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.

Jackson, MS – “An accurate census count in 2010 is essential to proper allocation of federal grant dollars to local communities and is critical to the creation of fair political districts to ensure people of color have accountable representation at all levels of government,” notes Echo Director Leroy Johnson as he explains Echo’s 5-year census and redistricting program of work.

In the Spring 2009 Southern Echo:

* Became a census partner with the national Census Bureau and Mississippi state level bureau to ensure effective access to information;
* Created state maps to show where hard-to-count census tracts are and the amount of federal grant dollars allocated to each county;
* Held census training sessions with its partner organizations in the MS Delta Catalyst Roundtable;
* Began outreach to grassroots community organizations across Mississippi to establish local Complete Count Committees to ensure the census bureau has accurate address data for every home before the census count is taken, to press for employment of local persons to do the census count who are familiar with community and are trusted by the residents, to monitor the accuracy of the count and file objections where necessary; and
* Will present 2 workshops on census and redistricting at the Pushback Network Convening in Las Vegas at the end of June.

The organizational work to build an effective 2010 census process will lay the foundation for the organizational framework needed to ensure the creation of fair political districts when the census data is released in 2011.

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.”

For one thing, we wanted to give people a minute-by-minute account of what was happening on the ground. We wanted to let the voices of the people be heard as to why they were voting, what issues brought them to the polls, and what it felt like to engage their communities through door knocking and phone banking.

We wanted to capture the energy and momentum of what we knew in our gut was a historical moment: young and old working side by side at the doors, first time citizens casting a ballot, the record number of registrations and turnout of a peoples who have endured a historical legacy of disenfranchisement at the hands of our political institutions–African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, women, and young people.

We also wanted to spotlight the ingenious ways our partner organizations were merging their electoral work to build upon a grander vision.

As members of Pushback, every organization around our table is committed to building long-term grassroots power through the combination of community organizing and non-partisan electoral organizing. Our model of integrated voter engagement is unique in that it consists of using multiple strategies to increase civic participation.

The ways in which each state alliance achieves this vision is a tad bit different. This is due to the fact that people are organizing in states with different constituencies, different issues, and different ways of developing leadership, creating policy change, and building out their state alliance.

However amidst these differences, the Project demonstrated how our bottom-up, state-based alliances are capturing political power by working alongside and as part of a multiplicity of peoples, regions, and issues.

Lessons Learned about Voter Engagement

“I am sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
~Fannie Lou Hamer

Our democracy rests on the ability of our political institutions to respond to and understand the needs of the constituencies that comprise the Pushback Network: people of color, working class and poor communities, women, and young people.

The common thread that connects our organizations is the consensus that we have to actively identify voters, engage them on issues that impact their lives at the local, state, and federal level, and then mobilize them to participate in the electoral system.

The victories accrued within one state are not confined to its particular boundary. When working within a national network, those state accomplishments are shared by every state in an effort to promote the progress and social justice of the entire nation.

Pushback Network’s goals are to:

• Build enough electoral power to insure that communities struggling on the margins have a voice in the decision-making process;
• Connect people to on-going community organizing campaigns that extend beyond the reach of short-term election cycles like the presidential election;
• Increase civic participation in order to hold America accountable to it’s promise as stated in the Constitution;
• An example of this within the network is New Mexico. In New Mexico, the Southwest Organizing Project initiated a non-partisan, nonprofit effort called the Campaign for a Better New Mexico. They agitate for the peoples of New Mexico to vote, because as they state in their literature, ‘If you don’t VOTE, they won’t listen…”

For many states within Pushback, their voter engagement programs had to overcome multiple barriers in this past general election. For example:

