The Art of Organizing with Tom "Smitty" Smith

In this episode, Pete interviews Tom "Smitty" Smith, a seasoned advocate who shares insights and personal stories from decades of organizing, advocating, and lobbying. The discussion covers the essential elements of successful advocacy, including the importance of coalition-building, strategic adjustments, empowering community members, and the art of creating a 'hero's path' for opponents. Learn how to identify key issues, find effective solutions, and mobilize diverse groups to create impactful change.

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Transcript

The Art of Influence with Tom "Smitty" Smith

Tom “Smitty” Smith” [00:00:00] how you're going to win is generally not clear when you start out, but the will to win and the will to modify your strategy and the will to empower everybody in the organization to help. is really part of the art of organizing. 

 [00:01:00] 

Pete Altman: thank you, Smitty. Appreciate you taking the time to join the campaign strategists today. Why don't we get started with, tell us about how you into doing advocacy work 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: A woman came to me when I was working at Legal Aid as a paralegal, whose husband had lost his job and she'd gone to the food stamp office to try and get the food stamps increased, so, because they were hungry.

She was told, can't do it. Not for six months. The policy is once every six months you can adjust it. Well. In the legal aid office, we did what lawyers do and rushed to the courthouse and went down and got an injunction from the federal courts and down in Brownsville and the state of Texas immediately appealed it and sent it to the Fifth Circuit where it stalled.

for years. Well, Mrs Vega and her family weren't getting fed. And [00:02:00] so we reached out to one of the local charities that had groups all over south Texas. that were experiencing similar kinds of problems with farm workers who were coming back from the north where there'd been an early freeze and their monthly income, annual income, was a fraction of what they'd told the food stamp office they thought it would be when they qualified.

And so the church based organizations we were working with began to signal around the valley and said, we've got a problem. What can we do? The farm workers union under the leadership of Cesar Chavez became very involved as did the legal aid offices. And this is a lesson that has followed me throughout my career.

So did the businesses. Suddenly, the grocery stores in the Rio Grande Valley, which is largely a poor area, were finding a decrease in terms of sales because there weren't food stamps [00:03:00] available to them. So the grocery retailers jumped in and became a business voice. One of the lessons I've learned in organizing is you never know how you're going to win.

And one of the things that became, has become clear to me is you figure out what the problem is, what the solution you expect, and who can fix the problem for you. And so we looked around. In the Rio Grande Valley was the chairman of the House Agricultural Committee, a guy named Kitcadela Garza, who had jurisdiction over food stamps.

And so we decided what we would do is hold a hearing and bring all these hungry people to a hearing in front of Kitcadela Garza. And we turned out far more than the auditorium at the local high school could handle. In fact, the high school had to put [00:04:00] speakers out in the parking lot because there were so many people who were there who started chanting in Spanish, We're hungry, we're hungry.

And we had also gotten a lot of positive press around this campaign at that point. And suddenly, De La Garza, Got the word from his constituents that this was a real problem for them. Now, in looking at our strategies, what we had wanted to do is to pass a right, a piece of legislation that said, anybody who's hungry ought to be able to get food within three days or a change in rules.

Delegars that kind of looked at us across the conference room table. And he says, don't worry about it. We got this. He says, I will just change the appropriations bill for the department of agriculture. And put a little rider in there, which is a directive, as it were, to the Department of Agriculture that they need to fix this problem within 30 days or their funding gets caught off, cut off.

And within 21 [00:05:00] days, there was a workable solution to where hungry people got food stamps within three days if they walked in and said, we have no food and our income levels have changed. And it taught me so much. About responding to the real needs of the peoples in the community and how to organize as a young radical I never would have thought about building a coalition based around church based organizations who were seeing day after day hungry people coming in and saying we need help because the food stamps aren't enough.

 By building alliances, building coalition we were far more powerful than just a few folks who are working at the legal aid office who are starting to see this. And then one of the business leaders in the Valley who was helping feed hungry people reached out to the grocery retailers and said, Hey, are you guys seeing a decline?

So you had this really interesting coalition of farm [00:06:00] workers and their clothes, clothing and business people in their suits and church leaders with the crosses around their neck coming in and all pleading with the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee to do something about this.

And with that kind of pressure, along with a lot of media and a lot of, in those days, flyers we put out at the food stamp office and at the Mutalista halls and at the Catholic churches, we were able to change policy within about 90 days. And that's how I got hooked into the business of lobbying and organizing. 

