Pushback Network is a national collaboration of indigenous, grassroots organizations and networks committed to building bottom-up, state-based alliances that change both the composition and levels of participation of the electorate.
We emphasize strategies to empower underrepresented constituencies: people of color, poor and working class communities, and young people.
Pushback Network envisions an authentic participatory democracy through which true social justice can be achieved. We seek a democracy that creates opportunities for ordinary people to make real contributions to the political decisions that affect their lives.
Brigid is getting ready to head down to New Mexico for a full week of rock-doc’in the vote through PBN’s engaged civic mobilization model.
Pushback Network is excited to launch The Project in October 2008. We’re sending two of the scrappiest young organizers we know, Brigid & Jason, down South (coordinated by our own “Wizardess of Oz” Samiya, hanging with our community organzing partners in New Mexico & Mississippi all through Election Week to Rock-Doc the 2008 civic engagement process. Read More »
Follow The Project, PBN’s live, daily, multi-media civic engagement project every day through November 7th. To lead us off, PBN is publishing a few critically important pieces that look at the importance of sound investment in effective civic organizing. Click here for updates.
“Y’all don’t know what you’re doing anyway,” is how Kentuckians for the Commonwealth’s Burt Lauderdale paraphrases the widespread dismissal of Southern leadership. “It’s a total mystery for progressives.”
“I was in a meeting right before the 2006 national election,” said Lauderdale. “The speaker got up and talked about all the really good work that was happening around the country. And then he said, ‘Well, of course the South is lost.’” Read More »
Follow The Project, Pushback Network’s Election 2008 Multi-Media Project online through your social networks, at our Project Updates Blog, or on Friend Feed and watch history happen with updates all day, every day through Election Week!
We’re going to the battlegrounds of New Mexico and Mississippi November 1-7, 2008, to show what the work our partners are doing to fuse community organizing and voter engagement and mobilize people of color, poor people, and young people looks like — in action and in near-real-time using photos, videos, micro-bloggging and more. Check back each day to see where we are with preparations, and see the organizing work happen through the post-election wind-up November 7th. Read More »
I had just walked in from the busy New York subway system only to be met by an even busier canvass team. Alfredo Carrasquillo, Ferdinand Joseph, Cha’ta Green, Demitrus Gonzales, Philneia Timmons, and Ann Valdez—the CVH Queens canvassers—were collecting their pledge cards, nonpartisan voter guides, and know your rights handouts and ready to hit the streets.
“I am a voice for the voiceless,” said Joseph, a 55-yr old man from the Bronx about why he walks with CVH on this campaign. “I’ll stick my neck out for them. Tenants who live in these projects have issues that need to be addressed and they’re looking for someone to show them how to get it done. In the buildings they live in, there are a lot of problems like tenant issues, no hot water, no heat, and the land lord doesn’t do anything. They feel like they’ve been forgotten.”
What campaign drives Joseph, and the rest of the walk team, into New York City public housing developments to knock on doors and speak to the residents? November 4th, CVH is asking voters to send a message to the next New York State Senator: it’s time to get serious about funding public housing. Read More »
