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Introduction 

Since the 2024 elections, the MVP team has received hundreds of questions from supporters. We have distilled them into a shorter set of questions here, along with our “real-talk” responses. We hope this is a useful addition to our preliminary 2024 Report and 2025-2026 plans.

Answering these questions is as difficult as it is essential. We are in a challenging situation in which no one – literally no one in the world – has easy solutions. Points of clarity are emerging but our assessment is still preliminary. We are analyzing why we lost, evaluating our own and our grantee partners’ work, and making audacious plans to upgrade our strategy for 2025-2028 and beyond. 

Even as we assess our 2024 losses and the changes needed moving forward, MVP remains committed to our core strategy of investing in local organizing. This is not the full solution, and we are exploring an array of strategic approaches. But there is no doubt that a well-funded, year-round local organizing infrastructure is essential to winning elections, building durable power, and accelerating policy change. 

And, while conventional political giving sinks dollars into ads that vanish after Election Day, our investments strengthen marginalized communities and the people-powered organizations that help form the bedrock of our democracy.

We are interested in hearing your feedback, and we welcome additional questions. You can submit a question here or by emailing mvp@movement.vote.

Gratefully,

Billy Wimsatt, Founder & Executive Director
Movement Voter PAC

Table of Contents

PART I: What Happened in 2024?!

1. Why did we lose the 2024 Presidential Election? 
2. Was 2024 a fluke or a full-blown political realignment?
3. Are there any 2024 wins we can attribute to MVP?
4. Does the MVP model still work (i.e. investing in local organizing)? What does the data say?
5. Did MVP fund deep organizing or “shallow” canvassing in 2024?

PART II: What Do We Do Now?!

1. How do we win back the voters we lost? And the potential Dem voters who stayed home?
2. Will there even be elections now that Trump is in power?
3. How do we protect vulnerable communities under Trump?
4. What do we do about the media, disinformation, etc?
5. What do we do about the Democratic Party?
6. How stable is MVP organizationally going into 2025?
7. How will MVP’s core strategy change vs. stay the same?
8. How do we weigh short-term electoral wins vs. long-term power building?
9. Is “the Social Justice Left” part of the problem?
10. Is America just a lost cause? (Should I move to Canada?)
11. What can MVP donors do now besides donating?
12. So what is MVP’s plan for 2025-2026? I need some freaking hope!

PART I: What Happened in 2024?!

Why did we lose the 2024 Presidential Election? 

In the basic sense of how we lost the Presidency:

• Trump won by 229,766 votes across three states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. This is not a blowout, but it is a wider win than 2016 or 2020 (78k and 43k respectively).
• Trump’s Electoral College win matched national shifts. Relative to 2020, he gained vote share in 89% of counties, shifting the popular vote six points nationally and 3.5 points in swing states.

• Trump won mainly because Democrats underperformed. Relative to 2020, Trump gained about three million votes while Harris netted six million fewer votes than Biden. But in the national share of the eligible vote population, Trump gained just 0.4% while Harris lost 3.5%.

Why did this happen? The various takes could (and will) fill books – check out this bibliography for starters. But the truth is, it’s all speculative until Spring 2025 when Secretaries of State will share detailed state-by-state voter data for more robust analysis. That said, here is what we know so far:

• Globally, incumbents are losing everywhere – literally and figuratively left and right. A simple likely explanation? Economic insecurity caused by inflation following the Covid-19 pandemic. 

• This was a ‘change’ election, and Trump was the change agent. In NBC exit polling, 73% of voters were angry or dissatisfied with the country’s direction. They supported Trump by 26 points. In CBS exit polling, 30% of voters ranked “ability to lead” as the most important quality, and 27% ranked “can bring needed change.” Trump won them by 31 and 48 points each.

