VIDEO: Reaching Rural Communities Through Relational Organizing

Below is a lightly edited transcript of a talk given by Hosier Action founder and Wallace Rural Organizing Fellow Kate Hess Pace at our second annual Wallace Symposium, which brings movements together to fight fascism and envision a more equitable future.

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Sarah Anderson: I’m Sarah Anderson with the Institute for Policy Studies, and I’m really excited to be moderating this session on reaching rural communities through powerful relational organizing.

And since this is part of the Henry Wallace Symposium, I wanted to point out that Henry Wallace might be best remembered as FDR’s Vice President during World War II, but before that, he was FDR’s Agriculture Secretary during the Great Depression, the worst crisis for rural America in our history. And he designed a lot of the New Deal programs that helped get farming communities out of that crisis and protected family farms like the one I grew up on in Minnesota.

Today, though, rural communities are in crisis again, with corporate monopolies squeezing small producers and with the hollowing out of manufacturing. In my hometown’s main street, a lot of the former stores and restaurants are now social service agencies and food banks to serve the poor, and I think it’s that way in a lot of small towns across America.

So we’re really lucky today to have someone who can speak about how to turn around things in rural America: Kate Hess Pace, our Wallace Rural Organizing Fellow.

She’s someone who grew up in a small town like I did, and like myself and so many others from small towns, she’s left for the bright lights of the big city for a while. But then, unlike me, she returned to her hometown and her home area in Indiana, where she says her family has lived for longer than anyone can remember.

Kate founded Hoosier Action in 2017 to improve the lives of working families in Indiana. She’s worked in organizing and advocacy for the past 20 years, developing the leadership of people who’ve been left out of public decisionmaking. Prior to moving back home to Indiana, she worked as a faith-based organizer with Isaiah in Minnesota, working on predatory lending and foreclosure defense. And she describes herself as a fierce evangelist for the stunning beauty of Southern Indiana and a deep believer in the strength of our people.

Please welcome Kate Hess Pace.

Kate Hess Pace (02:37): All right, good afternoon. So I’m the director and founder of Hoosier Action. I don’t spend most of my times in rooms like this and it truly is a pleasure to be with all of you. I found my way to organizing as a firm and deep believer in human beings and their inherent dignity and worth, and the belief that our world and society get better with more participation and more leadership, particularly from those that have been left behind.

Hoosier Action is a membership organization, and so I stand here representing our people. Our people are all in small towns and rural areas in southern Indiana. They live across the political spectrum. They are brilliant, they are hilarious, and they are shouldering more than they should. And their lives are harder than they have to be. 

So I organized in Minnesota for about 10 years, and I would come home to Indiana and be like, “What do you join if your water is poisoned? What do you do?” Where I’m from, by the time I finished high school, every factory in town had closed. We cut limestone. We stopped cutting limestone. We had an RCA plant. Several of my best friends’ dads lost their jobs there. You saw people plunged into unemployment. 

And so a lot of our small towns where we don’t have tourism have been shuttered. They’ve turned into places of liquor stores and payday [loan] stores and not vibrant economies. So I’d come back and be like, “Somebody needs to do something.” I’ve seen the power of organizing, and it can’t just sit in cities across the country. I know how much our people in Indiana both want to fight back and want to be a part of something — and have no invitation to do it.

I’m going to leave lots of time for questions, because I’d prefer to interact with you rather than talk at you. 

So I moved back  in 2017 and I had really been trained on a very rigorous and robust methodology of organizing. And I brought a lot of that methodology with me, but I also realized really quickly that it rested on top of a democracy that we did not have in southern Indiana. We don’t have contested elections, and most of our general elections, we don’t have an active press that reports on what you’re doing. We don’t have partnerships where we can build a coalition in the ecosystem. 

So we had to back up our organizing to think about: what is it going to take to create spaces and places that are legible to people and onboard them towards political leadership? 

The other thing we found was that our politics and people’s orientation to it had been entirely nationalized. So people could talk a lot about the president, and they would. They could talk a lot about what Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing, or Jamie Raskin, but they had no idea what was happening in our statehouse. No idea how the county commissioners just voted. And I think about it like a Jenga game where the bottom has been totally hollowed out.

