Pushback Network is fired up about the US Social Forum!

From June 22-26^th, over 200 members from the 9 Pushback State Alliances are uniting in Detroit to strengthen our collective efforts and craft visions of liberation and justice.

Seeing as the time has come for us to build collective power in this milieu of massive unemployment, SB 1070, the oil spill, de-funding of public education, foreclosures and the bank bailouts, Pushback has constructed a strong program that highlights the diverse, multi-issue, multi-region, multi-constituency nature of our network.

You can catch us in Detroit sponsoring the following workshops, convention, and party:

• DTE Protest on Tuesday, June 22
• Workshop: Why Get in The Game? on Wednesday, June 23rd at 10am, Cobo Hall M3-32
• Workshop: Grassroots Participation in the Redistricting Process on Wednesday, June 23rd at 1pm, Cobo Hall D3-26
• Inter-Alliance Dialogue Convention-Grassroots Responses to the Economic Crisis and Critical Issues of our Time on Fri, June 25th at 1pm
• Grassroots Global Justice 5th Anniversary/Leftist Lounge Party on Friday, June 25th at 9pm

You can download the entire Pushback program here: Pushback Network Schedule at USSF

We eagerly look forward to the Detroit for it opens up greater possibilities for creative resistance and transformation.

As a network, we see the forum as a crucial component to building a bottom-up, sustainable movement in the US that has the teeth to fight back against the current neo-liberal system that places profits over people.

We’ll see you in the streets!

Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary. A New Detroit is on its Way.

On January 27th, Pushback Network conducted our first-ever webinar entitled, “The Geopolitics of an Energy Colony: Case Studies of Kentucky and New Mexico.” We used this webinar to highlight the environmental justice work within the Kentucky and New Mexico State Alliances and connect the ways in which people of color and working class communities are fighting back against environmental racism through the creation of robust, grassroots led organizing campaigns.

Presentations were made from staff and grassroots leaders of SouthWest Organizing Project, Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment, and Kentuckians for the Commonwealth. In this powerful demonstration of cross state collaboration, each state linked the health and environmental effects in their own communities around uranium and coal extraction to state and federal policies based in racial and economic discrimination.

“We must look at the policy impacts with a lens that incorporates a race and class analysis to how we approach solutions for environmental justice,” said Robby Rodriguez, Executive Director of SouthWest Organizing Project.

Both Kentucky and New Mexico grounded their presentations at the local and state level. Retha Justice and Teri Blanton from Kentuckians for the Commonwealth looked at the environmental and economic impacts of the coal industry and mountain top removal. They cited the coal industry as the culprit responsible for the dire situation facing Kentucky, i.e. 25-40% of Appalachia is mined by mountain top removal, loss of union jobs, and 1,400 miles of Kentucky streams have been damaged or destroyed by valley fill practices. Moving to New Mexico, Nadine Padilla from Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment and Robby Rodriguez from the SouthWest Organizing Project examined the legacy of uranium mining and how the pressures for nuclear energy left their communities littered with hundreds of uranium mines, in a situation where mine workers had no compensation, and where communities were forced to drink polluted groundwater.

However, the webinar did not end at the local and state level. As is the work of the Pushback Network, we used this webinar as an opportunity to explore the various ways in which national coordination could strengthen campaigns rooted in community struggles. We used this moment as a way to build connection and intersection across states.

“Companies use the same tactics they have always used to divide communities. They get everyone fighting and take power when everyone seems to be their weakest. At this point it is so important for us to dig in our heels, become more organized, have people come together and find common ground,” Retha Justice, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth.

And find common ground we did.

Environmental racism reflects broader patterns of marginalization and domination that traverses states and communities. Pushback Network recognizes that our environmental justice organizing has to reach a new level of scale and coordination to defeat the destructive economic and environmental policies that are based in profit and not people. Our community organizations fighting on the front lines of this struggle are prime to win in states like New Mexico and Kentucky. And yet, to transform conditions across this country, we recognize the need to create linkages in our work and create synergy across community organizations fighting similar issues.

The webinar was a powerful moment of identification for those grassroots organizers and community members who faced similar living conditions in their neighborhoods but did not have the opportunity to reach out across states and talk about their shared experiences. That is, up until the webinar. Through this technology, members from both states connected across geographical lines and identified how they struggled with the destruction of their land and livelihood due to environmental racism. From this point of unity, the webinar ended with a shared commitment on part of the state alliances to continue the conversation and find ways to support each others work.