• Core Democratic constituencies moved to Trump. AP Votecast exit polling shows Trump made gains among young voters and voters of color. NBC exit polls show Trump won a majority of voters with no college degree and only lost Latine voters with no college degree by 51% to 47% — a 31-point gain from 2020.
• Anti-Trump voters stayed home. Democratic analyst Michael Podhorzer estimates 15 million people who voted “against” Trump in 2020 didn’t vote in 2024. This suggests Trump didn’t get much more popular; Democrats got less so.
• Trump won the “Misinformed Vote”. Polls by Ipsos, Data for Progress, NBC, and others show a dramatic divide: Harris won well-informed voters who follow traditional media, while Trump won misinformed voters, low-info voters, and consumers of non-traditional media.

• The biggest “winner” in 2024 was still the couch. More eligible voters stayed home than voted for Trump or Harris: Almost 90 million people, or 36% of the electorate. This suggests eligible voters were, overall, more fed up with our whole system than they were alarmed by Trump.

All of this is a tough pill to swallow. But when we see where we are, we can see what to do about it.

Was 2024 a fluke or a full-blown political realignment?

We should take our 2024 losses seriously, if not treat them hyperbolically. We are in a new political era. We need to question our assumptions and adapt our approaches. In terms of warning signs:

• The Democratic base has been eroding for several cycles. Working-class voters and voters of color have been drifting toward the GOP for over a decade. This cycle, Harris also lost ground among young voters and union households.

• Trump won with many lower-income voters. Overall, he won voters with a total 2023 family income under $100,000 by 51% to 47% (though Harris won with households under $30,000).

• As trust in institutions plummets, Dems have come to represent the status quo. Meanwhile, Trump has branded himself the ultimate disruptor. As strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio put it, “Democrats cannot be running as the protectors of norms and institutions, and yes, that includes democracy, because democracy never bought anyone dinner.” 

• The national media ecosystem has changed and there’s no going back. If we don’t change with it, we may find ourselves communicating to an ever-shrinking slice of the electorate.

However, there are important caveats, silver linings, and opportunities as well:

• 2024 was more a marginal victory than a landslide. Yes, we lost. Still, Trump won less than 50% of the popular vote by under 1.5% – the third smallest margin since 1888.
• The data suggests a “vote of no confidence in Democrats” vs. an embrace of Trump. Relative to 2020, Harris lost far more votes than Trump gained, with the biggest drops coming from “safe states” where there was less incentive to vote. We can’t stress it enough: The couch won.
• A racial realignment may be underway, but it may not affect our national political trajectory. Yes, the GOP is making modest gains with voters of color; but this is happening in the context of a broader “ideological sorting” in which liberals and conservatives across race and ethnicity are polarizing toward the Democratic and Republican parties respectively. The result will likely be “two parties operating essentially at parity” – i.e., close elections for the foreseeable future.
• In the 2024 House elections, Democrats gained a seat. This suggests the importance of candidate quality and locally tailored messaging, as well as the critical role of the year-round organizing by MVP’s local partner organizations. MVP partners mobilized voters in all seven districts Democrats flipped and in almost every competitive district. (Sneak peek: MVP is helping to organize a movement-wide effort to win the House in 2026 by scaling up local organizing in every competitive district. Stay tuned…)

Ultimately, the future is unwritten. Remember George W. Bush’s resounding victory over John Kerry in 2004, which was supposed to usher in a “permanent governing majority” for the GOP? Four years later in 2008, we elected Obama and a Democratic trifecta. What we do now matters. Buckle up!

Are there any 2024 wins we can attribute to MVP?

Yes! A lot. Our preliminary post-election report has more details, but here are highlights:

• In the Senate, MVP partners helped protect four seats, including three by less than 30,000 votes each: Michigan (where our partners made 8.9 million voter contact attempts), Nevada (6.7 million contact attempts), and Wisconsin (6.3 million contact attempts).
• In the House, MVP partners helped flip at least seven seats and hold ten, netting one Democratic seat and cutting the GOP’s majority to a historically thin margin. In each of the four closest victories involving MVP partners, Democrats won by less than 3,000 votes.
• Down ballot, our partners helped win liberal state Supreme Court seats in Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, and potentially North Carolina; hold the North Carolina governorship; break up GOP supermajorities in Montana, North Carolina, and Wisconsin; hold a trifecta in Maine; hold chambers in Minnesota and Pennsylvania; and hold off GOP expansion in Tennessee and Nebraska. They also helped win ballot measures protecting abortion rights in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, and Nevada; and ballot campaigns to advance economic fairness in Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, Kentucky, and more.

