How to Keep Organizers in the Movement: A Conversation with Immigration Organizer Tania Wolf

Tania Wolf has been organizing in the immigrant justice movement for nearly a decade—first at Make the Road New York, now in Louisiana supporting people inside immigration detention and their families. She came to this work the way a lot of children of immigrants do: not as a choice exactly, but as an extension of who she already was. Her parents migrated from Colombia and Ecuador and she grew up in Jamaica, Queens. 

When All Due Respect invited her to join the No Future Without Us cohort—a year-long research-to-action process to examine what’s driving immigration organizers out of the field and what it would actually take to keep them in it—she said yes immediately. She had just been laid off alongside 85 colleagues from a prominent Southern civil rights organization and she wanted to bring that experience into the room. What follows is an edited version of our conversation about the No Future Without Us compass, why the field keeps losing the people it needs most, and what it would take for that to actually change. 

Rebecca Gorena: You’ve been in this work long enough to have seen organizers leave, and you’ve considered leaving yourself. What gets lost when someone walks out the door that never shows up in any data? 

Tania Wolf: It’s the trust. An organizer spends months, sometimes years, building relationships to build a base. That’s how you get enough power to move a campaign. When that organizer leaves, they take with them the trust they earned—with community members, with partners, with everyone who knew them as the anchor person. A new organizer coming in doesn’t have that foundation. And right now, in a moment when people are hyper-surveilled and genuinely scared about who’s in the room with them, that matters more than ever. You can’t just transfer trust. It takes time, and time costs people. 

The other thing that doesn’t show up is the need for healing. When an organizer burns out, you’re not going to see that in a grant report. Nobody writes that so-and-so left because the grief of this work became too heavy to carry every day. But that’s the real story a lot of the time. I left after the first Trump administration because I was doing three jobs in one, and I just needed a shift. And I think that experience is pretty common. Living with grief and loss every day takes a toll on your body, and when organizations aren’t honest about that, what gets erased is the argument for investing in healing—in retreats, sabbaticals, wellness funds, actual rest.

And then there’s the toxic organizational culture piece. Most nonprofits are hierarchical, and the higher you go, the more removed you are from the people closest to the issue. Organizers are the ones talking every day with people who are living this reality. When funders or directors make decisions that don’t reflect that reality—decisions shaped by what a donor wants or what looks good in a report—and there’s no pathway for organizers to push back, people leave. That doesn’t show up in the data either. 

RG: The compass you helped create identifies six indicators for a sustainable immigration justice movement. Which ones felt most urgent to you, and which do you think the field is most resistant to actually acting on? 

TW: Two stand out. The first is organizer support and sustainability, which really means: are you paying people living wages? Are you including benefits, wellness compensation, actual material support? People push back on this because they immediately jump to “we need more money,” and that’s true, but it also requires organizations to look honestly at their own budgets. It’s not okay for a nonprofit executive director to be making $300,000 or $400,000 while organizers are making $58,000. Nobody wants to talk about that, but it’s part of the same conversation. When organizers have to organize their own workplace just to get basic compensation, on top of doing the actual movement work, that’s exhausting in a way that compounds everything else. 

The second is conflict accountability and oversight. Organizers are not immune to conflict—that’s just part of being human. But we often act like organizers should inherently know how to navigate disagreement and hold each other accountable, without ever being taught those skills. We come from different backgrounds, different cultures, different learned experiences. The compass takes a proactive approach to this, and I think that’s right. You can’t wait until things have already blown up. 

RG: The compass also addresses machismo, sexual violence, and NDAs in movement spaces directly. The allegations against César Chávez came out near the end of this process, and I know that shaped how we wrote that section. As a Latina woman who’s been in this work, what do you want people who’ve never experienced this inside an organization to understand about how it happens?

TW: It wasn’t surprising. That’s the first thing. It’s never surprising, because we live in a heteropatriarchal society, and the movement is not exempt from that. And as a Latina woman specifically, I can tell you that what Chávez did exists on a continuum with things that were just treated as normal where I grew up. A man commenting on how you look. A long hug. A shoulder squeeze. That’s where it starts. It’s grooming, and it’s slow and silent, and we’re taught not to name it.

Think about Dolores Huerta. She’s 95 years old. She waited until after this man died to say what he did to her. That’s more than 60 years of carrying that. And that tells you everything about the culture that made it possible—a culture where you don’t talk about it, where everything is hush hush, where the work is always treated as more urgent than the harm being done inside the work.

What I want people who’ve never experienced this to understand is that it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it doesn’t start with something obviously terrible. It builds. And the reason it keeps building is because organizations don’t name it, don’t define it, don’t create structures where survivors feel safe coming forward. When someone is removed from an organization for causing harm and nobody says why, that person goes and finds another political home and the harm continues. Accountability means naming it. It also means—and this is important for those of us who call ourselves abolitionists—thinking seriously about what restorative and transformative justice actually looks like in practice. That’s not the same thing as canceling someone and moving on. It means addressing the root of the harm, centering survivors, and doing the harder work of culture change.

RG: A significant part of the compass is directed at funders. What would you actually say to a program officer about their role in this?

TW: Read it front to back. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is: stop only talking to executive directors. Funders talk to leadership, and leadership is the most removed from the day-to-day reality of the work. If you’re in a meeting with an ED and you also have an organizer in the room, you’re going to get two very different pictures. The ED will say we can do this, this, and that. The organizer will say we don’t have capacity for any of that—what we actually need is investment in staffing, in payroll, in the unsexy infrastructure that makes the rest of the work possible.

Funders want to see the action photos. The march, the press conference, etc. But if you’re asking an undocumented immigrant mother with three kids to do base-building and campaign work, you have to make sure her needs are met first. You can’t ask people to compartmentalize their lives like that. The work and the worker are not separate, and funding has to reflect that. Investing in payroll isn’t glamorous, but it is repair. It’s what redress actually looks like when it’s not just a word.

And if you want accountability, build it into the relationship. Ask organizations what their conflict resolution structures look like. Ask how they address machismo in their organizing spaces before you fund them. Ask for organizers to be in the room when you’re talking about renewal, not just leadership.

RG: Last question. If this compass actually matters, what does it look like five years from now?

TW: It matters if organizations change who’s making decisions. Not just who they consult, not just who they survey—who is actually in the room, with real power, on a recurring basis. The layoff I went through, 85 people losing their jobs at once—that happens when the people at the top are far enough removed that they don’t feel the weight of what they’re cutting. If in five years organizers are meaningfully included in governance and leadership structures, if the vertical hierarchy has started to flatten in real ways, then this compass did something.

The version of this that doesn’t work is when organizations treat it as a checklist. Say they’re going to pay organizers better, say they’re going to do accountability training, and never attach a deadline or a mechanism for measurement. We know how to build campaigns. We know how to apply political pressure and impose costs on a target. We should be applying that same analysis to our own field. What are the consequences of not taking these steps? Who has the power to make the change we want? That’s organizing. And it’s the same work, whether the target is a detention center or a foundation.

The full compass, toolkit, and resource list are available at allduerespectproject.org/immigration.