Sunrise Movement Los Angeles Organizational Change
Sunrise LA Organizational Change
As Team Coordinator of the Mobilizations Team, I led the first-ever survey of Sunrise Movement Los Angeles as a whole to identify challenges that arose from COVID-19 and commissioned a report that proposed actionable counter-measures to boost activist capacity from 60% to 100%. The project was my first major intiative to inspire the youth movement towards data-driven activism.
📖 Skill Upgrades: Management consulting, organizational change, project mgmt, time tracking
💻 Platforms Used: Google slides, google sheets
⏰ Est. Time Req.: 51 hrs and counting
⏰ Est. Time Req.: 51 hrs and counting
Background
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| Sunrise LA 9/27/19 Youth Climate Strike |
Sunrise Los Angeles is a hub of the Sunrise Movement, a 501(c)(4) youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. The mission: build an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people.
Coming into 2020, Sunrise LA had significant momentum from monthly youth climate strikes held at the end of 2019, including one led by Greta Thunberg in November in which organizers said was attended by about 3,000 people. However by March 2020, like the rest of the city, Sunrise LA was hit with COVID-19. Local in-person actions that had fueled its momentum were immediately halted, member retention fell, and 13 teams within the organization scrambled to figure out how to proceed.
My role
When COVID-19 hit, I was on the Sunrise LA Podcast Team in the midst of producing our first episode (sidenote: as of late September, we have published our 3rd Episode!). I had a call from a fellow Sunriser asking to help on the Mobilizations team, which I had no idea about but I accepted anyways. I was still relatively new to Sunrise, having loosely attend a few actions here and there along with various in-person trainings and meetings. I learned that Mobilizations (a.k.a. The MOB) is the internal communication manager for Sunrise LA. It traditionally had overseen Sunrise LA's database through the CRM tools, ActionNetwork. The team also coordinated the Slack and Google Drive.I instantly recognized that MOB had huge potential to help Sunrise LA in a way no other team could. It controlled the digital tools of the local movement, which had just become more important than ever in COVID. I had known for a while I had wanted to make an impact with my technical skills and mindset, and here was a team that would empower me to do this. In just a couple meetings, I had volunteered to be the Team Lead, also known as the Coordinator. Personally, it would boost my ability to spearhead large scale database efforts in the non-engineering world while improving my people leadership skills. I had lots of ideas of how to revolutionize and spice-up the MOB in order to make volunteering with Sunrise more attractive.
One of these ideas was about helping the entire Sunrise LA as a whole. The way I saw it, MOB had a the opportunity to help bring change management to the entire Hub. A data-driven team could act as management consultants to find the gaps that had emerged or widened from COVID and help fill them through proposing and implementing actional countermeasures.
Plan
I called this specific effort Project Hub-Survey (or Project Survey for short).
My plan of attack was organized into phases:
Build Project Team --> Survey Teams--> Summarize --> Countermeasures --> Implement and Track
Tangible Outcomes Desired:
- Establish actionable countermeasures for priority themes
- Present findings to the entire Sunrise LA hub
- Establish a survey system that can be implemented on a quarterly basis
- Establish metrics to track progress based on survey results from each quarter
Summary
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| Project Over Time |
I track all my hours I put into the MOB team and break down these hours based on all the projects I manage. The above shows not only the weekly nominal hours I spent managing the entire MOB team (blue) and the nominal hours I spent dedicated to Project Hub-Survey (red), but also these project hours as a percent of total hours spent (black). I also show the approximate start, stop, and duration of each phase of the project, as well as the people power on the project. In the beginning, it was just my project leader (green smiley) and I. Eventually, I was able to recruit 3 more persons (blue smiley, yellow smiley, grey smiley).
As shown by the time plots, I was able to keep my time spent managing this project to 1-3 hours every week until the 8/14-8/15 Hub Retreat, an event in which all teams came together to discuss the entire Sunrise LA strategy after a summer's worth of struggling in COVID and what we could do to recover from the hit from COVID. It was a long-time coming to plan this event and the leadership wanted to do it right. For the Retreat, I committed 10 hours to help push out a final report of our findings, a milestone for the project as well as a critical deliverable to make the Retreat worth it. I am very proud of the project team's work to-date as well as its unwavering enthusiasm and teamwork.
