Tim Zhu for Metro DC DSA Steering Committee

Hi! My name is Tim Zhu and I am running for the Metro DC DSA Steering Committee.

One of our most important questions going forward in the next decade is how to break out of the insularity of the Left, and become an actual mass movement that is of the 99%, of the multi-racial working class. Our plans in building effective campaigns need to be created with this question in mind. My priorities for Steering Committee will include chapter growth and membership on-boarding, development, and retention. I want to increase member participation, ownership, and pride in the org, and our overall ability to marshal political power in DC.

Although I've only recently moved to DC earlier this year, I've been encouraged to run for the Steering Committee by several comrades who believe I can help the chapter grow, healthily and with intention. I have been active in left organizing, on and off, since the mid-2000s, since being a volunteer at the now-closed, collectively-run Arise! Bookstore in Minneapolis, MN.

I joined DSA on November 9, 2016. I co-founded the Honolulu chapter of DSA in early 2017. I helped grow the organization from 3 founding members to ~150 dues-paying members, and nurtured a new core of elected leadership and organizers. One of the things I've always been proud of for our chapter was having monthly meetings with high attendance rates relative to our total membership (between 20% to 40% of our total dues-paying membership). I developed our electoral endorsement process for the 2018 elections, helped set up the most robust canvassing and phonebanking operations of any non-union organization in the 2018 elections in Hawaii, and mobilized turnout for actions up to 100 people.

Personal highlights for me in working with the Honolulu chapter include helping a member and teacher’s union leader win her race for State House, and building relationships between socialist members of union locals through our Labor Working Group. Our membership in Honolulu is diverse, in terms of race from Chinese to Hawaiian to Japanese to Samoan, and also in terms of ideologies ranging from communist to social democratic to prioritizing indigenous sovereignty, and it’s been a great opportunity to organize a membership so diverse in viewpoints and backgrounds around common objectives.

I also co-founded Academic Labor United, a graduate union organizing committee at the University of Hawaii. I created our committee’s organizing, political, communications, and media strategy. I developed a card check strategy that resulted in 400+ union authorization cards signed in less than a month this spring. I’ve also recently worked as a salt on a successful union recognition campaign and contract negotiations at a 230 room, 65 worker hotel. I’ve worked many jobs in my life, but the most defining ones for me have been in the labor movement, natural resources management, food and beverage, and higher education. I currently work as a data specialist at a large labor union, with a focus on increasing membership density in key sectors.

I am a democratic socialist because I believe in fighting for the decommodification of life; an economy not oriented around profit but around human interests and ecological principles; the guaranteeing of basic human rights, including healthcare, housing, food, work, and education; the democratic ownership of the means of production; the leveling of hierarchies (economic, racial, gender, nation, colonial, imperialist, carceral); international cooperation; and more time for what we actually want to do in life.