I draw on decades of grassroots organizing experience and deep connections to national networks of power-building organizations, all focused on cultivating local leadership to drive the work. I have helped shape organizations and coalitions that honor the best traditions of old-school community organizing while equipping them with the most relevant tools for building power today: issue expertise, communications, research, policy, legislation, and political strategy.
The following drop down items are just a few selections which speak to the Nephesh in organizing and which inspire the art and science of community organizing. They are a few quotes from the body of inspiration which forms the underpinning framework and philosophy of the model of organizing in which I come from. .
My consulting practice was founded to support leaders, organizations, and movements committed to building real grassroots leadership and power. I specialize in training, strategy, and consulting rooted in the guiding principles of community organizing and in the inspiration of the term Nephesh. Wherein organizing is not only technical and cerebral, it is the soul and life force for purpose in organizing.
In this tradition, nephesh is invoked during one-on-one relational meetings, leadership formation, and public actions, reminding organizers that their work is not just technical, but spiritual.
In the context of faith-rooted organizing, particularly as practiced by leaders like Jose Carrasco within the PICO National Network (now Faith in Action), nephesh is not just a biblical term, it’s a guiding principle. Drawing from its Hebrew roots, nephesh means “soul,” “life-force,” or “breath”, “the living soul” according to some thinkers, the animating essence of a person or community. Students of this organizing lineage have deepened this definition by connecting it to the spiritual and relational dimensions of organizing:
Nephesh is the sacred core of leadership: the part of us that dreams, aches, and imagines beyond what is.
It’s the breath of prophetic imagination, the moral clarity that fuels human action, leadership, & movements for justice.
It’s the relational energy that binds people to one another, to their communities, and to their divine.
This approach transforms organizing from transactional to transformational: rooted in values, relationships, and the sacredness of struggle.
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Values without power is fantasy
Power seeks its own level, it only makes room for itself
The Golden Rule: Those who got the gold make the rules
Self interest is like a fine piece of pie crust. You can almost see right through it, the good stuff is underneath.
The truth is so important, it’s usually accompanied by a bodyguard of lies
A person’s inaction is compensated with rhetoric
1-1’s are the highest form of action
When in doubt, caucus
1-1’s are the first skill we learn and the last we truly master. Yet they are often the first practice we abandon when we dilute ourselves in the overconfidence of power or status. Illusions begin, we start confusing things, thinking we are something that we’re not. Then we look back at ourselves and think how stupid we were to think in such small ways about power. We tell ourselves, we are so much smarter now about power. Meanwhile, the ranch burns behind us as we defend it to our deaths.
That’s how you learn
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Your issues don’t justify your existence in the public arena. The only thing that justifies your existence is your values.
Self interest and values are the two faces to a double sided coin.
Who do you love?
Power destroys those who expend it without measure. Conversely, it destroys those obligated to exercise it and who prefer to steer clear of it. - Enrique Krauze
Today’s enemy= Tomorrow’s ally
Power can reward or punish
I have always thought that what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership in others. - Ella Baker
There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. - Ella Baker
Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it.- Ella Baker
You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders. - Ella Baker
Turn a negative into a positive.
Power: Good intentions are not enough.
The kingdom of God is not just words, its power. -1 Corinthians 4:20
The business of power is never personal. It’s business. Treat it that way.
Power is nothing like people. Power is more like a candle in the dark, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is.
Freedom is expensive, but the price is not impossible to pay. —Don Juan
Consider the power of wrestling your ally. His will is to kill you. He has nothing against you. -Lorna Dee Cervantes
Organizing is like poetry, if not poetry itself. It is simply an ability.
If you have lemons, make lemonade. Take stock of what you have and use it well. We say all the time in our organizing process
“Listen-Learn-Act-Reflect”. An initial crucial step, one often not taught, is first to Look. See what is there. See with beginner eyes what others can't see, and then build off that. Don't arrive and see gaps. Arrive and see potential. See capacity first. And that takes time. - Kevin Malone
Relationships lead to power. Activity leads to issues.
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Beware good luck, and delicious chestnuts: “Fattening hogs consider themselves fortunate”
“There are two situations for every human being. The first is the solitude we feel when we are born. Our first situation is that of orphanhood, and it is only later that we discover the opposite, filial attachment. The second is that because we are thrown, as Heidegger says, into this world, we feel we must find what the Buddhists call “the other share.” This is the thirst for community. I think philosophy and religion derive from this original situation or predicament. Every country and every individual tries to resolve it in different ways. Poetry is a bridge between solitude and communion. Communion, even for a mystic like Saint John of the Cross, can never be absolute. - Octavio Paz
The question posed at the beginning- How many and what kind of people read poems?—is inevitably bound up with the question of the survival of poetry in the modern world. And that question, in turn, is bound up with one of greater urgency and graver import: the survival of humanity itself. The poem, founded on the relationship of the elements, forms, and creatures of the universe, is a model of survival. Hugo said it in a magnificent phrase: Tout chercheout, sans but, sans trêve, sans repos-Everything seeks everything, without purpose, without end, without cease. The relationship between man and poetry is as old as our history: it began when human beings began to be human. The first hunters and gatherers looked at themselves in astonishment one day, for an interminable instant, in the still waters of a poem. Since that moment, people have not stopped looking at themselves in this mirror. And they have seen themselves, at one and the same time, as creators of images and as images of their creations. For that reason I can say, with a modicum of certainty, that as long as there are people, there will be poetry. The relationship, however, may be broken. Born of the human imagination, it may die if imagination dies or is corrupted. If human beings forget poetry, they will forget themselves. And return to original chaos. - Octavio Paz: MEXICO CITY, DECEMBER 1, 1989
Only poetry isn’t shit. - Roberto Bolaño
One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. - Roberto Bolaño
The American mirror, said the voice, the sad American mirror of wealth and poverty and constant useless metamorphosis, the mirror that sails and whose sails are pain.