Does the MVP model still work? What does the data say?

Short answer: Yes, but we need to scale it up, improve it, and invest in new approaches.

MVP’s basic premise has always been a “triple bottom-line” approach: that year-round local organizing helps: 1) win elections, 2) fuel policy change, and 3) build lasting power by engaging people in ongoing, non-transactional ways. There is strong evidence of our model’s quantitative and qualitative impacts.

That said, the field of local voter organizing is getting just a fraction of the resources it needs. Even Jen O’Malley Dillon, chair of the Biden & Harris campaigns, thinks so!

Yes, Democrats nominally had the better conventional “ground game” in 2024 — but as organizers Marshall Ganz, Astra Taylor, and others point out, much of the canvassing by candidate campaigns and the Democratic Party was based on a shallow, short-term, transactional model of voter contact. 

“Voter outreach needs to be people- and place-centered, not data- and advertiser-driven. It needs to be issue-focused and year-round, not scaled in eight weeks and gone overnight. And it must offer more than an awkward conversation at the door and an alienating avalanche of texts treating recipients like little more than ATMs. People need a sense of belonging and a compelling and credible vision of a future worth fighting for.”

– Astra Taylor, ”Democrats Much Touted Ground Game Was A Disaster”, in The Guardian

What’s the solution? More funding for independent, locally-based organizing, earlier and steadier, is a big part. But it’s not all of it. We also need to adapt our approaches to today’s media ecosystem. We are in the early stages of this area of inquiry, but we are confident this will be an important piece of how we win power back – not just in one election, but for the long run.

Did MVP fund deep organizing or “shallow” canvassing in 2024?

Both. Most of our partners practiced deep relational organizing and engaged trusted messengers to talk with voters in their communities. However, most didn’t get funding early enough to scale this work. Many, therefore, also ran scaled-up, “shallow” voter contact programs which have become the industry-standard approach (at least up until now). 

Although research has shown “shallow” voter contact to increase voter turnout and persuasion, the 2024 elections have called this approach into question. We on the MVP team are coming to believe these more transactional interactions (whether by door, phone, or text) are quickly diminishing in effectiveness, especially in high-turnout elections.

We are taking a hard look at resources spent on “shallow” voter contact, and we are focusing on supporting our partners to prioritize deeper organizing methods. However, this approach requires year-round, multi-year investment — not just short-term infusions a few months before a big election. 

The more our partners can maintain consistent organizing staff and robust volunteer operations, the more they can scale up and optimize their year-round voter organizing. This pays off in critical wins on Election Day, policy wins the rest of the year, and sustained progress over time.

PART II: What Do We Do Now?!

How do we win back the voters we lost? And the potential Dem voters who stayed home?

These are now some of the central questions of MVP’s and our partners’ work. The solutions will involve listening to and engaging more voters, more deeply and consistently; showing up year-round in communities of multiracial, working-class, and otherwise marginalized voters; improving our relational media communications; recruiting and supporting more compelling candidates; and telling a more compelling story. These are all areas in which local organizing must play a significant role.

One key lesson from 2024 is this: Political audacity wins over incrementalism. If we invest now in progressive, economic populist organizing, we can harness the deeper forces that doomed Dems in 2024 to fuel our comeback in 2026 and 2028. Peter Turchin, who studies political cycles over the past 5,000 years, explains it this way: 

• The wealth gap has widened drastically since the ‘70s.
• Like it or not, Trump has successfully exploited working-class and middle-class discontent by rebranding the GOP as a revolutionary populist movement.
• Meanwhile, Democrats have, in the eyes of too many voters, “morphed into the party of the ruling class” (which explains the phenomenon of the Bernie-to-Trump voter). 
• We can rail against Trump and the GOP’s hypocrisy in all of this — or, we can reclaim the populist mantle by pushing the Democratic Party to become the champions of “a new New Deal and a commitment to major social reform.”

