For 20 years, Food & Water Watch has been winning campaigns that defend our food, water, and future from corporate greed. Those victories come from our bold organizing strategy — which we learned from the very best. 

At our 20th anniversary benefit celebration earlier this year, we honored lifelong organizers Jackie Kendall and Steve Max. Jackie and Steve co-led the Midwest Academy, an organizing training center founded by Heather Booth, for more than 40 years. 

“I was trained by Jackie and Steve more than three and a half decades ago,” said Food & Water Watch Executive Director Wenonah Hauter. “They have always been important mentors to me and good friends. The training they teach serves as the foundational training for Food & Water Watch organizers and is central to how we’ve won campaigns.”

Over their decades-long careers, Jackie and Steve have been instrumental in many fights for social, economic, and environmental justice. They’ve protected social security and healthcare access, stopped polluting projects, fought for labor and civil rights, and more. 

Since Food & Water Watch’s founding, they’ve trained not just our organizers, but every single staff member across the organization. 

“As co-trainers, Jackie and Steve are just magic,” said Managing Director of Organizing Emily Wurth. “They’re both incredible storytellers, and what they teach just sticks with you. And what will stick with us most is the concept that we have the power to hold our elected officials accountable to the world we want.”

We sat down with Steve and Jackie to hear more about the Midwest Academy’s unique and winning approach to organizing, their impact on Food & Water Watch over 20 years, and what we need for the challenging times ahead. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You’ve both been activists for more than 50 years. What drives your passion for activism?

Jackie: What drives my passion is a strong sense of injustice and a thirst for justice. And it’s not something you do once and then it’s over. There’s this song that goes, “Freedom never came like a bird on a wing… You gotta work for it, fight for it, day and night for it, and every generation has to do it again.”

That’s what organizing is. You’re never done because the other side is always coming back to take away whatever you won. But that’s not enough to win. We’ve got to be able to organize with lots of people and build power in order to do it. 

Steve: It’s not a passion for activism in general. If you’re in the pencil world, sharpening pencils could be considered activism. What I’m doing is sticking it to the rich and powerful because they’re sticking it to me — not just me personally, but all working people. And we didn’t start this fight, and we might not see it finished any time soon, but we’re going to keep it going.

How did you first get involved with Food & Water Watch?

Steve: It was through the founding director, Wenonah Hauter. Jackie and I met her when she was working for the Union of Concerned Scientists. We were doing a training for them, and she saw what we could do, and then she brought us in to set up the training program for Food & Water Watch when she began it.

Jackie: We became not just work colleagues, but friends over the years. She hired us to train the original Food & Water Watch staff of less than ten people — now it’s over 100 — and then continued over 20 years. We’ve been not only training their staff and volunteers, but also some of their most experienced organizers to do this training themselves. 

And we’ve trained just about everyone on staff. It isn’t just limited to the organizers, and I think this is critical because organizing doesn’t take place in a vacuum. They’ve got great researchers, fundraisers, comms people, and all of them have been through the training. Each part of the organization builds on the other.

Can you explain what the Midwest Academy is for those who might be unfamiliar?

Jackie: The Midwest Academy just celebrated its 50th anniversary, and it trains organizers all around the country, around the world, from teenagers to senior citizens, to be strategic, bold, and optimistic.

Steve: It began in 1973, and we were all veterans of the movements of the ‘60s — the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-war movement, the student movement. In the early ‘70s, a new wave of activism began, which was more community-based and more locally oriented. The Academy brought a sort of merger of the movement spirit with very practical, day-to-day organizing.

At the time, new statewide organizations were also being formed; some of them coalitions, some of them neighborhood-based. We were instrumental in forming the organization Citizen Action, which began a national organization with some 32 state affiliates. 

At the same time, national organizations — this was in the Reagan era — were finding that their funding was being cut back. National organizations we never thought we would be working with — the American Cancer Society, AARP, the NAACP, the National Student Association — began coming to us either for direct training or for setting up internal training programs, as we did for Food & Water Watch. 

What does the Midwest Academy bring to organizing and campaigns?

Steve: What I think we mainly bring — and what I think the training is designed to bring — is a common language, a common vocabulary in a large organization.

People come from many different walks of life and many different parts of the country, and words mean different things. So the first step in building an internally cohesive organization is that people have a common way of talking about what they’re doing. 

The second thing we bring is a framework for planning that we call strategy development. As long as everybody in the organization has the same method in mind, then they can get together and go through the steps. 

It’s a set of steps — it’s outlined in Organizing for Social Change, the manual that Jackie and I and Kim Bobo authored — and we take people through developing a strategy chart. 

Jackie: There’s five columns on the chart. The first one asks, “What do you want to win?” Second: “What do you have as an organization to do it, and what do you have to build to do it?” Third: “Who are you going to organize?” Fourth: “Who can give you what you want?” — the decision maker. And the last one asks about tactics; how you go about doing that.

I went to the Midwest Academy as a trainee in 1974, and at that time I’d been working on winning freshness dates on food. At that point, there were no freshness or use-by dates. 

I and a bunch of other housewives decided we wanted dates on food. We just kind of took to the streets. It was very tactical. There was no strategy behind it. We just barrelled ahead and sometimes we’d win, sometimes we’d lose.

When I went to the Midwest Academy, it was like being hit upside the head by a two-by-four. Like — Oh! There’s a difference between strategy and tactics!

And it was life-changing. It made me want to do this work forever. It also made me want to train other people, because I knew the impact it had on what I did. 

