By Steve Early

Photo credit: Jacob Kearns

 This article appeared originally in Social Policy. This is part two of two. Read part one. 

A Bay Area Success Story 

How has the RPA managed to operate year-round for two decades as a multi-issue, membership-based organization and make steady electoral progress in the face of well-funded corporate opposition?

For a longer answer to that question, see Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of An American City, which chronicled the RPA’s first twelve years. Based on subsequent reporting and interviews conducted lately, here’s ten organizational tips that may be helpful to others on the left trying to create or sustain similar multi-issue, electoral formations:

Tip #1: Run “Corporate Free”—and on a Team!  

Post Citizens United, all office seekers, at every level of government in the US, try to convince their constituents of one thing: neither direct donations from wealthy donors or business interests or unlimited spending on their behalf by corporate Super-PACs will have any impact on their behavior in office.

Here’s the context for that kind of magical thinking in Richmond. A voter population that’s overwhelmingly registered Democrats participates in “non-partisan” elections for city council and mayor. Because candidates are identified on the ballot only by their listed occupation rather than any party affiliation, there’s no familiar clue about who is running to the left, right, or in the middle.

From its inception, Richmond progressives broke with local “politics as usual” by only fielding candidates who belonged to the RPA and ran “corporate free.” Then and now, this makes rejection or acceptance of money from business interests, large or small, a much-needed litmus test.

No other players in Richmond politics have ever been willing to take “The Pledge”—even liberal Democrats like Tom Butt, a two-term mayor elected ten years ago. His 2014 victory was aided by RPA candidate Mike Parker dropping out of a four-way race—in contemporary New Popular Front fashion—to avoid splitting the vote and putting Chevron back in control of city hall.

In California, office seekers who try to run in “corporate-free” fashion above the local level, face far more business-backed “independent spending” than Big Oil and Big Soda has ever deployed against the RPA in Richmond. (Over two election cycles a decade ago, that amounted to $6 million.)

Despite such heavily funded opposition, RPA candidates have won consistently by fielding multi-candidate slates, with a common program. And sharing resources, rather than competing for them as individual political entrepreneurs. 

Former Richmond city councilor Jovanka Beckles is upholding that RPA tradition in her current bid to become the next state senator representing Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, and smaller towns nearby. To beat a Berkeley mayor backed by big business, Beckles has coordinated her grassroots canvassing and voter turnout in Richmond with the overlapping efforts of RPA candidates running for city council this fall.

Tip #2: Make Creative Use of City Hall (And Its Farm Teams) 

After Gayle McLaughlin was originally elected mayor of Richmond—in a stunning, upset victory—she helped strengthen grassroots organizing in the city by seeding an array of city commissions, boards, and committees with like-minded activists rarely considered for such roles in the past.

This enabled some of her appointees—including Beckles and Martinez—to develop a further track record of community service that enabled them to become successful city council or mayoral candidates.

During eight years as mayor, McLaughlin built lasting relationships with a wide range of community groups and strengthened ties between city hall and Richmond’s forty neighborhood councils, another point of entry into local politics for RPA members.

RPA and its allies have conducted city hall training sessions to recruit younger and more diverse candidates for appointed positions on the Richmond planning and design review boards; a police oversight body that investigates citizen complaints; and other commissions dealing with arts and culture, parks and recreation, libraries, housing, and economic development.

As one such RPA recruit, I served for six years on Richmond’s Personnel Board, which OKs new city job descriptions, offers occasional advice to its HR Department, and holds hearings on worker complaints.

In one grievance appeal filed by the Richmond Police Officers Association (RPOA), we ruled against Richmond’s then-police chief when the latter denied time off to attend union training. In another RPOA case, we sided with the city (and its tax payers) by rejecting a multi-million-dollar claim based on a fanciful interpretation of contract language about negotiated wage increase “parity” for city workers.

Tip #3: Help “Electeds” Do Their Job, While Holding Them Accountable 

Getting elected to or holding public office as a working-class progressive is not easy, particularly if you have a demanding day job. Richmond’s current mayor is a retired teacher, so he can devote full time to his duties—even though Richmond, like many cities, delegates day-to-day administration of municipal affairs to an appointed city manager.

