Local Subgroups

DSA-LA is organized into many distinct “Local Subgroups”. Local subgroups organize around particular issues, skills, or campaigns, and are where the bulk of the chapter’s political work is planned and executed. 

Committees

From the Bylaws: “Committees are bodies essential to the character of the Local, and may be organized around common skills, institutions, or issues. The Steering Committee or the Local may establish best practices and procedures for the democratic operation of Committees.”

Committees exist to allow some members to focus their work on specific areas.  Most committees focus on developing policy, coalitions, and strategies around specific issues. They will sometimes propose campaigns that all members can participate in, whether or not they are part of that committee. Some committees are open to all members, others have their members appointed or elected. All committees have the primary goal of supporting the chapter as a whole, and their members and decisions are accountable to decisions made by the membership of the chapter.

Administrative Committee

Administrative Committee (AdCom) is a standing committee of DSA-LA that exists to fulfill core administrative work and assist elected leaders in making the chapter run smoothly. The committee is to work according to the direction of Steering Committee and its appointed liaisons. AdCom members are appointed by Steering Committee and are tasked with helping coordinate the various core chapter working groups, including Communications WG, Events WG, Finance and Fundraising WG, Operations WG, and Rose Buddies WG. Members interested in being appointed and onboarded to one of the working groups should contact AdCom to learn about current needs and opportunities.


Climate Justice Committee

  • Platform
  • Email: climatejustice(at)dsa-la.org

The Climate Justice Committee of DSA-LA recognizes the current moment as a historical apex; one that must end with the dismantling of capitalism as well as the reconstitution of society and its relationship to the Earth. In our dedication to a politics that places people and the planet before profit, the Climate Justice Working Group of DSA-LA will work to agitate, educate and organize on the local, state and national levels for an ecosocialist future in which democracy and equity are united with sustainability.

Join the Climate Justice Committee!

Electoral Committee

The Electoral Committee of DSA-LA exists to help the chapter gain the power and knowledge necessary to work towards and realize its various goals using the existing power of the state as channeled through elected office.

  • Learn more
  • Email: electoralpolitics(at)dsa-la.org
  • The electoral committee has 5 members, all of whom are elected by the chapter membership. Non-elected members can still work on and support Electoral projects.

Finance and Fundraising Committee

  • Email: treasurer(at)dsa-la.org

Healthcare Justice Committee

  • Platform
  • Email: healthcare(at)dsa-la.org

The DSA-LA Healthcare Justice Committee seeks to achieve a socialist health care system, clear from profit motives, as a human/moral right for all.

Join the Healthcare Committee!

Housing & Homelessness Committee

Given Los Angeles’s persistent housing crisis and capital’s return to the city’s urban cores, we do not view housing access and protections, rising rents, land speculation, environmental degradation, and homelessness as discrete issues. Rather, they are bound intimately together, each amplifying the others and creating stark, tangible manifestations of the ways capitalism displaces and dispossesses our communities.

Join the Housing & Homelessness Committee!

–Street Watch

  • Email: streetwatch(at)dsa-la.org

Street Watch LA is an initiative by DSA-LA’s Housing & Homelessness Committee modeled after LA Community Action Network (LA CAN)’s Community Watch program. Our short-term goals are to build collective power to decriminalize poverty and homelessness, expand housing and public health infrastructure, fight state violence, and connect the housed and unhoused communities in the most housing-unequal city in the country. Our ultimate goals are free and fair public housing for all, community control of housing, and the abolition of police and prisons. With these goals in mind, Street Watch LA centers the lives and work of BIPOC who are disproportionately criminalized and housing insecure.

Our main areas of focus are monitoring police presence and city agents throughout LA County, especially during LA’s notoriously brutal “encampment sweeps”; community check-ins and mutual aid, including food distribution, first aid, harm reduction, phone-charging stations, tents, and other quality of life supplies; and community organizing with unhoused people, including “Know Your Rights” trainings, first aid trainings, following the lead of encampment residents that wish to organize their own actions or programs, and sometimes the radical act of simply getting to know our neighbors.

Immigration Justice Committee

  • Platform
  • Email: immigrationjustice(at)dsa-la.org

The Immigration Justice Committee fights to organize and support the self-organization of immigrant communities as a central struggle in the larger fight against capitalism.

Join the Immigration Justice Committee

Know Your Rights & Political Education – Immigration Justice Resources

Labor Committee

The Committee is dedicated to developing worker consciousness and solidarity, both within our chapter and among the greater Los Angeles community. At the national level, the Committee also works in conjunction with the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission (DSLC), a network of DSA committees, working groups, and other bodies that formally interacts with other organizations that belong to or support the labor movement.

Join the Labor Committee!

