Everyone Has a Way
Learning to grow and contribute in movement campaigns with Lexi Galantino
For a lot of us, we know that there are so many things that need to change on a systemic level, yet if we aren’t working as full-time organizers, we’re not sure how to get started. We talked to Lexi to understand how everyone has a part to play in a movement, the multitude of approaches to change, and how big things can start with one email.
Yindi Pei:
Can you introduce yourself?
Lexi Galantino:
Hi, my name is Lexi, and my pronouns are she or they. I am currently located in San Diego, and during the course of Logic School, I moved here from the Bay Area.
My friend actually told me about Logic School, and it felt very naturally like the next step in my journey. About two years ago, it came out that my former employer has a contract with an organization whose work I vehemently disagree with—ICE [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement]. And so there was a big wave of #NoTechForICE. I was involved with the internal protests at my employer and it was A Whole Thing, as they say.
One of the things I noticed was that the conversation was going poorly. It didn't feel like people were talking to each other; it felt like they were very much talking past each other. It was hard to figure out the “right” place to take in all of this because a lot of people I really respected felt different ways about how best to move forward. Some chose to leave the company. Some chose to stay and protest loudly. Some chose to stay and organize more secretly. I was really concerned at the time with this idea of “What path is The Most Right?” Like, what “should” I do, and there wasn’t a clear answer. I ended up finding this ethics class being taught through some professors at Stanford, along with Bloomberg Beta, so it had a little bit of a VC tinge. It was very much institutional, but it was an ethics class. In that class, I learned about deontology versus utilitarianism. I realized that the multiple groups just had really different approaches. One group of people was like, “Ok, obviously we shouldn’t be working with ICE, and so if the company is working with ICE, we’re leaving.” Then another group of people was like, “Well, us canceling the ICE contract doesn't really do much to help immigrants because they use our company for software stuff; their software engineers would use them. If we cancel this contract, a competitor will step up immediately, and it won’t actually affect the work that ICE is doing.” On the other hand, this group felt that by keeping a contract and staying in the US government's good graces (especially in 2019), we were able to influence other things. We were able to have a seat at the table—it was a “seat at the table” argument. The thinking went that, by keeping our seat at the table, we had better standing to lobby the US government for other big things the company cared about, like being allowed to provide access to this body of communal knowledge to, for example, citizens of every country in the world. This conflict was tricky, and at the end of the day, it felt like the two groups were yelling past each other about which one was right and which one was wrong. So I got into this ethics class because I wanted to know which one was right. The class didn’t answer that. Instead, it taught me that one group has a deontological framework of ethics and the other has a utilitarian one. I don't know. Anyway, I enjoyed the ethics class, but its stated purpose was to complicate your understanding of things. And boy oh boy, did it do that. It took pretty much every issue that I felt like, “Oh, obviously, this is bad,” and made me think, “Dammit, I see the challenges here now.” It broadened my view there. But the downside was that it didn’t really have time to get to “Ok, now let’s take action.” It really just left us thinking more. I almost left that ethics class with a worse idea of what to actually do in the world—it almost made me feel like anything I did would be less effective. I was less sure about what I wanted to advocate for and how to engage in activism in the world... It was a little bit frustrating, but I just let that percolate for a little bit, right?
Then my friend from that class was like, “Have you seen this Logic School thing?” I definitely at the time did not realize how perfect it was going to be. It ended up being the perfect next step from the ethics class, which gave me a broader understanding of the ecosystem, although not as broad an understanding as after the first lecture at Logic School where we talked about the Algorithmic Ecologies. I was very scared to apply because I was wondering, “What if these people are too ‘activist’ for me? What if I’m not good enough, or ‘Marxist’ enough?” (At the time, I had had friends in college who identified as Marxists, and were pretty adamant about it, and I was intimidated mostly because I didn’t really know what it meant, heh.) It turns out that Logic School folks were pretty leftist, but we really weren’t talking about Marxist theory and, like, revolution as much I was nervous that we would. Two things have happened. One is I have learned more about the pros and cons of using theory, and that sometimes it’s just ways of people in college sounding edgy. The other thing was, everything we talked about, all of our discussions were … I just felt such a kinship. Our first meeting, where we just sat around and said what we were worried about in the world, was amazing. Hearing that other people were also worried that they weren't doing enough or activist enough felt really grounding.
Yindi:
I'd love to hear more about your project and how it began.
Lexi:
Again, it very much began from a place of anxiety and feeling intimidated, which is, frankly, where most of my life steps begin. I was really thinking hard about this project, driving on a windy road in the Bay Area, and I was thinking out loud to my partner. There's so much I am still actively learning about other topics I care about, like abolition stuff, that even though that felt like the “right” or the “most important” topic, I think I still have more learning to do before I can take effective action there. On the other hand, tackling homelessness is something I have years of intermittent experience around. Also, Erin from the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project came to talk to us, and that was a good example of something really impactful around the topic.
