At the 2026 DNC Summer Meeting in Austin, I participated in a training session on community engagement and coalition building. During the discussion, I shared our experience organizing diverse Asian American communities in Texas to stand together and voice their concerns over SB 147, the proposed land-ownership restriction legislation.
The training offered useful strategies for strengthening local engagement and coalition building. As I listened to the discussion, however, I noticed that much of the focus was on what national or organizational leadership could provide to local communities, including resources, messaging, training, strategic guidance, and other forms of support.
All of these are important. At the same time, I wanted to raise another question: What about the influence that moves in the other direction?
I had been thinking about bringing followership into the discussion because I increasingly see it as an important part of community engagement that is often overlooked. Time ran out before I had an opportunity to develop the point.
Shortly afterward, I read Carl Hartford’s reflection on courageous and effective followership. His discussion reminded me of Ira Chaleff’s The Courageous Follower and the idea that followers are not simply people who receive direction. Effective followers exercise judgment and responsibility and, when necessary, speak upward to those in formal leadership positions.
That brought me back to the SB 147 experience I had just shared at the DNC training. I had presented it primarily as an example of community engagement and coalition building. Yet when I considered how the movement actually began, followership had played an important role from the very beginning.
Before I Led, a Follower Called Me to Lead
Concern over SB 147 began escalating from the end of 2022 into early 2023. At the time, I was deeply immersed in preparing for my Ph.D. comprehensive examination and had not yet realized how seriously the issue was developing within the community.
On January 24, one of my longtime presidential campaign volunteers, who was also a Texas A&M professor with a Ph.D. in policy studies, called me. He had already written to the senator about SB 147 but received no response.
During our conversation, he told me:
“You have the power to influence more people. I don’t have that power, so you should be the leader to do it.”
His call caught my attention immediately. He had already tried to address the issue himself. When his individual effort did not receive a response, he believed a broader community effort was necessary and asked me to use the networks and influence I had developed over many years.
I accepted his challenge and began acting quickly.
At the same time, I faced a difficult conflict. My comprehensive examination was already scheduled for March after coordination among several professors. I could not simply postpone it myself, and I had no reason to assume that the university would approve such a request.
While the community organizing was beginning, I contacted my university and explained the urgency of what was happening in Texas. I requested permission to postpone the examination so that I could devote my attention to the community response.
In making my case, I referred to the leadership education I had been receiving. I had spent years studying organizational leadership in theory, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a case study of leadership in the struggle for human rights. Somewhat playfully, but also sincerely, I wrote that perhaps this was the time for me to become a “Martin Luther Ling.”
I was prepared for the request to be declined because the examination had already been arranged around several professors’ schedules. To my surprise and gratitude, the university supported my request and postponed my comprehensive examination until June, after the Texas legislative session concluded.
The university was not taking a position on the legislation or directing my civic engagement. It simply gave me the flexibility to respond to what I considered an urgent community responsibility and return to my academic obligations afterward. I remain grateful for that support.
Meanwhile, the community organizing was already moving quickly. I created the first WeChat group, which reached its 500-member limit within 24 hours. I then created additional groups, eventually reaching seven interconnected groups with nearly 3,000 participants.
The speed and scale of the response made it clear that this was no longer simply one person's concern or one leader's initiative. A much larger community response was taking shape.
Looking back, the sequence is important. The process began with a community member who had already taken action himself and then used his voice to influence someone in a formal leadership position. I responded, and the organizing process developed from there.
This was different from the conventional assumption that a leader first identifies an issue, develops a strategy, and then calls followers into action. In this case, a follower's awareness and initiative helped activate the leadership response.
Courageous Followership Is Not Passive Support
Chaleff’s concept of the courageous follower helps me understand that initial phone call differently.
Followers are often viewed primarily in relation to what leaders ask them to do. In practice, however, people closer to the ground may recognize an emerging problem before someone in a formal leadership position does. They may also have information or perspectives that leadership has not yet received.
That was what happened in this case. My volunteer had already acted by writing to the senator. When he received no response, he brought the issue to me and directly asked me to step forward.
I now see his action as an example of courageous and effective followership. He was not opposing my leadership or simply waiting for it. He was exercising upward influence because he believed action was necessary.
Without that intervention, I might have become involved later, or under very different circumstances.
Leadership Must Also Be Willing to Receive Influence
The experience also made me think about the leader’s responsibility in this relationship.
A follower can speak, but the influence goes nowhere if the leader is unwilling to listen. I could easily have told him that I was preparing for an important examination and did not have the capacity to take on such a major responsibility. I also could have assumed that, as the organizational leader, I was in the better position to determine when and how to act.
Instead, I listened to what he was telling me and reassessed the situation.
This is where I see a connection between courageous followership and inclusive leadership. Inclusive leadership involves more than inviting participation or providing resources. It also means recognizing that useful information and initiative may come from people without formal authority.
Relational trust and psychological safety are important in this process. People need to feel that they can raise concerns or disagree without damaging the relationship. Leaders also need to be sufficiently open to consider information that may challenge their own assumptions or priorities.
