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The Ontario Public Sector Employees Union (OPSEU/SEFPO) represents approximately 180,000 members across Ontario who work for the Ontario government, inside community colleges, in the healthcare sector, and the LCBO, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, among others. Within the LCBO alone, OPSEU represents thousands of workers divided among 42 locals across the province.
Tzazna Miranda Leal (they), Campaigns Officer in the Political Action and Education Division, has led the rollout of Action Builder to help with their organizing efforts in the LCBO campaign.
“We are working with a unit of 10,000 workers, and we’ve done a lot of recruitment of organic leaders,” Tzazna said. “We’ve recruited one or two or three leaders per work site or per division in the bigger workplaces, and we’ve been using Action Builder to do a lot of tracking of information that is being gathered by these hundreds of leaders we’ve recruited.”
“The members really, really like it because they can see their progress in other stores and in other regions.”
Action Builder is an easy to use, mobile-first organizing tool built by organizers, for organizers. The toolset draws on the time-tested tools organizers have used for decades, from wall charts and flip charts to notebooks and three ring binders, to produce a tool designed for organizers on the go, giving them needed information at their fingertips to grow power and win real change.
“A lot of the work is decentralized, so Action Builder has helped us do that,” explained Tzazna. “We’ve been making the leaders users so that they can do the assessments and track the actions themselves.”
As for how Action Builder compares to the spreadsheets and physical wallcharts they used in previous campaigns, Tzazna cited the tool’s ease of use and effectiveness for a campaign of this scale.
“Those of us who have done charting and tracking of our work over the years know that you can do this on paper and on Excel, but it’s nice to have an interface that members can use that isn’t a shared spreadsheet,” said Tzazna. “In this case, it’s hundreds of stores and warehouses and offices spread everywhere around the province, so it’s allowed us to centralize stuff that’s happening everywhere.”
“We’ve been making the leaders users so that they can do the assessments and track the actions themselves.”
Crucially, the LCBO campaign’s leaders have embraced Action Builder, enabling the campaign to amass regional data from hundreds of leaders in Action Builder all at the same time.
“The members really, really like it because they can see their progress in other stores and in other regions,” added Tzazna.
We are so proud to help power this historic organizing, and we will continue to work in solidarity with OPSEU and the LCBO campaign as they build a province-wide movement.