Moving forward, we believe the webinar was a strong first step towards understanding how we could connect our state alliances around cross-cutting issues and aggregate our power for transformative social change. To see the presentations in more depth, please check out the powerpoint presentations below.

Environmental Justice from New Mexico
Retha Justice from KFTC Presentation
Teri Blanton from KFTC Presention

In partnership with Wellstone Action, KFTC organized a Candidate and Campaign training this past weekend in Hindman with 30 participants. The focus was overwhelmingly on running for office in Eastern Kentucky, but some members from other parts of the state came as well.

The goal was to encourage people to run for office or to help their friends run by providing a top-notch campaign training focusing on campaign planning and budgeting, telling your story, grassroots voter contact, fundraising, base-building, stump speeches, developing a winning message and more.

“KFTC nationally is held up as a kick-ass gold standard of community organizing,” said Ben Goldfarb, Director of Training Programs for Wellston Action. “I’m a little nervous to be training you all, but I think it will be great.”

Local members with experience in Eastern KY races joined us to add what they’ve learned locally to the Wellstone model of running for office including Mike Dixon (mayor of Blackey), Bennie Massey (Lynch City Council), Carl Shoupe, (Benham City Council) and Randy Wilson (recent candidate for his Jackson Rural Electric Co-op).

“A big part of running is getting out there and talking to your neighbors, getting to know them, and talking about issues that they care about. A lot of us are doing that anyway and we should be doing it even more.”

This is the fourth time Wellstone Action has visited Kentucky and KFTC members have participated in each of the trainings. We’re considering another training if the Voting Rights constitutional amendment gets on the ballot next year.

We’re trying to schedule a smaller candidate training based on what we learned this weekend, tentatively in October in Lexington to replicate pieces of this training. We’ll put it on the KFTC Calendar as soon as we settle on a date and location.

This post was taken directly from the KFTC Blog.

Pushback Network (PBN) proudly welcomes accomplished social justice leader Peter Hardie as its new Executive Director.

Emphasizing community organizing and voter engagement strategies to empower underrepresented constituencies, PBN continues to grow as an organization assisting people in defining their mutual interests and working together to improve their lives.

“Peter is ideally poised to help lead the Pushback Network as a facilitator and as a leader in the national and local struggles for justice and democracy,” said PBN Chair Robby Rodriguez. “Currently, PBN is developing and implementing voter engagement and other civic participation strategies in eight states: New York, Massachusetts, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, and California. We foster collaborative efforts to increase the effectiveness of groups doing community organizing and non-partisan electoral work on the ground. Peter Hardie is an ideal fit for PBN because his career has combined organizing, advocacy and activism with significant experience and practice in organizational assessment and development. He has worked side by side with coalitions across the country and internationally to build grassroots political power from the bottom up. Peter has coached and advised a diverse range of organizations and knows how to encourage the best outcomes from them.”

Hardie comes to PBN most recently from his role as consultant to accomplished and emerging social justice organizations such as Right to the City, an alliance of base building organizations from cities across the country fighting gentrification, and Leadership Conference for Civil Rights, another national coalition of social justice advocates. He has demonstrated effectiveness in hands-on alliance-building and melding the practices of organizational development with the dynamic needs of grassroots organizing and coalition building. Hardie previously served as Executive Director for the Roxbury Youth Works, where he demonstrated a deep knowledge of, and commitment to, the principles of community organizing as focused particularly on building the power of young people and communities of color. With this impressive skill set, Hardie will work as Executive Director to facilitate the Board’s strategic planning and decision-making, manage a national staff, and take on and help guide the staff’s planning, program support, fundraising, financial management, and other key Network responsibilities.

“When all is said and done, the invitation from the Pushback Network was impossible to resist,” said Hardie. “My work life has centered on building community and building bridges between communities. This opportunity at the Pushback Network is about growth and renewal for the country and an opportunity for me to join an alliance of people with tremendous potential for change and impact on many levels”

“Peter has a great understanding of base building organizations,” continued Rodriguez. “His vision aligns perfectly with our own of a democracy where ordinary people, who have been historically pushed to the political margins, move and guide our political process by organizing from the bottom up.”

“The recent bailout on Wall Street reinforces the powerful necessity for political organizing among bedrock communities. The nation has elected a President who has asked Americans to roll up their sleeves and re-make this nation.” Hardie said, “The Pushback Network, with its diverse mix of communities and organizations, is the model for exactly the kind of civic engagement and genuine democracy that the new president and these times demand of us.”

