Greg Nammacher of SEIU Local 26 describes how a coalition of deeply aligned organizations works together across the Twin Cities to build power, and how that “peace time” approach (in the words of Emilia González Avalos) has pivoted in the face of the Trump administration’s occupation of the Twin Cities. Their coalition initiated the call for the “Day of Truth and Freedom” action on January 23, 2026, turning out at least 50,000 people in Minneapolis to march in sub-zero temperatures and drawing statewide participation from about one quarter of all voters.

One of the pieces that we have worked hardest on in the Twin Cities… is around coalitional dynamics and how to move effectively…. There’s just competition and turfiness built into the de facto structures of social movements in all the cities in our country that I’ve been in, and definitely in the twin cities.

So we have some theories that have been very important leading up to [the Day of Truth and Freedom], which is ten years of intentionally not trying to build a big tent broad coalition on any event that comes up, but trying to build a deep alignment of a set of organizations that are clear about building power. That means that it’s not big in number, but it is a set of leaders that are ready to take risks and that are crystal clear: that if our demands are bigger than small incremental steps forward in traditional bargaining, then we must be a part of a set of power[-building] organizations that can move faster and more powerfully. But that does not mean then that we jump into a big tent coalition with everyone. That means that we think systematically about who are the powerful organizations and sectors in our city that are ready to take risks, that need more than they can win by themselves and that are hungry about that. And the term we use for that is alignment. It’s a deeper thing. 

We’re underneath each other’s hoods…. We are agitating each other. We are pushing each other because we have a self-interest in each other’s bases becoming stronger and us being able to grow and have more power. That concept of alignment is super important.…

We’ve got ten years, fifteen years of history of pulling off things that we refer to as “weeks of action,” where each different group would do its own action on its own issue, on its own target. And that was wonderful, and then sometimes we do a unity march at the end. What’s great is we’re supporting each other and building out a sense of deep solidarity, but it is also true, we did not trigger the imagination of the broader community in many of those [actions]. We almost always accomplished more than we would’ve by ourselves, but it was not this level of being on top of a wave.…

We spend a lot of time, probably correctly, analyzing the weaknesses of the other parts of our movement.… but [the January 23 action] was a moment that this alignment intentionally made a choice that there were going to be players that were not traditionally in our tent, flawed players, but players that brought something that we knew we didn’t have. I’m not talking about being humble. I’m talking about being extremely, surgically clear that there are flawed characters and actors in your community that can for sure as hell deliver areas that you can’t. And if that’s true, you got to figure it out and figure out how to run with them. And that is just not how most of our local movements are built…. It was that intentionality, understanding others can deliver what you can’t, that opened up [the Day of Truth and Freedom] to be at a level that was much bigger than this [coalition] structure and these organizational muscles had been able to deliver before.

Excerpt from Minneapolis Fight Back with Emilia González Avalos, Greg Nammacher, and Janae Bates Imari, The Dig, 2026. Transcript lightly edited for clarity.