• In Mississippi, you didn’t need to tell anyone that the 2008 election was historic: the electricity of this defining moment crackled. Folks who had resisted every encouragement to register and vote since the 1965 Voting Rights Act jumped off the sidelines to vote for the first time. Teenagers, normally too cool to give a nod to politics, were thrilled to be engaged in this grand democratic enterprise. Young men came off the corner to lend a hand.
• Also, in Mississippi, community and electoral organizers actively worked to ensure their constituencies were not disenfranchised by voter intimidation and fear tactics. They did so by 1) educating them about their rights as a voter, and 2) devising creative strategies to deal with high illiteracy rates amongst residence of the Delta region and activating friends and family networks to help identify and mobilize voters.
• In New Mexico, SAGE Council worked tirelessly to push back against the wariness that some Native Americans felt about participating in the U.S. political process. However, through their voter engagement project Native American Voter Alliance (NAVA), they succeeded in increasing turnout by showing the importance for Native Americans to actively engage in the political process for the purposes of increasing funding for Urban Indian Healthcare, ensuring that development of Albuquerque is in balance with water resources, and preserving tribal sovereignty. NAVA is a non-partisan effort to build a strong electorate that is educated about issues that affect the health and quality of life for Albuquerque’s over 40,000 urban Native Americans.

Voter Engagement works best when organizers effectively build relationships overtime through the use of multiple voter contacts. Only through consistent contact, and long-standing presence within the community, will people begin to trust and engage with the political process.

• On Election Day, in Webster county, we preformed a knock and drag operation where we knocked on the door of every person that had registered within the 90 days prior to Election Day. What excited me was the fact that people recognized the organizers from the local organizations, thanked them for helping them exercise their right to vote, and time after time, door after door, they told us they had already voted. And for those who had difficulties with voting, we were able to trouble shoot and inmost cases help them out. This was only possible through the trust that was built over time.
• On the last day of early voting in New Mexico, a first time voter needed assistance in getting to the polls. She was 80 years old and couldn’t drive. Because of her affinity for SWOP, she asked a team of two SWOP organizers to drive her to the site.

Lessons Learned about State Alliances

“I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself.”
~Lone Man (Isna-la-wica)

Each Pushback State Alliance has its own path to power and policy agenda that reflects their distinct constituencies. However, even with the multiple issues and geographically diverse regions represented within the Network, Pushback understands the dire need to come together and work in coalition with one another in order to achieve social change on a national level.

In Mississippi, their statewide alliance strategically planned and coordinated their GOTV activities throughout the urban and rural areas of Mississippi. The MS Delta Catalyst Roundtable, comprised of ten grassroots community organizations based in the Delta region, brought together on a non-partisan basis an intergenerational team of teenagers and community elders to go door-to-door, hold community meetings and voter education workshops, help hundreds of registered voters to transfer their registrations to the precincts in which they lived to ensure their votes would be counted, conducted voter turnout motorcades and parades, talked on half-day radio live remotes to reach voters in surrounding counties, worked voter turnout phone banks and drove voters to the polls.

The live radio remotes reached radio audiences in excess of 125,000 on each occasion. The result: the 10 organizations touched directly more than 41,000 voters to help create the largest voter turnout in the state’s history.

In New Mexico, their statewide alliance strategically coordinated their GOTV programs, with SWOP focusing on the communities in Albuquerque and SAGE Council primarily working with the pueblos of Acoma, To’hagiileee, and Laguna.

Lessons Learned about Leadership Development

“The only safe ship in a storm is leadership”
~Faye Wattleton

Increasing voter turnout in an election is only effective if it can serve as a catalyst in developing a large group of grassroots leaders. Promoting leadership from within your membership and increasing their ability to assert power within their communities is the lifeline of any grassroots organization.

SWOP is committed to building leaders through their youth program, Jovenes Unidos. They are dedicated to providing leadership development to young people with opportunities and access to resources we need to think for themselves and analyze their surroundings, to have a voice in decisions that affect their lives, and to build power in their communities.

I witnessed SWOP’s leadership development in action, when I rode with Joaquin Lujan and Aurea during a drag and drop on the last day of early voting in New Mexico. Despite the generational differences, the two of them worked together to achieve a common vision: turn out people to the polls. As we drove, they engaged in casual conversations.

