“The country we live in has stark contrasts between those that have economic security and those whose security is constantly under attach. These contrasts are getting more and more extreme. The injustice is too painful to just sit back and watch. Low-income communities will continue being under attack unless they organize to push back. Sitting back means accepting the system that exists. That isn’t something I’m ready to do.”
– Sondra Youdelman, Community Voices Heard
Stories from the Ground
Getting to scale requires more than accumulating more resources to mobilize an ever-increasing number of voters to go to the polls. Instead, integrating multiple strategies such as community organizing, leadership development, coalition building, research/analysis, communications, public policy advocacy, and voter engagement into a larger, cohesive unit mitigates the current boom/bust cycle of elections and increases organizational capacity – as well as community empowerment – over time.
Collectively, PBN organizations have led campaigns that have redirected tens of millions of public dollars to combat poverty and have challenged a range of campaign targets to address root causes of economic inequality. PBN represents a truly bottom-up approach to building power and achieving new levels of scale and strategic coherency.
How we get there:
- At least one anchor organization convenes and leads a state alliance;
- Each state anchor must develop a “Path to Power” plan;
- A functioning State Alliance must include multiple organizations;
- Each state alliance must develop a multi-dimensional, multi-constituency, multi-issue strategy and a manageable work plan that includes a coordinated electoral field program, and work between election cycles;
- Each state alliance must have the capacity to develop a growing database of voters in multiple, strategically targeted regions of the state;
- Each state alliance must work responsively with and contribute to the building and sustainability of PBN, it’s goals and mission, and its partner organizations.
Highlights from the states
From New York:
CVH, JWJ, Make the Road-New York, New York City AIDS Housing Network, and FUREE all do direct voter engagement in New York City. Since 2007 was a non-election year, the groups used door-to-door as a way to recontact voters. At the doors, they discussed upcoming events and campaigns. To engage voters, they made a glossy, one-page document with the issues on which all of the NY PBN partner groups are focused. With this document, they asked voters to pledge support on the issues and hold officials accountable, or to attend organizational meetings. FUREE and MTR-NY held Membership Convention events to talk further with voters about the issues in December; these events garnered over 300 and 500 attendees respectively.