—Roberto BolañoNothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better. - Roberto Bolaño
Of all the islands he'd visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another. - Roberto Bolaño
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“Acts have power. Especially when the warrior acting knows that those acts are your last battle. There is a strange consuming happiness in acting with the full knowledge that whatever you are doing may very well be your last act on earth.”
“The trick is what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”
“In a world where death is the hunter, my friend, there is no time for regrets or doubts. There is only time for decisions.”
“To seek freedom is the only driving force I know. Freedom to fly off into that infinity out there. Freedom to dissolve; to lift off; to be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.
“A person goes to knowledge as they go to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it”
“The dying sun will glow on you without burning, as it has done today. The wind will be soft and mellow and your hilltop will tremble. As you reach the end of your dance you will look at the sun, for you will never see it again in waking or in dreaming, and then your death will point to the south. To the vastness.”
“All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. ... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.”
“Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you're about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you're wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch. Your death will tell you, 'I haven't touched you yet.”
“Don Juan told me that, from the moment when the explosion which gave us origin occurred, until the moment of our death, we live within a flow. And what aligns us with that flow? An incessant battle, which only a warrior will attempt. Because of that, a warrior lives in profound harmony with everything.”
“Discipline, as understood by a warrior, is creative, open, and produces freedom. It is the ability to face the unknown, transforming the feeling of knowing into reverent astonishment; of considering things that exceed the scope of our habits, and daring to face the only war that is worthwhile: The battle for awareness.
“Nothing in this world is a gift. Whatever has to be learned must be learned the hard way.”
“A warrior has four natural enemies: fear, clarity, power, and old age. Fear, clarity, and power can be overcome, but not old age. Its effect can be postponed, but it can never be overcome.”
“To be angry at people means that one considers their acts to be important. It is imperative to cease to feel that way. The acts of people cannot be important enough to offset our only viable alternative: our unchangeable encounter with infinity.”
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The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe, even a positivist one, remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of human beings in their wholeness in a coherent picture of the world. I hope I shall persuade..that such an attempt is possible, and that the preservation of courage and the joy of action in those of us who wish, and know how, to plumb the depths of things, depend on it… In such a vision human beings will be seen not as a static centre of the world, as they long believed themselves to be, but as the axis and leading shoot of evolution, which is something much finer.
“In the beginning was Power, intelligent, loving, energizing. In the beginning was the Word, supremely capable of mastering and moulding whatever might come into being in the world of matter. In the beginning there were not coldness and darkness: there was the Fire. This is the truth.
“So, far from light emerging gradually out of the womb of our darkness, it is the Light, existing before all else was made which, patiently, surely, eliminates our darkness. As for us creatures, of ourselves we are but emptiness and obscurity. But you, …, are the inmost depths, the stability of that eternal milieu, without duration or space, in which our cosmos emerges gradually into being and grows gradually to its final completeness, as it loses those boundaries which to our eyes seem so immense. Everything is being; everywhere there is being and nothing but being, save in the fragmentation of creatures and the clash of their atoms.”
“The future, is finer than all the past”.
“Love is the most universal, the most tremendous, and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy, it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.”
“One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing , if not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united (in relationship), and this sums up and is the very conclusion..of my work. But unity (a unifying relationship) grows, and we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more... To try to see more and to see better is not, therefore, just a fantasy, curiosity, or a luxury. See or perish. This is the situation imposed on every element of the universe by the mysterious gift of existence. And thus, to a higher degree, this is the human condition.”
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EPMD albums to quote: Strictly Business, Unfinished Business, Business As Usual, Business Never Personal.
“The job of resurrectors is to wake up the dead” - A Tribe Called Quest
They never grow old, techniques become antiques/Better than something brand new ‘cause it’s real/And in a while the style’ll have much more value - Eric B & Rakim, Don’t Sweat The Technique
Don't burn down the bridges that brought you across. Don't burn down the bridges you don't have to burn down. - Gladys Knight & The Pips, Don’t Burn Down The Bridges
It be’s that way sometimes. - Nina Simone
You've got to learn to hide your tears and tell your heart life must go on. You've got to learn to leave the table when love's no longer being served, to show everybody that you're able to leave without saying a word. You've got to learn to hide your sorrow and go on living as before. What good is thinking of tomorrow, who knows what it may have in store, you've got to learn to be much stronger at times. Your head must rule your heart. You've got to learn from hard experience and listen to advice and sometimes pay the price and learn to live with a broken heart. - Nina Simone, You’ve Got To Learn