Local Work from the Inside Out: Triangle DSA’s New Strategy and No Appetite for Apartheid Campaign

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the past twelve months have profoundly strengthened my commitment to the Democratic Socialists of America, and local organizing experiences in Durham, North Carolina have been instrumental in that process. My journey with DSA began in 2015, just as the nascent Bernie-bump was emerging; the subsequent decade was characterized by an on-again, off-again relationship with the organization. As I bounced between chapters with disparate political priorities, I continuously failed to enmesh myself within DSA’s mass, collective project.

Last January, I returned to the US after spending four years in the north of Ireland; looking to reestablish connections with American socialists, I tentatively returned to on-the-ground organizing alongside DSA comrades in the Triangle region of North Carolina. I always expected my stint in NC to be just another temporary situation; what I did not expect, however, was how the chapter’s experience of a moment-in-transition would intersect with my own. Needing to confront the contradictions inherent to chapter growth, the political conditions of semi-urban NC, and the uneven development of members in various stages of their organizing journeys, TDSA comrades launched a New Strategy for the chapter in early 2025. The New Strategy’s implementation, and its impacts on TDSA’s instantiation of No Appetite for Apartheid (NA4A), has influenced my approach to local DSA participation in ways that demonstrate the strategy’s potential effectiveness. Moreover, the process has offered practical lessons for a more generalizable approach towards addressing the interrelated challenges of organization, political direction, and local work.

Launching a New Strategy

For organizations rooted in their members’ democratic deliberation, questions of internal structure are inseparable from those of their politics. Consequently, a DSA chapter’s ability to formulate unified analyzes of local conditions, deploy its capacity in effective ways, and turn new members into leaders is critical to its effectiveness. In 2025, TDSA found itself in a position not unfamiliar to the post-Trump 2.0 organizing landscape. While membership increased on paper, chapter growth had largely failed to translate into new comrades prepared to take on leadership positions. Moreover, the proliferation of working groups and other semi-formalized chapter organs created a twinned problem: on the one hand, such bodies inefficiently ‘siloed’ work within spaces ill-suited for their political tasks; on the other, the groups themselves sucked up existent member-leader capacity while failing to adequately advance new members into leadership positions.

The New Strategy offered a proactive approach towards resolving these contradictions, and its successes emerged from the necessary recognition that structural questions themselves are political. Asynchronous deliberation and debates at our monthly membership meetings produced a document addressing TDSA’s needs by facing its crises head-on. First, the basic scaffolding of the chapter’s construction was taken down, and its core components were reimagined. Under the New Strategy, TDSA would abandon working groups and turn instead to a framework built on associations and campaigns. Associations would emerge from, and cohere around, members’ general political interests in topics like ecosocialism, internationalism, and labor. These bodies would then operate as concrete spaces for discussion and deliberation but would not require the stringent leadership structures that characterized the earlier working groups. Campaigns, by contrast, would encompass TDSA’s on-the-ground-organizing by identifying specific, outcome-oriented missions around which interested comrades can orient their activity. Moreover, their committees remained directly answerable to the chapter’s general body. The first campaigns embodied these visions of clearly-defined activity and transparency by formulating concrete objectives rooted in the chapter’s shared political program.

The idea, then, was clear enough: the New Strategy needed to provide less-rigid, approachable spaces for members to associate and develop in tandem while also redirecting the chapter’s mobilizational energy towards clearly delineated goals. All of this sounds reasonable in theory; but what did the reforms look like in practice?

TDSA’s No Appetite for Apartheid Campaign

Prior to the New Strategy’s launch, I floated between different working groups, unsure where my capacity would be best spent. Eventually, I landed on the Internacional Working Group (IWG). Given my interest in pro-Palestine organizing back in Belfast, the fit seemed natural enough; moreover, the IWG’s primary focus was its No Appetite for Apartheid campaign, an endeavor whose fundamental entwinement of local work, national scope, and international solidarity spoke to me.

It was clear, even as a new participant, that the myriad issues consigned to IWG’s remit were muddying its focus and making it less effective overall. Any given weekly meeting might cover funding for DSA’s Cuba delegation, hurricane relief efforts, or mobilization support for anti-genocide marches; all these items needed to be addressed alongside – or in lieu of – building up the NA4A project. Indeed, my earliest activities with the IWG were helping table and facilitating protest activity in Raleigh; while I capably handed out NA4A pamphlets and waxed poetically on its early successes, my personal connection to the project was still minimal, and my ability to cohesively link our priorities suffered.