And here we are with pretty broken politics and no on-ramps for people at the bottom to participate, to shape, to have any collective meaning about why the economy dropped out where you live. So we put a ban on talking about national politics, and we don’t care who you voted for. What we care about is you and your lives and what’s hard, and can we knit something together to actually change the material conditions of where you are?

And the other thing that we found, and I think this is true for you too, is that everybody’s muscle of working together and doing things in community was pretty atrophied. So how do we get people better at the imperfect, tension-filled work of sitting together and figuring out: how do we protect pregnant workers on the job? How do we get your wages higher? How do we get this site cleaned up that’s polluting your entire town?

So we set out to do that, and today, we have chapters in 13 counties. Our chapters represent different constituencies, so we have a chapter focused just on maternal health. I was just talking to somebody from Indiana and one in three counties doesn’t have an OB/GYN. We’re looking at this bill and seeing somewhere between 8 to 16 rural hospitals close, so how do we continue to make sure that people can both have healthy births and then have services and activities after that birth?

We have a Care, Not Cuffs chapter, which is one of my favorite and most boisterous chapters. And that is all people who are formerly incarcerated and in long-term recovery. We’re an area that was hit significantly hard by the opioid crisis. And so they just recently passed, it was a felony to test your drugs for fentanyl, so we got our state legislature to decriminalize fentanyl testing strips and it’s reducing the amount of overdoses in our community. 

We’ve also made sure that all of our first responders are equipped with Narcan and working to make sure that the stories of people who have been incarcerated or struggling with opioids or addiction are front and center and have public sympathy. And we’re moving towards that as a public health crisis, not a criminalization effort. 

We have Clark County Moms, which is all working class moms, most of their kids have IEPs or 504s so they’re trying to make it through the school system with significant challenges. So they’ve been trying to figure out both how do we fund our public schools and how do we make sure our kids are taken care of? And that chapter includes people from those deeply enmeshed in QAnon to very progressive Democrats, and they figured out together that actually all of us want our kids safe and taken care of. 

So our chapters range quite a bit, and we’ve figured out how they can both have their own identity and their nucleus as a chapter while at the same time being able to bring all of them together in one organization. 

I often put this slide up because I like to remind people what is at the core of organizing, which is not me coming to you and saying, “we’re going to run this campaign.” And in a place like Indiana, we don’t have enough people that would just naturally gravitate towards being a part of a statewide campaign. So we start with courageous and curious listening about what’s happening in your life, and then ask people, “do you want to do something about it?” 

So we’re not advocating on behalf of other people, but instead inviting them to join us to be a part of change. And when you move people from being victims of circumstance, over and over — and when you stay in that place, you stay in a place of blame, of resentment, of powerlessness, of fear, of hopelessness — if we move people towards actually, “you can bring this to your city council, you can bring this to your capital, and you’re actually not going to get stuck in being a victim, but you’re going to be a part of powerful change across our state.” It is transformative and has dividends far beyond any policy bill or election.

So, what I’ve come to in Hoosier Action — and I know that we are facing and staring down some of the most daunting challenges we’ve ever faced. I know that there is vast suffering where I live and where you live too, and it can feel like no solution is big enough, and there won’t be one silver bullet. 

What I came to with Hoosier Action is actually what we need is a lot more things lower to the ground that people can join and be a part of. So that they don’t feel like “politics isn’t about me and it’s about people yelling at each other in DC” and instead animating them towards “politics is about you and me and where we live, and democracy happens where we live, and you’re invited to be a part of it.” 

I don’t see a world where we get to the real change we need, where we don’t first have the majority of the country in our imperfect political homes that they’re shaping, building, and belonging to. So that’s what we’ve committed to do. And we had to figure out, like, what is the model that’s going to do this? Because we can’t actually just go inviting people to sign petitions.

So we worked with our membership for a long time to figure out three pillars, the essential things that have to be in place for us to be a durable political home in Indiana. The first pillar is “church.” 

We are a secular organization, though I would say the vast majority of our membership is deeply connected to their faith. But when we say church, what we’re talking about is filling in the gap of institutional collapse that’s happened. When my grandparents were active members of their church, they were parts of multiple clubs and civics institutions. Those institutions both created meaning for people and brought them into real public action, days of volunteering, etc. So our church part is how do we really become a place that you can walk into, and your values are reflected, and we’re going to make meaning, and everybody is welcome? 

