Make Change

Engaging and Turning out Black and Latinx Voters

Black and Latinx voters can determine the outcome of the election–if they vote. In this pivotal year, the media is returning to the tired story of last-minute, get-out-the-vote efforts built on an overly simplistic narrative of these communities including why Black and brown people, immigrants, youth, and women vote (or not). It reduces Black and Latinx communities to false monoliths, and these stories often noticeably lack grounding in real conversations with voters.

For more than a decade, Community Change Action and our grassroots partner organizations have built voter engagement programs rooted in the lived experience of the communities we organize with–year in and year out. 

This year, our field, digital, and relational organizing programs are engaging millions of voters in Black, Latinx, AAPI, and Native communities in eight key battleground states and dozens of swing Congressional districts. Early voting and mail voting has already begun in many states – and we will be organizing and motivating voters every day from now through November 3rd. Some examples of this work from recent weeks are:

• Tailored programs with messengers and messaging targeted for Florida’s diverse Latinx communities, including Cubans and Venezuelans in South Florida, and Puerto Ricans in Central Florida;
• Creative ways to safely reach voters amid the pandemic, including physically distant canvassing to drop off care packages and making 1 million calls to voters through virtual phone banks on Mexican Independence Day;
• Digital spaces to support and inspire Black leaders and organizers on the ground, including our “Black at the Polls” series, which features conversations with leaders from our partner organizations in the Black Freedom Collective; and
• Media strategies to uplift the voices of partners like PLAN Action’s Executive Director Laura Martin from Nevada, featured on MSNBC.

Big Ideas for Our Economy: Watch Community Change’s First ‘Ideas Summit’

With the global pandemic, economic catastrophe, racial justice uprising, and threats to our democracy, this summer laid bare the fundamental inequities that have been part of this country since its founding. Neither a vaccine nor a stimulus package nor a new administration alone will fix it. So, even while we fight for these things, Community Change and Community Change Action are building “imaginative power” (as Dr. Megan Ming Francis described it) to envision a just American Reconstruction. 

We held our first “Ideas from the Ground Up” summit in July (which you can watch here). The revolutionary conversation featured Nana Gyamfi of Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Tayna Fogle of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Nijmie Dzurinko of Put People First! PA, Dorian Warren of Community Change, and Lorella Praeli of Community Change Action, and many more! Our goal? To build power behind a set of ideas and values developed from the ground up. 

In a continuation of the bravery to dream big, Community Change Senior Organizer Tammy Thomas Miles, former Community Change President Deepak Bhargava, and Mimi Abramovitz of Hunter College published an article in The Nation that matches big ideas with big solutions by taking on the Covid-19 pandemic, the American economic fallout, and the need to radically reimagine this country’s safety net. 

Fighting for A Fair Tax in Illinois

As Stacey Abrams has said, “The structure of our tax policy in the United States is the most direct form of social engineering that we have and the least investigated.” Our grassroots partners in Illinois are leading a fight to change that. 

The state of Illinois currently operates under a constitutional provision for a flat income tax rate, which has contributed to challenges around economic justice and fiscal health.  Currently, all residents pay the same rate of 4.95% of their income to the state, regardless of their income or tax bracket, placing an unfair burden on the state’s low- to moderate-income residents. The Vote Yes on Fair Tax Ballot Committee, created in 2019, consists of 30 community, advocacy, and labor organizations that have led the campaign for a Fair Tax over the past decade. This includes our partners Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (part of FIRM), Worker Center for Racial Justice (part of the Black Freedom Collective), and other groups like Jane Addams, One Northside, and Grassroots Collaborative. They have a plan to turn out 300,000 voters in support of the Fair Tax ballot measure by Election Day. 

The Illinois Fair Tax ballot measure would change the state income tax to a graduated tax system that would impose a higher rate of 7.75% or more on those making over $250,000 while lowering rates for individuals making less to 4.95%-4.75%. It’s estimated to bring in about $3 billion a year in revenue and is one critical piece to repairing the harm of centuries of anti-Black racism, as Deangelo Bester of the Worker Center for Racial Justice shared at Community Change Action’s Taking Power Summit.