Thanks for the wonderful pics, Kentuckians for the Commonwealth!

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DON’T: Bait and switch. Be clear and honest with grassroots organizers about intentions and objectives.

DO: Share information and resources. Provide complementary funding, where appropriate, through clear accountable agreements to build long-term capacity that keeps working between election cycles.

DON’T: Come in with an agenda already in place. A useful ally’s agenda is informed by ongoing work on the ground.

DO: Work in areas where local leaders have identified existing gaps. Collaborate on strategies that strengthen long-term capacity to target demographics where local capacity is weakest.

DON’T: Employ messaging that is in conflict with ongoing campaigns. Design media strategies with long-term social change work in mind.

DO: Build on existing strengths and capacities on the ground.

DON’T: Poison the base and burn up turf. Work with grassroots organizations to extend their base, and yours, and share credit for shared work.

DO: Extend training opportunities to local organizers. Even when resources are left with local groups, those groups are too often left without the training to maintain them. Offer local organizations the training needed to maximize collaborative resources before you head home.

DON’T: Take the infrastructure and run. Hand-off what the campaign has built; hand off local volunteers and staff. Take the time for evaluation and debriefing with local partners.

]]> http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/11/02/ten-tips-for-effective-collaborative-organizing/feed/ 0 http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/11/01/collateral-damage/ http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/11/01/collateral-damage/#comments Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:00:22 +0000 Samiya Bashir http://pushbacknetwork.org/?p=160 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.

During the 2006 electoral season, PBN partner Kentuckians for the Commonwealth learned first hand how paratrooper tactics disrupt years’ worth of work in their communities. According to nationally based, numbers-centric guidelines, national groups did a better job targeting the KFTC’s population, and reached more people.

But a closer look shows that while KFTC contacted a third of the people the national paratrooping group reached, they did it for a tenth of the money. KFTC’s numbers, unlike those of the paratroopers, reflected three person-to-person contacts for each individual counted. KFTC’s contacts included civic education and leadership development on a personal level – a crucial benefit that lasts, and one that you can’t get from mailings or robocalls.

This was achieved despite having to constantly firefight to battle the bull-in-a-china-shop blunders of the national organizers. “Last November, on election day, our Lexington organizer was flooded with phone calls from people all over the state asking for a ride to the polls,” said KFTC director Burt Lauderdale. “Somebody at a national organization had contacted our office months before and asked, in general terms, if we provide rides to the polls. We said yes and gave them the info for the local guy.”

“What happened next,” said Lauderdale, “without our permission or notification, was that 36,000 letters were sent to a targeted selection of voters from all over the state. The letters were a mildly threatening attempt to increase turn out by intimidating voters who stayed home for the last election. The organization didn’t identify itself in the letters, listing only a P.O. Box. What they did say was, ‘If you need a ride, call this number.’ That number was the direct line to our lone organizer who was inundated with calls from hundreds of miles away. KFTC had nothing to do with this direct mail piece, but communities across our state were left with negative feelings about us and our work.”

“Now, when I talked to the director of that organization in the days after he was embarrassed,” Lauderdale continued. “He apologized for the miscommunication, then turned around this Spring and did it again. This same group sent another huge mailing to their database encouraging them to register to vote; only it was sent out to them after the voter registration deadline. This was all very expensive to do. It’s frustrating because it’s an ineffective waste of money. Plus, it creates a mountain of mess that we’re left to clean up.”

This organization was knowledgeable enough to locate KFTC and put their phone number onto its direct mail outreach. The next logical step is to find ways to connect with their work in a complementary way. This is where paratrooper tactics fail, and where effective bottom-up collaboration wins.

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]]> http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/11/01/collateral-damage/feed/ 0 http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/31/want-to-change-the-country-include-a-southern-strategy/ http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/31/want-to-change-the-country-include-a-southern-strategy/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 14:00:30 +0000 Samiya Bashir http://pushbacknetwork.org/?p=158

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.’”

Afterward, Lauderdale approached the speaker, told him he was from Kentucky, and pressed him not to write off the South. “He seemed sort of stunned that I was even at the meeting and didn’t know what to say,” recalled Lauderdale. What did he come up with? “‘Well, it’s not the organizers,’ he said. ‘There’s just too many Baptists.’ As if piling insult on top of insult might make his first gaffe better.”

