David Alton, co-founder of Ground UP WR

MESSY ACTIVISM is what David Alton and William Turman call it. They practice it through Ground Up Waterloo Region, a community action group they founded in Kitchener, Ontario in December 2020. They call what they do messy because there is no deep planning or heavy strategizing involved.

Learn from doing

This is how they explain it on their website: “We strive to learn FROM DOING activism and organizing. We will be messy, we will be loud, we will change our minds and our positions, and we will put out work and things that have typos or are incomplete. But this is better than doing nothing at all. We are all learning, and if we let perfect get in the way of action, we have already failed.

Everything we do is a work in progress (including this website). Join us in a progressive political awakening of Waterloo Region.”

“We came in really hot at the start,” says Alton. “Just really trying to amplify every grassroots call to action we could find and directly tie it to elected officials and just make as much noise as possible. ... Other grassroots groups started reaching out to us and we started talking about what are collaboration opportunities? How can we amplify your calls to action?

Community input key

Alton and Turman both have degrees in town planning. They share a deep interest in how to go beyond the academic, institutional and bureaucratic to promote direct and real citizen involvement in what happens in their communities.

Alton says, the two friends loved “to just rant to each other and complain.” Finally it occurred to them they should stop just ranting and do something more productive. “Ground Up started as that vessel,” says Alton “to be messy and voice concerns directly.

“It started very much as a Twitter account to try and hold elected officials accountable in a cross jurisdictional way from the smallest town council or school trustee to the federal and provincial—no elected official was safe from the scrutiny.

Alton and Turman also identified issue “siloing” as a problem to solve: groups narrowly focused on their own issues with no interconnection or sharing of data and expertise. They decided Ground Up would make the accountability of public officials and grassroots collaboration their prime objectives—in a messy way.

“You can’t really make relationships if you’re just sitting at home, not engaging in these things,” says Turman. “So you can’t be afraid to be messy. You actually have to get out there somehow. If everyone’s too scared to do anything, if we’re just trying to be perfect all the time, we’re not actually gonna do anything. And I think that’s what led us into our anti-racism rally.”

Activists had mounted a campaign to remove a statue of John A. McDonald in Wilmot, Ontario the summer before Ground Up was founded. They were not successful. To make matters worse, white supremacists announced plans to hold  their own rally in Wilmot in the spring of 2021.

“That’s where we decided to try and leverage this platform we created to do something and organize a rally in response,” says Alton.

Pressing on

Ground Up held town hall meetings with promising turnouts at first. But as the date for the anti-racism rally got closer “the more things got hostile,” says Alton. “all these allies and all these institutional leaders backed out.”

Ground Up plowed on. In the end about 50 people came to the Ground Up rally.

Messy activism does not take a lot of time to build relationships. But that is not necessarily a drawback, says Alton. “We’ll just do and do and do. And I think that’s become our relationship building thing, consistently putting ourselves out there in a way that shows that we’re not in it for ourselves.

“And so that posture of just messily doing and consistently showing solidarity, I think that has endeared trust to many people in the community. And we’re grateful for that.

‘How can we make it fun’

Ground Up is always looking for ways to “fill gaps” in community activism. This has led to projects on sidewalk clearing and accessiblity, a community budget initiative, compiling a data base and building a digital platform of information on, and for community activists and a weekly community bike ride.

Alton says: “So yeah, a week in the life of Ground Up is we meet once a week and we will see what the grassroots have said. And then we talk about how we can fill gaps. We can amplify causes and also how we can make it fun.

“We are just doing activists. But through that process, as we go, where is the community calling us? Where is energy being built? And we will just keep being this machine that chugs and says and does. oration. These pieces of access, these pieces of action for the community.

The source material in this story comes from a program produced by Scott Neigh on Talking Radical Radio https://talkingradical.ca/

To learn more about Ground Up WR go to https://groundupwr.weebly.com/

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