The second piece is “bomb shelter,” which recognizes that so many of our people don’t have enough of a floor underneath them to participate in politics. So how do we incorporate mutual aid into our work? And then, like, how do we make sure people have the information they need to be as powerful as possible? And how are we preparing for a future where we’re seeing ongoing crises and becoming the place that people can go and be safe inside of. 

And the third piece is more of the traditional community organizing piece, which is training, campaigns, a commitment to agitation, a commitment that you are the one that’s going to be a part of leading this, and you’re going to go find more people around you. 

I’ll go a little bit deeper into each of these. So our Moms chapter, they came to me and were like, “we want to start doing more art stuff.” And I was like, “okay, try it.” So their opening meetings are often like, come and paint a pumpkin and bring your kid. And all kinds of moms come in and they just sit and paint their pumpkin and talk about what it’s like to be a mom. There’s a lot of complaining. There’s a lot of lifting up about things that are hard, both big and small, but also just a space to connect and a space to be affirmed. 

We decided as part of our church pillar that we were going to buy property and become a visible part of the community. So we bought a couple of buildings, one so that people would have a space to walk into, so that we would be recognized in the community. 

But we have also been able to do things like on the side of this building, where Care Not Cuffs is building out a memorial garden for all the lives lost to overdose and suicide in our community. There has been very little public recognition of how much loss there is, and so it’s both about meeting people’s emotional and spiritual needs, but doing that in public so it’s seen, and we’re moving people away from just privatized pain and grief towards public recognition of your life matters, the lives that were lost matter, and things could be better if we work together and change the laws. 

We also did some things to just bake in rituals. So our chapters look really different, different kinds of people in them, and we want members to have a lot of freedom to shape them. But how can we make sure that everybody is doing some of the same things? So if you walk into a Care Not Cuffs meeting or a Moms chapter, you know that you’re in a Hoosier Action chapter. Then every quarter we bring the whole base together so that people can have the same language and talk to each other. 

So with our members, we built out 12 axioms. We read them at the beginning of every meeting, and maybe it is from coming out of faith-based organizing, but I was like I want a thing that we always return to that reminds us of who we are and what we’re doing. I think they’re on our website too. But just reminding people that we believe that people are at the center of our work, that every human deserves to live a life of dignity, that we get to determine what’s possible, and that our work calls us to choose change over comfort. And we talk through those, we have tension-filled conversations about those, and we remind each other of both what we owe each other and the work that we’re doing together. 

The second is bomb shelter. Sometimes this means lots and lots of Know Your Rights trainings. You don’t have a lot of rights as a renter or worker in Indiana, but we want to make sure that people are equipped. We do know your rights on medical debt, we’ve done medical debt workshops. We always feed people. We always have child care. And then with our building, we’re working to turn it into a resilience hub, so as the weather gets more and more extreme, we can actually be ready to respond throughout crises. 

This past summer was our hottest summer on record. It probably was here too, and where we live, there were no cooling centers at all. There was no place to go, and so we worked with 14 congregations to open cooling centers. They’re open again this year, and figuring out both how to build trust with the community, but also just committing ourselves that our power building is also about keeping people safe and secure. 

And this campaign, with the clergy and the environmental resilience group that’s been working on it, is now pushing the town we live in to get actual cooling centers open and to make sure we have plans in place. So in a year like this, where we had the third worst snow storm on record, we had twice the level of storms and tornadoes that we’ve ever had, and now we’re having the hottest summer on record, we’re trying to get city and state officials to partner with us to just make sure that people are safe. 

And the third piece of our plan is “vanguard,” sometimes revolutionary vanguard, depending on where we are. This is a meeting in Austin, Indiana. Austin is a town of about 4,000 people. Austin, when Governor Pence was there, he shuttered most of the Planned Parenthoods, and Austin, Indiana had the worst rural HIV crisis that I believe has ever happened in this country. Austin, Indiana, with my Republican Representative, then moved and fought the state to get the first needle exchanges open.

