After 5 Years, I Can No Longer Serve on the National Growth & Development Committee
Colleen and other DSA comrades participating in a statewide solidarity dues phonebank.
Colleen J. is a 2023-2025 National Political Committee Member. A GDC member since 2020, they’ve been a steering committee member since 2021 and served as chair from 2023 to March 2025. On the GDC, they built the national new member orientation program, ran the 2022 Recommitment Drive, co-chaired the 2023 chapter survey and report, and led the 2023–24 Solidarity Dues Drive that raised about $700,000 in dues income. The national Growth and Development Committee works on member recruitment, retention, organizer development and training, and dues-based fundraising. The GDC supports DSA chapters in these areas and provides resources to all members and was created in 2020 by a resolution passed at the 2019 Convention. This is part 1 of 2 articles on the GDC.
The national Growth and Development Committee (GDC) was founded in 2020 following an act of Convention and has always been a multi-tendency body, made up of members across the org who hold various caucus affiliations and members who are not caucused at all, frequently working directly with field organizers and other staff. The purpose of the GDC is to serve as the nationally coordinated internal organizing body that supports chapters in building up their own internal organizing strategies and processes related to membership recruitment, engagement, and retention. The work of the GDC has usually been generative and collaborative, and is critical to the task of our organization to build real, effective power by supporting and developing thousands of socialist organizers in the process.
I joined the GDC in 2020, have been a SC member since 2021, and have been involved in a number of important projects: coordinating and institutionalizing national new member orientation calls in the heyday of the 100K Drive, co-chairing the 2023 chapter survey and report, bottom-lining the 2022 Recommitment Drive, our organization’s first major retention drive in recent history, and helping write our two previous consensus resolutions passed at Convention. In Fall 2023, I was elected GDC co-chair. As co-chair, I am extremely proud of the work the body has done in the past year and a half in line with our most recent consensus resolution.
But at the March 2025 NPC meeting, Red Star NPC member Sam HL brought a resolution forward that unilaterally rewrote the national GDC bylaws, restructuring the body, deposing the current leadership, and mandating an entirely new process for leadership elections. Sam is a member of the GDC Steering Committee (GDC SC), but introduced this resolution without ever bringing his suggestions to the GDC or GDC SC. These behaviors are not new or surprising. Rather, they’re part of a pattern of behavior from Red Star caucus members on the GDC and beyond, demonstrating disregard for collective leadership or shared work and a pyrrhic, myopic drive to win the organization at all costs that corrodes our ability to build trusting relationships and accomplish our shared mission. Moreover, Red Star’s approach to DSA is heavily influenced by capitalist tech start-up thought, frequently to the detriment of our organization.
This top-down committee restructure came just days after the GDC SC, with my leadership as chair, concluded a series of meetings with the entire body to gather feedback and ideas to plan for the next six months of GDC programming, including implementing changes to address shared pain points, like building more capacity and creating more efficient application processes. Sam attended most of these meetings but did not meaningfully contribute or share ideas outside of a chat message during the meeting about how the GDC should not do a consensus resolution this year for convention. When his comrades on the GDC SC asked questions about why he was bringing these changes forward, he ignored them.
The changes were approved in a rushed deliberation by the NPC majority of Red Star, Bread and Roses, MUG, Ahmed, Luisa, and YDSA. An uncaucused GDC SC member wrote a letter to the NPC and annotated Sam’s proposal with questions, most of which Sam did not answer or address; the questions were acknowledged only at my urging in the NPC meeting. To date, Sam and Red Star haven’t communicated any of these changes, that they were being proposed or are happening, what the rationale was, etc., to GDC members. Sam and Red Star then moved to undemocratically shore up their power over the GDC: the only public announcement about applications to run in the new GDC SC election was a national member email sent out less than a week before the April 1 application deadline. It’s not at all surprising that the applicant pool was almost entirely made up of Red Star caucus members or their allies. Six of the twelve applicants are confirmed Red Star members, a seventh listed a Red Star member as a reference, and two applicants are in MUG. The remaining three applicants are, to the best of my knowledge, uncaucused, but at least one found out about the application from the Red Star discord. The only other formal tendency represented on the GDC SC now is MUG, and many of the new steering committee members were not previously even GDC members. Despite their calls to make the body more ideologically diverse, the steering committee is now far less diverse and multi-tendency than it was before Red Star’s proposal went into effect.
