The Relationships That Power Democracy: Organizing for the Long Haul

The last time Sulma Arias joined Momentum, in 2024, the argument was that rebuilding grassroots organizing was essential to confronting the conditions fueling authoritarianism. Two years later, she and Glenn Harris revisit that argument in a political landscape that has drastically shifted. On this episode of Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast, Arias, executive director of People’s Action, and Harris, president of Race Forward, talk about what organizing requires in a period of racialized authoritarianism —the use of racial division to gain and hold political power–and ongoing attacks on democracy. 

As longtime friends leading two national organizations,Glenn and Sulma move between the personal and the political, reflecting on what they are seeing across communities, what this moment is asking of organizers, and how relationships shape the way movements understand and respond to change.

Part of Race Forward’s new DemocracyIs: campaign, the episode pushes beyond elections to explore how democracy is experienced, practiced, and strengthened in everyday life. Glenn and Sulma wrestle with the challenge of leading organizations through interconnected struggles, the limits of any one organization trying to meet the scale of this moment, and what becomes possible when movement leaders and organizations work in relationship rather than isolation. 

Their conversation reaches from faith and friendship to multiracial organizing, collective action, and the generations that carried this work before them, while confronting a larger question at the heart of this moment: what will it take for movements not only to resist what is happening now, but to build the democratic future they are fighting for?