Organizing Around People, Not Transactions
Updated: Oct 28
Fifteen minutes after state Rep. Rachel Baker posted a sign-up link for a Zoom town hall with Ohio's disability community, a Statehouse staffer flagged a problem. Nearly 70 people had already registered for a call that could hold only 100. Within half an hour it was full, and many of the people who got in were angry with her. Some who didn't get in complained she was silencing them. She blames Zoom.
Baker, an Anderson Township Democrat who represents Ohio House District 27 and is the ranking Democrat on the House Medicaid Committee, had just voted for Senate Bill 315, aimed at fraud, waste and abuse in Ohio's Medicaid program. It passed 85-10 in June. Early versions put home and community-based services on the chopping block, including the modest hourly pay that lets family members care for disabled relatives at home instead of in institutions. Disability advocates filled the hearings. Baker says the final version kept services intact even though it added paperwork, and her statement after the vote credited House Democrats with changes that reduced the harm. From the gallery, though, all anyone saw was her yes vote.
Some activists advised her to let the anger run its course. She decided she owed people the chance to say it to her directly. The first session walked through what the bill actually did and what she had won in exchange for her vote, clearing up a good deal of misinformation along the way. Participants asked her to meet weekly. She settled on monthly, and by the second meeting she had stopped presenting altogether and handed the call over to them.
That instinct, going straight to the people a decision affects instead of working only through lobbyists, is what Show Up Better is trying to make normal in politics. The Cincinnati group was founded by Wyatt King, a longtime Democratic campaign staffer and current precinct executive and ward chair, and Jeffrey Stec, a facilitator and mediator who serves as its director of community building. Their argument is that political organizing has become hollow and transactional, and that it works better when it starts with real relationships, first among organizers and then in the neighborhoods where they live. The group is openly partisan. It raises money through a political action committee and counts electing pro-democracy candidates among its goals, but it describes stronger communities as its main purpose, with turnout following from that.
Stec describes a method built around what the group calls a Community of Practice: people doing similar work who meet in person every two to four weeks.
The first piece is simply being a community, sharing values and motivations until trust and mutual accountability take hold. The second is practical, adapting organizing tools to local needs so each participant leaves a session with a specific plan. The third is about keeping people connected between meetings, through newsletters, check-ins, peer mentoring and social and service gatherings, because the energy of a good meeting fades fast once everyone returns to daily life.
Baker found her way to the group through one of its sessions, and she says it named something she had been doing on instinct for years. Before politics she was a social worker and then a nurse researcher. She adopted children with histories of trauma and volunteers as a court-appointed advocate for kids in the justice system. She came to see public office as an extension of that caregiving. Afterward she ordered a book on community building, and reading it on a plane, she recognized her disability town hall in its pages, especially the turn her group had just made from listing problems to imagining possibilities.
With large federal Medicaid cuts coming, and the disability community likely to take much of the hit, Baker wants the monthly calls to turn into a working alliance. The idea is that everyone pushes the same way: Baker negotiating with leadership behind closed doors while advocates make their case at the Capitol and in the press, all of it aimed at goals the community sets. She also noticed a gap once she got to the Statehouse. Nurses, physicians and hospitals each have an association lobbying for them. Patients don't.
She got into politics because of COVID. As a nurse researcher she watched her hospital system revise its rules almost daily as new data came in, then watched state officials and her local school district make decisions with far less of that discipline. When her state representative hit term limits, she ran, knowing so little about the job that on election night, when she learned reporters would want to talk to her, she looked up what a state representative does. The seat had belonged to Republican Tom Brinkman, and she won it with 56 percent of the vote. At new-member orientation an HR staffer asked for a voided check so she could get paid, and Baker asked what for. She had assumed it was a volunteer position. She credits the win less to party than to twenty-some years in the district. Republican neighbors who balked at the D next to her name had trusted her to drive their kids to soccer every week.
On election night in 2024, Baker was standing on a chair thanking volunteers for her reelection when the screen behind her showed Sherrod Brown losing his Senate race, and the room went flat.
She told them that if their mood could swing that hard on who got elected to rescue them, they would be stuck in the same cycle every two years. She told them to look at the people standing next to them, because that was where change would come from.
U.S. Rep. Greg Landsman, who represents Ohio's 1st District, sees the same appetite. When I interviewed him for Soapbox in 2025, he was already urging people to lock into their communities. He believes the pandemic left people wanting to gather in person, and that today's divisive politics has made more of them want to participate rather than tune out. His lesson from years on Cincinnati City Council is to be the first to respond when someone asks for help, even with something as small as a stop sign.
Development, he argues, works when residents help plan it and fails when it turns transactional, because people simply won't buy in. Trust gets rebuilt less in formal meetings than at neighborhood festivals and farmers markets.
The other half of that argument is what happens when residents aren't in the room at all, and for that Landsman points to Wilmington, in Clinton County. Amazon Web Services wants to build a $4 billion data center there on 471 acres off U.S. 68, as close as 200 feet to homes in a neighboring subdivision, with 252 diesel backup generators. The Clinton County Port Authority, which backs it, says it will bring 100 permanent jobs. Landsman says residents learned about the project only after it had been negotiated, and he cites Wilmington as the reason he introduced a bill banning officials from signing nondisclosure agreements on data center deals.
Jessica Sharp, who built a house next to the site a year before she learned what was planned for it, has led much of the opposition. Residents have packed planning commission meetings, sued the city, and won an order barring the city from acting on a data center site plan while the case is pending. The city denies any wrongdoing. When residents wrote their own 33-page zoning ordinance and gathered signatures to put it before voters, the Ohio Supreme Court let the county elections board keep it off the November ballot.
Baker wants to try the same approach with foster care and adoption, two of her other policy areas, and she has about four and a half years before term limits to do it. She can fill a statewide call with 100 people in 20 minutes, which most Ohioans can't, and she'd rather spend that on convening people than on campaign house parties that feel like a used car pitch.
She won't be presenting at the disability group's next session. The members are setting the agenda, starting with the question she left them with last time: if they could write Medicaid law themselves, what would it say? Baker is candid that she doesn't have much power to give away. She's a Democrat in a Republican supermajority, with one vote and a seat at the table. She also says she can't understand why more legislators don't sit down like this with the people their bills will land on.
In Wilmington this September, residents stood before city council for hours, asking questions about rezoning the site from rural residential to light industrial. Most council members didn't answer.
Show Up Better is a partisan political organization.
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