Leadership Pledge

Leadership Pledge Retrospective, Part Three

Building the Connection Between NPC and Chapters, Addressing DSA’s Grievance Process, and Addressing DSA’s Budget Crisis

Red Star, Adithya P, Matt N, Shane K., John L

Jul 31, 2025 • 13 min read

This is the final section 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.

See Part One and Part Two of this series.

Building the Connection Between NPC and Chapters

– Adithya P

7. I will work to improve the NPC’s relationship with chapters, creating a mechanism by which chapter leadership is regularly in contact with NPC members and other chapter leaders.

The NPC this term has been much more accessible to membership and chapters than the previous term. As co-chair, Megan has made a point of being available to chapters and chapter leaders, regularly making visits to chapters and OCs across the country, giving trainings, showing up to chapter events, and speaking at chapter meetings and conventions. John has dedicated time to mentoring and developing multiple OCs and chapter leaders during his term, in addition to making himself available to chapters and leaders across the country during the budget crisis. Our NPC members committed to strong leadership by being unafraid to open themselves up to difficult questions and criticism even during the most heightened moments of the past two years.

However, we have not made a formal mechanism to regularly connect chapter leadership with NPC members. With over 200 chapters and OCs, many DSA locals still lack strong connections to other chapters or the national organization. While this remains an unsolved problem, it’s one that leaders across the organization recognize and are attempting to resolve in various ways. A Red Star proposal early in the term to have NPC members speak to chapters about signing up for Solidarity Dues had mixed success with adoption. We appreciated the resolution authored by Bread & Roses and Marxist Unity Group NPC members to have NPC-hosted national discussion circles for mass member input on our orientation to the 2024 presidential election – and its iteration into the Member Input Policy plank of the Democracy Commission proposal, regardless of our other concerns with the larger omnibus package. We’ve also seen a lot of success stories from the quarterly GDC National Leadership Intensives, which have brought together hundreds of chapter leaders the last two years for trainings and learning from one another.

Looking ahead to next term, we see a lot of potential for a revamped and more active GDC to play a larger role in building out these connections, including coordinating more closely with field organizers to further experiment with the format of monthly regional calls for chapter leaders – making them more deliberative and evaluative, with the goal of facilitating opportunities for chapter leaders to connect with and learn from each other as much as possible. To this extent, we will also prioritize holding more in-person regional organizing retreats.

While we believe strongly in making the NPC more available to chapters, we disagree with proposals directing NPC members to liaise with every chapter. We have seen this term that many NPC members (including our own at times) struggle to keep up with their existing responsibilities to liaise with national committees, or are sometimes entirely absent. We see similar issues occurring with chapters, and additional political concerns with each chapter having only a single NPC point of contact. Such proposals also punt on addressing the shared consensus within DSA that we need to build out the missing middle layer of leadership, instead doubling down on our existing reliance on “Super Organizers” and discouraging the delegation needed to develop new leadership at scale.

Instead, we plan to continue distributing the responsibility of supporting chapters throughout the national organization, and building many touchpoints for connecting chapters to national. We are also excited about the potential of proposals like the International Committee consensus resolution call to more closely integrate chapter internationalism bodies into the national committee. The GNDCC’s chapter support model – bringing in successful chapter campaign leaders, working to establish shareable best practices, connecting chapters with other chapters doing similar work, and providing direct support – also presents successes and lessons for other national bodies to learn from, regardless of its closed committee structure. We look forward to supporting these and other national bodies next term as they continue to experiment with tactics for building stronger connective tissue between chapter- and national-level organizing.

Addressing DSA’s Grievance Process

– Matt N

8. I will address the major deficiencies of the current structure and function of DSA’s Grievance and Harassment Policy, including by finding a solution for Grievance work that involves eliminating the organization’s relationship with PB Work Solutions.

This term saw the introduction of the National Grievance Panel, a functional replacement to the previous National Harassment and Grievance Officer. This was an essential part of the leadership pledge, returning the oversight of the grievance process to members rather than an unaccountable staff position contracted for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The National Grievance Panel design was imperfect, and has been imperfectly implemented: its original design for two NGP co-chairs has been neglected by the NPC after the body was convened, and the NGP has languished with only one co-chair to carry out its directives. Red Star has also not been able to serve as a liaison to grievance work due to our NPC members’ other competing responsibilities, a lack that has prevented us from having oversight on grievance work – unfortunately, there have been bigger priorities we’ve had to focus on handling on the NPC.

The Council of Grievance Officers’ revision of the grievance policy (CR08: Unified Grievance Policy at this year’s Convention) collects the many disparate pieces of what used to be DSA’s Resolution 33. The unamended resolution, while a necessary step forward for DSA’s grievance process in collecting all our grievance policies in one place, also crystallizes the current imperfect structures in place: staff serving as the front line for responding to grievances, exerting an enormous amount of control before members can ever take on their responsibility of addressing these grievances and issues of fellow members.

