The Long-Time Organizer Leading a New Wave of Rural Organizing

Evans is an organizer with Addition, a nonprofit founded in 2022 by George Goehl, the author of the Substack The Fundamentals of Organizing and the former executive director of People’s Action, a network of of 40 political organizations active in 30 states.

Goehl got his start as an organizer in Indianapolis in 1994 working with Evans, whom he credits as being “the first to share there was a methodology to organizing.” According to its website, Addition’s organizing philosophy is straightforward: “Launch new projects to reach more working class people,” “Train people to organize (and do it well)” and “Engage in storytelling that challenges narratives that write off people and places.”

Barn Raiser spoke to Evans about what he was hoping to accomplish through his work in rural Michigan.

Tell us a bit about your background. What led you to become a community organizer?

I grew up on a farm in northern Indiana. I’m a kid of the ’60s, and it was hard not to become radicalized if you were paying attention to the culture and the change that was going on, even from a farm in northern Indiana.

I come out of the Chicago School of Organizing. I was taught by Shel Trapp and people in National People’s Action. Their philosophy is to move very quickly. You meet people through door knocking or other processes, and then move them quickly into meetings, making decisions, identifying a problem and organizing directly towards a win.

What we do in rural organizing nowadays is more professional. We do the power analysis before we move to action. The people I currently organize understand that they’re oppressed, but they don’t understand exactly why. People understand that they are not getting a fair shake. They just have never been given the tools or the language to deal with it. 

The idea is that you talk to people, understand what they care about the most, and really listen. Don’t listen to confirm. Listen to what people are telling you.

Talk about the organizing you were doing recently in rural counties in southern Michigan.

Two years ago, I started organizing in Three Rivers, Michigan. I heard directly from people about the quality of their water. And the water was in terrible, terrible shape. It was saturated with lead.

The research we did showed that the whole municipal water system probably needed to be replaced. That was a $200 million proposition. There was no way that could be done. But the lead levels could be reduced significantly by replacing the lead service lines that took the water into people’s homes. The local government in Three Rivers would not even recognize there was a problem. They suggested that we were overreacting, and maybe they’d wait for another round of tests to find out if really there was that much lead in the water.

In August of 2023, there was an order from the Michigan State Environmental Agency to stop drinking the water. That really shook people up.

We engaged in a group of public meetings. We organized three nights of incredible public testimony over four months, where lots and lots of people came out to talk about their experiences. And just like in Flint, Michigan, people brought those samples of tap water that looked a lot like murky tea.

It was an amazing thing. Following the fundamentals of organizing, we built and built and built towards our specific demand— to remove and replace those lead lines. The city signed a consent decree with the EPA to accelerate the removal of all those lines. Three Rivers is now applying to get almost $12 million from the state of Michigan to finish the project quickly. So we will see whether this has been a significant win for the community, if in fact those lines start to get replaced.

Did that victory help change the political climate in Three Rivers?

The 70 or 80 people that participated in that campaign tasted for the first time a community victory. And that’s very, very important. We not only want to make substantial changes as organizers—we want people to get a sense of their own power. That’s something that’s a fundamental of organizing, whether you’re working in an urban area or a rural area.

I could get past cultural and political barriers by talking to people about their specific experience, the fact they knew that their water was bad, and that their local government wasn’t responding.

I met deeply conservative people as well as deeply radical and liberal folks. Many of them worked together on this. We won’t know for a time whether those kinds of connections will strengthen the community. But I certainly think so. When people work together across differences it’s good for the community.

How do you bridge those divides in rural communities?

I work very carefully to be nonpartisan, but we know the political context and the partisan context that’s happening right now.

One important difference in rural organizing versus urban organizing is the low population density in rural areas. We’re really committed in these Republican communities to reaching larger and larger groups. I don’t have enough time to do one-on-ones with everybody, but I still base a lot of my work on one-on-one conversations.

My goal is to find people who are anchors—someone whose experiences reflect that of dozens, maybe 100 or 200 other people who are like them—so that I can judge what I should be working on.

For instance, one woman who spoke at our town hall on Social Security cuts is a Stage 4 cancer victim, and she received Social Security disability. That’s the only thing that allows her to stay in her home while she’s going through complicated surgeries and chemotherapy. It’s very critical for her.

Another woman is 78 and her only income is Social Security. For a lot of seniors, 80% or 90% of their income is Social Security. She owns her home now and she’s frightened that even one missed payment is going to cause problems.

In organizing, we try to operate in an area of anger, but we don’t want it to be a hot anger or out of fear. We want to be kind of a cold anger. But this environment right now is generating emotions of extreme resentment and anger.

What are people’s first reactions about getting involved in this work, especially if they haven’t been politically active before? How do you make the proposition to get involved in public life?