The New Strategy profoundly affected this dynamic. Instead of weekly meetings fuzzily grounded within the arena of ‘international’ work, Wednesday planning sessions were instead reoriented towards NA4A explicitly. And this wider process served as an impetus to rejuvenate NA4A itself. While the campaign secured important morale-building victories prior to the New Strategy – namely, through pressure campaigns to remove Sabra hummus from Triangle cafés – the body has since utilized the restructure to better cohere NA4A’s vision and strategy. Rather than reactively targeting disparate stores across the chapter’s large catchment zone, members proactively decided to concentrate their efforts on a single city: Durham. Now, the NA4A committee is more effectively directing its collective energy towards creating an ‘Apartheid-free Zone’ in one central downtown area.

Alongside clarifying goals and consolidating our means of struggle, the chapter’s revamped structure has encouraged member development within our campaigns. Members feel empowered through their contributions, and they increasingly take the initiative in ways which dialectically develop their own capacities and that of the communal body: comrades have created new and Triangle-specific agitational materials; they’ve bolstered our educational and training outreach by hosting canvassing trainings; and they’ve recognized the need to build in-roads with local grocery and service workers to cement our presence in Durham. Perhaps most interestingly, a key impact of the New Strategy has been its effects on transparency and visibility of progress. Minutes from post-New Strategy NA4A meetings show a clearer and more guided evolution of our materials, plans, and policies. Derailments and stalled action items are less common as comrades share a concerted focus on making Durham Apartheid-product free!

Outcomes and Impacts

These highly-localized material successes may seem inseparable from TDSA’s specific internal dynamics and its political environment. However, my experiences within the chapter lead me to believe that several generalizable takeaways are eminent within the New Strategy and our NA4A campaign.

First, clearly delineating the connection between local organizing, National DSA’s prioritizing of pro-Palestine work, and socialist internationalism is a necessary condition for our struggle. A reasonable person may well ask how agitating against the sale of misleadingly labeled Israeli wines betters our movement. Our response must touch upon all three levels of engagement. While the process is ongoing, NA4A under the New Strategy makes tying these ends together much more manageable. Locally, a clear geographic focus allows us to better connect with store workers, Durham-based activists, Duke University students, and other community members who increasingly recognize DSAers through our constant activity. Moreover, NA4A’s targeting of major Israel-backing conglomerates and products surreptitiously produced in occupied Palestine gives the campaign a tight, principled focus. Rather than adopting a scattershot, reactive approach by morally reprimanding small businesses, the campaign seeks to remove the most offensive brands from our area while building constructive relationships with local workers and organizers.

Secondly, explicitly drawing together questions of structure and politics belies their separation into mutually exclusive organizing ends, highlighting instead their dialectical interaction. Capacity begets capacity: the energy spent developing the New Strategy’s internal-facing components has reemerged as time and space for external work and program building. Comrades experiencing this interplay for the first time at the local level are thus prepared to engage with the opportunities and constraints it creates at the level of national DSA.

Finally, the practical experience of campaign development and engagement with a chapter-in-transition affected my personal relationship with DSA at all its levels. In TDSA’s assessment of its shortcomings, I recognized the outworkings of Reform & Revolutions formulation of the Triple Crisis – or, at least, two of its central prongs. Alongside the crisis of consciousness, the Triple Crisis describes the critical underdevelopment of revolutionary leadership and organization. Experiencing these problems firsthand within TDSA’s local context solidified my orientation towards R&R’s foundational analysis. Moreover, while a new job will soon take me away from TDSA, the experience no longer seems like one-and-done; unlike my time in other chapters, these twelve months feel indelible and replete with institutional knowledge I can carry with me. In short, the New Strategy’s goal of developing a more capable and committed organizer worked… even if the fruits of its labor will be realized elsewhere.

This is not to say that TDSA’s New Strategy has been an unmitigated success. The former has still not led to the seamless cross-campaign collaboration that the chapter envisioned. There is also always a danger of chapters ‘resting on their laurels’ after undertaking a major project; a New Strategy is only as good as its constant development and reassessment, and TDSA will need to navigate its continued deployment into 2026 and beyond. However, the demonstrated commitment of my TDSA comrades, regardless of their political tendency, has convinced me that the chapter’s future is brighter when backlit by the New Strategy. And the NA4A campaign, for its part, is poised to achieve more in the coming months than it has in the past year. Though sad to leave the group, I look forward to their continued success and the opportunity to spread our shared, hard earned lessons to DSA comrades in other parts of the country.