Based on how the discussion over the decision to discard the current leadership and restructure the GDC went, I’m not sure the current NPC majority would have allowed me to return to GDC leadership. Even if I were approved, the body being almost entirely Red Star would greatly strain the work I could do. So, I have decided not to run again for the seat I was unduly and underhandedly removed from.
Red Star’s Patterns of Disorganizing Behavior
The GDC’s active member roster is typically under 30. As for most national committees, capacity and long-term engagement are recurring problems. I’ve spent five years working hard on the GDC because I know developing effective socialist organizers and supporting chapters in developing robust internal organizing capacity and strong organizing containers is foundational to our mission. I am confident that after five years of work on the GDC, I have left the organization better than I found it. Getting to connect with and learn from the countless DSA members focused on building socialist organization and mass movement keep me connected to hope, grounded in historic responsibility, and energized to keep fighting the long fight in the darkest of times. And for much of my time on the GDC, it has been a haven in national organizing that felt largely free from infighting and was focused on collaboration and collective work.
But since the run-up to the 2023 Convention, the GDC has increasingly become a site of one-sided caucus warfare that has hindered our critical work, demoralized committed organizers, and distracted us from our urgent public work of fighting fascism, building socialism, and growing an even more effective socialist organization. These factional initiatives have come almost exclusively from Red Star members and their allies, and intentionally present a one-sided perspective on real questions which promote a winner-takes-all approach to the organization rather than engaging in good faith about the complexities of collaborating across differences. Although I am deeply committed to our organization, this pattern of bad faith attacks and disorganizing behavior has made working on the GDC intolerable, and it’s part of a larger factional approach by Red Star that seeks to commandeer control of our organization at all costs and to questionable ends.
When disagreements arise, I have always tried to address them one-on-one and directly in good faith. When disagreements on the GDC have escalated beyond the committee, such as on the forums or social media, I have largely refrained from engaging. I’m not a poster, and I have generally found the cycle of public outrage to be counterproductive. Unfortunately, this has allowed the dissemination of a slanted narrative that has sown distrust in our organization, and I feel a responsibility to clearly lay out exactly what the patterns of behavior have been that are corroding our organizational capacity and trust. We are in a moment of historic risk and hostility as we try to build our project in the current organizing environment. We can choose to act according to the discipline this historic conjuncture calls for against the fascists and billionaires dismantling what remains of our democracy, or we can choose to act as if motivated by personal grievances and petty resentments.
A Bad Boss Approach to Work
Red Star leaders on the GDC have often behaved more like corporate managers than comrades, swooping in to make top-down proclamations, but rarely engaging in the actual work of organizing. They have frequently been absent, leaving me and others to pick up their slack. Adding insult to injury, they have publicly taken credit for work they did not do.
Although frequently grandstanding about the importance of fundraising work, Red Star NPC members often undermined our Solidarity Dues work. DSA Co-Chair Megan Romer drafted a resolution that required her to be part of the core team of organizers running the Solidarity Dues Drive. She would frequently take on tasks, like coordinating statewide phonebanks, but when she often didn’t follow through, other members of the team had to step in and run these things. Megan is paid with our dues money to work full-time for DSA and is expected to focus a large part of her work on fundraising. And yet I, while working a full-time job in addition to my work with DSA, organized over three times more Solidarity Dues phonebanks than Megan.
Sam was largely absent from the GDC and as the chair of the Fundraising Committee, although he frequently took credit for work that I and others did on both the GDC and Fundraising Committee. He insisted the NPC hold special sessions on fundraising to present work that he was largely uninvolved with as though it were his own. He also frequently disrespected and disregarded the time others put into work. For example, I took the time to do 1-on-1s with all GDC SC members to ensure everyone could help run our recent debrief and vision-setting process. Sam no-showed with no communication to the meeting he was supposed to help facilitate with me, after I specifically scheduled a session based on his availability and got his buy-in to participate in the call.
In the rationale for the hostile restructuring of the GDC, Sam presented a narrative that obscured both that there was work already being done to address issues that had been identified, and that Sam himself was frequently part of the problems that existed on the GDC. We interviewed all applicants to the GDC, and we had about 30 applicants in the past year, but a small subset of people did most of this work. Sam has never completed any interviews with GDC applicants.
