DO: Approach key local and regional groups before the strategy is set. Tailor efforts to the culture and politics of individual communities. No state is one community. Incoming organizers should seek synergies with existing work.

DON’T: Bait and switch. Be clear and honest with grassroots organizers about intentions and objectives.
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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.
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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.’”
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Community Voices Heard was bustling on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 21st.

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.
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