These are people that have been fighting really hard for harm reduction, completely hit by the opioid crisis. And part of our programming is that in most of these towns, there are no town halls to meet the people that are running for office where you live. So this was a town hall where we had Republicans, Libertarians, and Democratic candidates there. Our members get to ask their questions about their values, they actually get to participate. We’ve seen lots of people switch who they support by just having that experience of getting to ask questions and see what people stand for. 

But we live in a place where this is a very rare thing, especially in smaller towns and areas. And part of this is also really committing with our people to build independent political power. That doesn’t mean we’re trying to build a new party, but that in our state where we live, we do not see the parties responding to the needs and concerns of working class people, and we want to have enough power inside of our membership to push on either party. Because what has happened in Indiana is that if you want to live somewhere that has amenities and that has resources, it will likely be blue and it will likely be completely unaffordable.

The county I live in is purple, one of the very few purple counties. The mayor of my town is a Democrat. He just chose to put $500,000 towards a mountain bike trail while we have a list of hundreds waiting for Section 8. For the last month, I’ve had a mom and a son sleeping in their car in our parking lot because they can not find housing. So part of the push that we’re trying to make is to create a large enough bloc of working class people and working class voters that either party will start to be more and more accountable to, and to start to redefine what politics is with regular people at the center of it.

All right, so, this was our last quarterly meeting. We’ve been launching this neighbor to neighbor to program since the beginning of the year. This is Knock Your Block. We’ve got more members knocking [on doors on] their roads and blocks than we ever have. And it really started with we have to get the deepest, densest network of people around us — whether it is climate or AI or authoritarianism, the way we’re going to get through it is together. 

So we’re going out, neighbor to neighbor, and are just making emergency contact lists. Who in your neighborhood is vulnerable? What elderly people are you going to check in on if the power goes out? Who needs diapers, etc.? And then we’re asking people if they want to join us on working on this long term. 

So I’m gonna leave you with this, and then actually, really want to have a conversation. 

I was really happy to see Knock Your Block go, and it feels like an odd and non-traditional community organizing campaign, because there isn’t a campaign at the center of it. But really what it is is that we want to make sure our politics are driven by the people that live where we live, and it’s about growing our capacity to be in relationship with each other, even if we disagree. And what I haven’t seen in this country is enough politics that are driven from places like where I’m from. 

So how do we get our moms, our members, our formerly incarcerated people, at the center of politics in Indiana? And then, how can this be more of a model so that we have the Nebraskas and the Kansases and the Alabamas as real, full participants in the project we’re all trying to work on? I think with that, I’m going to hand it back to you, and then we’re going to have a discussion. Thank you.

Sarah Anderson (21:32): And Karina, my colleague, is handing out some note cards for questions. But wow, they’re piling up already. This is great, so I will just dive in. It’s so great to learn from your wisdom of working on the ground there in Indiana. One of the questions I got is, how do you deal with the dominance of Fox News and right-wing media, and just generally media disinformation? 

Kate Hess Pace (22:00):  I’m going to say a couple different things about that. Most people aren’t that political. They just aren’t. Like, there’s a whole set of people that already have their political ideology fermented, they don’t gravitate to my organization. And that’s not who we exist for. 

I would say that most of our people are a mess of values. We live in a conservative area. They’ve been rained on by lots of ideas, but they’re not necessarily watching Fox News every day. They’re mostly trying to work two jobs and get their kids out the door and deal with life. So misinformation is a little bit more of a thing, and we take it head on. 

/And you know where people grow and change? It’s in trusted relationships. So the more we have that with people, the more we can move them forward to a more full worldview that includes a whole diversity of people inside of it. And the more we focus on people getting a material floor underneath them, the more their capacity to have that worldview grows.

Sarah Anderson (23:14): That’s great. Here’s a nice one. Your work is so powerful and beautiful. Thank you for sharing it with us. Can you share about your journey in getting funding and resources for Hoosier Action and your work?

Kate Hess Pace (23:25): Sure, so a couple of things. It helped that I had organized for 10 years before in the Twin Cities, so I came with a lot of relationships. I think a lot about how hard this would have been if I had just been in Indiana, and I want to figure out how we can equip the amazing, talented people in places like where I live, without them having to leave first. So I did come with a set of relationships. 

