#Dream Big, Start Small, Prepare For The Long Haul BRRN: There’s lots of interest and excitement about popular and neighborhood assemblies now, as Trump has returned to office. Having gone through this experience, what advice and lessons would you want to share with organizers interested in experimenting with this kind of neighborhood structure in their backyards?

M: Don’t be grandiose. If you go out and just declare “I’m going to have a neighborhood assembly,” it’s probably not going to happen. I think if KPA had been called at any other moment, it would not have happened in the way it did. I think if we had tried to do it the same way after Trump’s election in 2024, it would not have happened. [Trump’s first election in 2016] was a unique moment when we could just flyer the streets and random strangers who had never come to an organizing meeting before would show up, all speaking different languages. Today it would take much more ground work.

You need to have built a lot of connections with people before you ever call a first assembly. If there are a bunch of churches or other social institutions on board and they can vouch and turn people out, that’s something. … There were people who had a lot of connections in the neighborhood, but [KPA] was put together without much background, without much organizing on the ground initially, again because of the moment we were in. We built connections to various churches later. If you have that kind of history and those kinds of connections, then you can build something like KPA. Otherwise, I think it’s quite hard in our present political context and in a context where people aren’t very used to neighborhood assemblies. If you’re going to do it, you have to start small and be prepared to put in years of work.

The other key lesson is that, if you reach a place where you have the capacity to actually call an assembly, you have to have a structure and decision making process in mind as you begin. Really, you have to make sure your spaces are democratic, open decision-making spaces and have a clear idea of what you’re going to do with that. I think that moment was also special [when] the first assembly was in February 2017, right around the inauguration, because the problems and the answers were both quite clear to people. The problem in the neighborhood was immigration raids and the solution was to stop them, to keep them out. Our task was to develop a strategy and set of tactics for how to actually do that.

In times when it’s more diffuse, when there’s a whole bunch of competing issues and nobody is quite clear on what to do about it, it’s a lot harder and it’ll take a lot more time. But it’s also, I think, the responsibility of revolutionaries to think through those and propose the key issues and the key solutions, which is what these spaces are for, right? Then from there you come to a concrete project. I think a neighborhood assembly, like any other meeting, is kind of pointless to most people unless it’s clear: this is what we’re doing, this is how, and this is what the purpose is.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Koreatown Popular Assembly, we recommend watching A Year in Popular Power #2: Stopping ICE Raids with Koreatown Popular Assembly and reading Koreatown Popular Assembly: Shutting Down ICE, Building Popular Power.