Case Study: When the Honest Answer Is "Not on This Timeline"

Sector: Nationwide grassroots political organizing campaign, seeking to launch a state-level pilot

Role: Contracted as Colorado Organizing Director for a three-month engagement, leading a two-person subcontractor team

The Challenge

A national organizing campaign had an ambitious vision: convene a full political spectrum — community organizations, unions, environmental groups, and parties from across the spectrum — into a state-wide "laboratory" culminating in a sortition-based citizens' assembly tasked with drafting a new constitutional framework. Colorado, seen as uniquely anti-partisan rather than bipartisan, was chosen as the state to prove the model could work, with a goal of a statewide convention by year's end and a national convention the following year to mark a major historical anniversary. The campaign brought in outside help in April with that end-of-year deadline already set. The organization had never built a theory of change or stakeholder analysis, and couldn't yet articulate a credible path to its own goal — even internally.

The Approach

The engagement began with groundwork: building a database of over 150 community organizations across Colorado who might plausibly be partners, then conducting outreach and in-person relationship-building to gauge real interest. That process surfaced an early, important finding — the pool of organizations aligned with the campaign's mission skewed heavily toward the progressive end of the spectrum, well short of the full political range the model depended on. In parallel, the engagement produced what the organization had never had: a visual theory of change and supporting documentation laying out, stage by stage, what success would actually require.

The Outcome

The analysis led to an assessment the client hadn't asked for and didn't want: launching a credible statewide coalition and holding a genuine citizens' assembly in Colorado was achievable in about a year — not in the six months remaining on the original timeline, and a national convention on the following year's schedule wasn't realistic at all. The recommendation was a minimum three-year trajectory to build the coalition sustainably rather than rushing toward a date. The client's leadership disagreed with that conclusion at the time. They later adopted the theory-of-change framework into their broader organizing toolkit regardless — a sign the diagnostic work held up even when the timeline recommendation wasn't the one they'd hoped for. The engagement stands as a clear example of a core distinction in this kind of work: transformation within a single organization can happen fast, even in a single quarter — but rebuilding a system of governance across a divided state, or a country, cannot be forced onto an artificial deadline without costing the effort its credibility.