I will say, when I decided to move back to Indiana, multiple people said to me, “I just want you to know, Kate, nobody gives a shit about Indiana.” So that’s like, true, and that’s always been true. And I also heard a lot of like, “you can’t organize those people.” And both of them I firmly ignored. 

Also, we have a much lower cost of living. Things are cheaper. I needed enough money to get off the ground. I started with — I did 13 house parties, I moved down with $12,000. And then mostly we have been trying to figure it out. Our members pay dues, we have individual donors, and then I work very hard to make sure we get grants that are actually connected to our members’ interests and not pulling them away from our interests. 

So that takes more work too, because there’s a lot of philanthropy that wants to tell us what to do, instead of figuring out, like actually what our moms want right now. And what they want right now is to go after Meta, who’s building a data center in their town and got a $6 billion tax break while the schools are getting gutted. I don’t know if we’ll get money for that, but that’s where my accountability sits. So I’m trying to find money all the time that is going back to the things that they want to do.

Sarah Anderson (25:11): That’s great. We’ve heard a few times throughout the day about the problems of corporate monopolies, and that was an issue that Henry Wallace actually was passionate about as well. And one of the questions has to do with that. Has Hoosier Action dealt at all with the need for stronger antitrust enforcement in agriculture?

Kate Hess Pace (25:30) We have not, we have not dealt with that. 

Sarah Anderson (25:33): In your area, is there much of a farming community left? 

Kate Hess Pace (25:39): There’s a little bit. A lot of our family farms have turned into large scale corporate farms, but there are some. We started for a while doing a food and farms coalition. I would love to rebuild that. I will say like our base is increasingly uncomfortable with how dependent we are on these global networks while we live in a place that should be able to grow its own food. And I would say, across political ideology, they really want more access to that, but we’ve yet to run a campaign around food and farms.

Sarah Anderson (26:11): Great. This one is, while encouraging people to become agents of change in their communities, how do you also help them avoid getting painted into meaningless corners or getting outmaneuvered by experienced opponents? I know you’ve gone up against some big opponents. 

Kate Hess Pace (26:33): Who asked that question? Do you want to say more about it?

Audience Member (26:38): I just think that your organization appears to be doing a terrific job bringing people together, giving them a voice, but then how do you avoid dumping them into the political arena where they get outmaneuvered and outfoxed by wily, experienced, well-endowed opponents?

Kate Hess Pace (26:59): Well, first, I would say our membership is smarter than our opponents. That doesn’t mean they don’t need training and they don’t need pushing and they don’t need people to walk with them. But in the small towns that we’re operating in, my membership is sharp. 

Now, that is where organizing training comes in. And I didn’t really talk about power, but our entire orientation is we win when we have enough power to win. So how do we get the power to win? And so it’s both running a power analysis, and we train people on that. 

Right now we’re trying to move nine people on one city council. We know we have to get seven to override the mayor. So how are we going to get that seven? We do a power analysis on every seven of those city council people. What do they care about? What do you have that they want, and what are you going to do to be in relationship with them? 

The thing that is weirder about where I am is that that kind of active community participation in politics doesn’t exist. In Bloomington a little bit, right? So it doesn’t exist. What we find is that people are confused and hostile to just basic participation of community members. And that is often the hump we’re trying to get over. Even if they’re a well meaning public servant, they’re not used to community members being like, “actually, we want to have coffee with you, and we’re going to do it again, and we have a set of things we want from you, and we believe you work for us.” 

We have a lot — and this is on both sides of the aisle — of old boy networks that want to do what they want to do and pass money out to their friends. I don’t know if that helped.

Sarah Anderson (28:44): This one resonates with me. In my hometown, the local newspaper shut down five years ago (mine shut down in the last year). I am wondering if this reality has posed challenges in your work with Hoosier Action, and what methods do you have for addressing the lack of outlets for community news?

Kate Hess Pace (29:02): It’s a big deal. One of our chapters I didn’t talk about, and I wish I would have, is pretty new, and a member just wrote me the day before yesterday. It’s called the Transparency and Accountability chapter. And actually their main thing is they train people to go to city and county council meetings, take notes, and report out. And so we’re trying to figure out how to make that even bigger and more public. 

