MVP National Briefing: Strengthening Local & State Organizing

Thu, May 29 ⸱ 3-4pm ET • 2-3pm CT • 1-2pm MT • Noon-1pm PT

Virtual Event ⸱ Zoom link shared after registration

Join MVP for a national briefing on what it will take — and what MVP and our grantee partners are doing — to scale up the year-round relational organizing needed for building true political power that lasts.

2024 was a wake-up call, but organizers have been sounding the alarm for years: the year-round local organizing sector and election-time independent “ground game” need to grow significantly bigger and more effective if we want to secure durable electoral majorities and meaningful policy change.

Addressing this gap is not a magical silver bullet; as a progressive movement, we also need to 1) build a new media and youth leadership juggernaut to win hearts and minds on a mass scale, and 2) transform the Democratic Party.

That said, strengthening year-round local and state organizing is still a central and essential part of the solution. Building an active and engaged base from the bottom up is crucial to our electoral prospects, AND it is core to how we can most reliably achieve state-level policy progress and minimize harm to vulnerable communities — especially while MAGA holds federal power through 2029.

Speakers:

Billy Wimsatt, MVP Founder & Executive Director, will open with a brief overview of MVP’s more nuanced and expansive theory of change in this new political moment — and how strengthening the organizing sector is one key part of that framework.
Javier Morillo, MVP Senior State Strategy Director, will present our vision for scaling up large-scale, year-round base building and relational voter organizing in battleground states and beyond — and how we are honing our grantmaking strategy to further expedite that vision.
Joy Cushman & Doran Schrantz at State Power Action Fund will discuss their groundbreaking research, in partnership with that of fellow MVP ally Pro-Democracy Campaign, to A) quantitatively measure MVP local grantee partners' year-round base-building work, and B) empirically demonstrate how this work enabled them to reach, persuade, and mobilize Democratic voters in 2024 that no one else did.
MVP Local Grantee Partners: Alex Gomez, Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), and Todd Zimmer, Down Home North Carolina, will illustrate how this data-driven research affirmed and informed their organizing and electoral strategies in real-time.

Notes:

This call is open to all MVP supporters.
Although we often share the video and slides after briefings, we are currently assessing whether we can do so in this case, due to the potentially sensitive nature of the research that will be presented.
After the briefing, you are welcome to join MVP staff for an optional 30-minute informal Q&A.