Building Leadership Agility at the ACLU

Members of ACLU’s 2018 “Promote the Vote” campaign in Michigan standing together. (Photo by Kary L. Moss)

When the ACLU was established in 1920, the freedoms enumerated in the Constitution had never been fully tested in the courts, and only through persistent and broad public activism have important civil rights and liberties protections been fought for, codified in our laws, and their protections widely enforced. But every win has had to be defended and today we face renewed assaults on democracy, immigrants, Black and brown communities, transgender children, and reproductive rights.

We must therefore ask: What does this moment require of us?

Because we understand the fragility of civil rights, our strategies must be long-term and must adapt to shifts in the political terrain. States that face the greatest onslaught often have the fewest resources and those without power must continuously struggle for their most basic rights. And the pandemic and its compounding effects have had profound impacts on the constituents and communities that we serve and colleagues we serve with.

For the last four years, the ACLU has set out to meet these challenges by leveraging a surge in resources to our affiliate network to build infrastructure and expand the range of strategies we use in service of our mission. Our Strategic Affiliate Initiative (SAI) has invested $30 million in 12 affiliates with great potential to impact urgent and important issues or highly contested political terrain. This infusion of resources has not only grown our affiliates nationwide by 40 percent—and even more in SAI affiliates—but it has forever changed workforce demographics and scope of skill sets available to accomplish the work.

As the executive director of one of the beneficiaries—the ACLU of Michigan—and, more recently, as the director of the national department that works with and supports our extensive affiliate network, I can say that we learned that certain imperatives are the only way to stay true to our mission as a social justice organization and to be effective in the field:

1. Leadership agility that centers equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging practices is required at every level of the organization;
2. Mutually reinforcing activities focused on people and culture can generate enormous power that prepares the next generation of leaders; and
3. A “backbone” organization must exhibit leadership agility as well, capable of discerning trends and driving resources in service of long-term program development, sustainability, and knowledge and learning.

The Strategic Affiliate Initiative

The ACLU’s affiliates, and 1500 affiliate staff, have long served as the canaries in the coal mine on civil rights and liberties issues facing this nation. Because the civil rights agenda is set on the ground, the organization’s founders established a structure of independent organizations, nestled within the broader ecosystem of a national organization.

First, the SAI program committed to certain essentials—operations, finance, and development—in addition to investing in advocacy tactics. Each SAI affiliate set goals that could be achieved within four years and, while maintaining the ACLU’s non-partisan role, began to educate and illuminate the civil rights and liberties positions of candidates for elected office and municipal and state legislative advocacy. For example, affiliates prioritized reducing mass incarceration by attacking cash bail systems and harsh sentencing laws, as well as working to expand access to the ballot and ending collaboration of local law enforcement officials with ICE.

Almost immediately, rigorous prioritization and expansion of tactics yielded significant policy accomplishments. In the area of criminal justice reform, for example, affiliates began to engage in voter education in down-ballot races, benefitting from a partnership with the ACLU’s Campaign for Smart Justice, a dedicated effort to reduce the prison population and eliminate racial disparities. For example, in Arizona, the affiliate targeted the Maricopa County attorney’s race, running an ambitious voter engagement program with local Latinx-led consultants. With trained volunteers, the affiliate reached over 750,000 voters via phone and text and 380,000 voters through targeted mail pieces and radio ads. This work convinced Allister Adel, the winning county attorney candidate, to publicly change her positions on several key criminal justice reform issues. In Texas, an affiliate’s engagement in the Dallas DA race helped lead to the election of an official who committed to a decarceration rate of 15-20 percent, while the Georgia affiliate’s sustained voter education effort helped elect reform-minded Black sheriffs in Cobb and Gwinnett Counties. 

On voting rights, we saw significant wins across the nation. The Michigan affiliate led a successful ballot initiative—Proposal 3—to allow for same day registration and no excuse absentee voting in 2018. The Georgia affiliate, whose staff expanded from four to fourteen in just two years, worked to defeat measures that would eliminate voting days, voting hours, and no-excuse absentee voting, as well as playing a lead role reducing the absentee ballot rejection in the 2020 election rate to a mere 0.15 percent. And in a widely celebrated effort, the Florida affiliate became a key partner to Floridians for a Fair Democracy to pass Amendment 4 which restored voting rights to the approximately 1.6 million Floridians with felony convictions who have completed their sentences. 

Lessons Learned

All of this work has spurred tremendous organizational change. Every affiliate had to rethink team structures, center the leadership of people from directly impacted communities, and scale programs with more and better data. Leaders needed to be resilient, flexible, balance attention to short-term and long-term priorities, and foster individual initiative and strong teamwork. Affiliates needed to adopt an “equity mindset” with improved practices around giving and receiving feedback, hiring, and retention practices. And the national organization had to evolve as a “backbone” organization to a necessarily fragmented, geographically separated, and demographically diverse federated system.

1. Organizational Leadership Agility

The ability to anticipate and respond to changing conditions, and to manage complex interdependent relationships, is one of the most crucial organizational skills. For example, in Georgia, after the legislature passed an abortion ban, the affiliate quickly identified a leadership gap and adjusted their focus from mass incarceration to reproductive justice as a welcome and trusted partner with other advocacy organizations. After the 2020 election, Florida refocused from state-level politics to local officials who were open to policy reforms on bail, sentencing, collaboration with ICE, county election administration, and reimagining policing.