I would say the vast majority, well over 80%, of the people I meet have never been involved in any kind of political activity.

They haven’t gone to precinct meetings or to city hall or even signed a petition before. Quite often they won’t sign a petition the first time I talk to them. But I can begin to understand if this person will talk to me again.

What long-term organizing infrastructure are you trying to build?

I’m focusing right here in Michigan’s 4th Congressional District, which includes Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, two small Rust Belt cities, and about 18 rural towns, looking at it and talking to people who understand the national congressional races. This is potentially a swing district. We’re reaching out to other advocacy organizations like Indivisible and other groups to build permanent networks where we are and if nothing else, providing information to people in real time.

Several of us organizers attended a webinar that Bernie Sanders held about two months ago that was attended by 3,000 people. We were able to connect with 18 other people on the call who are from this congressional district. I made the phone calls, meet with people individually, and they were very, very interested in organizing. With those 18 people we began to work on senior issues.

We took a group of people that were politically interested and moved them into action. As an organizer, when we do town halls, I’m encouraging other people to do most of the tasks. I’m showing them how to do it. It’s like coaching somebody riding a bicycle for the first time.

We only had 17 days to help a complete group of strangers to put on their first town hall. Having never done organizing before, these people were able to take this on and be successful.

On June 17, we had a Medicaid for All town hall here in Kalamazoo. About 130 people showed up. These are real town halls—I want to stress this. These aren’t the public relation events that some congressional representatives right now are holding, pretending to be town halls. These are forums in which people can speak and ask questions. And we try to have experts there to answer their questions.

In our group of about 140 people that came to our meeting in Kalamazoo, we identified about 30 people who were Republicans. We ran a very respectful meeting, a nonpartisan meeting, and they were not upset by what they were hearing from the people talking.

Several spoke up about the need for some kind of coalition between conservatives and liberals at this time, because we are all in the same kind of barrel together.

We have two town halls coming up, one in Paw Paw on August 4, and then one in Battle Creek on August 26. We’ve invited our congressman Bill Huizenga (R). He probably will not attend, but he has four democratic challengers who are planning to attend. And we’re going to be giving them equal time to speak, but the bulk of this meeting is going to be questions and opinions from people who come.

That is the encouragement I have as a community organizer. I see people more motivated now than ever before. And almost all the people I’ve worked with are age 55 or above, only a handful are younger.

It’s so gratifying to see older people willing to take their time and learn something new like community organizing. Because this is a little bit beyond activism. We are really committed to making the relationships, changing relationships of power and building power among this group of people.

If we’re going to have small “d” democracy, we have to have more and more people in these kinds of forums, not isolated individuals, but folks that have been organized to come in and share their ideas.

How are people responding to the Republican’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which, among other things, slashes both Medicaid and food assistance through SNAP?

This is a terrible bill. It’s going to hurt lots of people. In Michigan, 2.6 million folks are on Medicaid. The rationale for these changes, like work requirements, is that we have to get these lazy people working. As we dig into the figures, 92% of all Medicaid recipients in Michigan are already working. Now, those are low-paid jobs, those are part-time jobs. These folks are trying to connect with the market system. A lot of working people are going to be hurt by these new Medicaid rules and the monthly employment reports they have to file.

The two big impacts are on nursing homes for low-income people that rely on Medicaid support, and also the smaller rural grocery stores—and chains like Save-A-Lot—that get up to 30% of their monthly income from SNAP. If there are significant reductions in this food assistance, then we’re going to have smaller grocery stores going out of business. That creates even more food deserts.

It’s clear that these kinds of changes will hurt senior citizens. It’s  going to ripple throughout society.

And it’s going to hurt adults who are caring for senior citizens as well as the sandwich generation—adults right now who have parents they care for and children that aren’t fully raised. It’s going to put tremendous, tremendous pressure on people. Our concern is that not everyone sees this.

Those of us who read the news and who are politically active, know that after the 2026 election, there’s going to be a tsunami of change coming when many of these cuts take effect. We’re happy that we reached 100 to 150 people per town hall, but it’s clear we have to begin developing campaigns where we’re reaching thousands of people, particularly the people that are going to be impacted by these changes. There are 750,000 people in our congressional district.

The Republican Bill Huizinga won last time, by 50,000 votes.

Democrats, to their credit, understand just how treacherous these cuts are going to be to their constituents.

How have the people you’ve been talking to in rural areas of the district reacted to these cuts?

Overwhelmingly negative. When we talk to people and they learn about what’s going on, 70 to 80% of folks are against these changes because these cuts are going to impact themselves, their families and their communities. The folks on the ground are very, very concerned about hunger, food insecurity and falling income. The cost of living is really going up. Grocery store prices, utilities and rents are out of control. Senior citizens that I’ve talked with have had their rents go from the $600 to the $900 this year.