It’s critical to decide what you want to win and who the decision maker is who can give you what you want. And all of the organizing you do has to be directed at that decision maker to get the win that you want. 

So it’s not enough to just say “We care about the environment, we’re passionate about this or that.” You could be working 24 hours a day doing stuff, but if it’s not strategic, it doesn’t go anywhere.

You’ve worked with a lot of organizations over the years. What stands out to you about Food & Water Watch?

Steve: What’s unique about Food & Water Watch is that they can’t be bought. They don’t advocate fake solutions, they don’t greenwash the corporate line. I won’t tell you who does, but Food & Water Watch doesn’t.

And a lot of people say the fights Food & Water Watch takes on are unwinnable, but it’s not like Food & Water Watch thinks that. They’re not for jumping into unwinnable fights. They have a strategy; they figure out a way that it can be won. 

Jackie: No issue is inherently winnable. If you figure out a strategy and organize enough power, you can win things that other people think are impossible.

Food & Water Watch has done this over and over again. I think the most striking example is their work on fracking. When they first called for a fracking ban, so many other organizations, even environmental organizations, laughed at them. 

But they did it, and eventually they got a couple of states and scores of municipalities to ban fracking. They’re willing to get out there on the cutting edge.

You’ve been activists for 50 years. What have you noticed about the evolution of activism, and what do you see as becoming more important now?

Jackie: Probably the biggest change that I’ve seen in my organizing career is the new technology, which is both wonderful and sometimes a nightmare. During the pandemic, we ended up doing a lot of things online. 

The technology has to be a tool that we use and not the end. Doing the volunteer training online during COVID ended up proving to us that you could do it.

But it’s not a substitute. It’s just an additional tool. We need to use both of them. We still have to be on the ground, in-person, with volunteers and decision makers.

Steve: I think the big change that I’ve seen — and I’m 85 years old — is that people now believe that sending email is as good as showing up. Now, sending email is good, but it’s not as good. 

The technology has always been changing. Just think — something like 12,000 people showed up for the first Lincoln-Douglas debate in a little town in Illinois, and what made that possible was the new technology. And the technology of that era was the railroad.

The railroad was a technology that encouraged showing up. Email is a technology that encourages staying home. And that’s been the change, and that’s what Food & Water Watch works to overcome. That’s what has to be overcome. 

There’s too much falling into passivity and thinking that there’s an electronic button that you can push that can create social change. There isn’t. 

What does it take to win as an organizer?

Jackie: An incredible sense of optimism and being strategic. You can’t do this kind of work if you’re pessimistic. You’ve got to believe that you can change the world. And we can, if we organize.

Steve: It takes power to win. It’s not what you know, it’s not who you know, it’s how you can make public officials do something that they are under great pressure not to do. How to get them to do the right thing, when they’re under great pressure to do the wrong thing. And that’s what we try to bring to the organization. 

What would your advice be to a new organizer?

Jackie: Be an organizer, not just an activist! You’ve got to be working with an organization, building power, and challenging those in power. You can’t do it on your own or with just a few people. 

And get training! I was doing this work for years before I went to the Midwest Academy, and if I had found that strategy chart years earlier, it would have saved me a lot of time and effort! 

Steve: We are in an era where the preservation of democracy itself is the main issue here and the world over. All campaigns must now be fought with an eye to uniting the democratic forces.

What gives you hope for the future?

Jackie: The past. We’ve been through some terrible, terrible times in this country. I’m 83 years old, okay, I’ve seen a lot! And we’ve been through wars and slavery and civil unrest. All kinds of horrible disasters. And eventually, we come out of it. 

As I said earlier, you’ve got to be optimistic, and I think seeing successes in the past means that there can be some in the future — but it ain’t gonna come from an 83-year-old these days! We’ve got to pass it on and others have to do it. Every generation has to do it again.

Steve: Mainly what gives me hope is that we have survived the past and lived to tell about it. When you think about our history — the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Fugitive Slave Act, the Dred Scott decision… 

Believe it or not, during the Woodrow Wilson administration, Wilson actually believed there was an enemy within, and he went out and arrested 10,000 people — socialists, pacifists, and German immigrants.

So it’s not that we haven’t seen this kind of thing happen. We’ve survived it, and we’re going to continue to survive it.

Why is it important to support Food & Water Watch, now more than ever?

Steve: Food & Water Watch is not going to be intimidated. We’re going to see a lot of the mainstream environmental organizations continue to back off from difficult issues, particularly in response to their funders.  

Food & Water Watch doesn’t do that. The people they attract want them to be a certain kind of organization, want them to be continually telling the truth in Washington.

Having that kind of funding base is what’s going to make all the difference, and those are the people we need to bring in. 

This is a time when it’s essential to support Food & Water Watch because the Trump administration is going to be rolling back all of the gains that we’ve made in the climate arena. You could just see how terrified they were that people would make the connection between the fires in California and climate change. 

This is a moment when connections like that can be made, but it’s only made if organizations like Food & Water Watch — well, there aren’t organizations like Food & Water Watch, there’s only this one — make them.

Jackie: Food & Water Watch is bold and they’ll step out and take on the hard things. That’s the bottom line. And I love all the people there. They’re fun, and you’ve got to have fun while you’re doing this.

It’s not enough to just sit at home, write letters, sign petitions online. You’ve got to get out there, give money, volunteer, and put it where it will win and make change! And given the current political circumstances that we’re in… wow, Food & Water Watch needs you, now. And we need Food & Water Watch!