Pete Altman: You've been an activist, an advocate, lobbyist, campaigner, a strategist for some 50 years. And in that time you've worked on a huge number and variety of issues, environmental, climate, consumer, food, ethics, insurance. you have a specific process for figuring out what [00:07:00] strategies you need in order to achieve?

Whatever the change is that you're working on for a given effort. Mm-Hmm?

Tom “Smitty” Smith: Yeah, sure. There are a couple of sort of slogans that kind of embody that. There's all, there's a three part analysis that you usually try and do, and one of them is, what's the problem? What's the solution? and then who can actually give you the solution. Um, And that becomes a, that latter becomes a very sophisticated part of the long term strategic analysis because it may not be as clear as you think it is. But we'll get to that in a few minutes. And then there's a a another kind of set of frames that are useful. One is my mama used to say that we all don't sing the same part in a choir. Sometimes you'll take the lead. Sometimes he'll take the lead. Sometimes she'll [00:08:00] take the lead. And each of the verses in a song is different and tells a different part of the same story and generally builds to a conclusion. But the, our goal. As a choir is to say, basically same, sing the same theme, the same melody and more or less in time so that every story told by an organizer, whether that's a family that's gone hungry or a business that seeing their income drop off or a church leader that seeing their budget being busted by this large influx of hungry people. They all come to the same chorus, which is we need to fix the food stamp program to be able to get us food in an emergency very quickly because hunger doesn't wait. And that [00:09:00] whatever the, the recipient, a person or entity is, whether it be Congress or USDA or the courts, or the administrator of USDA, or the chairman of the committee, that actor is going to be a much different person depending on where you are, the context you're in, and what you have learned over time about who can resolve the problem quickly and easily. And, Every campaign is built around a plan. Plans will change and we'll get into some of the planning in a few minutes. But interestingly, one of the most profound lessons I ever learned came, was based on Greek mythology. And there was a guy by the name of Joseph Campbell who studied The [00:10:00] myths of the world.

And he came up with a phrase that has stuck with me for the last 50 years, which is you always want to paint your opponent, a hero's path to make them feel good and to be able to have a story that they can share with their grandchildren about how they were a hero. in their lifetime and resolved a problem for the people who were hurt by an issue. And so coming up with a way to paint your opponent as a hero in their own mind and in the eyes of the people that he sees that give him credibility is a critical

strategy. And it's one of the hardest things that you can do because you don't know this person. You really don't know what makes him tick, but for the chairman of the house [00:11:00] agriculture committee, being able to come home and hold up a piece of legislation that fed hungry people, thousands of hungry people in his home community. and be a hero among the Catholic churches in his community and getting a attaboy from the archbishop was his way to become a hero and to be recognized as doing something for somebody else other than just the farmers and the growers in his community and it is those people who elected him. Not the growers and not the farmers. And so there are innumerable examples of how the sort of test of how you can create a hero's way or a hero's path for your opponent becomes a critical component of your organizing campaign 

the other big reality is that campaigns build and they build in frequency and in [00:12:00] volume. And as we know from the waves that destabilize the edge of an ocean or a large lake or that can turn over an ocean liner or a large freighter, the frequency and the amplitude, as it were, of the waves of energy coming from a campaign are really critical in terms of building the forces necessary to change the status quo. So, while you may start out meek and mild, coming up with voices that hit from different parts of the community, each with a different message, that continue to grow in frequency and amplitude, is a basic principle of physics. You can change anything with that. We see that in hurricanes, or we see that in wind, or in flooding, or in large wind driven [00:13:00] storms. Water events, floods so yeah, it's, we know this, we know this is a principle that changes the world.

Pete Altman: Yeah, it's like, how do you add more energy into the system so that you're creating waves that get bigger and bigger and eventually are enough to, 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: And that's one of the organizer's

tricks in the organizer's toolbox book is sitting down and putting together a timeline, dates as it were, of things that you know are going to happen. I'm organizing a campaign in central Texas right now where we know we're going to have a major milestone. In the end of October and coming up with a series of press events over essentially the next five weeks is a critical strategy to doing this, to be able to build the coalition, to be able to build pressure for on them to say, okay, we're going to have to give you something without that kind of [00:14:00] noise, that kind of uproar, that kind of pressure, then they're not in a position to have to give you anything in negotiation.