With the pressure of timeframes, affiliates found themselves refining their goals to become more specific. Arizona set out in 2017 to reduce incarceration rates and racial disparities in incarceration, and by 2020, they had targeted a bill that would increase prosecutor transparency and a sentencing reform bill that would provide earned time off to people in prisons. With clearer, more precise goals, the affiliate was then able to focus on educating voters about the primary obstacle to criminal justice reform: the Maricopa County Attorney. Affiliates also innovated. For example, both Kansas and Florida affiliates devised a new strategy—“the 80/20 Model”—spending 80 percent of their time on campaign priorities. While they adjusted the model over time, the effort created an environment in which the practice of prioritization could be modified and refined.

Aligned leadership is a precondition to organizational change. With such quick growth and a highly pressurized external environment, leaders had to raise expectations of their teams at every turn. Supervisors had to become more knowledgeable about the work of those they supervised. They had to intentionally discuss roles and decision-making responsibilities and authority and, in some cases, adapt long-standing structures. Team leaders had to shift from thinking about department priorities to organizational priorities and were called upon to engage in purposeful planning, attend to culture, and challenge their own assumptions and approaches. Instead of simply celebrating obvious wins, leaders had to consider other metrics of success, ensure that the right questions were in front of the right decision-makers, and help employees understand how their work contributed to the bigger picture.

Because traditional hierarchies often became a lightning rod, it became an organizational imperative to communicate transparently about the roles of Executive Directors and Boards of Directors and clarify or improve processes. As new members joined the ranks of board members, affiliate boards found themselves needing to shift from traditional models of program oversight to what McKinsey has called “big bet decisions”—that is, decisions with major consequences for the organization that often involve situations with unclear or right choices. Strategic planning became the operative space to explore, process and digest the new normal and center equity at every level of decisions. Some affiliates, like Ohio, incorporated community input into the process with listening sessions gained through nine regional volunteer-led Action Teams. This required adaptable planning processes, or as David McGuire of the Connecticut affiliate observed, “decision points that help us dictate the next phase of the work.”

2. Engaging Meaningfully to Harness ‘People Power’

Large scale social problems require meaningful and authentic partnerships because no single organization alone will solve them. To engage large numbers of people in electoral campaigns, ballot initiatives, and targeted legislative goals, affiliates had to build trustworthy and culturally resonant relationships that centered those most impacted by our policy efforts. The swell of grassroots activism demanded that affiliates increase the breadth of partners and depth of relationships.

For their work on criminal justice reform and educational equity, Arizona stopped outsourcing advocacy work and hired staff who held organizing trainings, reaching out to formerly incarcerated people, recruiting, training, and developing impacted leaders, and selecting “super volunteers” to hold active positions on their planning committees. For their work on policing reform, Louisiana’s Executive Director, Alanah Odoms, launched Justice Lab, a statewide initiative designed to address racist policing through section 1983 litigation and galvanized nearly 150 lawyer and volunteers at law firms and corporations and student practitioners at 20 legal clinics. For their work on voting rights, Michigan used their institutional power to partner with and support broader networks of BIPOC-led grassroots organizations, partnering with more than 140 organizations and sub-granting more than $2 million to 29 organizations.

Our understanding of how to do this work within a larger ecosystem deepened. Staff learned to better listen for, and respond to, new needs and demands from an increasingly younger and more diverse staff. And changing demographics forced teams to modernize in every area: professional development, onboarding, performance management processes, intentional communication, and management training. ACLU of Pennsylvania Executive Director Reggie Shuford reflected: “Hiring individuals who were directly impacted by the issues we are working on, acknowledging past missteps the ACLU has made, developing long-term relationships, and distributing resources when possible have given us a completely new perspective on our work and ‘cred’ in the community which has led to stronger change.” 

3. Role of Backbone Organizations

Changes at the local level require the same leadership agility and equity principles and practices at the national level. We therefore created a multi-disciplinary team to integrate people and culture work into program planning and design, developed new programs, and worked to scale existing programs. We designed a suite of resources on multi-year budgeting, centering long-term sustainability as a goal. Incorporating the approach from Real Time Strategic Planning by David LaPianna, the national office promoted new, more flexible models focused on generative questions and inclusive decision-making. We launched new programs focused on workplace culture adopting the concept of a “belonging” culture, as pioneered by john powell.

To address the obvious training needs we partnered with The Management Center to create “Managing for Racial Equity” and developed new programs on restorative justice, decision-making, and role clarity. We launched employee resource groups to help younger staff find community and support and dedicated “safe spaces” for Black staff to provide a strong foundation for their growth, resilience, and leadership aspirations. We revamped onboarding systems for new national and affiliate staff to convey key information about the entire nationwide enterprise and community they had joined. And we created a new Affiliate Leadership Development Academy with specific cohorts focused on experienced managers to those new to the workforce.

Looking Forward

In all, the multi-million, multi-year SAI investment had as much a transformative impact on the national office as the affected affiliates. Focused on ambitious policy wins, the effort has had cascading impacts at every level of the organization. As we conclude this effort, we better understand the power that can be achieved when inter-dependent organizations come together around a shared purpose that is as committed to those wins as it is to growing leaders and establishing the conditions that create durable institutions capable of meeting future challenges. As we look ahead, we are now bringing forward these lessons to a new effort dedicated to building the long-term power and capacities of our southern affiliates who face some of the most brutal assaults on civil rights.

Read more stories by Kary L. Moss.