Community-Based Voter Strategies:
CCC Voter Strategies a Huge Success
Monday April 11 - Wednesday April 13, 2005
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The Center for Community Change hosted a conference on community-based voter strategies to highlight the work of the Center’s Community Voting Project, a non-partisan initiative that registered and mobilized approximately 250,000 new low-income and minority voters during the 2004 election season.
This conference brought together organizers and grassroots leaders from diverse backgrounds, ages, and 150 community-based organizations around the country. Conference participants shared lessons from the last election, examined best practices from other grassroots voter projects, and discussed ways to link effective community-based voter work to securing improved public policies for poor and working people in the future.
The program had a mix of informative plenaries and workshops, with exciting receptions and evening dinner programs. Keynote speakers included such prominent politicians and community leaders as civil rights leader Hollis Watkins, Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and former congressman Ron Dellums. The more than a dozen workshops provided participants with a range of opportunities for learning new skills and techniques for building on their successes from 2004, or starting new voter projects in the future. Workshops focused on such topics as data management, fundraising, building a field operation, getting your message out, voter access and protection, and recruiting and training candidates for office.
The conferences’ overwhelming success illustrated the level of excitement and commitment among grassroots organizations for community-based voter work. These grassroots voter projects provide a new model for voter education, registration, and mobilization. In contrast to traditional top-down approaches of “parachuting” into local communities, community-based voter projects offer long-lasting returns. Grassroots groups have relations of trust with their members, intimate knowledge of local conditions, and a ready pool of volunteers who will be around after Election Day---all critical to registering and mobilizing voters over time.
In the future, the Center will be building off its 2004 Community Voting Project to train and support more community groups in conducting effective voter mobilization. If you’d like more information about our plans, please contact Cecilia Fucuy, Community Voting Project Director, at cfucuy@communitychange.org.
Click here to view conference agenda (PDF, 533k)
Click here to view photo gallery
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