Democratic strategist Waleed Shahid has some ideas for what it will take to do this — and one key piece of the puzzle is investing in grassroots progressive organizing and social movements.

Will there even be elections now that Trump is in power?

We believe competitive elections will continue. We aren’t putting it past Trump to try to subvert future elections, but it would be pretty hard to do so: Ending elections would, among other things, require each state government to decide not to hold them. We don’t think it helps us to catastrophize or make Trump appear more powerful than he is. Trump would like nothing more than for us to decide the fix is in, conclude there is nothing we can do about it, and surrender in advance. Don’t fall for it.

How do we protect vulnerable communities under Trump?

This is a question of immediate concern to MVP and our partners, many of whose constituents will likely be personally affected by the Trump agenda. Our partners are ramping up services, mutual aid, and advocacy to protect their communities. For example:

• In Arizona, Progress Arizona is launching Proyecto Progreso to counter Prop 314 and Trump’s proposed mass deportation plan. The initiative aims to build a Spanish-language media coalition to promote Know Your Rights education and public calls to action while coordinating MVP partners to host legal clinics, workshops, and immigration-related events.
• In California, Chispa will be working with immigrant rights groups in Orange County to support sanctuary cities in resisting federal deportation efforts.
• In Colorado, New Era Colorado is publishing a guide for the state legislature and city councils on how to protect people and communities against Project 2025 at the local and state level.
• In Georgia, Georgia Equality is running a media campaign to counter anti-trans mis/disinformation. They are one of the strongest LGBTQ+-led advocacy organizations and are yet again preparing to defeat anti-LGBTQ+ bills.
• In New York, Make the Road NY is organizing alongside coalition partners to pressure New York City Mayor Adams to resist Trump’s deportation agenda by limiting collaboration with ICE and upholding and strengthening laws that protect families from separation. And, Battleground New York is organizing federal legislative campaigns to block regressive tax and healthcare bills, targeting Republican U.S. House reps for persuasion (“vote ‘nay!’”) and accountability (“you voted ‘yea,’ we’ll vote you out!”), and “shoring up” support for vulnerable Democratic representatives.
• In Wisconsin, Citizen Action of Wisconsin is gearing up to take on larger campaigns around healthcare – and to do so they have hired a new Healthcare Coordinator. They are running persuasion campaigns in two U.S. House districts — WI-01 and WI-03 — urging their representatives to vote “nay” on federal efforts to cut health care.

What do we do about the media, disinformation, etc?

This is a huge problem – one of the biggest or arguably the biggest. It’s also one of our biggest areas of exploration now. MVP and our partners are learning alongside organizations that specialize in media and digital strategies. Throughout 2025, MVP will make recommendations to our donors to fund a portfolio of leading organizations and projects in the digital media and organizing space, as well as our partners’ digital organizing and innovative media efforts. We’ll have more to say about this over time. 

What do we do about the Democratic Party?

MVP and our partners are in conversation with various leaders within the Democratic Party. There are exciting local and state-level models that could be helpful to test or spread. We’ve also proudly signed onto the Democratic Power Building Pledge, organized by our allies at Arena, urging all DNC Chair candidates to invest in permanent, year-round organizing and grassroots leadership. Although MVP’s lane is primarily to build complementary infrastructure to the Democratic Party, we are increasingly looking at ways to engage with the party more directly. We’ll have more to say about this over time.

How stable is MVP organizationally going into 2025?

MVP is in our strongest position ever – financially, organizationally, and in terms of our team’s capacity and collaborative fighting spirit. We have a strong financial and legal team, operational systems, compliance protocols, and controls. And we take seriously the responsibility and leadership required of all of us in this new chapter in American history. In short, we are ready to rise to this challenge.

How will MVP’s core strategy change vs. stay the same?