Our job is clear. It's to come up with a campaign over the next five weeks that wins. And, you know, using not only the traditional media, which is where my strength is, but the social media, things like protests and then a variety of other civil disobedience techniques. are critical to being able to make them realize they've got to do something or they're going to look bad back home in the communities they care about.

Pete Altman: The other point you made about engaging with. People who have, influence, or you may not necessarily know that they have influence, but that they can then set in motion a bunch of behind the scenes action that you don't necessarily know the details or who's involved, but that brings other voices and other weight into the issue.

It just reminded me of that phase during the campaign where you and I were [00:15:00] going up to Dallas every month where we just gathered with dozens of people from the Dallas area that Molly Rook helped to organize and in a restaurant and we'd have dinner and then talk about what was going on with the bill that.

Concerned renewable energy and what was like the next steps? Who were the legislators that needed to hear from people? And even, what kinds of people, and I just remember we had such an extraordinary array of individuals. At that table who were all brought in because they were environmentalists, but their connections went into the builder community, the teaching community, we had nurses, we had doctors, we had chaplains or pastors.

And then they would each go and find more of their sort of ilk so that they could go in and meet with legislators and present the perspective from each of those different areas.

Tom “Smitty” Smith: Well, one of the, one of the And that also goes to a [00:16:00] really important point. One of the reasons we had targeted the Dallas Fort Worth area was we had done an analysis of the power players within the Texas House of Representatives and the chairman of the State Affairs Committee through which this legislation was going to go and the vice chairman of the committee through which this was going to go. Had districts that overlapped in sort of a wealthy enclave in East Dallas and Northeast Dallas, and there were a lot of members of the Sierra Club. There were a lot of

people who were socially active Democrats. There were African American activists and there were folks in the church groups, all of which were interested in doing something to reduce air pollution. And one of the things that Molly and Rook and an organizer by the name of [00:17:00] Rita Beving and this cadre of people did, was they went and set up tables at the local Whole Foods Market or at the Sierra Club or after church in various parts of the city and got people to sign postcards and pledged to call these two legislators. So by the time the legislature showed up in Austin that year when this bill was going to be debated one of the members of the legislature at that time, Senator David Koehn, called up and said, Okay, this is the second most important issue based on mail in my district. Any other than teacher pay raises, how are we going to solve this problem? And in addition we had also been organizing a little community about halfway from that little community of Waco, Texas, which is about a hundred thousand population [00:18:00] halfway between Dallas and Austin. And where the chairman Republican chairman of the committee, David Sibley lived and worked in. And again there, it was surrounded by coal plants. And the air pollution study showed it with that plume of pollution was going right over Waco on its way up to Dallas. So, coming up with a strategy to organize in that community. Led us to getting the Chamber of Commerce of all people to pass resolutions against coal plants and concerns about the air pollution because they were bordering on an unhealthy air status that would have reduced economic development for that community. And so when we and we, in addition, did surveying. And we tested the proposition of do you want renewable energy in your mix? And would you be willing to pay an extra two bucks a month to have a portion of your [00:19:00] energy coming from renewable energy? Numbers were overwhelmingly yes. We want it. This is a Republican district.

And so when I showed him that number, those numbers in Waco, Texas, in a polling operation that wasn't particularly expensive, he said, so what's the paragraph look like that we're going to put in the bill? And that's essentially where that came from was not only the church ladies and the environmentalists and some of the folks in the business community, but that polling data that said, we're willing to pay a little bit more to jumpstart

this particular technology. And the interesting news is that today, 20 years later, It is the cheapest way to generate electricity in Texas. Wind just beats the pants off of anything else. But the combination of solar with battery storage beats the price points of a new natural gas plant. And so, when [00:20:00] you look at the plans for the future generation in Texas the amount of renewables and storage exceeds by eightfold The amount of energy that is expected to be constructed from new natural gas plants 

Pete Altman: let's recall the economic argument that we could make at that time in 1997 to 1999 was that renewables were price stable as opposed to Natural gas plants, which spiked of course, up and down depending on fuel availability. But they weren't cheaper at that time. Although, our part of our pitch was if we build enough, the price point will drop in this and become a really cheap source of energy.