Current Mayor Eduardo Martinez had made the most of a dynamic three-member staff, which includes former RPA co-chair Shiva Mishek, a former Rent Board member; former RPA intern and community activist Tony Tamayo; and, former Chevron refinery worker and USW Local 5 leader, BK White, who is in charge of “just transition” planning for Richmond.

But if you’re a part-time city councilor in a smaller city like Richmond, you generally don’t have personal staff help. You must prepare for and attend long meetings on weekday evenings and be available to attend all kinds of community events on weekends. Twice a month, on Fridays, Richmond city councilors get packets, 400 to 600 pages long.

These documents relate to the official business on their agenda the following Tuesday night. To cast informed votes—and be more than a rubber stamp for the full-time city bureaucracy or unwitting tool of business interests—they must wade through this pile of city contracts, budget materials, consultant reports, memos from city department heads and lawyers, and draft resolutions before the meeting starts.

That’s where RPA’s Council Action Team and other task forces and committees come into play as support groups for progressive council members. These community volunteers—with expertise in areas like including taxes, budgets, housing, education, economic development, and environmental action—help individual council members prepare for upcoming meetings. RPA sub-committees also mobilize concerned citizens to attend city hall meetings and make ample use of “public comment” periods to support or oppose measures pending before the council.

Tip #4: Develop Labor, Community, and National Allies 

RPA has benefitted from its long-time synergy with advocacy organizations that regularly rally their local constituencies in similar fashion. These non-electoral groups include Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN), the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and Reimagine Richmond, which recruits young people of color to become more involved in civic affairs and wants to reduce crime “through community-centered, non-law enforcement solutions.”

Unions representing Richmond city workers, local teachers, or nurses, doctors, and therapists at Kaiser Richmond Medical Center have been solid supporters of the RPA and its electoral work. Their backing, plus picket-line alliances with Chevron refinery workers represented by United Steel Workers Local 5, has been a much-needed counter-weight to anti-RPA campaigning by RPOA and building trades unions always on the side of Chevron and local developers.

Since 2014, when Senator Bernie Sanders keynoted the largest pre-election rally in RPA history, he has been a continuing personal endorser of RPA candidates for city and state office. Our Revolution, created after Sanders’ first presidential campaign, has also been a consistent supporter and valued helper with RPA campaigns.

The RPA is also affiliated with the California Progressive Alliance, a loose network of like-minded groups throughout the state. A proposal to become part of the national Workings Families Party, in order to gain additional outside resources, was considered and rejected by the group six years ago (with this author arguing, as a rank-and-file RPA member, in favor of that affiliation).

Tip #5: Reimagine Public Safety 

Fours year ago, progressives around the country hoped that Black Lives Matters protests in response to the killing of George Floyd would lead to meaningful police reform. That didn’t happen in many places. Worse yet, calls for “defunding the police” led to major blow-back at the polls in Minneapolis and other places.

In Richmond, the city council tried to build on a widely acclaimed “community policing” experiment launched in 2005 by voting in favor of what local organizers hailed as “one of the most important police budget reallocations in the country.” Critics of spending 40% of the city’s general fund revenue on policing originally sought a 15 percent cut in the RPD budget.

Instead, in 2021, the council approved cuts of 5 percent a year for the next two years, which freed up more money for the Office of Neighborhood Safety, a seventeen-year-old program to reduce gun violence. Other funds were reallocated to a new civilian-staffed Community Crisis Response Program and expanded services for Richmond youth and unhoused people.

In 2023, Richmond—once one of the most violent cities in the country—had its lowest homicide rate in fifty years, although half way through this year, that same death toll (8) has already been matched. For the time being, at least, such tangible improvements make it harder for RPA critics to exploit public safety concerns for their own political advantage.

Tip #6: Push Popular Ballot Measures 

If your municipality allows local referendums on public policy issues, get measures on the ballot during election years that will boost turnout for progressive candidates—if you’ve picked the right issue.

RPA had its worst year ever at the polls in 2012 when its candidates backed a soda tax championed by one of its members on the city council (a Kaiser doctor not running for re-election that year). This proved to be racially divisive and drew heavy outside spending by the beverage industry, which defeated the measure and helped tank the candidacies of two RPA candidates.

Four years later, a successful grassroots campaign for adoption of rent control in Richmond led to a much better electoral outcome for two younger RPA members. One was twenty-six-year-old Melvin Willis, a local high school graduate and skilled organizer, who worked for ACCE, the tenant rights group that got rent regulation on the ballot.