We are proceeding on three tracks. 

One, MVP’s core strategy works. Our partners have won hundreds of electoral and policy victories in the past decade, including in 2024. This is not surprising: Organizing has been a primary driver of progress throughout human history. Our commitment to deep, local organizing stays the same. 

Two, we know many of MVP’s local partners want and need to upgrade their work. We are doubling down to help them do that through our grantmaking, capacity-building support, and our program team’s thought partnership and mentorship — but losing the 2024 federal elections has lit a fire under our asses to level up the progressive movement. We are now enlisting some of the best organizers in our sector to do this, including Doran Schrantz, former Executive Director of Faith in Action Minnesota, one of the primary architects of the 10+ year path to progressive governance in her state. 

Three, we are leaning into innovation, learning from the “other side,” and testing new models. Our biggest area of focus is determining how to make meaningful interventions in the wild and wooly media environment. In this vein, we are planning to expand and deepen our partnerships with leaders and innovators in the new media space, both to make direct investments and to make smart recommendations to donors looking to invest in this space.

How do we weigh short-term electoral wins vs. long-term power building?

The two are deeply interrelated. In many ways, this question presents a false choice. 

Short-term electoral wins are integral to long-term power building and transformational policy change. In fact, without short-term wins, we risk long-term power loss via gerrymandering, control of courts, and other right-wing structural interventions.

Bottom line: Ain’t no long term without the short term!

At the same time, if all we do is focus on short-term wins, we will never make the forward-looking investments necessary to expand the electoral map, expand progressive governance and end regressive governance at the state level, and build the holistic, bottom-up, multi-generational movement our country needs — not just for the years to come, but for the decades to come.

Sadly, too many Democratic players are not pairing their electoral work with a long-term vision or power-building strategy. The beauty of MVP is that we seek to do both wherever possible.

Is “the Social Justice Left” part of the problem?

There is some indication that cultural alienation from the Democratic Party, resentment of liberal elitism, and aversion to social justice rhetoric (and derisive rightwing caricatures of “wokeness”) were factors that helped the GOP to wedge potential Democratic voters from Harris and/or toward Trump. 

How big a role each played is still unclear and we will continue to seek deeper analysis over time, including when we receive voter file data in the spring.

But for argument’s sake, let’s assume this cultural backlash did play a role. If so, the important thing is to de-conflate locally-based organizing groups from “terminally online activists.”

Are there times when some organizations’ language is less strategic? Yes. Do we sometimes raise this with our grantees or connect them to strategic communications support and training? Also yes. But what activists spout on the internet or say on campus (some of which is, in fact, planted by infiltrators, bots, and bad actors) could not be more different from what MVP grantee partners say and do. 

Because local organizing groups operate in multiracial and working-class communities every single day, they are well-calibrated toward meeting “normal people” where they’re at, listening to those voters’ concerns and aspirations, and speaking about the things they care about in language that resonates with them.

MVP and our partners are proactively thinking about this problem, asking questions like: 

• How can we communicate effective messages and neutralize the other side’s wedge issues? 
• How do we balance populist rage with strategic messaging? And authenticity and relatability with message discipline? 

We have a genuinely difficult set of problems to solve, especially in the internet age in which anyone can create a public message and the most controversial messages will tend to get amplified. Local organizing helps inoculate against this kind of messaging and builds relationships and trust with cross-pressured working-class voters.

Is America just a lost cause? (Should I move to Canada?)

You’re asking if you should move to the “51st state”? Sure! Or how about Greenland? Just kidding. (By the way, humor is a key part of how we’re all going to stay in good spirits and beat the opposition!)

But seriously. No, America is not a lost cause. And where would you go? The rest of the world is facing similar threats.

The next four years will be a strenuous test with horrible consequences. But humanity has been through many many terrible chapters before. Through adversity, we will grow stronger and smarter. Our opposition will overreach and make mistakes. This is an opportunity for us to challenge ourselves to be better. We will win some and we will lose some. But the silver lining in any adverse situation is that it will force us to learn, improve, and figure out creative solutions and better ways forward. 