I also knew that I was gonna be moving to San Diego, so I wanted to make sure I worked on something that I could see through before the move. I saw that the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco had a few working groups, including the Human Rights Workgroup and a Housing Justice Workgroup. It said to just email a certain person if you were interested, so I emailed Kelly. I led with, “I’m nervous, but could I join you?” And she was like, “Absolutely, please join us.” So I attended those Zoom meetings, which really became part of the project I focused on for Logic School—this bigger push to end “poverty tows” in San Francisco. For any number of reasons your car can get towed in San Francisco: cars that have five or more parking tickets, the car has been parked there for more than seventy-two hours, or six months or more of expired registration. This affects unhoused people the most, especially those living in their cars. I drifted to the poverty tows project because this woman, Sam, came into one of the Zoom meetings and was like, “Hey, you know, we have been doing this project for ten years trying to get this outlawed. And right now we have a window of opportunity to maybe get it done. We need people to help with this.”
Yindi:
Were there any challenges that you encountered for this?
Lexi:
Honestly, my own self-doubt was the main challenge, like the whole frickin’ way. Also, little things. I mean, some experiences that I wouldn't even necessarily label challenges, like I learned how to use TikTok because I made a TikTok to inform folks on poverty tows. I don't know how successful it was because one thing I learned about TikTok was that it's not really the platform for localized things by design.
The self-doubt felt scary. But the community that I had with Logic School was key—having people tell me, “You got this.” Having that and being surrounded by people in Logic School who were more experienced in doing activism than me. Willy is someone who I will name specifically—watching Willy get up at the rally in San Francisco for Rideshare Drivers United was stunning. When I was just starting off, I was super hung up on, “Am I meeting the bar for an activist?” But I think I was just so inspired by folks around me—I mean, Yindi, your project showed me that something that you can do to add to the conversation is also producing art and working on your own healing, and Mel’s project, which was using art and making a healing space, was so inspiring in the same way.
Have you seen that resource map of the different roles folks in a movement can take? That different folks can do different things? One thing that I’ve settled into, after working through a lot of anxiety, was maybe I actually could use the skills that I have at the edge of my comfort zone to grow, while working in a way that felt good to me. I don’t need to leap with both feet out of my comfort zone all at once. I can work sort of at the edge.
Yindi:
Yeah, that's something that I've definitely learned from being inspired by disability activists and just being physically and emotionally and mentally unable to move past a certain point, and just having that be it for that, for the time being. Where is your project now?
Lexi:
So we were not successful for the time being at getting poverty tows outlawed—there was a meeting where that was voted upon. But there are more movements happening on that front in different channels and folks continuing to lobby around it. One thing that has really changed in me is an understanding of how certain policies affect folks really differently than you would expect. In LA, they're making these sort of safe sleeping sites where it's an enclosed area set up by the city for folks to specifically pitch their tents and sleep. Being up in San Francisco and being with the Coalition on Homelessness group, I learned that there are a lot of things wrong with that proposal. It's something that, at least in San Francisco, with the powers that be that proposed it, may be because they actually think it's a good thing. But it feels more along the lines of [doing it] in order to look good for other folks who don't actually understand the problem. And it's one of those things that I think does look good until you actually understand the problem. Some of the problems being that those sites end up being pretty policed and controlled in ways that folks who are houseless not only find incompatible with their needs but that also don’t respond to their needs in different ways. I think sanitation was maybe another piece.
Yindi:
What’s next for you?
Lexi:
What I'm percolating on right now is what am I going to do next? Now that Logic School has ended, I don't want to fall back into anxiety-covered inaction. I think part of what I've learned through Logic School is to recognize that I have been organizing for a little bit now and also adjusting capacity. Right now my capacity is zero because I have a new dog, a new apartment, and am adjusting to the San Diego area and learning about the local politics right now. Also I’ve now learned that you can just email someone to get involved. Actually, I emailed this group in Philadelphia, which is where I'm from, that works to rescue food. I found out about them with the recent flooding from Hurricane Ida in Philadelphia. They have this whole network to rescue food and redirect it to soup kitchens, homeless shelters, etc. They have an app, and they need more help on the app. So I reached out to them, but then I was also really honest with them about capacity. The biggest thing I have learned about this is that if you're just super honest with people, they will very often meet you where you are.
Lexi Galantino (she/her) is a senior software engineer and activist who is passionate about the safety of marginalized folks, be it on the internet or elsewhere. Her professional career has traversed the spectrum of social interaction online, from first working to prevent the very worst the internet has to offer and nudging people toward good online citizenship, to now fostering healthy and productive discussions and starting to think about what “fun” in an online community might look like. In addition to her nine-to-five she has just started exploring organizing with other activists for change, particularly to fight homelessness and support unhoused individuals.
To learn more about COH SF, visit https://www.cohsf.org/