Tom “Smitty” Smith: So that goes to a different component of this whole organizing strategy, which is we had, in addition to organizing in urban areas, [00:21:00] reached out to rural areas. We hired,, put together a coalition of environmentalists and the businesses that were going to be benefiting from renewable energy and the environmentalists were good at raising money to put together studies and to going out and doing the clean and green messaging. But we didn't have any money. The big businesses that were going to profit from this had money. And so what they did was they hired a lobbyist at our suggestion, and we said we'd split it 50 50, we'd come up with money for studies and talk about how good this would be if they were to match that money with lobbying money, and they hired a team of lobbyists that would would work for the Farm Bureau and other organizations that were trusted And that community. And so we had a campaign based around the idea [00:22:00] that renewable energies would be good for rural America. 

Pete Altman: You are exceptional at finding it more voices to bring into the chorus. And I've always marveled at that.

 How do you do that? What's the secret sauce there?

Tom “Smitty” Smith: Well, part of it is pure luck. I gotta admit, I've been a very lucky human being in my life. But part of it

is doing 

Pete Altman: not be underrated. 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: who people really listen to. And part of that is listening to what they say when you're in a lobby visit, or looking at who gives them money in a political context or who, Sits in the church. pews on a given Sunday morning. And so oftentimes figuring out in a we were doing a campaign out in little town of McKamey, Texas and when you looked at [00:23:00] the two most powerful voices on Sunday morning, the majority of the white people went to the Cowboy Church. And this is Texas, so you just have to suspend disbelief, but there is something

called the Cowboy Church. It's a non denominational church that works around

Pete Altman: Oh, it literally called the cowboy church. That's not just a characterization. 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: And then the other was the Catholic Church headed up by an African by the name of Father Okabama. And so we went and sat and met with both of them and talked about an issue of what we were going to do with the nation's radioactive waste and that they really wanted in their backyard at a radioactive waste dump out on the New Mexico border. And the father said, well, no, we don't. And the messaging coming through the Catholic church from his From his sermons and [00:24:00] from the, what the opportunities he gave us to host meetings in the parish hall, we're very much in opposition. The cowboy church was all about, this is about jobs, but when we actually showed him how few jobs were going to be coming that were from the community and how many of them were coming in from other places and pushing out folks, then he began to change his tune as well. But this was not a good idea because we were important folks from up north and places like that. That we're going to change our way of life in this community. And and there's also significant tax impacts that were going to happen. So, you know, it's a, it's a matter of looking at who people listen to and doing that analysis is. Again, mostly luck, but when you ask people, where do they go to church? Who do they, do they know the [00:25:00] father? Could they set up an opportunity to meet with them? Or on the dominant economic side, if you're asking, you know, if you ask somebody, what's their faith? Where do they go to church and then they're going to open up to you in a different way than if you're some sort of a organizer from Austin and in a way much more heartfelt of where do you practice your religion and who do you listen to in that church and that gives you a lot of clues in terms of the messengers they trust.

Pete Altman: When you think about who are the donors, how do you go about figuring out which donors actually have a relationship that they can leverage? 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: Yeah, so it is just exactly that you take a look at their campaign contributions and the amount of money varies according to the race, whether you're a city council person or state rep or state senator, gubernatorial candidate, and you look at the top, you'd say, take the top 10 [00:26:00] donors or everybody above 10, 000 or something like that. And you circulate that list amongst people who are from that community and say, do you know somebody? One of the when we were doing the campaign out in the Midland, Texas area around the radioactive waste dump

we had reached out to the Democratic Party in Midland County, which is a tiny, tiny part of the political structure there. We ran into an oil man who was a Democrat. And he looked at the list of donors and he said, Oh yeah, I'm part of a lunch bunch group that meets on Fridays with the largest donor to Tom Craddick, who was the legislator who had been representing that particular district for 54 years. And he and I had never gotten along. And [00:27:00] he and I had always been at odds. And so we sat at lunch, he invited me to go to lunch with him. And we sat down and talked to Craddock's largest donor who said, yeah, I don't want that radioactive waste. It could affect my ability to sell oil on the open market because if there's an accident. then you know, my market's gone. Nobody wants radioactive oil. And there were a couple of other people at the table. And so as a result of that Craddock's position changed because the position of his largest donor changed and he invited us to his office and To give credit to my wife, Karen Hadden, who's been a long time organizing partner of both of ours. She met with another large oil company out there, the largest in the Midland area, the eighth [00:28:00] largest in the state of Texas, and hit it off with the attorney, one of the attorneys, that worked for that particular law oil companies and put together an organizing campaign with her. And they spent a lot of money influencing the legislature to ban the importation of high level radioactive waste, which brings us to another really important point. Treat your enemies well. And with respect, if there's something you got on him, go ahead and hit him with him. But in that particular instance, our, the oil companies became our best allies. I've