This year, Willis is seeking a third term on the city council. Both he and his two RPA running-mates have campaigned not just for election to office but for ballot measures designed to improve municipal election procedures (via adoption of ranked choice voting) and make Chevron pay its fair share of local taxes. As noted above, the RPA and its allies (APEN and CBE) used a proposed 2024 ballot measure, calling for a new tax on locally refined oil, to trigger negotiations with Chevron over a financial settlement. Those talks led in August to an agreement requiring the company to pay Richmond $550 million over ten years in return for the city withdrawing the initiative to avoid further litigation over it. 

Tip #7: Link Local Problems to Global Ones (but Don’t Overdo It!) 

On behalf of the people of Richmond—or at the behest of advocacy groups among them—progressives on the city council have a long history of passing resolutions on controversial “big-picture” issues, seemingly unrelated to local governance.

Even when overly wordy and unnecessarily inflammatory, such statements generally offer good advice to less-progressive policy makers at the federal level. For example, anything war-related usually mentions the need for “new national priorities”—i.e. spending less money on the Pentagon and more federal tax dollars on housing, healthcare, education, and environmental protection in places like Richmond.

Nevertheless, with great election year regularity, RPA foes lambast its resolution passers on the council for triggering long and contentious meetings about problems that can’t be solved locally or even at the county or state level. 

Last year’s expression of solidarity with Palestinians—still under US-funded military attack ten months later—immediately drew social media accusations that local progressives are pro-Hamas. Other critics accused the council majority of insensitivity to Jewish residents, some of whom now feel “unsafe” because Richmond called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Opposition candidates, this fall, are already blaming any local problem—from potholes to trash dumping to dangerous driving and illegal fire-work displays on the Fourth of July—on council incumbents too preoccupied with seeking peace in the Middle East.

To narrow the basis for such criticism, it’s best to stay away from performative anti-imperialist politics and related sloganeering. Focus instead on concrete demands like cutting the military budget and redirecting those savings to cities in need or taking steps at the city level, like ending any municipal investment in weapons manufacturers (which Richmond did in May to follow up on its Gaza ceasefire call last October).

Tip #8: Survive Defeats and Defections

Since its founding, four RPA activists sought city council seats but did not win. Several others, including current mayor Eduardo Martinez, had to run more than once to succeed. Over the past twelve years, three RPA members who served one city council term or less, ended up losing the confidence of fellow progressives because they cast controversial votes on unpopular development projects. 

Two of these RPA candidates decided not to run again. The other, a promising young Latina activist, lost a re-election a bid in a crowded field of other candidates because she had been, in effect, “de-selected” by too many original supporters.

In a contentious but democratic vote at a membership meeting not long after, a founding father of the RPA was then removed from its elected steering committee because his organizational behavior, according to some critics, had become hostile and disruptive. One long-serving city councilor quietly resigned from the RPA, in solidarity with him, while remaining a stalwart of the council’s now progressive super-majority.

This whole process would have been a lot messier without an official structure, which the group lacked during the first decade of its existence, as an informal political club. In 2015, members finally approved by-laws. This simple, five-page document creates a twelve-person steering committee headed by two co-chairs, a treasurer, and secretary—all elected every two years by dues-paying members. Prior to that, critics of the group often criticized its campaigns for democratization of city government as “hypocritical” because its own internal decision making involved only a few people, operating in not very transparent fashion. 

Tip #9: Rely on Membership Dues, Not Just Philanthropy 

Like any organization, RPA still has its weaknesses. One, at the moment, is fewer dues paying members—down to less than 100 from a peak of nearly 280 after a big election win over Chevron-backed candidates ten years ago. That struggle required building an overlapping “key list” of 450 “supporters” and a friendly voter database of 3,400.

A dues hike (from $12 a year to $60) made annual membership drives more difficult unless credit card payments were already authorized and automatically renewed. Today, RPA’s annual income from membership dues is one third of it was pre-Covid.

A large private bequest from a recently deceased RPA leader, plus a multi-year grant from a progressive foundation, is more than compensating for that. A group run mainly by volunteers in the past is now lucky enough to have three part-time or full-time staffers.

