TAL 2025-2026 Strategic Plan

Hello everyone!

We at the Architecture Lobby have been thinking lately about the future of our organization and the landscape of labor organizing amongst architectural workers. We’re excited to tell you all about our upcoming plans and priorities, but first, we’d like to announce our new slate of organizing committee members for the upcoming year! These groups share the responsibilities of the Organizing Committee (OC) and supersede the individual elected roles of past OC rosters, based on new governance meant to alleviate burnout and work more collectively.

On our administrative committee we have Blake Fisher, Rand Lemley, John Ludlam, Chase Robinson, and Cath Wang. Our strategy committee consists of Joshua Barnett, Sam Busman, Gabriel Cira, Evan Hall, James Heard, Daham Marapane, and Martin Weiner. Our finance coordinators are Kirsten Day and Niels Hoyle Dodson. These members will serve one-year terms.

For the upcoming year, we’ve identified some immediate projects and goals for the Lobby to pursue changes in workplaces and communities. We invite you all to add your voice to the conversation in whatever ways you’re able! .

1. A focus on campaigns over working groups. One of the primary purposes of the strategy committee will be to develop and build consensus around campaigns for the Lobby to pursue. We’d like to focus on singular campaigns with tangible winnable goals that architectural workers located anywhere can easily discover and get involved with. Our hope is that this reduces administrative load and enables effective directed action.
   During the Lobby’s earlier days we were one of the only venues for architectural workers to express discontent towards the status quo in our profession. Today that problematic status quo has only become more starkly apparent, and so many more architectural workers have been aligned with our goals, through other organizations or action. There is less a need for a mass member organization to address every issue for architectural workers. We want member campaigns to be able to throw the weight of the Lobby behind relevant issues and pressure points in real time. With The Architecture Lobby serving as a connective tissue, it should be easier for an architectural worker to learn about a campaign and get involved.

2. A focus on chapters as social spaces. Rather than assuming that chapters will have their own initiatives and administrative roles, we want to reinforce the idea that local chapters are spaces for informal gathering, solidarity, and fun. There is plenty of work for us to do over zoom calls, google docs and discord posts, but underpinning all of this are the person to person relationships we foster in our chapters. Check the local chapter connection page here!

3. We’re moving to Discord! We’re finally leaving Mobilize (and Zoom!) for a more versatile and public facing platform for communication. The new Discord is a communication server moderated by the Lobby that will be open for anyone to join, discuss architecture, ask for advice, and find community, but also will have a paywall behind which dues paying members can work on Lobby campaigns and administrative work. As the algorithms of twitter and instagram have become less conducive for healthy community building and media dissemination over the last few years, we believe that our discord server could help fill those needs for people interested in discussing our profession and its issues.

4. Debrief on TAL’s participation in La Biennale di Venezia. After being invited by the curators in November ‘24, a campaign of Lobby members embarked on an international collaborative work to lay bare the current issues within the profession around the globe. A collection of over 25 video interviews is placed in conversation with prompts for attendees to scrawl their own grievances and visions for the future. Seeking a democratized approach to the work, the video interviews are hosted on the Lobby’s YouTube channel here.

5. Expect a more regular newsletter. We hope to make this newsletter a regular occurrence that reports not just on what the Lobby is working on, but our analysis of our present moment and the work that allied organizations and individuals are working on. If you’re interested in helping us write this newsletter, please reach out!
   

Lastly we’d like to end these newsletters by sharing links to recent work that our members and allied organizations have been up to. If you have a project that you think we should share in the future, please reach out!

Links:

Toronto chapter’s Know Your Rights zine (specific to their region): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ukwKCyhUL-R180RjZieMa5oExa4qHjob/view

Toronto chapter’s Compensation Negotiation zine: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eIGEo4gvOcUmGydwvxK59qU3Wi9hbkhL/view

Distributable Know Your Rights for construction labor protection from ICE to be printed in a document set and posted at a jobsite: https://terremoto.la/land-and-labor?fbclid=PAQ0xDSwLZ9rhleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABp1mWQNQRbdkKo2w5fJN8mtnIpaMMfsoVijULO53ZPUde0PUcW1fkhJBOitWl_aem_FPb_0nJTRC8ZFnKTuScOng