Process Details
When I became the MOB Team Coordinator, the team had been reduced to only the veteran Sunriser who brought me in (I called him the team advisor), two other Sunrisers, and me. I decided to define its work into 4 projects:
1) Project Hub-Surveys2) Project X-Factor: an iniative to manage Sunrise LA's database and apply quantitative methods to find factors that hook and retain new membership3) Project Newbies: Using the factors from Project X-Factor, create tools to help help the onboarding team in Sunrise LA, the People Power Team4) Project Newsletter: Send out communications a la our weekly newsletter
I presented this structure during the first couple meetings, obtained buy-in from all members, and assigned roles. I took over Project X-Factor as the database is the central element to everything the MOB does. Without being comfortable working the ins and outs of the database, I would not be an effective leader. All of our team's relevance power came from this database. As Team Coordinator, I would need to have control of the database since most of the communications and requests to MOB from other teams involved it in some way (emails, membership queries, leadership approvals, data access, etc.).
Build Project Team
As like all projects I created, the first step in Project Hub-Survey was building a solid crew comprised of project leads and project members. To recruit effectively, I translated all my thoughts into a 1 pager summary to make pitching to potential recruits easier. This effort became more important because the original members who existed promptly pivoted to other teams and I was reduced to just the advisor and me. I had my work cut-out ahead of me!
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| MOB Overview |
This one pager made gave a clear top level picture of the MOB functions and the leadership of the Team. It helped me recruit and onboard two fantastic project leads, who then were able to help craft the mission of each project. I really enjoyed this initial ramp up period because it was like establishing a mini-startup and afforded me the challenge of creating a lasting legacy for the team. I was thrilled to see the new project leads step up to the challenge of taking over new projects. These intial days were full of constant brainstorming on how to execute the projects with just a skeleton crew. We were all in a life-boat together in a sea of novelty. I was lucky that my new project leads were also engineers, which helped pre-select the MOB leadership to be very detailed and technical.
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| MOB team org chart by early July |
In the beginning, Project Hub-Survey consisted of my project lead and me. By July, though, after significant investement into onboarding new recruits and making sure there was a good fit with the project, we had 3 new people assisting. I had then been able to do some transition to boosting human resources for the other projects, which had started to ramp up, and off-load some of the survey work I was doing. I continously updated a team org chart to reflect these changes, and in July I was happy to have new members helping for each project in MOB.
Sidenote: MOB has grown into a consistent 13 person team as of early September.
Survey Teams
To ensure project members could collaborate on surveying, I prepared a spreadsheet in Google Sheets that had tabs for inputting the survey notes for each team (ex. Team HubCoords, Team External Communications, Team Actions/Campaigns, Team Mobilizations....) and one tab (called 'Theme Count') that would be where we could summarize our feedback. In this way, the 13 teams we had to survey could be controlled by one document and feed into the next phase, the summarization.
With the survey tool in place, we began making a list of questions we wanted to ask teams. The list would be simple: questions to get a sense of how things are going in the team and how MOB could help them. As we refined these questions, another came up that was very important too: what is your current capacity and what is your ideal capacity? Current capacity was equal to the number of people that were currently active and ideal capacity was equal to the number people the Team Coordinator deemed needed to execute all projects and tasks in the team. With a pre-set list of questions, we began going out to different teams. Surveying teams entailed sitting in on their meetings as guests and asking our lsit of questions to members. We made it a practice to notify the Team Coordinator in advance so that he/she could add our survey work into in their agenda.
At first, the surveying process was relatively slow since it was just my project lead and I, and sometimes the Advisor, taking on a team or two. Admittedly, we were also a bit messy in the beginning. There were several rounds in which we came back together and found that our questions needed some refining, leading to us having to do an entire new wave of surveys again. We had to do this to ensure objectivity, which entailed asking the same questions to all the teams. Sometimes, we had to loop back to a team because the answers were actually confusing too and we needed some clarity. To avoid too many meetings, for some teams we made a judgement call to just message the Team Coordinator on Slack instead of burdening the entire team with another agenda item during an all team meeting.
In terms of the time frame of all this surveying, it was not a clear cut schedule either. We soon found out that some teams were more responsive than others. A few teams even were not meeting regularly anymore because of COVID, or had just disappeared! This was a result of Team Coordinators facing personal challenges from the pandemic or members falling off for related reasons. In addition, there were a few teams that took a very long time to respond to pings on Slack, forcing us to delay a significant amount of surveying well into the 2nd month since the project started.
The final part of being objective in the survey work was making sure we obtained team feedback all at once if possible because team capacity and conditions change quickly in volunteer groups. This was something that I continuosly reminded my project lead to be cognizant of.
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| Surveying the Arts/Media Team |
The above is an example of the notes taken one during our survey of the Arts/Media Team. The survey process involved logging who was surveying the team, when the survey happened, and the team members in attendance. This was to ensure we could follow-up if needed. The meat of the sheet was the list of questions, in which our team filled out with as many notes as possible. This template was copied and pasted into each team's tab.
