be his first polit­i­cal cam­paign. He’s plan­ning to help Ilhan Omar, a 33-year-old Soma­li woman, win the Demo­c­ra­t­ic pri­ma­ry and oust a 22-term Demo­c­ra­t­ic-Farmer-Labor Par­ty incum­bent Phyl­lis Kahn in the Min­neso­ta State Sen­ate. “[Omar] rep­re­sents the con­stituents, diver­si­ty and the young ener­gy that’s tak­en over Min­neapo­lis,” Mussé said.

One next step, Goehl told me, might be to con­vene state-based People’s Sum­mits across the country.

The exact details of what will hap­pen next remain hazy. But what­ev­er shape the post-Bernie future takes, many activists seemed to feel the Sum­mit offered a good start. Thou­sands of email address­es and phone num­bers were exchanged and a space for reflec­tion and strate­giz­ing was pro­vid­ed with­in what the Summit’s web­site calls ​“a time of tremen­dous tur­moil and pro­gres­sive opportunity.”

“You knew that we would need to gath­er,” Klein said to DeMoro the open­ing night. ​“You knew that we would need a place to look each oth­er in the eye.”