Throughout our nation’s history, we’ve learned that in order to make long lasting, bold change at the national level, we must commit to long-term, local organizing. Local campaigns recruit members to their cause, shift public thought, put everyday people into power, and achieve wins that build momentum for sweeping national change.
In fact, local campaigns have historically been a tool for poor, Black, and brown movements to organize their communities around demands that feel closer to home than federal policy. From the Civil Rights Movement to Freedom Summer to the Suffragettes, to the power of the labor movement in winning the original New Deal, every campaign used local organizing to build enough people power to make change possible.
That local investment is something that extremists and fossil fuel billionaires know well. They spent the past few decades organizing and polarizing communities on the ground to build power. From taking over schools to training students each year through the Federalist Society, they have built power from the ground up. That’s how they’ve been able to implement hateful transgender bathroom bans across the country and load up a Supreme Court willing to reverse Roe v. Wade under a Democratic trifecta. And they’re not stopping.
We must be as ambitious as our opponents. We will continue to push our politicians at the national level and by winning power election after election, but we can’t just resort to the same tactics we’ve used in the past. It’s time for us to get serious about building long-term power and organizing a movement across race and class that can transform our society and take over every level of government .
Together, we will build organized people power. We will take over every level of government, remove fossil fuel corruption, corporate greed, and the people fallen to its influence. We will distribute the power and resources of the government to the people and communities most harmed by injustice, and vulnerable to the climate crisis. We will fully capture the public imagination of what is right, necessary, and expected of the government in the era of climate crisis, and organize their voices to demand immediate action. We will become enough of a credible threat to the powers-at-be that we are not only heard by our leaders, but we, as a movement, lead us through the crisis.