Every six months, we’d check in with members and reassess our projects and capacity. This was always based on input from members and their interests and capacity, and then the GDC SC would collectively figure out how to staff all the projects in ways that ensured work could continue. There were opportunities for Sam to make suggestions, which he rarely did. Instead, he’d wait until we had done all the work of figuring out teams, and then he would pull people he wanted for his State of DSA project anyway.
Some of the newly announced Red Star NPC slate have taken a similar dishonest tack to try to positively position themselves. Hazel was one of the new joins to the GDC, and recently has been the most vocal with untrue assertions, seemingly in an attempt to heroically position herself as filling the void. She joined the GDC in late January, two weeks later joined the GDC SC, and ran for the NPC vacancy shortly after that. Since joining the GDC SC, she has repeated incorrect claims on the GDC slack and DSA Forums that resources like a Centralized Resource Hub or “real” roster of GDC members does not currently exist; they do, and she knows that because I onboarded her and shared these resources with her. She similarly claims clear work plans, point people to activate team members, and quarterly updates did not previously exist, but that is also not true. They were all already part of GDC work, but frequently Red Star members just did not contribute to them, as neither Sam nor Hazel shared an update on their State of DSA project on the March quarterly GDC report. The two major initiatives of the new SC: to build a training library and a resource library, already exist. Chapters can see and request the full range of trainings here, and the GDC ran and promoted regularly scheduled trainings on a number of topics. Similarly, we had been collecting and building out resources for chapters on a number of topics; we just needed more time and capacity to continue developing these resources.
Red Star’s tech boss mindset is on display outside of the GDC as well. While advocating for a resolution for mass staff layoffs, Sam HL casually compared DSA to the tech start-up world. He argued that mass layoffs were commonplace and thus we should be unconcerned at the prospect of laying off approximately one-third of our staff at a moment when fascist and far-right forces were coalescing in the US and globally. At the East Bay DSA social after the February 2024 NPC meeting, I met an East Bay DSA Red Star member and prominent poster who unironically described himself as a “venture capitalist socialist.”
Red Star Leading GDC Trainings
A Red Star member was co-chair with me for a time on the GDC and was the chair for the training subcommittee. They had very high aspirations for their work but it quickly became clear they did not have the ability to follow through. Soon into their term, individual GDC members began to reach out to me; they had reached out numerous times to the training chair but weren’t getting plugged into the work. A backlog of chapter training requests piled up for months without response. Eventually, the Red Star member resigned, and an uncaucused veteran organizer stepped in to run this committee; a few months after we added two more people to help bottomline the coordination of this substantial work and get things back on track.
Doing What They Want, and Not Asking for Forgiveness Later
About a month after the new training chair took over last summer, I learned that someone was holding Robert’s Rules trainings on the GDC Zoom account. This wasn’t one of the trainings that we offered through national resources, and there wasn’t an active GDC campaign on this. I found out it was Andrew T., a San Francisco Red Star member, holding these sessions, and I reached out to him one-on-one to talk about it. He told me his approach is typically to ‘move fast and ask forgiveness later’ an adage I had only heard before from big-brained billionaires like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg.
In DSA, we use our internal democracy to determine how we use resources and what we prioritize. I asked Andrew to hold off, just for long enough to get the training resources set up properly and publicized so all chapters had a fair chance to participate. He agreed to this in the initial conversation with me, but in reality he didn’t hold off. I had another conversation with him and brought in our then-chair of the training committee, and after a few months, he did make sure the work was moved to the GDC drive and reflected on the national training website.
I was more than willing to reach out directly to ensure misunderstandings were resolved and work could move forward; it’s good that the GDC now offers Robert’s Rules trainings to all chapters. However, Andrew’s behavior demonstrated an aspect of tech industry culture that is commonplace in Red Star members’ undemocratic approach to the organization. What matters is moving fast to get their way, and breaking things, including organizing relationships and organizational trust, is just part of the process.