MVP is building an amazing “beloved community” of partners, donors, and volunteers to create these solutions. This is a big part of what gives us hope! And we would love to have you be a part of it. 

If history is any guide, the pendulum will swing back, and it is our job – and our privilege – to help design the country that we will swing back to. 

If you look at the last three swings (Reagan/Bush → Clinton; Bush II → Obama; and Trump → Biden), each new Democratic administration was more progressive and transformational than the last. Each represented a synthesis of the most popular parts of the prior Republican administration and a correction to its excesses and mistakes. We have the opportunity to organize and design for the next pendulum swing and to make it the best version of what we envision it could be.

Please don’t leave or give up hope! We know it’s hard some days. But we need you with us. Together we will do amazing things.

So what is MVP’s plan for 2025-2026? I need some freaking hope! 

It’s clear we have four main jobs through 2028:

1. Block the Trump agenda and protect our most vulnerable communities.
2. Build state-level power through local organizing and big-tent alliances.
3. Innovate and adapt our work: Organizing, digital, media, culture, & more.
4. Win at the ballot box from down-ballot to Congress and President.

(You can see an overview of our preliminary plan here.)

Let’s start by talking about the Block and Win parts of the work. 

We’re going to work hard on blocking as much as we can of the bad legislation at the federal and state levels. And on winning the biggest elections of 2025 and 2026 – aiming for a repeat of the Democrats’ 2017-2018 comeback (or the 2006 wave following the Democrats’ 2004 blowout). 

Our first big test of 2025 is the Wisconsin Supreme Court race on April 1st which will effectively determine control of the state. 

Then we’re going to go all hands on deck to help our Virginia partners win a Democratic trifecta and elect Democrat Abigail Spanberger as Governor this fall. Our partners in Virginia already won a pair of special elections on January 7th, holding their narrow majorities in the Virginia legislature and improving slightly on Harris’ performance in those districts. 

There are several other important 2025 races including a Pennsylvania Supreme Court race in the fall, legislative special elections in Michigan, and tons of down-ballot races – from mayors to school boards to district attorneys in crucial states where our partner will need to build up our organizing and electoral capacity in advance of 2026. 

In 2026, we are going all hands on deck to win back the House – which Republicans hold by just a few seats. This effort will begin ASAP with a legislative accountability campaign in the most vulnerable Republican-held House districts. 

We are helping pull together a Battleground Alliance (building on the success of Battleground New York and Battleground California — essentially a souped-up national version of those successful state-level models!) that will start with an effort to stop bad Republican legislation, and evolve into House accountability and organizing to flip the House in 2026, and keep it in Democratic hands long-term. Ditto for the Senate, although that’s a much smaller battleground (North Carolina and Maine are the best pick-up opportunities, and we will mostly have to defend in Georgia and Michigan).

Along with winning back the House and making gains in the Senate, our focus in 2026 will include state-level elections, with an emphasis on the perennial Presidential battlegrounds: Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, as well as a broader set of states including Minnesota and Maine (which will also have a competitive US Senate race). 

Winning Governors’ races, state legislative chambers, Secretaries of State, Attorneys General, and State Supreme Courts is foundational to strengthening democracy and progressive governance in all critical, winnable states. Our goal at the state level is to build from today’s 15 Democratic state trifectas to as many as 28 we could win if we play our cards right over the coming decade.

The 2025-2026 electoral fights will be huge, and if we can do well in them, it will go a long way toward stabilizing our democracy, cutting our losses, and setting us up for a comeback in 2028. 

Building Stronger State Ecosystems: Beyond Blocking bad things and Winning good things, we’re going to lean hard into Building stronger state-organizing ecosystems in each of our perennial battleground states. We’re doing a deep dive on analyzing each of our state ecosystems this year (strengths, weaknesses, areas of growth, and potential innovation) and working with everyone we can to figure out what it will take to make each of them significantly stronger. And we’re bringing on an amazing consultant Doran Schrantz, (a brilliant architect of the Minnesota model), to help us do it.