That’s where I had a set of members being like, “they’re using our opioid settlement money for surveillance.” And they knew that money was not for surveillance. So they’ve been able to catch things, see things, and then they’re running a campaign to just have more participation in the local budget process. But that kind of trust, it’s both trust in government and then also having a local ecosystem of news. We can’t fill all these gaps, but we’re trying to figure out ways that people can actually be local journalists themselves, and what kind of shape does that need to take? 

There’s a cool organization in Maine called Maine People’s Alliance, and they built their own newspaper called The Beacon, and they actually run their own stories, tell their own stories. And there are models like that that I’m interested in, because we’re not going to get another daily newspaper in Martinsville or in whole sets of places that I live. 

Sarah Anderson (30:23): This one’s a little bit related, so I’ll go to this one. This person said “On Tuesday, I attended an event where Representative Erin Houchin, spoke. I asked her what her views on funding PBS and NPR are. She gave a weird response, saying she used Grok, Elon Musk’s AI, and said public media was biased, too liberal, and thus she supported defunding it.” And this person is wondering, how important are PBS, NPR, etc. in your southern Indiana region?

Kate Hess Pace (30:58): I want to be careful, because that’s actually not a thing I’ve talked to my people about. So I don’t know, I could guess. I don’t think there’s a great NPR listenership in our base. I’m sure lots of them have used PBS, but I actually don’t know, and it’s not an issue that people bring to us, with the exception, potentially, of some of our membership in Bloomington.

Sarah Anderson (31:20): Are you planning to organize your members to try and keep hospitals open, given the Medicaid cuts and all?

Kate Hess Pace (31:26): Great question. Okay, yes. So during COVID, we, like all of you, spent our time online. It was a rough transition where we lost part of our base that just wasn’t in the practice of getting online for meetings, and we had a new base that was more statewide. So we’re picking up all of these people statewide. 

This is a long way to get to your question, but I’m going to get there. 

And we realized at some point, we’re never going to get transformation in Indiana if we’re just skimming the surface across the whole state and trying to figure out who agrees with us. And we could get some numbers, but that wasn’t the path. So we pulled back and made a real commitment to 13 counties, and we want to do strong local work. That is what the majority of our organization has been committed to — with the exception of Medicaid. 

We’ve been fighting on Medicaid since we started and worked really hard to get the work requirements taken off of our Medicaid program. It was a multi-pronged strategy that included both lawsuits and sending lots of people to the Capitol. So Medicaid is the one — and every single one of our groups, from the Moms group to it being the only path to recovery for a whole lot of our members struggling with addiction — we will continue to fight on Medicaid. 

I think in Indiana, we’re looking at somewhere between 9 and 16 rural hospitals closing. So that is a space where we do want to try to build up and down the state to figure out how to fight back on that. So yes is the answer. It’s the one place I want to grow to scale over depth.

Sarah Anderson (33:01): There’s so many interesting questions: in Colorado on state issues, many times, the voices of rural areas are overridden by more populated areas. Do you have that problem? And if yes, have you dealt with it? How have you dealt with it?

Kate Hess Pace (33:18): There’s more power in the rural areas, is that what it’s saying?

Sarah Anderson (33:19): No, the voices of rural areas are overridden by more populated areas. 

Audience Members (33:26): It has to do with a lot of state ballot issues, such as the recent reintroduction of wolves into Colorado. Of course, those in rural areas were not in favor of that, and they’re losing livestock because of that, and now they’re dealing with that after the fact, and it’s causing a lot of turmoil, both financially and emotionally.

Kate Hess Pace (34:01): So I feel like I have two. Indiana is a little bit like the country, where actually power is disproportionately held in the rural and small town areas. Indianapolis has very little power at the state legislature. If you want to organize and have power at the Capitol, you’re not going to start in Indianapolis. 

So that dichotomy is true, but I would say the people that are representing rural and small town areas of Indiana are not in relationship with the bulk of the people and don’t really represent what they want. So I’m not quite sure we have the same urban rural divide that plays out like that, but I don’t feel like regular people get heard at all. But I would say that’s true in our urban areas too. I wish we had ballot initiatives.

