Leadership Pledge Retrospective, Part Two
This is the second of a three-part series reflecting on the Leadership Pledge Red Star put forward before the 2023 National Convention, and evaluating our term on the NPC plank-by-plank. Find the rest of this retrospective in Part One and Part Three!
Expanding the Growth and Development Committee
– Hazel W
4. I will expand the Growth and Development Committee with effective local organizers from a variety of organizing backgrounds and ensure it is used for gathering information and reporting back to the NPC and staff on the state of local organizations.
In March 2025, Red Star’s NPC members championed a bylaws amendment to reform the GDC and re-elect its steering committee to make it easier for members to join, promote member-led democracy, and empower people to pursue projects they care about. This change was driven by serious concerns about the GDC's increasingly insular and overly-conservative culture. Instead of fostering an open, dynamic space for cross-chapter engagement, leadership prioritized gatekeeping and control over key infrastructure like meeting notes and tech tools, and limited Steering Committee participation to NPC liaisons and designated Subcommittee leads. Applications to the body were subjected to unnecessary scrutiny, reinforcing a top-down culture at odds with DSA’s commitment to democratic socialism and mass organizing. Other DSA members and leaders have described this culture in greater detail elsewhere.
Red Star views these changes – not just limited to structures and bylaws, but also actively fostering a more positive and open organizing culture – as a critical part of building an effective democratic organization capable of seizing on openings in class struggle and training a layer of organizers who can lead it. As we wrote in 2023, "It’s crucial that the experience of a full cross section of organizing experiences, political viewpoints, and local contexts is represented on the body - decisions made about the GDC’s composition and strategic direction will have a direct effect on whether and how DSA grows and becomes an effective organization."
As a result of our reforms, the GDC has seen an explosion in growth with the highest rate of new member admissions in recent history, more than the combined total of five of the last six quarters. This growth comes not only from a streamlined admissions process, but also a major increase in applications – more people are applying now than in any quarter since the 2023 Convention. Furthermore, the body also saw more activity than ever, holding the largest all-GDC member meeting in committee history in July, and seeing more members than ever recorded before participating in the GDC Slack.
Unfortunately, several of the organizers who disagreed with the reforms decided not to stay after its reformation, and NPC members from Groundwork and Socialist Majority chose to abstain from voting in elections seating the new Steering Committee. Despite their departure the membership body has grown larger than ever.
Red Star rejects a transactional model of member engagement that treats organizers as a reserve labor pool for tasks like phonebanking or list-cleaning. While these tasks are important, we believe the GDC must focus on developing the political and organizational capacity of DSA’s base – its chapters. That means not just tapping members for labor, but offering them meaningful tools and trainings to develop militant organizers locally.
In that spirit, Red Star put forward resolutions to expand the GDC’s external-facing work to build up local chapters, launching key initiatives to develop easily accessible Training and Resource Libraries tailored to chapters based on what organizers say they actually need. These trainings cover a range of topics including How to do Democracy, Conflict Resolution, Membership Drive trainings, and more. When members of the new Steering Committee realized a similar resolution was submitted for National Convention, they identified that most of its goals did not need to wait for a convention mandate several months away and proactively recruited its authors to begin building out that more robust national resource library right away – a contrasting approach to bureaucracy putting it in service of Letting Members Cook.
We also took the lead in gathering data on local organizing to better inform the NPC and national staff. This includes:
- Listening sessions with dozens of organizers across the country to understand common successes and challenges in recruitment, retention, and external organizing
- In-depth case studies with core organizers to document key stories
- Detailed quantitative research on local recruitment and retention trends
All of this work will be compiled into the upcoming State of DSA Report, to be delivered to the NPC by convention.
Further, Red Star is proud to have increased transparency on the GDC significantly so that members know what’s going on and how to get involved. Steering Committee minutes and meetings are now available to the membership, not just SC and Staff, and the GDC Secretary now posts regular updates after every meeting on the DSA discussion board and GDC’s #general Slack channel.
There are a few areas where Red Star could have improved. For example, we regret not involving some of the GDC’s core organizers more fully before passing the GDC amendment. That said, we are proud of the amendment’s impact and grateful they’ve remained part of the Steering Committee and that we continue to have a strong, valued relationship with them. We also regret that our comrade Shane K had to step down from his Co-Chair position on the GDC at the beginning of the term. We’re grateful he found the proper home as Co-Chair of Budget and Finance, where he has been excelling.
There is so much more to do to develop the GDC to its full potential. Our vision for the future is one where members trust the GDC to truly listen to their needs, and in turn readily share input about tactics they've found useful for developing their own chapters and ways they can share them with other chapters across the country. In the coming term we want to develop greater integration with YDSA's YGDC building stronger pipelines between chapters, with our field organizer program helping support staff work and aligning it with democratically-decided member organizing priorities, and with chapter membership coordinators and membership committees across the country.
