Understanding Ward Organizations

This is an edited and updated version of an article originally published on Medium in April 2023.

Chicago’s ward organizations (WOs), often called “independent political organizations”, have become major contenders in the political ecosystem.

The WOs played such an important part in the 2019 and 2023 municipal elections, and the 2024 IL Primaries, that it would benefit organizers to consider how to relate to them and how they might factor into the long-term project of building a worker's party.

Please note that, while this article hopes to loosely sketch out the role of WOs within Chicago’s political ecosystem, a more in-depth article exploring their history was authored by Simon Swartzman in 2021. This article is based on my observations as a member of 33rd Ward Working Families between 2018-2024, which may differ from the experiences of other WOs or other members of 33WF.

What are they?

Ward Organizations are miniature, ward-level political parties. They are groups of like-minded people who work toward organizing within the ward and contesting for power in local elections. Generally, with a priority on the aldermanic seat, but not limited to it. They are scoped to a given ward because political representation in Chicago begins with the ward’s alder.

Chicago is unique with its unusually large City Council. We have 50 seats representing the city’s 50 wards. This is both a strength and a weakness. It is a weakness to need a minimum of 26 votes in City Council to pass/block legislation. However, it is a strength that the high number of wards means each one tends to be geographically small enough to be manageable for grassroots organizers to build a party within it.

Ward organizations do not have any preset politics. Generally speaking, what they have in common is they tend to represent an insurgency against candidates in power or against the local ruling clique. Some ward organizations are explicitly socialist. Others, like 33WF, tend to be open to any Leftist and tend to be influenced by the mass movements of the day.

When Bernie was on the rise, many of our members were self-identified socialists. Ever since the 2020 Uprising, many now call ourselves abolitionists. Hopefully, we’ll continue to politically develop with the movements around us and the coalitions we join. While Chicago’s WOs have landed somewhere on the spectrum of the Left, typically under the umbrella term of “progressive”, people could theoretically build Centrist or Right-wing WOs.

What do they do?

The primary work of a WO is to contest for power in local elections. Logically, if you want to win an aldermanic office, you need to recruit people who live in the ward to campaign and develop candidates. This may sound obvious, but many political organizations take for granted the mainstream approach to elections: flood social media and mailboxes with campaign literature while deploying paid canvassers who have little/no interest in the campaign, most of whom don’t even live in the area.

But the experience of elections in the 33rd Ward, and Chicago’s Northwest Side, has demonstrated in 2019, 2022, 2023, and 2024 that organized groups of neighbors who are politically invested in their neighborhood will outperform the mainstream’s impersonal strategy.

So far, WOs tend to be all-volunteer. Meaning, they lack any paid staff who can focus on organizing full-time. As such, volunteer-based groups can only recruit and retain members by proving through action both their political principles and effectiveness. Action keeps members engaged and builds political trust that we will put our money where our mouth is.

Aside from being electoral vehicles, WOs are also capable of engaging in other fields of struggle between electoral cycles. Based on the concrete experience of 33WF, ward groups can and do: connect with other organizations of struggle in the ward like tenants unions, immigrants rights groups, or mutual aid networks. They can also canvass neighbors as an auxiliary to the alder's office for programs like Participatory Budgeting, support workers striking within the ward, or collect petitions for referenda like lifting the ban on rent control or #TreatmentNotTrauma. We can even fundraise for larger political issues such as abortion access, or host a version of cop-watch in case ICE agents were spotted in the ward. We have even served as a community space to host a local family's baby shower!

In other words, the non-electoral organizing that happens between elections is not optional: it is absolutely essential. It allows WOs to build the infrastructure, organizing experience, community relationships, interpersonal relationships, and recruitment necessary to make the electoral campaigns successful.

Regarding infrastructure: having a physical office in a ward to provide space for organizing and socializing is indispensable whether or not there is an election. With infrastructure like this, WOs become both political and physical beachheads of struggle within communities. These offices have been bases that could be used by the WO itself, but also could be used as an organizing space for socialist groups organizing in the ward for Democratize ComEd, feminist groups needing space for art builds before protests, etc.

The office obviously comes in handy for elections specific to the ward. But it also helps anchor campaigns that span across numerous wards. For example, one ward-level WO obviously can't bottom-line something city-wide like a mayoral campaign. But it can be relied on to hold down its respective ward for the city-wide campaign.

Foundations for a political party?

Given that most Chicago elections are rooted at the ward level, it also makes sense that any concrete attempt to build a political party would require, at a minimum, a network of WOs that were battle-tested to form the foundation of that party.

Based on the history of the British Labor Party or Bolivia's Movimiento al Socialismo, any attempt to build a worker's party would also require coalition building with organized labor. This is important to note as many WOs have gone out of their way to collaborate with various parts of Chicago's political ecosystem both during and between election campaigns. Many WOs have also developed relationships with United Working Families, which operates as a political arm for several unions and has explicitly stated its desire to build a political party.

Collaboration has also been increasing between WOs. In Chicago's northwest side, 33WF teamed up with 30th United, United Neighbors of the 35th Ward, 39th Ward Neighbors United, and United Northwest Side to host a progressive mayoral forum. These WOs endorsed Brandon Johnson for mayor, which created an organizing opportunity for the northwest side groups to collaborate to knock doors for him and their respective aldermanic candidates. Most recently, the Northwest Side had a stunning victory for Graciela Guzmán for State Senate in IL District 20, beating $2.6 million with our people power.

It is through this sort of shared struggle that individuals and organizations learn to build trust and unity from the bottom-up.

Conclusion

Whether electoral campaigns win or lose, they provide an opportunity to get people organized. Based on Chicago's city council, wards provide the smallest defined area to focus on that organizing, while creating ward-level beachheads of electoral and non-electoral struggle.

With all of this taken together, I think WOs have become an integral part of Chicago's political ecosystem, alongside unions, socialist and abolitionist groups, etc. As such, I hope they continue to grow and spread across the city and serve as models to be copied/adapted in cities across the country. Much like organizers are invested in helping seed, nurture, and defend unions: we should take a similar approach to WOs.

After decades of writing-off electoral politics due to the limits of our two-party system, Bernie Sanders' 2016 campaign forced the US Left to finally engage in elections. WOs represent a serious attempt to approach electoral politics from the bottom-up, and deserve to be supported and studied.

Updated 09/24/24: Added link to "What is a Political Party?"