I remember my first time sitting in on a meeting and surveying the team at hand. In all honesty, it was sad hearing some of the troubles faced by its members. I felt even more compelled to take detailed notes so that I could bring back quality feedback. I also remember the side discussions that were engendered from hearing members supply their thoughts. Such discussions turned into more detailed responses from some related questions. In this sense, the survey process was actually very fluid and up to the surveryor him/herself to tease out all the problems facing the team. The most important item was to obtain as much information as possible for us to make sense of the broader trends appearing in Sunrise LA. I always drove this idea in mind as surveying took place. And as mentioned before, sometimes the feedback we received would lead to some additional questions we thought were helpful to add to the official survey question list. An unexpected advantage that resulted from the detailed notes we took was our ability to pull out quotes for the final presentation. These quotes turned out to be very powerful examples to elucidate challenges faced by teams.
New members who came onto Project Hub-Surveys were really rewarded by the work too in that it gave them a chance to see what all teams were doing. In general in the past, new members to Sunrise LA often critiqued the onboarding process as lacking in understanding what all teams did. The MOB survey work provided a direct way to sample who and what consitituted each team.
Summarize findings
Even before I had onboarded a project team lead, I had already been thinking of how to ensure Project-Hub Surveys had a clear method to normalize all the team inputs. After all, we had a total of 13 teams to survey and there would be many different flavors of input. We would have to setup a framework that could normalize feedback from all the teams and then pull it all together in the end in an objective manner.
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| Survey Tool to establish our data collection framework |
The idea was to aggregate the verbal and written results from surveying teams and group them into themes. How did we come up with such themes? These themes were subjective. We decided as a team that we would need to use our common sense to create themes or not based on the survey results. For example, if a significant amount of teams (~>3) had a lot of feedback about not having enough people, we would create a theme called "more capacity". All teams would be evaluated for these themes, so that in the end all teams had a standard comparison. If the theme were exhibited by the team, then it would receive a "1" under its team column in the 'Theme Count' tab. In this way, we could see themes that had a heavy reoccurence based on the counts. We would then color coat them to signify priorities we would have to hit during our next phase. I made sure to obtain buy-in too from my project lead, who immediately understood the methodology and agreed it would serve our need.
The spreadsheet methodology closely borrowed from those that I had learned at Toyota R&D, especially how to quantify qualitative feedback. It was one that was especially needed when we worked with non-technical teams on a vehicle build. By translating feedback into boolean 0s and 1s, we could convert the words from feedback into graphs or charts for the engineers to make software and hardware adjustments. For example, sometimes during test drives, sales colleagues would drive our prototype vehicles and report their acceleration feeling in terms of something subjective such as "good", "bad", or something in between. If there weren't telemetric systems in place, as engineers, my software development team would have to find a way to quantify these subjective comments. In such cases, we resorted to converting the subjective comments onto a scale of 0 to 5 based on worse to best and then tabulate them all on this scale to see the broad impression of the acceleration feeling. Of course, at Toyota we worked hard to try to have data acquisition equipment onboard as much as possible to avoid such wishy-washy scenarios!
I also spent a lot of time planning the survey tool to be sustainable so we could use it for future interations of the survey process. The long-term vision is to convert much of the matrix approach to one that can be automated through drop downs directly in the spreadsheet tool itself or even through a custom API. This is why the tabulated approach is preferred to a simple word document. Just as in my professional career, I always try to put in more upfront planning than the actual execution (80% planning, 20% execution).
Countermeasures
Having summarized the survey responses, our next phase was to determine countermeasures to the challenges identified from our summary work. However, we recognized we needed to also ensure the results were clear not only to ourselves but to anyone outside of MOB.
Up until this point, the Project Hub-Needs team was operating in semi-stealth mode. During MOB meetings, all projects would update each other on how things were going, but really all the work was done during the week outside the all team meetings. What most members in the MOB knew was only surface level information. As such, the project lead had a great idea of having the entire MOB team workshop the summary work to put "fresh eyes" on all the results as a bridge to the outside world. We wanted to do this so the definitions of each theme would be clear to outsiders. At the same time, we would work together on coming up with countermeasures. The idea was that if our entire MOB team understood the survey results and countermeasures, then all of Sunrise LA would also be able to understand them.
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| All MOB meeting group brainstrom session to clarify Survey results |
To facilitate this refining process, the project lead and I hosted a special MOB meeting in which all members present were split into breakout groups. Each breakout group took on a slice of all the themes present and had at least one Project Hub-Survey member and at least one non Project Hub-Survey member. For the first half of this meeting, breakoutgroups combed through their assigned themes and defined the themes, edited the wording of survey results to be clear, and then brainstormed actionable countermeasures. During the second half of the meeting, all breakout groups met together to share thoughts on each group's work. We used Google Docs as our collaboration platform.