Immediately Escalating to Temper Tantrums
These trainings seemed to go smoothly for months until a training the Friday of Inauguration Weekend. Andrew scheduled these trainings on Fridays at 7 pm ET, an unusual time for a standing event. Usually a training committee chair would send the facilitator the RSVPs for that training to do reminders ahead of time. The day of the training, they’d start the Zoom and pass it over to the facilitator in the 15-minute meeting prep time before the call. Andrew didn’t check in with this person until a couple of minutes before the training, and the person didn’t start the Zoom. A minute before the training was supposed to start, he began frantically posting on Slack. When no one responded by that Saturday, he posted a large screed on the Forums claiming “something is off with the GDC and getting in the way of our mission”, claiming we did nothing to help chapters recruit members in this critical period (we were just winding down a four-month program emphasizing exactly that), and incorrectly claiming his Robert’s Rules trainings are the majority of training work the GDC does. Despite having time to post, when a training chair reached out directly to talk, Andrew said he didn’t have time for a conversation.
One of Andrew’s initial complaints was that someone needed to communicate the need to reschedule the training or send a new Zoom link to the people who had RSVP’d. I found out that Andrew had been sent the contact info of everyone who had RSVP’d to the training the day before. I also asked him several times if he would contact those people or draft an email, but he ignored my asks and did not contact the registrants.
His other complaints had to do with coordination and logistics. This was already something the training committee was seeking to refine with the recently appointed additional subcommittee co-chairs, and a meeting was already scheduled for a few days later to explore solutions like Zoom meeting codes. Andrew continued to be belligerent and, when I tried to de-escalate, told me “This conversation is generative to me” and insisted on continuing to post on Slack and in the Forums, rather than talking directly with his comrades about this.
The Slack thread included a number of Red Star members chiming in, including John on the NPC, to agree how deep of a structural problem this was, and when people asked for more specifics or examples, none were given. The Forum thread turned into a negative pile-on, including Forum moderators passing judgment that I was “condescending” for suggesting Andrew be more proactive in ensuring the logistics of his training came together.
Nearly all GDC SC members reached out to me about this incident and expressed frustration at Andrew’s insistence on escalating a mundane and resolvable problem and also to disrespect the collective work of the committee by denigrating his comrades publicly. Because of this, we took some time in a meeting to discuss this and decided to have a GDC SC member follow up with him one-on-one to talk through how his behavior had landed with and impacted the GDC. Sam was opposed to us having any sort of conversation about this, preferring we ignore and thus tacitly accept Andrew’s behavior. Sam appeared not to care that every other member of the SC saw this as behavior we wanted to address. Andrew T. is also now one of the GDC SC members, so under Red Star’s logic, he was actually rewarded for this behavior.
State of DSA
The final example I’ll dig into involves Red Star’s State of DSA project, which seeks to serve “project customers” like the Democracy Commission and chapter organizers with reports on chapter organizing activities. This project was created by an amendment (pg. 41) Sam and Red Star brought to the 2023 GDC Consensus Resolution (pg. 36). Since its creation in 2020 by the passage of a resolution at Convention, the GDC has always presented a consensus resolution at Convention. In 2023, we held meetings with GDC members to discuss the consensus resolution and there was an open process for members to contribute language that could be added to the resolution after body deliberation. Although he was on the GDC at the time, Sam did not engage in our consensus resolution process. Instead, he used an amendment for a project that replicated already existing work on the GDC and grandstanded on an ultimately meaningless leadership pledge about fundraising and staff relations, in order to heighten his and other Red Star members' profiles in their NPC election run. The amendment passed, and so the GDC was tasked with producing State of DSA Reports.
Red Star members on the GDC claim we have been blocking their State of DSA work, but this is a deflection from the fact that very little progress was made on the project for nearly a year. The work that did occur was controlled by an insular group: four Red Star members from the San Francisco chapter and one uncaucused member from the East Bay chapter. The GDC SC found out after the fact that Red Star members published a report that was not brought to the GDC SC, which went against the established practice with other GDC public reports like the chapter survey. At the end of January, Sam brought another Red Star member, Hazel, to the SC meeting and wanted her immediately added to the GDC SC to take over from him on the State of DSA project—just two weeks after she was approved as a GDC member. Although unusual, this was approved unanimously, and I met with Hazel days later to onboard her.
The GDC SC was just about to begin a series of deep discussions about debriefing GDC work and vision-setting projects for the next six months, and as an SC body, we planned agendas that included input from the field organizing team. Hazel expressed urgency in wanting to move forward with the State of DSA project, and I raised the points about the composition of the team and that no concrete plan had been brought forward for listening sessions. There was no structured agenda with questions or a proposal or research rationale for who was being invited to the listening session. This information is still not clear, and the Red Star leaders on the project have not provided that information despite repeated requests for it. Despite this, they continue to claim SMC members on the GDC were obstructing their work. They held their first listening session about a month after Hazel was onboarded, and it appears that recruitment was largely through their internal caucus network, further validating the concerns raised about ensuring the work was truly representative and structured to achieve the stated goals of the project.