Finally, we think it’s critical to absorb the large influx of members in a sustainable and politically meaningful way by providing chapters with toolkits and guides tailored to their onboarding needs, organizing new member orientations, developing a mentorship program, crafting trainings based on member input, developing leaders through our leadership intensives, and offering tools for member retention based on our State of DSA research. Ultimately we want to chart a more sustainable growth trajectory for DSA that is less reliant on political externalities like presidential campaigns.
In summary, Red Star led the charge to transform the GDC into a more expansive, member-driven body, pushing for structural reforms, democratization, and a renewed commitment to bottom-up organizing that better reflects the needs and potential of the broader DSA membership. As a result, the GDC is better positioned to build chapters to be more effective and revolutionary bodies of the working class.
Disciplined Communication and Commitment to the NPC
– Chris W
5. I will operate with discipline and communicate compassionately by using social media, national forums, and other communication channels responsibly, and being considerate of the political implications of withdrawal from the NPC election or resignation from the body.
One of Red Star's first tasks after Sam, Megan, and John joined the NPC was to help reopen the DSA Discussion Board (aka the DSA Forums) and transfer ownership from the then-closed National Comms Committee to the member-run National Tech Committee. Under previous ownership, the shared members-only discussion platform was marginalized – rate limits were instituted without warning in early 2023, breaking basic site functionality and hamstringing members' ability to communicate with each other. These were promptly reversed once the keys were given to the NTC, turning the forums into a more vibrant internal discussion platform over the past two years.
One of the Convention Planning Committee's goals of hosting all convention proposals and debates on the Discussion Board was to provide an actual DSA-moderated environment where members could interact that is not as easily monetized by Elon Musk. To this end, it has been an unqualified success, and we would be remiss to not shout out the countless hours of labor put in by CPC and NTC members, leaders, and forum moderators, who represent a broad swathe of tendencies and backgrounds across the organization and whose accomplishments are often unsung.
Early concerns that moving the submission process to the Forums would stifle participation proved unfounded. According to the NTC, 3,483 members created new accounts to access the Convention Portal and the Forums for the first time during the proposal and amendment submission period, which ran from February 20 to June 30. A total of 114 total items qualified for the agenda this year – almost three times the number of proposals that were eligible for consideration in 2023, and more than 2023 and 2021 combined.
In 2023, the text of proposals were available on DSA’s website, and separate links to sign on to proposals were provided, with the signature list maintained by the authors themselves. Members providing their name and membership email address to sign on did so at their own risk. In one case, names taken from a public listing of resolution supporters were reproduced on a right-wing website dedicated to doxxing leftists.
By way of contrast, membership verification in 2025 was easily automated by staff, and kept entirely within our own systems. Instead of running 45 different external lists against the membership rolls, the list of forum users who signed on to a proposal was run once against the rolls to verify membership in good standing. In addition, the NTC instituted a privacy-friendly option where you could opt out of communications sent by the authors of the resolution you were signing on to.
The successes of convention planning this year are the results of a massive collaborative undertaking from comrades across the organization and the multi-tendency, multi-committee effort represents DSA at its best. Red Star is proud of the role our members played in contributing to and supporting this project.
In the next term, Red Star will continue to collaborate across tendencies to open up our national communications apparatus to members passionate about using our organization’s bully pulpit to agitate, educate, and motivate about socialism across every platform we can leverage. We must adapt to meet people on the platforms they actually use and enjoy using, even if that means moving away from X.com, which is familiar, to newer media like TikTok or other services.
Whereas previous NPCs collapsed with recriminations and infighting, replete with resignations and replacements that reshaped the ideological majority on the body, the 2023-2025 term saw only one resignation, the lowest in the modern, post-2017 era of DSA.
On the NPC, we have received feedback from staff and members that the political guidance they need from the committee has been lacking, causing uncertainty about generating general communications or content not tied to a specific event or story. More often than not, general political messaging falls to the wayside in favor of whatever newsworthy event grabs the attention of NPC members, and the guidance staff and members receive is therefore limited to the circumstances. Going forward, there should be a unified, strategic approach to messaging in our communications across platforms with clear guidance on the political content from our elected leadership. Too often, the NPC is voting to revise or rescind statements put out by lower bodies, instead of providing the leadership they were elected to provide in the first place.
To that end, one of the most critical aspects of leadership is accountability: the simple recognition that we are responsible for our own actions, and that we own the consequences of those actions. Leadership is not the denial of mistakes or the covering up of errors, but learning from mistakes and understanding that errors will be made in the pursuit of a more perfect politics. Leaders are not afraid to apologize when they are wrong, and are not afraid to ask for an apology when wronged. They understand that all organizing is a relationship built on trust, and that honesty and personal integrity are good governance and good policy. To that end, credible interpersonal communication begets credible public or external communication, and thus builds our party.