As seen in the picture above, the Google Docs platform was useful because we could all comment on certain areas and add our thoughts on how to address challenges. One issue, as seen in Theme #1, was having centralized tasks. Because of the de-centralized nature of Sunrise LA's approach to grassroots organizing, it was easy for tasks to be dished out in a seemingly randomized and unorganized manner. One feedback idea for a countermeasure was to impelement a digital task manager tool, and members started commenting on this potential action, which flowed into another area of the brainstorming session.
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| Another example of brainstorming countermeasures |
In the second screenshot of our breakout session work, another issue can be seen as being common in the COVID era- teams atrophying. As I saw it, some teams needed to re-prioritize their identities given the nature of organizing was fundmentally changed because of the virus. For instance, the External Communications Team interfaces with the press. COVID destroyed LA's appetite for Climate Change related news in deference to the econmic issues wreaked upon it by COVID. Unsurprisingly, the amount of work that External Communicans had dried up. In such cases, as I wrote, it was necessary to adapt to tasks that could be relevant to the times instead of sitting on a team identity that was obsolete, which is unfortunately what happened.
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| Organizing our Countermeasures |
The breakouts were very fulfilling because the ideas that flowed through all our brainstorming were very rich, not only with ideas from veteran Sunrise members but also with those of relatively new members. As can be seen in the 'Counter Measures' tab in our survey tool above, this infusion of broad sampling was very key to the Project Hub-Survey team finalizing a clear set of countermeasures that would be easily presented for the last phase of the project. I really appreciate the project lead for so logically tabulating everything that was brainstormed.
More importantly, the breakouts allowed our team to bond together and relate to our collective Sunrise Movement experience. It is easy for members to get carried away by individual tasks. The brainstorming session revealed the value add that all activists have.
Implement and Track
The last and most critical step was delivering our results to the entire Sunrise LA hub in a clear, concise, and complete manner. Our fourth Project Hub-Survey member was hugely successful for the presentation work. He had lots of experience composing presentations for the startup world and as such, was very capable of leading the presentation drafting.
Over the next two MOB meetings leading up to the Hub Retreat, I scheduled dry runs for the presentation. I made sure to time the sections that each project member spoke and ask everyone listening to provide feedback. To ensure feedback was upbeat, I used a tecnique I learned from another veterean Sunriser called asking for Praise and asking for Deltas, where Praise = good things about an individual's delivery of his/her section of the presentation and Deltas = things you can work on. All members presenting were professional and took the constructive criticism to heart. It was really heartwarming to see members cheer each other on and promote unique strengths. For instance, one Project Hub-Survey member was very eloquent and told very personl stories. We encouraged this person to talk LONGER and dive deeper into the final presentation because as activists, telling a compelling personal story is the most effective way to inspire people. Another member was very humble, and so we encouraged this member to expound and not be scared to show the depth of research done as well as become more animated.
Such suggestions were part of what I had designed the entire Mobilizations Team to provide from the day I became the Team Coordinator, which is to be a laboratory of experimenting and execution of ideas that could be brought into one's career. In this, being a good presenter was the skill that was highly developed. In my view, volunteering is not just a means to an end. It is a highly complementary part of ones development in real life. It should not be just an activity that is done to look good or feel good. It should provide hard and tangible outcomes that can be used as strong resume builders and/or life experiences to share and reflect upon in the real world as better leaders in your professional and personal life.
By the second dress rehearsl, the Project Hub-Survey team was ready to to the Hub Retreat, which had over 50 people in attendance. When it came time to show our hard data on how we could help restructure ourselves going forward, people were very astounded by our quantitative results and cheered for the work. Many remarked how professional and clear it was.
Our slides:
Next Steps
Our work is not done! One of our original goals was to implement the survey process quarterly so we could always stay relevant to the times.
As we have limited resources, the Project Hub-Survey team identified top priorities that resonated with the entire Hub and/or seemed like relatively low hanging fruit to tackle first. For instance, one of the priorities that resulted from the Hub Retreat was to improve the onboarding process. Currently, the onboarding process is very manual and convoluted, with much of the burden on leaders to do busy admistrative work. It is easy for documentation of new membership to get lost. So, some of our Project members are currently working on helping implement digital tools to automate the onboarding process. And remember that task manager idea? We have people helping Arts/Media Teamwith a digital task manager tool that will streamline how tasks are tracked.
With some recent expansion of membership in the MOB team, I also am in the process of recruiting more project manager type individuals. There are so many connections from the MOB team to others that it is becoming unwieldly for existing MOB leadership to handle.
If you ever want to join Sunrise LA and/or my team or discuss this philosophy of data-driven activism, please don't hesitate to contact me!
jjc2184@caa.columbia.edu
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