There is already promising work underway by MVP partners. For example:

• In Michigan, 482Forward, Mothering Justice, and Michigan Education Justice Coalition are building an organizing school to strengthen the progressive sector’s workforce development.
• In Montana, A Better Big Sky is working to raise $500k for coordinated legislative advocacy work, which they would regrant in a way that would incentivize multiple partner organizations to work together more deeply on setting shared legislative priorities, developing shared messaging, and executing shared campaigns and programs.
• In New Hampshire, the NH Democracy Fund is continuing to invest in and serve as the central coordinator for a start-up “revenue table,” a coalition of partner groups working to advance narrative shifts and policy changes around the role of taxes and revenue in government. In a state like New Hampshire with no income or sales tax, this could be a truly transformational shift that would set the stage for more progressive policy change at the state and local levels.

In North Carolina, the NC League of Conservation Voters is running a training program for people who want to join local government boards and commissions. So far 90% of their trainees have made it onto a board or commission.

We’ll have a lot more to say about this as we develop the strategy for each state.

Innovation: Finally, we’re going to lean harder than ever before into innovation. 2025 will be an intensive year of learning and challenging ourselves and our partners for MVP. We are humbled at our losses in 2024 and we believe a big part of our role in 2025-2026 is to help convene, agitate, and challenge our hundreds of partners, donors, and everyone else to look honestly at where we’re at, to learn from 2024, and to innovate in any way we can to get to a better place, including grappling with the media environment. We’re in a lot of conversations about this, and our internal motto is “No business as usual.” 

Overall, we’re going to double down on what’s working best, be tougher in challenging anything we’re not sure is working as well as it could, push ourselves and our partners to question our assumptions, and invest in and refer donors to support innovative efforts and leaders. 

We’re very clear that we’re in a terrible situation that isn’t going to fix itself. We’re going to have to innovate our way out. Adversity is the mother of invention. We are agitating and asking everyone we know to lean into invention!

What can MVP donors do now besides donating?

Our top recommendation? Organize donors with us! Funders large and small have always been among the unsung heroes of successful movements throughout modern history.

Here’s what you can do right now: Sign up to be an MVP donor-organizing volunteer.

By filling out our intake form you are raising your hand to say, “I’m in – let’s do this! Let’s fully fund the movement together!”

After you sign up, we’ll follow up to connect you to volunteer opportunities, online and in-person (where applicable). We have four established local volunteer hubs in the Bay Area (CA), Washington State, Eastern MA (Boston), and Western MA (Northampton), with emerging hubs (or “hublets” as we affectionately call them) in places including DC, NY, LA, and Atlanta. We also have national volunteer opportunities you can participate in remotely, like our current “donor thank-you” effort.

Here’s why we consider donor organizing an integral part of building our movement for progress, and why MVP is investing in creating the largest, most united movement of donors supporting grassroots organizing year-round, on the ground – every year, not just big election years:

• To date, philanthropy has never adequately funded year-round local progressive organizing in the US. As a result, we’ve not yet been able to realize the full potential of organizing “ecosystems” at the local, state, or national levels. 
• The closest we get to huge financial infusions in power-building organizing work is during high-profile Presidential election years. But long-term power building doesn’t work with sporadic investments every two or four years.
• When enough donors see the odd-numbered years are as critical as the even-numbered years, we will finally be able to keep up the momentum, keep veteran staff and seasoned organizers on payroll, seize key political opportunities no matter when they arise, and grow our long-term political power in a far more consistent way.

While there is enough wealth out there to fully fund our movements for progress, too few people with wealth give away substantial amounts to power-building organizing. Even fewer are willing to make multiyear commitments that would allow the work to grow. And among those who do, too many often place restrictions and conditions on the types of work organizations can do. This is the big-picture problem that MVP is working to change through both donor advising and donor organizing. 

The only way to fund and build organizing ecosystems to the degree needed in this country is through a cross-class giving revolution. We hope you will join us in making this vision a reality!