In this case, the follower had the confidence to speak directly to me, and I was willing to take his message seriously. The leadership response emerged from that interaction.
From Upward Influence to Coalition Building
Once I responded to that initial call, the community response developed very quickly. The first WeChat group reached its 500-member limit within 24 hours, and I continued creating additional groups until we eventually had seven interconnected groups with nearly 3,000 participants.
The participants came from many different professions, backgrounds, community organizations, and political affiliations. Some were Democrats and some were Republicans, while others were not particularly involved in partisan politics. Their differences mattered less at that moment because they shared the same concern about SB 147 and wanted to do something about it.
The rapid growth created an immediate organizational challenge. Managing several thousand people through WeChat groups was not enough, so we formed an Organizing Committee and established multiple functional teams to carry out different responsibilities. One of these was an outreach team that connected with other ethnic communities, organizations, and potential coalition partners.
We distributed responsibilities according to people's experience, skills, networks, and willingness to contribute. Some participants were already established community leaders, while others gradually assumed leadership responsibilities through their work in the movement. Volunteers helped organize activities, brought in new participants, contributed ideas, and took responsibility for different functions.
My role was to provide overall direction and coordination, but it was neither possible nor desirable for me to direct everything. The Organizing Committee and functional teams allowed people to work with considerable initiative within their areas of responsibility. As the movement developed, I saw participants move naturally between following and leading depending on what needed to be done and who had the relevant knowledge or capacity.
The diversity and size of the group also made me increasingly conscious of the responsibility I had accepted. Thousands of people from different backgrounds and political affiliations had come together around one shared concern and placed considerable trust in my leadership.
I felt the weight of that trust and the responsibility that came with it.
This was a voluntary civic movement. There was no employment relationship or formal hierarchy requiring anyone to remain involved. People participated because they believed in the purpose of the movement and trusted that their collective concerns would be represented responsibly. That trust became an important part of sustaining the coalition.
As the work continued, influence moved in several directions. The initial call from a volunteer had influenced me to act. I then provided direction and helped establish an organizational structure. Members of the Organizing Committee and functional teams continued to bring information, concerns, ideas, and recommendations into our decision-making. Some volunteers gradually assumed greater leadership responsibilities as the work developed.
The experience did not fit neatly into either a top-down or bottom-up model. Leadership and followership were occurring simultaneously at different levels of the coalition. People sometimes followed the overall direction of the movement while leading within their own areas of responsibility. I was leading the broader effort while continuing to receive and respond to influence from the people involved.
This was the coalition-building experience I shared during the DNC training. Looking at it now through the lens of followership helps me see more clearly that the coalition was sustained not simply by leadership direction, but by the interaction among leadership, followership, shared purpose, and trust.
What Was Missing From the Training Conversation
The DNC training appropriately emphasized the resources and support that national leadership can provide to local communities. Organizations need infrastructure, strategic guidance, communication systems, training, and coordination.
My own experience suggests that the relationship also needs to work in the other direction.
Local communities are not simply recipients of national strategy. They often possess information and experience that national organizations cannot obtain from the top. People working directly in communities may recognize an emerging issue early and understand local relationships or cultural considerations that are less visible at the national level.
This does not mean that bottom-up influence should replace top-down leadership. Both are necessary. National organizations can provide resources, capacity, and broader strategy, while local communities provide information, experience, feedback, and initiative that can help shape that strategy.
There is also a horizontal dimension. Community organizations learn from one another, build relationships across different constituencies, and sometimes create coalitions around concerns that do not fit neatly within existing organizational boundaries.
The SB 147 experience showed me that effective community engagement depends on maintaining these channels of influence rather than assuming that strategy originates primarily at the top.
Leadership and Followership as a Reciprocal System
When I first became involved in the SB 147 movement, I was not thinking about it as a case of followership. I was responding to a community concern and trying to organize an effective response.
Looking back, however, the followership perspective helps explain how the process began and how it continued to develop.
A volunteer recognized the urgency of the issue before I did and called me into action. I accepted that influence and assumed responsibility for organizing. As the movement grew, other people contributed information and expertise, took responsibility for different functions, and sometimes emerged as leaders themselves.
The university's flexibility also mattered. By approving my request to postpone the comprehensive examination, it removed a significant constraint and allowed me to devote sustained attention to the community effort while returning to my academic responsibility later.
What appears from the outside to be a story about a leader organizing a community was therefore more complicated. Leadership was important, but it was not operating alone. The process depended on people being willing to speak, listen, assume responsibility, and respond to one another.
This is the part of the discussion I had hoped to raise during the DNC training in Austin.
National organizations need to support local communities, but they also need mechanisms that allow local knowledge and experience to influence decisions at higher levels. The same principle applies within local organizations. Leaders provide direction, but they also need to remain receptive to the people closest to the work.
My SB 147 experience reminded me that leadership does not always initiate the process. Sometimes a follower sees the need first and prompts the leader to act.
From there, leadership and followership can continue to influence each other. In my experience, that reciprocal relationship was an important part of how a community concern developed into an organized coalition.