During two virtual afternoons in 2021, we strategized together to discuss the challenges and opportunities in our work to support powerful and impactful organizing, narrative, and policy reform programs with partners across the country.
Our political industry in the last few decades has come to treat citizens as consumers and not participants, with an increasingly market-driven approach to politics. The impact on research, learning, and metrics has largely been to target citizens as atomized individuals, to measure treatments delivered to these individuals, and to evaluate the impact on an individual basis with voter turnout and partisan support the primary indicators. However, in this learning community, we are focused on growing a healthy, multiracial democracy: driven by and working for powerful grassroots organizations. What does research, learning programs, and metrics look like when our focus is the health of our democracy and power rooted in democratic practice? In this session we will share innovations from the DPI community in the last year around researching and measuring organizing inputs, collective capacities and power in practice. In a case study, Color of Change will share their progress and challenges as they work to put the civic leadership of their members at the center of their evaluation and metrics.
As tech tools and unreliable voter lists have taken over civic and political outreach, many voters of color are being left out. This session will focus on the communities left unseen by the political industry’s voter files in the wake of the techno-political revolution and how organizing groups are innovating their own solutions to find them. DPI Analyst Miriam McKinney Gray and Michael Ingram from Florida Rising will lay out the problem: how race modeling, vote propensity scoring, and voter file matching redlines communities with the most untapped power and how overdependence on data tools and algorithms leave millions of potential voters unreached. Staff from the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, ISAIAH, and the AAPI Force will share their effective methods for reaching their communities and propose sustainable wide-reaching solutions for member based organizations.
We know from political science that individuals do not make decisions about their democratic participation in isolation but in community with their families, neighbors, and values-based institutions. These are “political homes”—spaces of belonging and powerbuilding in their communities. In this session, we will hear from researchers and organizers about how they have come together to develop learning agendas to understand “political and social homes” and their role as containers for collective action. Over the next year, the DPI community will embark on a multi-state, multi-researcher project that examines how participants in organizing groups define a “political home” and what they seek when joining one. The research will also explore the meaning and value associated with the idea of a “political home” among unaffiliated potential members and how organizations can meet the interests of those seeking a political home.
For too long BIPOC communities have been treated by the political industry as monolithic collectives to be mobilized to outcomes defined by someone else’s goals. At DPI we believe that the most powerful way to increase political participation and civic action is not through tactical, transactional interventions but through support of and deference to base-building organizations. These grassroots groups deeply understand each constituency’s narratives and beliefs about politics and power and can build actual collective power to win change for the long term. This conversation will share how the DPI community is building a more nuanced understanding of the Black community and their orientation towards power and politics through strategic partnerships between organizations and culturally grounded researchers. Through thoughtful research informed by organizers, we’re disrupting political assumptions about Black voters as cynical and uninformed and learning about how to support and sustain Black political engagement for the long term.
MODERATOR: Prentiss Haney (Co-Executive Director, Ohio Organizing Collaborative) SPEAKERS: Ray Block (Associate Professor, The Pennsylvania State University), Arekia Bennett (Executive Director, Mississippi Votes), Marshall Shorts
MODERATOR: Sandhya Anantharaman (Interim Director of Programs, Kairos Fellowship) SPEAKERS: Jung Hee Choi (Deputy Director, Power California), Vanessa Kelly (Digital Director, New Georgia Project)
MODERATOR: DaMareo Cooper (Director of Place Based Power, Center for Popular Democracy) SPEAKERS: Heather McMahon Calhoun (Senior Project Manager, Community Building Strategies), Kirk Noden (Community Building Strategies), Mary Sobecki (Executive Director, The Needmor Fund)
SPEAKERS: Alex Gomez (Co-Executive Director, ACE/LUCHA), Tomas Robles (Co-Executive Director, ACE/LUCHA), Hannah Furstenberg-Beckman (Researcher, Local Election Officials: Discretion and Democracy Project)
MODERATOR: Andrea McChristian (Law & Policy Director, New Jersey Institute for Social Justice) SPEAKERS: Ronald Pierce (Democracy & Justice Fellow, New Jersey Institute for Social Justice), Pastor Rhonda Thomas (Faith in Florida), Hannah Walker (UT Austin), Ariel White (Associate Professor, MIT)
MODERATOR: Tova Wang (Democracy Fellow, Ash Center, Harvard Kennedy School) SPEAKERS: Jerusha Conner (Villanova),Kei Kawashima-Gisberg (Newhouse Director, Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts CIRCLE), Johnnie Lotesta (Assistant Professor of Sociology, Appalachian State University), Destini Philpot (GoodKids MadCity)
MODERATOR: Andrea Mercado (Co Executive Director, Florida Rising) SPEAKERS: Doran Schrantz (Director, ISAIAH), Mike Podhorzer (Advisor, AFL-CIO)
We conclude with a set of small conversations to discuss what we can do together to elevate organizer voices in the political industry; what research, data, and tech is needed to elevate organizing; what we need to do to increase philanthropic support for organizing and year-round base-building; and what more we need to do to effectively support BIPOC communities and grassroots organizations in the policy and electoral battles to come!