–#HollywoodLabor

  • hollywoodlabor(at)dsa-la.org

#HollywoodLabor is a subcommittee of the DSA-LA Labor Committee. Comprised of a small group of workers who currently make their living in the entertainment industry, #HollywoodLabor includes rank and file union members and unrepresented workers, freelancers, actors, writers, editors, technicians and directors. #HollywoodLabor organizes events that address industry issues and workers’ needs, and aims to fight workplace injustice through education, organizing, and advocating to shift industry standards and workplace policy throughout Hollywood.

Mutual Aid Committee

  • Platform
  • Email: mutualaid(at)dsa-la.org

Mutual aid is a voluntary exchange of resources and services for the mutual benefit of all people involved. It involves comrades coming together to work as equals for the common good by assessing what people need and what people can provide. Mutual aid projects come from and are run by the community rather than nonprofit workers, foundations, or charity programs created by the ruling classes. No one is made to feel inferior for receiving help, as it is fundamentally an organic and egalitarian social relationship, not a material one based on hierarchy, and everyone provides what they can rather than separating into “givers” and “receivers.”

Join the Mutual Aid Committee!

Political Education

  • Platform
  • Email: politicaleducation(at)dsa-la.org

Capitalism has taught us that a society structured around an endless quest for profit and the pursuit of individual self interest is natural; as socialists, we identify capitalism as the artificially imposed set of relations that it is. The Political Education Committee seeks to challenge what is understood to be “common sense” under capitalism and offer ongoing opportunities to expand our collective understanding of socialist concepts, histories, and strategies.

Join the Political Education Committee!

Prison Abolition Committee

  • Platform
  • Email: prisonabolition(at)dsa-la.org

The DSA-LA Prison Abolition Committee works toward a future of total prison abolition, which entails the abolition of all forms of the carceral state, including policing as well as public and private prisons. We work toward building well informed and researched alternatives that foster a fair and equal society that come in many forms: rehabilitation, medical and mental care, health care in the form of food, housing, physical and community support. We wish to collectively demystify the idea of prison abolition and work toward a future void of punitive and vindictive justice where every person’s humanity is realized.

Join the Prison Abolition Committee!

 

Campaign Working Groups

Campaign-based Working Groups organize around a single campaign or goal, with a defined strategy, purpose, and endpoint, and whose work does not fall squarely under the purview of any single Issue-based Committee. Working Groups build external partnerships and emphasize coordination and engagement with Issue- based and Internal Resource Committees, as appropriate.

NOlympics

  • Platform
  • Email: nolympics(at)dsa-la.org

The NOlympics LA Coalition is changing the conversation on an LA 2024 2028 Olympics, because the Olympics destroy communities and kill cities. Regardless of how “successfully” they are executed, these “Games” will expose tens of thousands of our fellow Angelenos to incalculable risk and feed the problems which are already devastating and destroying the fabric of our communities today, while depriving us of the resources we need to make the city better. Our goal is still to stop the Olympics.

Join the NOlympics Working Group!

Caucuses

AfroSocialists in LA

AfroSocialists in Los Angeles advocates for and builds power with DSA Los Angeles’ Black membership and the Black community of LA. We pursue this work to help build a multiracial working-class base, the only viable strategy for securing a socialist future.

Through public and internal education and agitation, we aim to continue the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition, as well as the radical traditions of other oppressed minorities. Our goal is to act as a network that will support and develop Black DSA-LA members as leaders in the organization and in the community.

LGBTQ+ Caucus

The LGBTQ+ Caucus is composed of LGBTQ+ members of the Los Angeles Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America and serves as a welcoming place for LGBTQ+ socialists from across the greater Los Angeles area. The LGBTQ+ Caucus is founded on the principle that our collective struggle for Socialism is inextricably linked to the fight for Queer Liberation. As a multiracial, multigenerational and multi-tendency Caucus, our members are actively involved in committees, projects, and leadership positions throughout the Chapter. This puts us in a unique position to promote collaboration between groups and ensure that all of DSA-LA’s work remains inclusive of queer perspectives. We take every opportunity to debunk Rainbow Capitalism. We uplift the rich history of LGBTQ+ revolutionaries who came before us, carved out their own liberatory spaces and fought creatively and ferociously for our survival.

Many people come to Socialism because of personal oppression and violence they have faced as queer people. Our caucus provides a space where this lived experience can nurture political analysis. Visibility is key to welcoming new members. To that end, we recruit at queer events and develop social and cultural events open to all members of Chapter.

We stand in solidarity with our Black, Brown, Asian and Pacific Islander, Indigenous comrades and all communities of historically marginalized identities that are disproportionately exploited by racial capitalism and patriarchal systems. None of us are free until all of us are free. 

We love our allies, but reserve Caucus membership for queer or questioning folks only. You do not need to be a dues-paying DSA member to attend our meetings. New folks are always welcome.