If we’re serious about changing the country we cannot afford to entire states or regions. When it comes to the South and the Southwest, the people designing the electoral strategies often have no knowledge of the regions. They’re afraid of them and filled with prejudice. As a result the attitude toward folks on the ground is disrespectful and dismissive. As a result, when paratroopers drop down to run campaigns, they often stumble from one lost opportunity after another.

The assumption that we can’t move a progressive agenda in the South or the Southwest is wrong. This conclusion is usually offered by people who look at the map through the political version of those old 3D glasses. All they see is red or blue with a little purple sprinkled in for texture. What they don’t account for is that when you are actually in these communities – and no state is made up of only one community – a completely different story is being played out.

We have developed leaders who are assertive, detailed and clear about their goals. There is a great deal of synergy in our operations that national groups are missing out on. As Missouri Jobs with Justice’s Lara Granich told us, “The learning curve can go both ways.”

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]]> http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/31/want-to-change-the-country-include-a-southern-strategy/feed/ 0 http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/29/keep-up-with-the-project/ http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/29/keep-up-with-the-project/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:01:21 +0000 Samiya Bashir http://pushbacknetwork.org/?p=153

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.

We’ll also be sharing work from our other state-wide partners to showcase how, from New York to California, integrated voter work builds and strengthens organizations, creates leaders from contacted voters, and shifts public consciousness towards an agenda that supports progressive social values.

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]]> http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/29/keep-up-with-the-project/feed/ 0 http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/29/election-2008-%e2%80%93-live-from-a-neighborhood-near-you/ http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/29/election-2008-%e2%80%93-live-from-a-neighborhood-near-you/#comments Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:07:09 +0000 Samiya Bashir http://pushbacknetwork.org/?p=141 Kicking off in New York City on October 24th and preparing to stretch through non-traditional battlegrounds of Mississippi and New Mexico, Pushback Network (PBN) is getting down on the ground with the people pushing civic engagement to new heights. From November 1st through November 7th, 2008, Pushback Network staffers Brigid Flaherty and Jason Cooper are pairing up again with Samiya Bashir for a live and direct multi-media project.

Through this project, PBN will capture the non-partisan, on-the-ground, electoral field programs in two of our states: Mississippi and New Mexico. “The truth is that the electorate is changing,” said Cooper, “and people are getting involved in record numbers not just in voting, but in educating themselves and their neighbors about the issues at stake in their communities. Pushback Network partners drive the ground game locally in eight states across the country. We’re going where history is being made in civic engagement and putting it on the record not just for Election Day, but for what’s next.”

The Project will track Flaherty and Cooper as they traverse the states documenting efforts live through in-person interviews using photo, video, and the latest micro-blogging tools. The days up to, through, and beyond November 2nd will be tracked using PBN’s Tumblr blog, its website, and online social networks.

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“Democracy doesn’t end on Election Day,” said Robby Rodriguez, executive director of South West Organizing Project. “We’ve got to invest in local groups that are doing the work before, during, and after the election season. Pushback understands that the changes we make in New Mexico bubble up to change the country.”

Cooper will be traveling from the Delta through and across Mississippi working with groups like Southern Echo, Parents and Youth United for a Better Webster County, Activists with a Purpose, Action Community Education Reform, Citizens for a Better Greenville, Concerned Citizens for a Better Tunica County, Sunflower County Parent Student Organization, and Fired Up! Flaherty will be traveling through battleground hot-spot of Albuquerque across New Mexico with leading community organizing groups of South West Organizing Project and SAGE Council.

“This system is so often about tearing people down,” said Leroy Johnson, executive director of Southern Echo. “They tell us we’re too poor; that the system is too sophisticated and complicated for us to comprehend. We tell our community that we believe in them. We give them the skills and allow them to do it. From there they can do it better than anyone else.”

PBN has grown in two years to eight states, Alabama, California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Mexico, New York, and Nevada, by creating opportunities for increased networking, training, funding, and resources to help the best community-based organizing groups grow to the scale needed to do their work better. Organizers and communities around the country have heard PBN’s mission. The Project will show what PBN’s work to fuse community organizing and voter engagement work to mobilize people of color, poor people, and young people looks like in action.

Check back each day to see where we are with preparations, and see the organizing work happen in near-real-time through the post-election wind-up November 7th. Don’t miss the work we’ll be sharing from other state-wide partners who we’ll be keeping up with every day as well to see how integrated voter work builds and strengthens organizations, creates leaders from contacted voters, and shifts public consciousness towards an agenda that supports progressive social values.

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Download the Press Release here.