Organize Your Community

A step-by-step blueprint for building organized power to fight for humane, nonprofit healthcare in your community.

Care, not profit, through aging, illness, and dying.

This is how we are building and organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area — and you can do the same in your community. What follows is our blueprint: the steps we are taking, the tools we are using, and the framework that guides us. Adapt it, make it your own, and join us in demanding care over profit everywhere.

This guide is drawn from health justice organizing frameworks, disability justice practices, and community power-building models.

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12 Steps to Organizing Your Community

Step 1: Clarify Purpose and Analysis

Define the problem locally. Ground your work in values and rights. Choose a concrete initial goal — stop a hospital closure, oppose a for-profit takeover, demand staffing ratios, or win a county resolution supporting nonprofit models.

Step 2: Map Your Community and Stakeholders

Identify who is most affected: low-income elders, disabled people, caregivers, communities of color. List power holders and potential allies: unions, disability justice groups, faith communities, senior organizations.

Step 3: Build a Core Organizing Team

Recruit 5–15 committed people. Set norms and structure: regular meetings, clear roles, decision rules. Center lived experience — people harmed by for-profit care should be in leadership.

Step 4: Listening and Story Collection

Hold listening sessions in churches, libraries, senior centers, and online. Document stories safely with consent. Connect personal stories to the system.

Step 5: Research Targets and Policy Landscape

Map the money and ownership. Identify leverage points: licensing bodies, state AG, Medicare/Medicaid regulators, local elected officials. Learn what public comment processes exist.

Step 6: Choose a Strategy and Clear Demands

Set a winnable first campaign. Draft specific demands: no closures without community approval, safe staffing ratios, community seats on hospital boards.

Step 7: Build a Broader Base

Use outreach near hospitals and clinics, senior housing, social media, op-eds, and tabling. Partner with unions, disability justice organizations, Long COVID groups, and faith congregations.

Step 8: Shape Narrative and Public Education

Core message: For-profit healthcare puts profit over patients — we demand care as a human right. Use story-based teach-ins, webinars, fact sheets, and short videos.

Step 9: Plan and Escalate Actions

Start with petitions, call-in days, letters to the editor. Escalate to town halls, marches, coordinated testimony at hearings. Protect participants.

Step 10: Engage Institutions Without Losing Independence

Work with public health agencies and nonprofits, but guard against co-optation. Push for structural change, not just advisory roles.

Step 11: Center Equity, Disability Justice, and Ethics

Prioritize those most harmed. Address race and class directly. Practice ethical storytelling — emphasize consent, dignity, and structural analysis.

Step 12: Evaluate, Learn, and Sustain

Track turnout, new leaders developed, media hits, and policy wins. Debrief after every action. Create governance structures that survive burnout and turnover.

Host a Teach-In

A teach-in is the right first move. Here is a 60–75 minute agenda you can adapt for churches, senior centers, and community spaces.

1. Welcome (5–10 min) — Share your story. Introduce: Care, not profit, through aging, illness, and dying.
2. Local Case (10–15 min) — Present a local case of for-profit harm.
3. Systemic Case (10–15 min) — Present a systemic case.
4. Connecting the Dots (10–15 min) — Discussion: What feels familiar?
5. Small-Group Sharing (15–20 min) — Groups of 3–5 with guiding questions.
6. Close with Invitation (10 min) — Political goal statement and next steps.

Strategic Framework: From Catalyst to Movement

Phase 1: Prepare the Ground

• Define the political goal clearly
• Build relationships with allied organizations
• Collect stories of elders and families harmed by for-profit care
• Develop campaign infrastructure

Phase 2: Identify and Seize the Catalyst Moment

The catalyst requires a morally unambiguous injustice — a real person, real place, real harm. It must be universally felt, morally stark, concrete, and already organized around.

Phase 3: Escalate to Structural Demand

• Use the catalyst story to dramatize the broader system
• Channel outrage into the structural demand: nonprofit universal care
• Build toward state single-payer bills, federal hospice reform, bans on private equity in healthcare

Your First 90 Days

1. Weeks 1–4: Form a core team of 8–10 people and agree on your first campaign target.
2. Weeks 4–8: Hold 3 listening sessions, collect 20 stories, publish an open letter.
3. Weeks 8–12: Build a coalition of 5–7 groups, launch a petition plus a town hall with local media.
4. Ongoing: Demand a public hearing, pack the room, coordinate testimony and press coverage.