Massachusetts Delegation: Lessons from the 2025 Membership Assembly
The Massachusetts Nonviolent Medicaid Army (Mass NVMA) is a two-year-old state formation, started when a former Put People First! PA (PPF-PA) leader moved to Massachusetts. A small core of leaders cohered in Eastern and Western Mass by reconnecting with existing leaders and with new leaders drawn to the clarity of the NVMA. The state formation was further strengthened when two leaders from the Vermont Workers’ Center moved to Boston last year. We have been building out two regional committees in West and East while systemizing basebuilding cycles in each region, developing new leaders in the process.
This is the second year the Mass NVMA sent a delegation to the PPF-PA membership assembly, and new and more-experienced leaders are coming from both Boston and Western Mass.
Allie: The Put People First assembly helped me get a better grasp on why we do the work that we do with organizing. I heard that we organize so we are ready as leaders to take in the masses when the conditions get bad enough that people are forced to demand a change. The work we do can feel intangible at times so this was helpful for me to put things into perspective and feel more invigorated and committed to organizing in our community. I feel like I have seen activists groups struggle with longevity and burn out because it feels like they are constantly fighting a fruitless, losing battle so having this mindset shift has been impactful for me to see the ways that the work we do is different and while it is still difficult, it is done with intention and knowledge of the hard work that it will take.
I also feel like it helped challenge my idea of what a leader is and the qualities we all need to be striving for in our leadership. I have been intimidated by powerful orators in our movement and felt like they have a skill set I do not but seeing them speak and learning from them showed me that this is not an unobtainable thing, it is just a skill that we all can and need to learn how to do. The quote about a leader needing to be able to lead a meeting, scrub a toilet, etc. really rang true to me and showed me that versatility and adaptability are important traits in leadership. I tried to challenge myself to be like this by saying yes to new things even if I found it scary or uncomfortable. I used to be incredibly scared of public speaking but I have made an effort to say yes to doing it in order to allow myself to further develop as a leader, as I know this is an important skill for leaders to have and growth will only come if we put ourselves in situations that allow for it. I also allowed myself to help with songleading in ways that scared me. As a musician, it is hard for me to separate performance from making music for organizing so I wanted to put myself out of my comfort zone by saying yes to helping with musical aspects of the assembly and beyond back in MA in order to check my ego and allow music to be used in organizing contexts without thinking about how I sound.
The assembly also showed me the different ways people have been organized. I met people who joined through door knocking, were organized through church or online and it taught me that we must try multiple avenues to reach people. With this, I also saw the importance of accessibility in these spaces and how this weekend would not have been possible without the care for different people’s needs and meeting them when possible, including things like childcare.
Taka: Attending the Put People First! PA assembly for my second time and helping to lead our state delegation for the first time, impacted me personally and clarified the direction of our state formation. I am still processing the lessons learned.
In the way that leaders in a state formation have distinct needs and interdependencies to develop their 4 C’s, I’ve realized that different state formations of the NVMA also have distinct ways to learn from and support each other given their specific histories. Since getting back, we’ve successfully held not one but two People’s Clinics in Eastern Massachusetts. Specifically, we learned from leaders of the Illinois NUH that consistency and follow-through are key elements of deploying a project of survival as a basebuilding strategy.
Due to the increasingly precarious survival of the poor and dispossessed as well as our own efforts, our two-year-old Eastern regional committee is at a potential point of significant growth.
By learning the history of how the Maryland United Workers grew with fits and starts from a local to a statewide movement, I was reminded that leadership development is a slow and steady process through organizing cycles and campaigns. Building solid leadership to take on growth is a prerequisite to successfully harnessing such growing interest (to not let gold pass through the sieve). I believe we are starting to do that!
I look forward to hosting our own exchange in the future, and I am proud to be part of this deeply human thing we are doing together.
Stacey: This was my second PPF-PA assembly since getting involved with Massachusetts NVMA over a year ago, and also my first-time co-leading a delegation. Through co-leading a delegation from Massachusetts, I developed better understanding and skills in the small components of leadership, like organizing a debrief, supporting new leaders, and paying attention to details. The experience helped me feel more confident in taking on leads and developing new leaders through our basebuilding activities in Western Mass.
I also developed more clarity about our next steps in Massachusetts by having a better understanding of the campaign and tactics welded by PPF-PA. It was clarifying to see how the action and discussion of #Crozer8 agitated new members at the assembly, including members who came to the assembly because of the basebuilding done around Crozer, and how new leaders are developed through the campaign. The opportunity to exchange ideas with other states in different stages and conditions helped me see the need to be flexible and creative with our activities in Massachusetts, and in Franklin County — both being able to weld our strategy specific to our region and being realistic about our capacity.
Since we are in our early stages of building in Massachusetts, I also appreciated the opportunity to connect with other leaders, especially those building or have built new organizations/HRCs. Beyond talking about the need to focus on leadership development early on, I felt more committed to our project in Western Mass by having a more realistic understanding of the challenges that inevitably come up with building new organizations.
Bassima: “Leadership is when your thoughts govern your actions,” Nijmie explained in the closing ceremony of the membership assembly. To really be a 4C’s leader, you have to work on closing the gap between what you think and what you do. That sobered me right up, even as I said my goodbyes, it kept gnawing at me, this simple truth. So obvious when you first hear it, so shocking in its simplicity.
At the PPF-PA membership assembly, I saw many leaders moving in ways that clearly embodied their thoughts and feelings. Looking back through snippets of memories from that powerful weekend, I finally had the rubric with which to process that ineffable magical love I see in this community. There is no magic here. We are ordinary people who are actively committing to each other and ourselves, committing to the laborious day to day struggle of building up our community, educating ourselves, learning from each other, learning from our mistakes. Committing to match our actions to our thoughts, today and every day.
My journey in the NVMA has been a bumpy one. I have struggled in my own leadership development in ways that have impacted our nascent state and regional formation here in Eastern Massachusetts. At the PPF-PA MA, I found tools that helped me push past the mental block of the shame that comes with failure. I saw leaders I looked up to being vulnerable about past failures and humbly sharing the lessons learned along the way.
Since returning from the membership assembly, we in Eastern Mass have been working through an organizing cycle in my own neighborhood, Roslindale. Building on lessons learned from the people’s clinic workshop, and further advice I had received from leaders in other states who were generous with their time (thank you Kelly!), I was able to take on a leadership role in this, and feel somewhat competent as I did it. We have had 2 people’s clinics with many lessons learned in the process and are currently base building for and planning our upcoming North star event. The next challenge after this will be to maintain the connections between my local community in Roslindale and our state and regional formation in a sustainable and consistent way before we tackle the next neighborhood. I have a long trip home planned which will take me physically away from all we are building, and the skill I have to build up now is how to maintain connectedness and commitment during a prolonged physical absence. I will need an action plan for this, and then follow through, for to be a leader I must do what I think. I have finally understood that commitment is not a feeling, it’s a series of consistent actions.