Our amendment (CR08-A02: For a Member-Led Grievance Response) establishes the NGP as the primary clearinghouse for this work, staffed with two co-chairs who are the front-line responders. We are happy to see that this amendment qualified for the proposed consent agenda alongside two other amendments to CR08.

Next term we will prioritize having one of our NPC members serve as a liaison to grievance work, pushing for greater oversight and accountability in a key area of internal work. There are many other revisions that the grievance policy will need in the coming years, but these are important steps forward that will lay the foundation for future revisions led fully by membership.

Addressing DSA’s Budget Crisis

– Shane K and John L

9. I will commit to leading the way for our org to remain independent and member-funded even as we approach a significant budgetary crisis. I will spend no fewer than 2 hours per week on dedicated fundraising work which is strategically agreed-upon by our development/fundraising staff and the NPC body itself in order to help close our deficit and build toward a more sustainable future.

Budgeting and Looking Back

We came into this NPC term in the midst of a serious organizational budget crisis. As previously flagged by both DSA staff and the outgoing Budget and Finance Committee, DSA was rapidly nearing our six-month required reserves, had not had a finance director in place for several months, and faced a projected potential deficit of over $2 million for 2024. The Budget & Finance Committee, established after previous crises that led to near-total staff layoffs in the early 2000s, had not met since June 2023.

From the outset of the term, Red Star recognized that dealing with the organization’s financial issues would take a lot of time and energy to figure out. Sam HL became Fundraising Committee Chair, and John L stepped into the role of Treasurer in the hopes of digging DSA out of this hole and righting DSA’s finances. Alongside Shane K (who joined B&F as a member and eventually became committee co-chair), he dedicated substantial time throughout the term to working with finance staff and committee members to clean up our books, complete overdue audits, and begin drafting and implementing long-overdue budgeting and spending policies. Throughout this crisis, our finance staff worked tirelessly under immense pressure to stabilize our systems, correct years of backlogged accounting, and provide what clarity they could. Their dedication was essential to preventing total financial collapse.

We did not realize exactly how disorganized and out of date our financial records were until we began this work in earnest. Much of the investigation and cleanup we did of DSA’s books had to happen at the same time that the NPC had to make difficult decisions about budget priorities within DSA, including major cuts and layoffs. This led to a lot of frustration: we could not always give the clear and up to date information we wanted while we were in the deepest parts of the budgeting and layoff process. Even now, we struggle to get timely financial updates to the NPC and membership because we are still catching up on foundational financial tasks.

At the outset of the term, several outgoing directors privately told the NPC that layoffs would be needed to keep the organization solvent, and urged them to move quickly. We agreed with them and believed that delays or “waiting and seeing” on cuts would deepen the deficit. As national co-chair, treasurer, and fundraising chair, Red Star’s three NPC members took the lead on the budgeting and layoff process.

Throughout this process, we took significant heat and even organized pressure campaigns from nearly every caucus and tendency within DSA to protect areas of spending. At the same time, the approach taken by the Socialist Majority Caucus and Groundwork NPC members, particularly in coordination with the staff union during negotiations, was not helpful in advancing the NPC’s efforts to reach a sustainable agreement, and public statements by members of the Bread and Roses Caucus questioning the value of specific departments and even staffers contributed to serious hostility from the earliest part of the process. These combined actions often escalated tensions and undermined the collective decision-making process, making an already difficult situation more challenging.

Ultimately, we believe that we came to an appropriate place with where the organization was at the time. The cuts we made were difficult and both politically and personally fraught for all involved, most of all our staff themselves. While these decisions were not made lightly, we recognize how hard this period was for those affected and wish the situation had been different. We never ever want to go through this again. This is why we’ve prioritized building systems that ensure clean, up-to-date financial reporting accessible to staff, the NPC, and members heading into Convention and beyond.

Together, we implemented critical foundational steps: regular financial reporting, the development of formal policy documents, and support for staff in catching up on essential financial tasks. These efforts helped restore much-needed accountability and clarity to our financial processes:

Regular monthly and quarterly updates provided to the NPC and members via the Forums
Tightening up fundraising, hiring, expense and budgetary processes so they are clear and allow for long term financial management
Collecting existing financial policy and drafting new policy so the organization can be guided towards long-term solvency
Breaking away from a two-year cycle of boom and bust fiscal management into steady long-term and multi-term financial management
More frequent and more descriptive financial reports from the Budget & Finance Committee and support for finance staff in doing the same, including the posting of the 2024 written budget report, shared with members as early as possible
The development of an updated cost-out process for the 2025 Convention, spearheaded by Red Star members in the Budget & Finance Committee, to help delegates understand the financial and organizational impact of resolutions and make more informed, prioritized decisions at Convention

The new cost-out system is particularly important because it doesn’t just give members better tools for understanding the requirements for the proposals they will be voting on; it also gives committee members, staff, and resolution drafters the opportunity to review and discuss what implementation would actually require. This process creates space to build a shared understanding of what each resolution means in practice, and what kind of resources (staffing, time, funding) it would take to execute.

