In their groundbreaking book Prisms of the People, Hahrie Han, Liz McKenna and Michelle Oyakawa found that powerful base building organizations build a culture and set of practices where groups of individuals can adaptively deploy their resources to move power strategically. But how can organizations do that important work in an election season when it is easy to reduce our members and volunteers to cogs in a voter contact machine?

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.