Independent Political Organization with Jonathan Nagy of United Neighbors of the 35th Ward

Jonathan Nagy (he/him) is an ex-architect, former professional bread baker, and current Director of Communications and Engagement in the office of Chicago’s 33rd Ward Alderman, Rossana Rodríguez-Sánchez. For the last seven years, he has organized with United Neighbors of the 35th Ward, an all-volunteer independent political organization in Chicago.

United Neighbors of the 35th Ward (UN35) is an independent political organization (IPO) founded by residents of Chicago’s 35th Ward in 2015. They organize on Chicago’s Northwest Side to connect poor and working people to their elected officials, campaign to elect community leaders to government offices, and organize with their neighbors to build the thriving communities we all deserve.

Read more about UN35:
University of the Poor | Electoral and community organizing in Chicago

Refractions of the Rainbow Coalition: Harold Washington and IPOs in Chicago

MOLLY United Neighbors of the 35th Ward is how we met originally! Although you’ve now been involved for a much longer time and more meaningfully than I ever was. UN35 is an IPO, an independent political organization based in Chicago's 35th Ward. Not everyone knows what an IPO is, especially if you live in a place where they are not part of the political landscape. So to throw you in the deep end, what is an independent political organization, and how do they fit into the political landscape in Chicago?

JONATHAN Yeah. So an independent political organization at its core is about liberating people from the demands of our two-party government system in the United States. 

Our analysis is that the Democrats and Republicans serve the same interests, which is not the interest of poor and working people in Chicago or across the country. We like to talk about how the “independent” part of our political organization is working-class political power. That means neighbors coming together to discuss their shared vision, organize their values and ultimately change the communities that they live in to support their needs. 

MOLLY UN35 is not the only IPO in Chicago that shares these values and this political project. I don't know if you would call it a coalition, but what does the landscape of aligned IPOs in Chicago look like?

JONATHAN [Laughing] Thank you for designating the difference between coalition and aligned projects. Absolutely a point of debate. 

Our work fits into a wide landscape of political organizing in Chicago. The Democratic political machine here in Chicago is very, very deeply entrenched, not only in the political landscape, but also the cultural landscape. And over the years, the greatest catalyst for independent political organizing in Chicago was Harold Washington's campaigns for mayor. Those campaigns registered thousands and thousands of poor Black voters across Chicago and organized political folks into small organizations that worked for the betterment of the people of Chicago, rather than as foot soldiers for the Democratic Party.

MOLLY I didn't know that connection!

JONATHAN Yeah. So the first IPOs emerged in the 1980s. And now we have a resurgence of IPO organizing activity across Chicago. We are part of a network on the Northwest Side of Chicago in particular that is made up of, I’d say, 10 self-identifying IPOs with vastly different goals, but working toward political independence in this part of the city.

We started in maybe 2021, 2022, so not that long ago, organizing a loose grouping of independent organizations on the Northwest Side, our neighboring organizations, to sit at a roundtable together and talk about broad questions like “co-governance,” also known as “collaborative governance.” How do we lead alongside our elected officials? How do our members share power in the organization and the community? These really fundamental questions. And then, what are our organizing goals? If we're building power in our districts, how do we tie it together?

We're starting to see that manifest in a really incredible situation where we have independently elected grassroots leaders up and down the ballot. We have our aldermen, state reps, state senators, our congresswoman, our county commissioner, water reclamation commissioners and other county seats, down-ballot offices like our local police district council members, and we’re organizing for other offices. So we have this community of UN35 and other IPO members now holding political power and using that to connect people to resources and wield influence.

There are other pockets of IPO organizing activity—I’d say at least a dozen, if not 20, IPOs across Chicago in different regions and various states of formation. So it's a really, really active and vibrant political community, experimenting with lots of different formations of organization, representing lots of different types of communities, but emerging from this need to respond to a lack of representation of poor and working people in government. 

MOLLY Next year will be UN35’s tenth anniversary. In broad strokes, what’s UN35’s story?