This is a big first step towards prioritized decision making at Conventions, and we hope to build on that with our amendment R44-A01: For a Member-Guided Budgeting Process. We believe this improved process reflects a step forward in our ability to govern democratically and responsibly, especially after a year when we were too often reacting to crises rather than planning ahead.

Fundraising and Looking Forward

As Fundraising Committee Chair, Sam helped recruit new members to participate in fundraising work for DSA after having open committee applications for the first time in recent memory. This included supporting member-leaders in providing branding for DSA’s Choose Solidarity, Build DSA campaign, which was run in partnership with the Growth and Development Committee, organizing one-time donation phone banks, providing member oversight to the work of DSA’s new Development Director, and preparing for DSA’s National Convention fundraiser by organizing an auction and paddle raiser event. Red Star NPC members were among the most frequent phone bankers for Solidarity Income Based Dues.

Despite many NPC members committing to spending no fewer than 2 hours per week on dedicated fundraising work, finding NPC attention for this work was difficult throughout the term. Asking NPC members to work through lists of rank and file members was an ask that was often not met with a lot of follow-through. We suspect that this is partially because it’s not clear what the value added from NPC members was compared to other member volunteers who may have had fewer demands on their time. We still need to find the best ways for NPC members to participate in fundraising in a way that is uniquely suited to NPC members as political leaders and representatives of tendencies within DSA.

While we are proud of the work we’ve done toward stabilizing the organization’s finances, these measures are not what ultimately pulled DSA out of the budget crisis. Our recovery was driven primarily by a dramatic surge in membership following Trump’s election. This political moment sparked an unprecedented wave of grassroots mobilization—and with it, a flood of new members paying dues. Looking at the data from 2023 through 2024, the trend is unmistakable: dues income steadily climbed starting in late 2023 and continued to rise throughout 2024, peaking dramatically in November 2024 with a single-month total of $601,492 in combined dues.

This upward trajectory has laid the foundation for a projected 2025 income of $1.4 million over 2024. However, we have been in the same position before – after the Bernie bumps of 2016 and 2020. We cannot make the same mistakes as we have in the past. We plan to take full advantage of this more secure footing and not repeat the mistakes of overcommitting our finances that led us to the previous crisis.

We should not, as National Co-Chair and former Treasurer Ashik S. suggested during a recent meeting to set the 2025 Convention Agenda, fall into the trap of thinking that because we are in a better place now, we can return to business as usual, or worse, resume unfocused spending that lacks long-term planning. We still have serious financial obligations: staff raises are coming due next year, the organization has been operating without a National Director (or Chief of Staff equivalent), and general costs continue to rise (and stable expendable income among our membership is likely to fall) as the country and world experience mass inflation and increasing economic hardship. We are at a precarious time, and need to be planning for our financial sustainability. This is why we have brought the amendment R44-A01 and will be supporting the amended resolution – it creates the kind of structural, sustainable framework we desperately needed during the chaos of 2024.

For a Member-Guided Budgeting Process

In 2025, this will allow us to scale responsibly – increasing staff capacity when our dues income supports it, while ensuring we don’t overextend ourselves again. Current numbers would support additional hires for DSA in 2025. Current personnel payroll and benefits are 36% of dues income; however, this includes the two co-chair salaries, which would be excluded from the staff calculator under the proposed amendment calculation of staff expenses, opening up more space for bringing on additional staff under the cap. After excluding the co-chairs, personnel salary and benefits are 32%. This means we could, under the calculation of the amendment, take on additional salaries up to $562,946 and stay within the 40% cap of total dues. That is 3-5 new staffers under current projections. The amended resolution also allows for up to an additional 20% of income to go to paid full-time political leadership; for example, following through on the 2023 Convention resolution to pay 2 full-time NLC co-chairs to further our labor work.

Under this system, if recurring dues income continues to grow (as it has since late 2023), then DSA can safely hire more staff, up to a cap of 40% of recurring dues (50% before triggering a hiring freeze). More importantly, this amendment makes democratic budgeting at Convention actually doable. Instead of drowning in spreadsheets and technical line items, delegates will be able to debate and decide meaningful priorities, like how much should go toward organizing, communications, or chapter grants, within defined spending categories. This ensures that the Convention sets real political guardrails without trying to micromanage every line of the budget.

We believe this policy will set the table to allow us to make smarter determinations of other places to direct our spending, particularly toward increasing direct funding to chapters via the dues share and grant programs. Our amendment prioritizes that when the staffing caps are met, we can prioritize increased spending towards chapters in a responsible and sustainable way.

We’ve seen what happens when we try to govern without these tools: we end up in drawn-out budget crises and arguments about priorities, making painful cuts across the board because we lack clarity, accountability, and foresight. This amended resolution gives us the tools to avoid repeating that cycle. By anchoring our spending to our actual income, building in flexibility, and centering democratic participation, this resolution doesn’t just prevent future financial disasters, it strengthens our ability to govern as a socialist organization rooted in transparency, sustainability, and member power.

Further Discussion

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