Sarah Anderson (34:50): This person is asking: how do you navigate opposition to your initiatives from other community members, if you faced any? Or does everything just sail through? It’s hard in a small town where everybody knows each other. 

Kate Hess Pace (35:06): Yeah, my neighbor is my state rep. There was a way in which I learned there’s no shortcuts. Me and my team are really trained: you walk towards people, you walk towards people. Orientation really matters. There’s a lot of skepticism. There’s been a lot of cynicism, a lot of like, “who are you?” I think especially as a woman director, especially one that lived elsewhere and moved back. That’s a regular thing, I think. And I just don’t think you can organize without hitting opposition. 

What we’re trying to figure out is how do we get the biggest amount of people with us possible? And then we do a lot of work, especially in small towns where it’s like the mayor is your cousin or whatever, to figure out how we operate in public life together, and how that is different from how we operate in private life together. And in private life, we’re friends, we have fun, we’re there because we like each other, we love each other. In public life what we are there for is to do the work collectively together. 

So we have whole trainings that wrestle with what is public life and what do we owe each other? What do we owe each other in it, and how do we operate inside of it?

Sarah Anderson (36:31): This might be a good follow up on. How do you balance all the needs with limited capacity, with people working and feeling spread too thin? How do you get people to show up to all those fun looking meetings that you showed on the slide?

Kate Hess Pace (36:44): I had a whole meeting on this with one of our chapters recently. That was maybe a year ago, and I was just asking them, when do you choose staying at home on the couch, and when do you choose coming to a meeting? What are the things that make you choose to come out to the meeting? 

Since COVID, people’s capacity to leave the house after 6pm is low, and then they’re also managing 10 million other things. And that is where it’s a lot of follow up. It’s a lot of relational invitations. It’s not flyers, it’s not Facebook events. It’s like, “Dennis, are you coming to the meeting? Okay, cool. I’m going to check with you in two days and make sure you’re gonna come to the meeting. And also, will you bring some food?” So asking people to do things really matters. 

Part of that question was about balancing the needs. I think a lot of us come to organizing because we have big soft hearts, at least my team does. I don’t think there’s an easy way to balance how many people in our community are getting evicted or…we’ve tried to put things in place where when people go to court, we have people go with them. We’ve had mutual aid funds that people can access. I try to hold on to the very clear fact that we cannot buy people out of poverty, and our commitment is to do long-term work and not be a charity organization. I do find it regularly devastating. We’ve done our best, and sometimes we just can’t help a lot of people.

Sarah Anderson (38:16): How do you get people to agree to not talk about federal-level politics in your meetings, and as a progressive, how do you avoid having people think you’re pushing it on them? Do you think that model works for other contexts? And the person who wrote this says that she or he is an organizer in Georgia. 

Kate Hess Pace (38:41): Oh, cool. I’m happy for you to follow up on that question. Our membership consistently reinforces that we’re an independent organization, we don’t talk about the president. They like that. They like the capacity of being able to have a conversation about politics or resources that isn’t the thing that’s taking all the oxygen in the room. It’s actually the people on the poles that are resistant, the people that already have a pretty formed political identity that want to talk about national politics all the time, but most of our base doesn’t. So that hasn’t been a huge issue. 

When we run into stuff it is more cultural. A lot of our membership wants to end with prayer, and we have a bunch of secular people for whom that’s not resonant for them. So how do we combine those two things, so you can have deeply meaningful expressions of your faith, and you can sit in the room as a non-believer and also have a deep experience? It’s less about what’s been driven online in terms of dividing us around national issues that are not about our day-to-day lives. The things that we’re up against are a little bit more cultural: i.e. how do we hold people together? Does the Georgia person want to say anything? 

Audience Member 3 (39:58): Yeah, I’m a mutual aid organizer in Athens, Georgia, and I run up a lot on the issue of people broadly agreeing when I suggest “we need more mutual aid in our community.” But if I make it clear that I am — or I try not to make it clear that I’m a progressive because a lot of times with people I know that that will drive them away — but I’m curious how you’ve been able to cultivate that, without feeling like you’re pushing it on people. Because I think it would work really well in my context, in Georgia, but I think that if they hear it from me, they might not want it.

