“This system is all about tearing people down. They tell us we’re too poor; that the system is too sophisticated and complicated for us to comprehend. We told our community that we believed in them. We gave them the skills and allowed them to do it. From there they were able to do it better than anyone else.”
– Leroy Johnson, Southern Echo
Stories from the Ground
In both the 2004 and 2006 election cycles, the unprecedented mobilizations on both the left and the right revealed significant limitations of erecting and imposing large top-down structures across several and diverse organizations, including lack of trust and coordination among allies.
PBN stresses the development of inter-organizational trust and long-lasting relationships to achieve heightened and more effective levels of coordination. Building alliances at the state-level, both between election cycles and during elections, creates the space for participating groups to build working relationships, gain clarity of goals and functions, and develop and refine infrastructure.
Each state must develop a statewide power-building strategy which includes: recruiting, convening and maintaining a statewide non-partisan electoral alliance; developing a comprehensive non-partisan electoral field program that includes voter contact goals and strategies; promoting and developing approaches to engage grassroots volunteers in on-going strategies to deepen and expand our base; developing and maintaining tracking systems and monitoring, evaluation and accountability measures.
Highlights from the states
- New Mexico state alliance partners worked together in 2007 to collaboratively craft a state-wide “Path to Power” plan in conjunction with other groups around the state. In addition, by delegating tasks, taking on different pieces of work, dividing up legislative districts, engaging the media and practicing disciplined messaging, the alliance partners were able, working with the Center for Civic Policy, to quickly defeat bad legislation and push forward legislation favorable to the community.
- In 2007, Southern Echo and the Roundtable worked with the MS Department of Education to fashion, adopt and implement the community participation facet in the first year of the new statewide Dropout Prevention Program.