By centering compassion, consideration, and discipline (both in message and in person) in our social practice, we create an environment where constructive criticism can be freely given and received. It is no coincidence that the superstar organizer is not valued for their “hard skills” alone, but for their “soft skills” as well, in dealing with individuals and groups. The ability to cultivate such an environment is both undervalued and extremely gendered, and we wish to see the ability to empathize and reason in comradely struggle with one another become more valued and universal across the organization.
Correction: The initially published version of this article did not clearly attribute successes of this year's Convention Portal to the National Tech Committee and its member-leaders. We apologize for this oversight in our editorial process, which should be recognized as an error on the part of our editors and not the author. We have made edits to this section to better distinguish the collective accomplishments of projects Red Star members have participated or led in, and ensure that the work of other members and leaders outside the caucus is appropriately credited.
Partnership with the Staff Union
– Megan R
6. I will partner with the staff union to produce a report on staff satisfaction and address major concerns, and hold a review of director-level staff priorities and work.
Coming into our NPC term, we knew that there was a budget crisis developing, but we did not understand the scope of it. DSA budgeting is complicated and budget presentations to members had historically been framed in fairly broad categories of expenses and income, but did not typically offer the nuanced analysis of “burn” rate nor ongoing (monthly) vs. fixed expenses, and the organization was several years behind on closing out internal audits and assessing actuals. It took us several months to get a real grasp on where the budget actually stood, and what we found was grim.
This led us to the conclusion that we needed to significantly and quickly rein in our recurring expenses. Ultimately, there are only two real recurring expense pools that could be drawn from: chapter dues share or staffing costs. Making the decision to move forward with layoffs was not done lightly or whimsically; we knew that it would cause strain on internal structures, serious organizational distress, and would have immediate material effects on a number of comrade staffers who were going to lose their jobs. Our assessment was that cutting chapters’ dues share would be more dangerous, rendering chapters unable to continue participating in the active campaigns and internal organizing projects that make it possible to recruit and onboard new members.
Our predictions about both capacity and organizational distress were correct, and this was particularly poignantly felt by our NPC members (especially me) who work daily with staff. This significant shake-up did cause tension, but both we and the staffers who remained (all but five, when all was said and done) are committed to the organization and found a way forward by focusing on the tasks at hand. John, who sits on the Personnel Committee and the Budget and Finance Committee, was able to negotiate a staff raise at the end of 2024, based on increased budget projections from our post-election membership bump. We also pushed for a part-time finance staffing position to be re-filled as a full-time position in order to expand capacity in that department, and passed a resolution tying any newly-opened staff positions to our budget actuals to prevent future over-hiring against a budget deficit. We continue to believe very strongly that a well-managed staff is a powerful and necessary component to an organization like ours, and can help operationalize work in really important ways, and we believe that if we hire people, they should be able to feel secure about their job.
Because of the tensions with the Bargaining Unit collectively and staffers individually, we did not ultimately request a report, but did work to ensure that the NPC was responsive to requests from the Bargaining Unit, and struggled through expectations from both sides in order to improve communication. There is still a lot of work to do on this front, but we do feel that some progress was made, and hope to continue to work constructively to build a better relationship between the NPC – the representatives of the membership as a whole – and the Bargaining Unit.
Though we also did not perform a formal review of director-level work, we did work closely to develop better organizing relationships with directors. Sam, as Fundraising Chair, worked closely with the former and current Development Directors to expand our fundraising work; John, as Treasurer and Budget & Finance Chair, worked closely with our Finance Director on getting our books ship-shape and developing an open budgeting process and giving members updated and complete information on a monthly(ish) basis; and as one of the co-chairs, I work with the full director team in a wide variety of capacities.
It should also be noted that the departure of the National Director at the beginning of 2024 did stall out a lot of this specific staff-audit/staff-self-reporting work. Red Star is basically aligned that it is important that the next NPC hire a “Chief of Staff” or similar position who can take over the internal/admin work that was under the National Director’s purview, which would also help the next co-chairs do more of the political work that their position calls for. Despite the fact that this point of the leadership pledge was not fulfilled as written, the intent was excellent, and would be an important first step for a new Chief of Staff to take on in conjunction with the next NPC.
Further Discussion
If you're interested in discussing this piece with other DSA members, head on over to the DSA Discussion Board.
The forums are open to all DSA members in good standing. If you haven't made an account, you can do so at optin.dsausa.org. If you're not a DSA member in good standing, sign up or renew your dues at dsausa.org/join.