Kate Hess Pace (40:38): I don’t even know if a bunch of our members have an orientation towards the word progressive. Like, it’s not what they’re thinking about. So that’s one thing. But a lot of what we’re talking about is power. And that we are pushing on people a little bit, right? Like, if you want change, you need power. How are we going to get you power? 

So we do have a methodology, an orientation, an ideology that is everyday working people need more power, and we are fervent about pushing that. And then we feel like the nationalization, the corporatization of our politics, has sucked everything away from us so that you can’t get the childcare you need. People are kind of down for that. 

Sarah Anderson (41:22): This person was curious: what does membership mean for Hoosier Action? Do you have dues? How are decisions made? Are there elected officers and so forth? 

Kate Hess Pace (41:33): We do have dues. They can be a quarter a month or $25 a month. It doesn’t matter what you pay. Your membership is flat, everybody’s in. Membership sits inside of chapters, and those chapters decide what they’re going to work on. We don’t have elected bodies. I’d like to get somewhere closer to that, where we actually have a membership board that sits across all of the chapters. Our Moms organizer right now is building a table that includes membership from each chapter so that they can work on statewide campaigns and legislative campaigns. But everything is not elected, it’s based on how much power people are bringing in and their commitment to the organization.

Sarah Anderson (42:14): One is about your role as a Wallace Rural Organizing Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. What are you planning to do with that, and is part of it to share lessons from your experiences for other parts of the country?

Kate Hess Pace (42:31): Yes. That’s why I was really excited about this fellowship. I feel like it takes a fair amount of catalytic energy to just like start up a thing. Organizing is hard, as many of you do it. And also you’re running campaigns, you’re getting your ass kicked all the time. So I’ve just been head down, with my people, making mistakes and making gains and learning a whole bunch of stuff along the way. And so this is the first moment that I have had to step back and think about what have we learned about what is required to engage more people, particularly people who aren’t already politicized. 

And then, I really believe in southern Indiana, but I also believe that the problem that we’re trying to work on is both a national and global problem of how do we reconnect with people who’ve been really left behind in progress. And so I want to spend this time both understanding what we’ve learned and then figuring out how we can equip more people to start more things at the local level that are broadly engaging people, particularly working class people.

Sarah Anderson (43:41): Wonderful. I think I’ll slip one last question in here. I’m getting word that we have to wrap up soon, but I think this is an interesting one. What role can local history play in organizing rural communities? For example, the history of labor disputes and examples of people standing up to power with their communities in Appalachia or the Rust Belt. I don’t know if you’re drawing anything from the history of your region in your organizing work for inspiration.

Kate Hess Pace (44:08): There’s a whole bunch of people in the organization that want to dig more into this. I have a lot of colleagues at Down Home North Carolina, and they organize in rural parts of North Carolina, and I see that they really do draw upon the legacy and memory of civil rights activism there. 

We don’t have that memory in Indiana. Eugene V. Debs is from Indiana, we’ve had moments of activity, we fought back Right-to-work for a very long time, but there are parts of our history that we have to wrestle with too. Like how during the rise of the Klan in the ‘20s, we were the home of the Klan. There are interesting things to lift up — my town was one of the towns that passed an ordinance to ban the Klan. The Klan in Indiana really was about appealing to working class people, protecting women and children, and being a part of something. It was a civic engagement process. So we understand that as a horrific model, but it was an organizing model in our state. 

So we are trying to both reckon with the legacy of amazing leadership and hard work, and that we’re a state that, like all of our states, has a lot of horrors in its past. And how do we bring both of those together to understand that we don’t want to be nostalgic. We want to look forward together and figure out a future that moves us and our state towards multiracial democracy.

Sarah Anderson (45:41): Fantastic. This has been such a rare opportunity to talk to someone like Kate, who’s really grappling with all these questions and challenges on the ground. She gave a presentation to our staff the other day where you said there’s like, how many more times more organizers per capita in the Bay Area than Indiana? 75 to 3, or something like that. And it’s such tough work, and she’s clearly learned a lot. 

And I just really appreciate her sharing her lessons, and from the proliferation of the questions from the audience, I can tell that people really engaged. So thank you so much to all of you, and to Kate.