2024 Community Change Overview

Power from the Ground Up January 2024

Community Change is a national organization that builds power from the ground up.

We are organizing for a world we have not yet seen. We aim to create a multiracial democracy and a people-centered economy where all our communities can live in dignity and flourish with the rights and freedoms that we all deserve.

Approach To make real our vision of transformation, Community Change aims to fundamentally rebalance power in the United States. We’re working directly with people impacted by injustice, communitybased groups that are organizing in states across the country, and ally organizations across the social justice ecosystem .

We’re building a multiracial movement of, by, and for low-income people and creating a powerful collective identity rooted in linked fates and committed to our common cause.

Through Community Change, we’re organizing to build a peoplepowered economy. That work includes delivering material benefits for Black, Latino, AAPI, immigrant, and low-income communities, bringing directly impacted people into the political process, and telling a new and compelling story about the positive impact of government.

Through Community Change Action and its political arm, Community Change Voters, we’re flexing our political muscle to bring millions more people into civic life so that their elected officials reflect our communities and deliver on our priorities.

And with the power of organizing, ideas, and politics, our communities will win.

@CommunityChange @CommChangeAct

Analysis At a moment when many despair for the future of American democracy, Community Change sees our long-term bets in states like Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico paying dividends for our communities.

We see our work to imagine a new political economy replacing the “common sense” of neoliberalism. Experiments with familysupporting policies like the expanded Child Tax Credit prove the potential of government action to end poverty.

We see the electoral powerhouse we’ve built with and for Black, Latino, AAPI, Native, immigrant, and young voters over the past 20 years. New political realities in states like Arizona show the power of hard-to-find voters to determine elections and the effectiveness of our program’s approach to engaging them.

The Power Of People

We create spaces for people affected by injustice to claim their voice and power with the largest relational voter contact program in the country.

We support the sustained, mostly invisible process of grassroots organizational and leadership development.

Stories

Politics

We listen to the people closest to the pain to surface their ideas and learn what persuades and motivates them.

We bring more people into civic life and the day-to-day, year-in and year-out practice of democracy. Their engagement is the best defense against authoritarianism.

We lift up bold ideas to popularize alternative narratives and advance policy prescriptions that point to new paradigms.

We leverage the power of real relationships to motivate the hard-to-find voters who determine election outcomes, particularly Black, Latino, Native, AAPI, immigrant, and young voters.

We throw down with our partners, providing strategic support and our own staff capacity for their campaigns, organizing resources, and lifting up their work in states as laboratories for new economic paradigms.

We walk with our partners as coconspirators, growing their scale and rigor over decades, building the architecture of solidarity among partners in one place, and accelerating the spread of effective strategies to other contexts.

We reach people where they live, both online and in the real world. We empower people who share experiences and identities to engage in digital spaces like TikTok and with their friends, family members, and communities. We amplify their voices to shape public discourse and change cultural common sense.

We tell a story about democracy where the government is a force for good and every person has a role in civic life.

We build relationships with political insiders to shape the terms of the policy debate.

We bridge the field and the federal, wielding inside influence with policymakers and exerting outside pressure to win policy change on issues at the intersections of economic and racial justice such as child care and guaranteed income.

We figure out how to meet emerging challenges. From digital organizing practices to electoral data analytics to liberatory leadership models, we deliver what the moment demands.

Community Change fuses together the people power of organizing, the narrative power of bold ideas, and the political power of voter engagement.

Our Arc 55+ Years since leaders of the civil rights, labor, and anti-poverty movements founded Community Change in 1968.

40+ States where we’re building power with over 150 grassroots groups.

50+ Projects incubated with Community Change’s fiscal sponsorship and support.

52k+ Childcare Changemakers taking action with other child care providers and parents.

137 Alumni of our cohort-based, liberatory leadership development programs, including lead organizer and management cohorts and Power 50.

Community Change was founded in 1968 by leaders of the civil rights, labor, and anti-poverty movements. Their vision and their charge—to build power through grassroots leadership, to challenge the government to be a force for good, to focus on poor people, especially poor people of color—are just as relevant today as at the time of our birth.

Over the past 55 years, we have evolved to meet the demands of the social justice ecosystem. We have built the infrastructure necessary to wield the full collection of power-building tools from organizing to politics.

Community Change is a 501(c)(3) organization - communitychange.org Community Change Action is its affiliated 501(c)(4) advocacy arm - communitychangeaction.org Community Change Voters is Community Change Action’s political arm - communitychangevoters.org

@CommunityChange @CommChangeAct