May 30th, 2010
Inside a brightly-painted East LA building, twelve young men and women, mostly Latino, sit at long tables, each wearing large headphones and gazing attentively at a laptop. Speaking energetically in Spanish or in English, with both excitement and confidence, this phone bank team will have over 150 conversations with voters in under an hour.
InnerCity Struggle Phone Bank
This is what transformative change looks like. Over the course of the California Alliance’s March Civic Engagement Program, Inner City Struggle (ICS) – an East LA youth organizing group — contacted over 10,000 voters. Since last Fall, they have had over 20,000 conversations – an unprecedented feat for the organization. ICS, along with the other 18 community-based organizations that comprise the California Alliance, have collectively spoken to over 330,000 voters. This past few months’ newfound capacity dwarfs the Alliance’s previous efforts –when reaching 40,000 voters was considered a victory–and demonstrates the potential of this first-of-its kind civic engagement strategy.
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May 30th, 2010
Conservatives have spent billions creating and testing successful anti-government and -tax messages over the past 40 years, to build support for dismantling policies that regulate the free market and redistribute economic opportunity. They well know the power of ideas and well-crafted messages in this media-saturated world; in fact, their ideas now dominate public thinking. How many times have you found yourself reflexively criticizing government or qualifying a pro-tax position? Only 32% of Californians support progressive tax reform, according to recent Public Policy Institute polls — and only 13% strongly support it. In order to build majority support by reaching the “moveable middle,” a smart communications strategy is essential, with ideas, messages, even “memes” — concepts that go viral and are grasped by everyone — to attract fresh support for change.
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May 30th, 2010
For Jean Kayano, chief administrator at Knotts Family Parenting Institute (KFPI) in San Bernardino, cuts to social services are not abstract. “Every program we have is affected by state funding,” she says. Particularly infuriating are cuts to foster services, when foster parents are already asked to “raise kids on less money than it takes to house a dog at a kennel.”
KFPI, a new member of the California Alliance, began 20 years ago as a group home for foster youth facing homelessness and substance abuse. But, 12 years later — after much organizational soul-searching — the leadership expanded KFPI’s scope. “We weren’t making transformative change,” Kayano says. Thus, the shift from simply assisting disadvantaged youth to actually preventing the abuse and neglect that often separates families in the first place.
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