As fascism takes force nationally, organizers in Kansas City are charting a different path and building power locally. At its 2025 convention, KC DSA elected new leadership and passed bold resolutions that reflect a spirit of revolutionary optimism.
With the constant bombardment of headlines about the Trump administration, ICE crackdowns, and just the overall strengthening force of fascism in the US, it is easy to feel the weight and anxiety of it all. But revolutionary optimism and hope do not come from wallowing in our living rooms, watching the news 24/7 (looking at you Hasanabi heads). Rather, it comes from comrades who are organizing right now, even in the face of it all.
That sense of revolutionary optimism was on full display at KC DSA’s 2025 convention. As one of the outgoing Steering Committee members, Cale put it:
I feel the weight of history whenever I read something, whenever I read the paper, whenever I read any theory. But I have never felt more at ease at the end of a year than this one. To go from 200 to 400 members, to be this organized - we are ready to meet history.
This optimism isn’t just a feeling; it’s backed up by real growth. As Cale mentioned at the start of 2025, KC DSA had 245 members in good standing. Today they’re sitting at 416. That leap puts Kansas City in the top twenty chapters nationwide for both percentage growth and net members added. With that, they’ve become the 45th largest DSA chapter in the country, just twelve spots behind St. Louis at 525 members and on par with other similarly sized cities.
With nearly 200 new members adding to their organizing capacity, KC DSA joined forces with the St. Louis and Mid-Missouri DSA chapters to launch the Midwest Socialist Fundinomenon, a fundraiser to eliminate medical debt. During this campaign, they hosted musical and comedy shows to draw attention, raise money, and bring new people into the movement.
The Fundinomenon was a success. From February to June, the three chapters raised nearly $16,500 to eliminate $3.48 million in medical debt for 2,250 residents in Kansas. That's a profound impact, one that might not have been possible without the influx of new members fueling the campaign.
Medical debt abolition showed what KC DSA could do with new energy and resources. At their 2025 convention, members voted to turn that same organizing power toward immigrant defense with the KC ICE FREE campaign, reaffirming the fight by dedicating nearly ten percent (~200$) of their quarterly income to the KC ICE Free working group.
All this wouldn’t be possible without the dedication and guidance of those on the steering committee. At this year’s convention, the chapter elected a lot of new faces into leadership, most notably the election of Drew Sorenson as Co-Chair.
I’m an unapologetic socialist, and I want to help lead this chapter into the future of a socialist Kansas City, and socialist politics more generally across the world,
Drew brings both political clarity and organizing experience to the role. Before moving to Kansas City, he was active with both Chicago DSA and NYC DSA.
I’ve been rank and file for 8 years in the DSA… I want to see our chapter become a powerhouse, like the other two chapters I was part of. I believe we can make that happen—better than New York.”
After moving to KC, he joined KC Tenants, Sunrise, and the local DSA, but reaffirmed his commitment in time and theory of change by making the local DSA chapter his political home.
During the convention, Drew laid out a vision not just for growing membership, but for developing a strong core of organizers. As he put it:
At the end of my term I would love to see, even more so than membership growth, members move their way from paper members to supporting, to active, to core. To see a vibrant organizing base in our chapter and every position at our next chapter convention be contested by competent organizers who have to actively defend a specific political vision.
When I spoke with him during the Sunday brainstorming session, what stuck out most was his energy and hope for the chapter. It’s clear he sees KC DSA as ready to step up to history, and his leadership reflects that conviction.
During his time in the NYC chapter, Drew mentioned his involvement with the campaign to elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He told me that the experience was exhilarating, but also a lesson. Since then, he has rightfully become more critical of over-reliance on endorsements and personality-driven campaigns, believing DSA must chart its own path.
His leadership is already reflected in the organization with his proposed resolution, R03: For a More Political KC DSA. R03 is a call for the chapter to take itself seriously as a political force that is unapologetically socialist, to not be absorbed into liberal resistance narratives or reduced to coalition work without clear boundaries. It insists that KC DSA must sharpen its political clarity, strengthen its media and education work, and become the leading voice for a socialist vision in Kansas City.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what to look forward to for KC DSA. There is a lot to look forward to in the Kansas City organizing scene, in spite of the growing threat of fascism. And at the helm of this movement are the working-class organizers stepping up to lead. Their commitment embodies a crucial socialist principle: that to build a better world requires not just hope, but disciplined organization and accountable leadership. As Friedrich Engels argued in On Authority, complex collective action is impossible without it, and 'a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is... the act by which one part of the population imposes its will on the other.' For KC DSA, stepping up to history means embracing the serious, organized work of building working-class power, ready to meet the challenges ahead.
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