A lot of them had to scramble to find much worse accommodations. Some of them will simply be paying more and eating less.

We need affordable senior housing, and we have to solve the problem of senior hunger. Because a large number of seniors in Michigan are working-class people and poor people. We’ve had a downturn in our economy here over the last 30 years. This used to be part of the bustling manufacturing area in Michigan. The towns here had factories that served Detroit at its peak for almost 40 years. This was the income for this district.

That’s long gone. What we have now are service jobs. And we have state preemption laws—laws passed by Democrats in Lansing—that don’t allow us to do any local rent control or to have any local minimum wage laws to raise the wages of people.

We’re caught between the federal cuts and state regulations that don’t allow us to do local decision-making. As a regular American, I’m not really happy with Michigan Democrats.

What is your philosophy for organizing at a local scale?

At a local scale, it’s about this idea of meeting strangers, listening to them and understanding how they tick. Again, not just listening to confirm your own ideas, but listening for what they care about the most.

You may understand that there’s a much larger problem, but there may be a smaller portion of the problem that they really, really care about. At the same time, we’re experimenting with ways to knit together larger networks of folks. We’ve done some snail mail mailings, a thousand people at a time.

We’ve tried to do petitions online. We’ve done surveys. Now we’re doing radio ads and Facebook ads.

I still believe you have to start with people and start where they’re at. You need to be honest with yourself, but don’t judge and don’t argue.

You build the relationship before you start sharing how you think. They might think I’m a real dingbat. I am in some ways radical, but I also want to raise their awareness about the contradictions of our system.

How can you have a system of capitalism when large numbers of people have no access to the two primary things that capitalism brings: property and liquid wealth? There’s clearly so much monopoly control of industry and so much structural inequality. But if people don’t know that, you can’t bore them to death with your analysis. Only once people get a sense of their own power, then they begin looking for themselves and doing some of their own research.

I’ve seen it again and again.

I think the future of organizing is going to be largely in rural areas because we can make that difference. Have you heard of Jane Kleeb? She’s now the president of the Association of State Democratic Committees and a vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee. She started out doing rural organizing in Nebraska.

Watching what she did by starting with organizing farmers and Native communities to stopping the Keystone XL pipeline, that was a form of community organizing. And she really believed in organizing locally, starting with two people and building up to 50.

And when you have 50, you move and try and build to 100. When I think about what we need to do in rural organizing, it’s going to be a lot like that.

What advice might you give to young organizers today?

A lot of people, especially younger people today, base their model of social change in a kind of activist idealism. They believe that if they have the right slogan, the right pamphlet, the right bumper sticker, they’re going to bring together people who believe like they do.

But if we’re going to be effective, we have to actively build networks not just among the people we get along with, but with people who may not think as we do. These are people who may not agree with us on some things, but they do agree on other things, and they are willing to work with us.

We have to have that tension because if we’re going to have thousands of people working together, we’re going to have different opinions on different kinds of cultural and political issues. But if we have relationships with each other, we should be able to build the capacity and the numbers of people that we want. That takes intention.

And you only do that by carefully building relationships.

Are you optimistic?

Yes, I am. The fundamentals of organizing have worked my entire life in urban areas, and I see the ways they’re beginning to unfold and work in rural areas as well. There was a great meeting on March 1 of this year in Lincoln County, Wisconsin, in the middle of nowhere, because they were concerned about the local county-owned nursing home Pine Crest.

Why are all these people in this big warehouse? Well, they have the same self-interest, don’t they? Their families and their parents are in these institutions.

They want to make sure that they remain good, that there’s Medicare money to care for their families. And I love that.

Joel BleifussMore by this author →

Joel Bleifuss is Barn Raiser Editor & Publisher and Board President of Barn Raising Media Inc. He is a descendent of German and Scottish farmers who immigrated to Wisconsin and South Dakota in the 19th Century. Bleifuss was born and raised in Fulton, Mo., a town on the edge of the Ozarks. He graduated from the University of Missouri in 1978 and got his start in journalism in 1983 at his hometown daily, the Fulton Sun. Bleifuss joined the staff of In These Times magazine in October 1986, stepping down as Editor & Publisher in April 2022, to join his fellow barn raisers in getting Barn Raiser off the ground.

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Justin Perkins is Barn Raiser Deputy Editor & Publisher and Board Clerk of Barn Raising Media Inc. He received his Master of Divinity degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School. The son of a hog farmer, he grew up in Papillion, Neb., and got his start as a writer with his hometown newspaper the Papillion Times, The Daily Nebraskan, Rural America In These Times and In These Times. He has previous editorial experience at Prairie Schooner and Image.