JONATHAN UN35 emerged from an aldermanic race. In 2015, now-Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who's now in his third term as alderman, ran as the first openly gay and socialist alderman in Chicago's history since the early 1900s when socialism was just like, a thing. And part of that organizing campaign, to get him elected to office that first time, was to root his work in the poor and working communities in the 35th Ward. He focused on bringing impacted people into the work, and that tradition came from his mentors that were involved in the independent political movement around Harold Washington's campaign.

That work resulted in his victory and subsequently founding United Neighbors of the 35th Ward. The organization was formed as a place for people that were mobilized by the vision of his campaign to come together and continue to do the work. Before Carlos was even in office, he helped organize I think it was five town halls, one in each of the neighborhoods that make up the ward, where hundreds of residents came together and engaged in a deliberative survey-slash-town-hall format to set priorities for organizing work. UN35’s work is still largely rooted in those priorities. There's affordable housing as a central tenet, fully funded and affordable public schools, community safety, immigrant justice and defense, and any number of emergent social issues that have come up over the years, for example, progressive taxation reforms at the state level.

UN35 was founded in partnership with a citywide organization, Reclaim Chicago and The People's Lobby, that helped fund the initial organizing activity of the organization. So that helped pay for our office space, helped pay for an executive director, and helped train our organizers, of which I was one. I joined the organization in early 2017, about a year and a half after it was founded, and went through a variety of training and mentorship programs through these citywide organizations. 

And then there was a period of time during an electoral cycle where the IPO had to contend with a question of independence. Through a series of disagreements on organizing strategy, we ultimately we went through a shift where we decided to become an entirely grassroots-funded and volunteer-based organization. That historical moment split us from the citywide organizing projects and reoriented our work to a deeply personal organizing space rooted in building local power informed by the goals of our neighbors above all.

Our Dream is for Members To Be Able To Track Their Stories

MOLLY You've been organization secretary, and that's a volunteer role, for four years and counting. What is your work in that role, and how is it related to data strategy and data management?

JONATHAN When I first talked about being org secretary, it was before I was even really on what was then called the Advisory Board. They needed more bodies at the table, and I wanted the responsibility, so they brought me in and one of the key gaps in work that was happening at the executive level was straight up just like, documentation organizing. I had a big old Google Drive that dozens of people were working on for a few years and there was chaos in there. Nothing was saved in the right place. The committees had committee folders within committee folders. Nobody could ever find anything. 

MOLLY This is maybe familiar to anyone who has ever used Google Drive. 

JONATHAN Yes. The very first thoughts I had toward this were, let's get to a point where we can find the things that we've done. There's a lot of repeat work that happens because there's no awareness within the organization of what has happened through history, what questions have been asked and solved and what resources are available to people.

Now we have a Google Drive map document that we can present to people that says, this is all the information that we host in our drive, kind of a table of contents, but that doesn't provide access. It's just this resource with lots of information in it; if you have questions or need a tool, here's some options. Reach out to an organizer and there's probably something that exists for what you're looking for. That took a few years to get to, like all things do. 

One of the biggest projects that I've spent years wanting to grow into is media management. We are a powerful grassroots organization that tells amazing stories and are in and out of a lot of campaigns. We have historically not kept a multimedia archive of our work. There's very little that we have access to from our early years. There's been interviews, reports, coalition spaces that are lost to history because nobody wrote them down or organized them. Now the media committee, which is different from our communications committee, is explicitly tasked with capturing the stories of the organization. Our media folks dig through all of our members' phones, the internet, find the impact and imprint that our organizing work has had on our members and on our community. 

MOLLY So they're not just keeping track of stuff as it's created, in present time, they're also going backwards and finding archival stuff and organizing it. 

JONATHAN Correct. And then there's this extra layer in the present of putting the best things in a folder. Five years from now, if we want two images, the powerful images from our campaign for Senate or whatever, we have those power images that we can just grab. You don't have to go through everything. 

So I've gone through our files, our media. The third point is our current data management practices, just member data. What information from our members and from people that we interact with in community do we hold? What's the most precious?

MOLLY Yes. How would you describe the organization's data strategy? What organizational goals is the data strategy intended to support?

