Our BLOCK and BUILD strategy is in full swing this year– we’re halfway to our goal of 1 million dials to white voters in swing states. And our projects in the rural and small town South are expanding across Tennessee and deepening in Kentucky to fight for working people in majority white areas.
This week we are running our Many Over MAGA Fall Fundraising Drive to ensure we have the resources to show up big for the election, to protect election results, and then powerfully grow our work for the long haul. Your gift this week will be doubled by a generous donor! Can you join us today to support our work in the South?
As you know, our Southern projects in our Grassroots Organizing Department organize working people in majority-white areas around housing issues and tenant’s rights. We’re working in small towns in TN, KY, and now GA with little to no other progressive organizing infrastructure– areas that are heavily invested in by the far right.
In Kentucky, our projects are fighting back against the state’s recent bill to criminalize homelessness connected to the SCOTUS Grants Pass decision. We’re doing a candidate survey for city council members to determine where they stand on housing issues– and then mobilizing voters and putting public pressure on candidates to support our campaigns.
In Tennessee, our newest projects in Columbia and Tullahoma launched in April and are already knocking doors, training leaders, and building off of what we have learned over the last 7 years organizing in small town TN. This spring in Columbia, we met a local woman who said she supported the cause, but didn’t want to “do” anything. Five months later, she’s facilitating group meetings, helping launch programs, and attending organizing trainings. By deeply investing in leaders, we’re transforming their understandings of what they believe they can do and what’s possible in their communities.
At a meeting in Columbia this summer, a member said to the group, “Well, we’re about class consciousness here.” As the far right battles for the allegiance of the white working class, our programs are building working peoples’ commitment to solidarity across lines of difference. By investing in individual leadership, we strengthen local projects and then bring these projects into multiracial state and national coalitions.
We invest in the South both in our grassroots and electoral programs 1) because it is key to the far right’s strategy and 2) because our people there are looking for belonging and better answers to their suffering than racism.
Can you give a gift today to find our people and stop the far right in the South?
In solidarity,
Erin Heaney
SURJ ED
Showing Up for Racial Justice
PO Box 1376
Buffalo, NY 14205
United States