Meet Trish Adobea Tchume, our Sterling Network Organizer: Part Two

Editor’s Note: Last week we were pleased to bring you part one of our new Sterling Network Organizer Trish’s conversation with our communications consultant Elisabeth. Without further ado, here’s part two!

Elisabeth: We are all working so differently from "normal" these days. What challenges and opportunities have you faced in organizing a network amidst both a global pandemic and a pivotal time in the movement for racial justice in America? How can networks play a transformative role in times like these?

Trish: Psychologically, I think so many of us are still sort of operating in triage mode right now, and rightly so. While in many ways things have calmed down from the height of the pandemic, we still suffered the most deaths due to the virus by far of any state in the nation. People are still holding that trauma and will be for a long time. And it continues and will continue to have an impact on our economy and the way we live for a long time. So many people are suffering and the people who are feeling the pain of that suffering are disproportionately black and brown in this city.

You add to that the fact that the scourge of racism is front and center for us again as a nation and the fact that many of us feel under attack by our own government.

So there’s just not a lot of physical, emotional, or mental space for folks to do anything that doesn’t feel vital in this moment. And if we’re being honest, it’s so much easier and so much better to be building relationships and trying to develop shared understanding in person with each other. It’s hard to get on yet another Zoom call. So there’s a lot about this moment that doesn’t make it a great time to be a network organizer.

But what I come back to is the fact that we need spaces like this now more than ever.  Prison abolition, reparations, universal basic income – it takes imagination space to come up with ideas like this in the midst of our current structures. And it takes decentralized networks to push these ideas out into the mainstream – we saw this with Occupy. We see this with the Movement for Black lives.

The ideas that will help our fellow New Yorkers survive and thrive beyond this moment will be generated in spaces where folks have the opportunity to imagine something more radical than what they can conceive individually or organizationally. And the relationships that form in spaces like this are what can make those ideas a reality.  

Elisabeth: What developments/happenings with the network are you excited about? Where do you hope to see the network a year from now?

Trish: When I look at projects that are emerging like the Generative group and the Supporting Immigrant Workers group, I’m grateful for the impact the Sterling Network is already having on the city and hopeful for what more we could do to change the city for the better.

Take for example our Generative group. During our June convening, network members were expressing their anxiety not only about all the pending cuts to the city budget, but about all the ways their agencies would be pitted against each other during the budgeting process.  One network member, Emma Jordan-Simpson, wondered aloud how this network could encourage agencies to take a different view and approach to the budgeting process. She asked how this network could be instrumental in pointing to all the sources of revenue the city could be using to expand resources and create more abundance. She asked how this network could encourage their fellow agencies to not engage in the Hunger Games.  

We created space for this wish she spoke out loud and Fellows gathered around that idea and mapped out what it could look like. The idea developed into a speaker series where Fellows have tapped their connections to various experts that put the network in direct conversation with people trying innovative and targeted approaches to expanding city revenues and increasing community investment. Fellows from the group take turns reaching out to and tapping other Fellows to lead the conversations. The conversations help deepen the network’s shared analysis and expand the realm of possible approaches for the city of New York.

The network’s Supporting Immigrant Workers Group has taken an idea that emerged from a design sprint hosted in June by another Fellow, Dan McPhee, where several ideas emerged. But this one, to pilot a know-your-workplace-rights campaign for immigrant workers throughout the city, has really taken root. The project has taken shape around a collaboration between Michelle Flores, a Fellow who organizes immigrant workers, William Weisberg who runs Forrestdale (a large social service agency in the city with many immigrant clients), and Rose DeStefano, another Fellow whose work is in collective impact and is very thoughtful about program development.  

They took the problem of immigrant worker exploitation, especially during this time of COVID-19, and developed a know-your-rights training and print materials campaign that could be piloted at Forrestdale first, then possibly expanded to other organizations within the network, with hopes of then expanding citywide. In an ideal network, according to my learnings from Movement NetLab, “many people are identifying opportunities, pulling together the people and resources, and taking action that has impact.” The Supporting Immigrant Workers group is such a great example of seeding that type of action. I love that with this project, no one person has to understand how this whole thing is going to work and it doesn’t have to be a fully-formed, full-blown program in order for us to try it out. The network provides a great space for folks to offer the seed of a solution for something that they see as a much bigger problem in the city and test out those solutions in trusted spaces. 

In the case of the Generative group, so many transformative ideas begin with a rumble in our gut that something’s just not right and doesn’t need to be this way.  When you read the story of the beginnings of Black Lives Matter, you always hear that the idea wasn’t to begin a global movement. Patrisse hashtagged a post from Alicia with a phrase that was in her heart, and Opal and Alicia heard her, resonated with and amplified the phrase. That idea had enough resonance to spark BLM chapters all over the country, the Ferguson rides which evolved into the Movement for Black Lives. Obviously not every idea becomes a global movement but networks are the fertile ground where those kinds of seeds can take root. I’ve seen it happen and the promise of that keeps me committed to the potential of groups like the Sterling Network!