JONATHAN Our data management strategy right now is almost entirely focused on tracking people's participation, so really attendance. And weirdly enough, from attendance, a lot of things can be determined, especially for our organizing model, which is about naturally expanding our base and reaching more people, but also about folks' personal journey. We're really, really interested in helping people stay, which is often really challenging for people in independent organizations. So we have been trying to develop a system for data management that allows us to see who's staying and who's dropping off. Then it's easier for our organizers to check in with people and follow up on what their needs are.

As our organization matures, we're seeing the amount of things that we're trying to do be filtered down to one core goal of getting neighbors to talk to each other. That's whether you come to our space to participate in dialogue, whether we meet you on the doors, or whether you read our newsletter or social media. When we distill all of our projects down to that core function, we just want to know who we're reaching. Over the years, we've tried a lot of experiments with data collection, data point management, varying levels of specificity and creativity on what we do. And at the end of the day, if we know that people are coming or leaving, we're able to do the necessary follow-up and course correct. It’s truly helping us spend less time maintaining data points and more time getting to know people's character through conversation. 

 I was in a data meeting yesterday. I’m working with one of my colleagues on the Executive Committee to restart a little data working group to get us out of Google spreadsheets into a program that we're developing in Airtable. We started with a list of like 20 data points that we could collect, gathered from a survey of all of our organizers, all of our various committee leaders and folks like that. It produced all these different ideas around data points that would be helpful for committees to work with. To not get ahead of ourselves, we are first focusing on refining our sign-in data collection, where among all of the suggested data points, we’ve landed on collecting: name, phone number, language preference, and email, the really simple things. These will allow us to follow up with anyone that signs in and layer in any additional helpful information about them over time. We wanted to avoid a person, who is meeting this group of strangers for the first time, having to immediately decide as they walk into an event to give away their home address or any other deeply personal information like their job, their goals in life, the social pressures that brought them to an organizing meeting, etc. We want that info to be gathered as we develop a relationship, like you would with anyone else in life.

Our long term dream is to have an accessible management system that produces member profiles where our members are able to track their stories: This is the first event that I went to with UN35. These are the variety of things that I've done with the organization. And to access photographs. Ultimately, we want our data to feel as though it's reflective of somebody's journey and experience, that it's a helpful tool that tells a story of the way that we do our organizing and the impact that our organization has on people.

Passing the Torch

MOLLY I know that your goal in the medium-term is to transition out of this role as organization secretary. How are you thinking about that leadership transition? 

JONATHAN When you're involved in a big organizing project, there are things that you want to see accomplished. And it always takes many years to get there. I think that I'm at a point in this role where I have given about all I can give, creatively. I've pulled in a lot of wisdom and experience and I've kind of gently passed it off to others in the form of more manageable and bite-size organizing projects. The way that I have seen my approach to organizer skill-building and mentorship is identifying a small thing that somebody's interested in and helping them craft it into a project and then give it to them. I feel like I've been doing that with little nuggets of my big “organization secretary” vision.

I want to see UN35's data and media management, the communications work, grow into a more collective project. I feel like for years, all of the questions and projects have been pointing back at me because the archive lives in here [points to forehead] or in the memories of other longtime members. We have not done the organizing for there to be a collective effort. And now that we have a couple committees and there's new people holding the work and asking the questions, I would actually like to see what happens if I step back. And that's not to say like, go away, but not be the center of the decision making. I hope to continue to be a resource and a reference, but I think I need to be engaged in different organizing projects and exposed to different problems in order to grow as an organizer myself. I'm bumping into the same questions over and over again in the UN35 space, and it's because I've been doing the work for so long, which limits me from exploration, experimentation, and learning from other organizing spaces. I want to be able to help people answer questions and solve problems quickly and efficiently, but there's an argument that organizing skill happens through solving problems. 

Our next Executive Committee will be elected the year after next. So in the next 18 months or so, I really hope to see myself kind of fade into a more advisory role. We'll see how that goes, because the work needs to happen, and if there's nobody to do it, I will be here. But it's my hope that there is a strong enough group of people that have been mentored into their responsibilities in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming to take on. 

Got an idea for a future post, someone I should talk to, or feedback of any kind? Email me at molly@tallgrassco.com! I'd love to hear from you.