Yet, every two years, the Alliance still faces the additional challenge of helping its candidates raise enough money to win office or get re-elected while still having a big enough annual operating budget to pay non-campaign expenses like $35,000 for rental of a year-round office and meeting space.

In some election cycles, key community allies try to tap the same local donors on the RPA’s list to get rent control passed or, this year, a “polluters tax” enacted. These non-electoral groups have always relied on the usual funding sources for progressive non-profits—grants from social change foundations and wealthy donors, while counting anyone on their mailing list as a “member.” (I recently rejoined the Working Families Party; all it took was pushing a button—and, even there, no dues or donation was required!)

Older labor activists in the RPA have long stressed the importance of paying dues to the group. In unions, this personal financial commitment is a prerequisite for attending meetings, running for union office, and participating in any other forms of rank-and-file decision making, like contract ratification votes. However, when Reimagining Richmond leader Marisol Cantu conducted a “Listening Project” for the RPA two years ago to get helpful community feedback on its work, she found that “paying membership dues was a turnoff.”

More familiar with online networks and the organizational culture of local nonprofits funded by foundation grants, some younger respondents wanted a “diversity of options” to qualify for RPA membership—like doing a certain amount of volunteer work. Another Listening Project finding, according to Cantu, was that “new members won’t join if they don’t feel represented.” And that’s where passing the torch comes in.

Tip #10: Pass the Torch 

The RPA has tried to be cross generational, as well as multiracial. It now includes “elders” (not my favorite term) who were part of the founding generation of the group or joined after that but are now retirees in their late 60s or 70s. There’s also a middle layer of activists in their 40s or early 50s, often with families, younger kids, and full-time jobs. Finally, there are newer recruits drawn from local high schools and community colleges, Richmond-based youth organizations, and a talented pool of college graduates who returned home to serve their community.

One older member of that cohort is Doria Robinson, a third-generation Richmond resident who studied at Hampshire College in New England. She came back to create a garden network called Urban Tilth to promote sustainable agriculture and healthy eating in the city. Two years ago, she won election to the city council based on her work with a nonprofit that now has a big staff, many volunteers, and a $6 million annual budget.

Current RPA co-chair B. K. Williams sees her job as “passing the torch to the next level of leadership” who are following in Robinson’s footsteps. Her advice to IPOs elsewhere is “find young folks, money to fund them, and let them plan ways to take over.” Within the RPA, that effort has taken the form of a youth internship program, involving young people, ages seventeen to twenty-two, who work for the group during the summer or after school. Some former interns have become paid staffers or elected leaders.

A Winning Formula

In their new book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, Stephanie Luce and Deephak Bhargava profile labor and community organizers doing similar work around the country. These activists understand, as Bhargava recently told The Guardian, that “electoral strategies only focused on candidates are not likely to succeed”—due to popular “cynicism about politics because it hasn’t consistently delivered material improvement in people’s lives.”  

In contrast, a “long-term, community-centered organizing approach” can be effective in communities of color and among young people, even if they are “afflicted by despair or a deep distrust of establishment political parties.” In Richmond, that challenge has been met by a local political formation with a twenty-year track record of not “just inviting people to vote, but also inviting them to work on the issues they care most about.”

It’s a winning formula, worthy of emulation, and may work, once again on November 5—for Claudia Jimenez, Melvin Willis and Sue Wilson, a first-time candidate on this year’s RPA slate. All three hope that their election night party in Richmond will not occur, as it did in 2016, against the backdrop of a presidential victory by Donald Trump.

The Republican Party is no fan or respecter of “municipalism” in states red or blue unless it’s of the MAGA sort. If Trump wins, governors and state legislatures aligned with the right will enact more bans on progressive policy experiments at the local level.

As Local Progress, a national network of left-leaning elected officials, has warned for some time, the spread of “pre-emption”—directed at any flourishing blue enclaves in red states, like Austin, Texas—will make the job of “claiming the city” much harder over the next four years.

On the other hand, if millions of Americans reject Trump for a third time in the popular vote and again in the electoral college, the climate for policy innovation and experimentation at the municipal level will be far better, now and in the near future.

About the Author 

Steve Early is a former International Union representative for the Communications Workers of America who has been a dues-paying member of DSA since 1982 and the Richmond Progressive Alliance since 2012. He is the author of five books, including Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City, published by Beacon Press.