lobbied against the oil companies for close to 40 odd years, and I still do. We still do. But on the other hand, it's, there are points when the oil companies are our best friends in a particular

battle because they know how it's going to affect their [00:29:00] economics. And so once again, the business interests that might be affected by radioactive oil. Once they heard that began to be alarmed and help us in terms of organizing,

Pete Altman: That's one of the important lessons of politics is that you're you know, allies today, maybe enemies tomorrow vice versa, just depending on what the issues are and what the intersection of interests is. 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: And one of the things that is important is that leaders are leaders. Um, and if they are a leader of a local PTA, or they're a local, they're a leader of a political party, or they're a leader in their local community organization. They're going to know other leaders and that's one of the things and they're going to know they're good. Associates, the people that are part of their lieutenants, as it were, who are also people who can carry a [00:30:00] message and who know people. And typically that's a matter of testing out messages, winnowing the leadership and figuring out if they're going to be helpful to you. But usually that's somewhere in the neighborhood of about 3 percent of any body that you approach is, are the leadership class. And they're the people who have self selected and taken responsibility to assume the responsibilities of an organization. And getting to those people is far more important than doing the retail politics or that you might if you were simply standing at the door of a church on a Sunday morning handing out a leaflet. And there's a role for that. It's certainly, it matters a great deal. But, um, you know, you're going to have to have a leader that people contact who understand what the issue is before you [00:31:00] engage in the retail politics of leafleting or trying to get people to do something.

Pete Altman: Yeah. Just organizing a protest. It's a lot easier if you've got relationships with leaders of different groups who can help develop turnout, to do that kind of retail presence. Terrific. 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: Organizing is something that is a tool that enables us to win campaigns that Far exceed what we ever initially thought was a problem, and part, and it often can cause systemic change that lasts decades beyond the winning of a particular campaign, and one of them is the evolution of renewable energy in Texas, for example. Oftentimes, the groups you create continue to meet and to work together to solve emerging problems long after the first problem you come to them with does it. Exists. And there's organizing that is responsive [00:32:00] for, to the needs of the people who are having a problem, like the anti hunger example I gave you at the beginning, and there are those kinds of organizing campaigns where you're aware of a piece of legislation pending regulation or a lawsuit that you need to jump into right away, where you have to go out and knock on doors to get people to come to a meeting. And that's okay. There are different kinds of ways to approach it, but the fundamental principles are the same. Coming up with an analysis of what the problem is, the solution, and then who can help you solve that problem and what they can do in the instant. What's the next step for them, is probably the most important question you're going to ask. There are a lot of tools that you as an organizer are going to have. Having protests is one of them, doing press conferences or getting stuff up on social media is another. [00:33:00] But the art of analyzing the hero's path, to figure out who is the person who's really going to make a decision. Is the, and who's going to influence that decision may lead you away from the board of directors of a corporation to the daughter of the president of the corporation or to the wife of the president of the corporation and looking at who they hang with and who gives them value may be able to lead you to a garden club or to a a plague playground where.

One of the folks, one of the lobbyists that we have part member of our team would talk to the legislators when our legislator, when he was watching his kids play soccer about air pollution, and that changed the mind of that key legislator. So the, how you're going to win is generally not clear when you start out, but the will to win and [00:34:00] the will to modify your strategy and the will to empower everybody in the organization to help. is really part of the art of organizing. And the belief that you can and you will win in the long term is something that keeps you through those times when you've been kicked hard and you're laying on the ground and can't figure out how it is you're going to get up. But time after time you get back up and you continue and your your insistence on winning will make an enormous difference in the outcome of the policy. Pete, thank you so much for all the work you've done, but also for inviting me to be a participant in your new podcast. It's been a joy talking

Pete Altman: Thank you, Smitty. 

Thank you so much for joining me and for giving time. I really

appreciate me this 

Tom “Smitty” Smith: Well, I'll see you down the line. Thanks. Bye bye. 

​[00:35:00]