We teach and train people to do lots of things: build strong online programs; measure the reach and effectiveness of every email and every tweet; set goals and metrics, then strategize with all the data those metrics create.

All of these parts and more are critical to running ambitious, effective campaigns that engage others to win. But at the end of the day they're just the engine.

The longer I organize, the more I learn that the engine just isn't enough. In the last few years, I've come to believe that the fuel it takes to drive the engine, the two factors most critical to great campaigns, are things we absolutely cannot teach: Courage and Commitment.

No fuel, no forward progress. And no amount of planning, data analysis or training is a substitute.

WHERE DO WE FIND COURAGE?

Every change maker I've ever met has a story about when he or she first stood up for something that really mattered. When was it for you?

For me it was my senior year in college. I grew up on a potato farm in Caribou, Maine. My family went bankrupt in the early 1990s when Idaho industrial farms took over the potato market from small family farms like ours. Fortunately for me Bowdoin College, a rather upscale liberal arts school in Maine, didn't look at my parents' income. They accepted me then supported me with a significant scholarship. My first day on campus I felt both grateful to have the opportunity to go to a school like Bowdoin, and humbled by the beat-up Horizon hatchback with my grandmother's rocking chair tied to the top that my parents parked in the line of Audis and Volvos.

My entire life I had been painfully shy, really to the point that I didn't speak at all in classes my first three years of college. My worst fear was (still is) public speaking. But early in my senior year Mario Cuomo came to speak on campus. It was the first time I had ever heard anyone at Bowdoin speak publicly to a large gathering about unequal our economy is, how much a threat that inequality is to our democracy, and about the government's role in addressing that inequality. A few days later, another student, Wystan A., wrote an editorial in the student paper. He tried to undermine everything Mario Cuomo had argued for, making anyone who ever depended on government help seem unworthy, un-American even. After reading his editorial, I went back to my room and furiously started writing a letter to the Editor, letting Wystan know that I was one such unworthy person, whose parents had depended on the help of the government in their moment of deepest shame and despair.

Wystan's letter had stirred in me the most visceral sense of indignity. Not an ideological, self-righteous anger, but a real grief from remembering how very hard my parents worked to try to get by, how desperately they tried to avoid depending on government assistance, and how feeble they felt when it became the only option. In my letter I wrote about what it was like growing up in

a family that weighed putting oil in the furnace in a cold Maine winter against paying the grocery store tab so we could keep getting food. I wrote about what it was like to have the privilege of living at a college where the average student drove a car worth more than my parents' annual income.

In a moment of absolute fury at the world as it was, I hit "send."

I quickly realized I had just outed myself as white trash at one of the ritziest schools in the country. (In retrospect the fluorescent pink t-shirts and mall hair probably gave it away long before.)

I was absolutely terrified.

But a few days later, when the letter ran in the student paper, other people like me started coming out of the woodwork. Soon, other scholarship students, professors who wanted to do something to help, staff who served us food and answered phones, and other students who were just curious started asking me "What can we do?" and "What should we do?" We formed a team and launched a year-long effort to save need-blind admissions at Bowdoin (so that the Admissions department would never decide whether or not to admit a prospective student based on their parents' income). We organized to get first-generation college students and low-income students to speak up in class and participate as full campus citizens. And we launched a "conversation about class" at a school that really hadn't talked about class in any public way to that point. Over the years since then, Bowdoin has developed one of the most progressive financial aid programs in the country. This is certainly not just because I decided one night to write a letter. But our organizing that year was a piece of the puzzle that I'd like to believe helped move the campus just a few steps forward on this issue.

SO WHAT IS COURAGE?

Maybe it's easier first to say what it's not. It's not judgment of others. It's not wishful thinking about "sustainable" or "systemic" change-there is nothing sustainable about change. It's not ideology. It's certainly not conditional on having a perfect "power map." And it's not simply a rush to righteous action. I am honestly worn down and demoralized daily by how many campaigns I see that are founded on these conditions, mindlessly dependent on these things.

I am also fatigued by campaign leaders I meet who are searching indefinitely for the perfect plan to which they can commit, coming back month after month with some revised version of their plan with little action at all in the interim. News flash: there is never a perfect campaign plan worth committing to. The world is chaotic and unpredictable. There is only the courage to commit to a change worth fighting for, the urgency to create enough of a plan that such courage is actionable in the real world in a purposeful way, and the humility to invite others to join us in action, and ask that they help us figure it out as we go.

Courage is not being "empowered" by someone else. When I sat in my bedroom writing a letter that night, no one was there empowering me. There were many afterwards who joined with me as peers, though. None of us have the ability to empower anyone else. We can, however act with courage on what we think is right, invite others to join us, and share responsibility for winning change.

Courage is not about crafting campaigns that will ask less of people. Courage doesn't pander to people by pretending they don't know what power is and how it works in the world, as if one click or one rally could win everything. That's the opposite of courage. And, truth be told, the opposite of respect and dignity. Courage is having the respect to ask much, much more of ourselves and of each other. Courage is launching into fights that seem all but impossible when we start. Courage is being very transparent about the remarkable odds we're up against, and trusting that others can find the courage in themselves to stand up despite those odds.

Courage is the emotion that precedes all action, the feeling that comes before all planning. It's grounded in a deep insufferable grief, based in our own, our friends' and our families' real life experiences, not founded in some academic theory or ideology about the way the world should work.

Courage is, in essence, the insatiable quest for human dignity that derives from the deepest, most desperate sense of real despair with the way things are.

WHAT DOES COURAGE LOOK LIKE?

The thing about courage is that we know it when we see it. Courage is like a virus, an infection of dignity. We all learn at some point in our lives how it feels to be fiercely afraid and to act in spite of that fear. We know what courage feels like in the way our stomachs turn over and chills run through our limbs. So when we see someone else act in that way, it engages the same feeling in us.

We can recognize courage in small actions, like the first actions most of us took when we started organizing.