However, it quickly became apparent that each was transferring knowledge onto one another. They both took turns sharing how they came to community organizing. Aurea talked about her experiences of being a young woman in Albuquerque and the issues that brought her to SWOP. Joaquin shared his experiences as a youth and the reasons why he’s continued to work for social change with SWOP. Both were respectful to one another’s standpoint.

SAGE Council is an Indigenous and people of color-led organization using community organizing to build power through action, education, leadership development and political participation. Our commitment to social change and self-determination is based in spirituality that honors Mother Earth and all peoples.

Bruce Maquakin explained to me his path to becoming a leader within SAGE during a drag and drop in the pueblo of Acoma.

“When I first started out, I didn’t have too much experience with phone banking. One of the first things I learned was phones and how to make phone calls. And then I started learning more about data entry and field. And as I progressed, I learned more about campaigns and how to be a part of a tea.”

Southern Echo is working to empower the African-American community in Mississippi through an inter-generational model of effective community organizing. Bringing younger and older together in the same training and work ensures that younger people become part of the evolving leadership process. When older leadership cannot carry on any more, younger people are already in place, with knowledge, experience and commitment to sustain the work. Younger people get hands-on experience that enables them to develop the vision, tools and skills necessary for effective leadership.

Taken together, Pushback Network understands that the development of new, accountable leadership and organizations to empower the community depends on the transformation of individuals who do the organizing work, and transformation of the communities in which they work. I saw this played out directly in New Mexico with the youth teams of SWOP engaging in door-knocking. As well as the youth in SAGE conducting phone banks.

Conclusion

“Democracy doesn’t end on Election Day.”
~Robby Rodriguez, PBN Co-Chair

From our experiences in Mississippi and New Mexico, Jason and I witnessed the power of engaging voters and increasing turnout. The GOTV efforts in both states weren’t about electing people into office. The GOTV efforts were about educating and mobilizing people around issues that impact their lives as a way to build stronger, healthier, powerful communities.

We were humbled to witness history in the making. From car door to car door in a Mississippi motorcade, from phone call to phone call within SAGE’s office, we saw people demanding to be counted! The Project shows us that voting is neither an abstract concept nor an empty gesture that bears no weight in the everyday machinations of our government.

Through the testimonies of organizers, staff, and community members, we were able to showcase the power of Pushback Network and the model being worked by our partners in eight states from coast to coast. With all that, we know that The Project still only skimmed the surface of the depth and breadth of Pushback Network. Join the hundreds of new followers who discovered our work through The Project and stay tuned to what other extraordinary feats we have in store.

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/mobilizing-voters-in-the-delta/ http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/11/01/mobilizing-voters-in-the-delta/#comments Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:58:16 +0000 Samiya Bashir http://pushbacknetwork.org/?p=165 Jason Cooper on the road through the Mississippi Delta mobilizing voters with Southern Echo and our Mississippi partners.

“We just wrapping cars for the motorcade and are on our way through Hollindale, Greenville, Winterville and Metcalf” said PBN Program Director Jason Cooper. “I’m with a beautiful black woman who was born and raised in her small town and decided to stay because she wanted to make a difference. Now she’s mayor. This is so great! We’re jammin’ to Al Green, driving through towns all along the Delta and talking to folks about voting!” — Jason

Follow their trip on local radio 94.3FM and go on out and see them! See great pics here –>

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/brigid-heads-to-new-mexico/ http://pushbacknetwork.org/2008/10/31/brigid-heads-to-new-mexico/#comments Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:26:21 +0000 Samiya Bashir http://pushbacknetwork.org/?p=164 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.

The days up to, through, and beyond November 2nd will be tracked using PBN’s Tumblr blog, its website, and online social networks. Follow The Project on:

Be on the lookout after the election for our wrap-up.

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.

Follow The Project on:

“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.