I’ve been dabbling in the past year and a half with getting into orgs, which haven’t been that hard since I live in a big city, but I still had trouble staying consistent with it or feeling like I have any actual impact.
I went through orgs dealing with asylum seekers, unions for part-time workers, food security, fun local events that raise money for the aforementioned food security project, and now I landed in an org dealing with helping low-wage workers getting benefits that their employers stole from them. Most of them are refugees, some are Palestinians, which does feel somewhat impactful, but it’s still a minority.
These were all great orgs with moral people, but the catch is that I can’t be passive with it like in my work. There aren’t really any managers that are responsible for finding me work at these orgs, because they’re busy with their own work. There are no Bullshit Jobs there. I need to ask around and find work myself.
This is exhausting, especially while juggling a 9-5 and a couple of hobbies, and while I’m fully aware of the capitalistic scam of keeping us busy working instead of organizing, I’m yet still frustrated with it. Anyone feeling the same? I hope it’ll get more impactful as my life gets more stable, and I have an overall optimistic feeling about this, but non the less the helplessness I feel right now is real :(
Leafleting is harder than I thought. It seems to come to other members naturally, I have some social aversion and it seems to manifest most in situations with strangers.
I’m working on some IT stuff and hoping to improve the organization of the group. I’m waiting for it to be in a state where it is presentable as it’s lacklustre currently. As well, I’m trying to line up projects that are closer to my expertise to provide novel improvements. One example is slowly downloading a corpus of Marxist works and training a QA ML model on it to serve as a chatbot. Last time I touched AI stuff was years ago and things have changed substantially. The resources are there but I’m a bit wary of committing too many resources so I’m only working on it bit by bit while I do more in person stuff I can be confident will be of some help.