NPC Liaisons to the GDC and Blocking Applicants
One of the main arguments for restructuring the GDC was that the body was too dominated by SMC, wasn’t multi-tendency, and that the alleged dominating tendency frequently blocked other members from joining the GDC. From late 2023 to the end of January 2025, we had thirty-two applicants to the GDC. Four applicants did not respond to requests for interviews. Four applicants are still pending interviews or votes with GDC SC members as of the writing of this article. Two interviewees ended up not actually wanting to apply for the GDC, but were instead interested in resources. Of the final 23 applicants, 21 were admitted. Despite this reality, and the reality that Sam HL has not done a single interview for the GDC, he and other NPC members hostile to the GDC frequently repeat this false claim to members.
In November 2023, the NPC had a process for determining NPC liaison appointments to different committees. I don’t recall there being any contentious votes, and NPC members worked out amendments and requested changes that were then approved. And yet, months later, Ahmed posted on the Forums claiming he’d been barred from the GDC SC, and I and my tendency were the ones to blame. But he had never requested to be considered as a GDC liaison, and had even been a guest speaker on a national new member orientation. This was clearly untrue and yet I still received emails from members I’d never met angry at me for this supposed unjust obstruction that never happened.
The Impacts of Manufacturing Crisis
The escalating hostilities from Red Star reached their zenith with Sam’s unilateral proposal to effectively DOGE the GDC. To do this, he again presented a one-sided narrative of crisis on the GDC that erased comrades’ good-faith contributions to the work and hours of time put into proactively gathering feedback and making adjustments. Sam rarely engaged in this work and frequently wasted our time by doing what he wished as an individual in the face of the collectively agreed upon processes and decisions made. The solutions he proposes are unlikely to address the root issues he claims to want to adjust in the name of greater efficiency for GDC. Looking past the rhetoric to focus on actions reveals the intent here is to depose the people he sees as roadblocks or enemies and who he feels no need to be accountable or connected to, so Red Star can continue doing what they’ve always done on the GDC without having to deal with feedback they don’t like and ignore anyway.
The outcomes here are predictable. There will likely be a mass exodus of committed members from the GDC of many tendencies, which has already happened after various Red Star outbursts, and the GDC will be firmly under the control of Red Star and those who agree with them or are too afraid or tired to voice any dissenting opinion. Rather than making the body more diverse and multi-tendency than it was, it moves us in the direction of a system of patronage and personal loyalties where Red Star will bully and degrade whichever members remain. It is part of a longstanding pattern of undemocratic and uncomradely behavior that includes public outbursts, one-sided narratives for factional gain, and treating comrades as disposable enemies who get in the way of the ultimate goal: winning DSA for Red Star. It is misguided and misses the urgent point of this political moment - that our strength comes from our interdependence and that we are doing our real enemies’ work for them by taking up inward-facing battles against each other. Red Star’s often flawed logic and individualistic behavior belong more in the capitalist world of tech start-ups, and are often antithetical to the mission of a socialist member-led organization. Their forceful takeover of the GDC leaves us even more vulnerable to fascist attack at a time when we need a disciplined organization more than ever.
Democratic socialists have dangerous enemies who have risen to power, and we would do better to focus on fighting them. Unfortunately, Red Star’s approach to the GDC demonstrates an insistence on taking aim at comrades, leaving us even more vulnerable to fascist attacks and setting us back on our work of developing more and stronger organizers. I’m tired of being routinely disrespected by my supposed comrades, and I’m tired of seeing people who dedicate hours of their day and years of their lives to move forward the mission of this organization being treated as disposable. We must be better than this. The historic task ahead of us requires it, and it’s on all of us to guarantee that we build a DSA that is laser-focused on building power, courageous in meeting the political moment, and rooted deeply in principle to know who the real enemies are and act accordingly. I urge members to pay attention not just to what people say, but what they do to build the organization and world they envision. Do not take people only at their word or the stories they tell; ask them what they’ve actually built, and pay attention to their actions and practices.