April 2023
PENNSYLVANIA STANDS UP - AND DELIVERS!
In our instant-gratification culture, it’s sometimes hard to grasp that winning isn’t just defined by an election tally, and it certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Building a winning movement takes long-term investment, patience, and persistence. And then? Winning is only the beginning of delivering what people need.
Airlift Partner Pennsylvania Stands Up (PASU) gets it. This amazing young organization exemplifies not only how grassroots movements grow and win, but why progress doesn’t stop there:
“Our long-term work and vision as an organization is to govern. Unequivocally and unapologetically, we want to have the power to make the decisions that impact us, our families, and our neighborhoods, because that’s how we build a Pennsylvania that works for all of us. To us, governing power is not just a buzzword. We know that power is organized people and organized money, which is why we are investing in building a long-term infrastructure of year-round, neighbor-to-neighbor campaigning.”
Take, for example, PASU’s key role in passing the Whole-Home Repair Act, which began through listening to Pennsylvanians’ concerns about high energy bills, deteriorating residences, and climate. A win-win-win solution was spearheaded by PASU and one of its founding members and current state senator, Nikil Saval. It’s a great case study for PASU’s long-term investment in leadership development, co-governance, and delivering real results to real people.
Saval, a politically active progressive, started with PASU after tasting their secret sauce: a time-honored, deep, one-on-one conversation. PASU then helped him develop his leadership skills through their Precinct Committee Person Project. Running for this office gives members the opportunity to learn and grow by running for a low-stakes, hyper-local office. Committee People are a crucial link between the Democratic Party and grassroots communities. They educate their community about important issues and upcoming elections, conduct voter registration drives, and Get Out The Vote on election day. By serving as Committee People, members establish themselves as a voting-rights resource for their neighbors, build trust, and cut their teeth running a successful campaign.
So it was for Saval, who was then recruited by PASU and others to run for state Senate in 2020; he upended a 12-year incumbent. Once in office, Saval began co-drafting groundbreaking legislation with PASU members and other community organizations to address two of Pennsylvania’s biggest crises: housing and climate.
This legislation, the Whole-Home Repair Act, was designed to keep working people in their homes, make their homes safer and more energy efficient (enabling lower environmental impact and lower utility bills), and streamline their access to the program. It’s available to low- and moderate-income homeowners and small landlords who guarantee affordable rentals.
While Senator Saval held bi-weekly roundtables to gather community feedback from those most impacted by the housing crisis, climate injustice, and utility insecurity, PASU worked in coalition with partner organizations to get grasstops feedback. Constant communication, complete transparency, teamwork, planning, and good old fashioned organizing were their guiding lights.
Pennsylvania Stands Up also spearheaded a week of action to introduce Whole-Home Repair, building a groundswell of demand for it. This was followed by a lobby day coordinated with a broad coalition of organizations across the state. In July 2022, they secured $125,000,000 for the Whole-Home Repair fund. But that’s not the end of it: PASU will continue to spread the word, help eligible people apply for the funds and make repairs, and lobby Governor Shapiro and the now bluer state legislature to continue funding this vital program.
PASU notes:
“The success of this legislation shows what we can do when we invest in our members and develop their leadership. Nikil started as a member. We invested in him as a member leader. Once he built trust with our community, we helped elect him to hyper-local office. This effort activated and accelerated our base-building. We canvassed and supported Nikil’s election, and once in state office, he co-drafted the Whole-Home Repair legislation with our base. Our base, in turn, worked hard to build momentum in our communities and get this landmark bill passed. It demonstrates what we can achieve through long-term investment in governing power for working people.”
Or, as Carol Gonzalez of Lehigh County says about how Pennsylvania Stands Up and delivers: “I'm so tired of needing home repairs and getting ripped off by home maintenance plans and 'repair‘ professionals. Whole Home Repair is what we need to solve that problem and provide the funds and expertise needed for people to live in a safe home.”
Now that’s base-building!
PERSISTENCE PAYS!
GREAT NEWS FROM DOWN HOME NORTH CAROLINA
Airlift has always supported new progressive groups across the country. We’re excited to introduce our two new Partner Groups for the 2023-24 election cycle: Black Male Initiative Fund in Georgia, and One APIA Nevada. Each group focuses on vital communities that have suffered from severe under-investment: Black Men and Asian Pacific Islander Americans. Welcome!
The North Carolina General Assembly just passed Medicaid Expansion. Hundreds of thousands of our neighbors (600,000+), as well as many of our members, will now finally have healthcare. This is without a doubt a working class, people-powered victory. It’s been a long time coming, and it wouldn’t have happened without us.
When Down Home knocked our very first doors back in 2017, rural North Carolinians spoke loud and clear: We need healthcare. Six-out-of-ten said they regularly worried about “losing access to healthcare, Medicaid or Medicare.” Six years later, we’ve repeated this listening project from the mountains to the coast, and healthcare has remained a top priority everywhere we go. We knew we had to build power so we can get what we need.
So our members got to work, and kept the pressure on. We doggedly organized for Medicaid expansion, traveled to Raleigh, lobbied, held rallies, and deep canvassed to mobilize our communities. Most importantly, we built power. To remind legislators who they work for, we took the fight to the rural districts where politician’s resistance to Medicaid expansion was greatest. Often, we won those battles, breaking the supermajority in 2018 and preventing its return in 2022.
The lesson? When you fight for what you need, and back it up by organizing for power, you can win. And securing healthcare for 600,000 Carolinians is about as big as it gets.
But we aren’t done. If it had been up to working Carolinians, we would have had Medicaid expansion 12 years ago. Thousands of our neighbors and many of Down Home’s members would still be alive today. The fact that this took so long exposes the way that the system has been rigged against us.
And now that we won, they are trying to rig it all again. The same lawmakers who blocked Medicaid expansion for so long have attached its passage to the state budget, using North Carolina’s health and well being as a political bargaining chip to push other items of their agenda through. If the budget doesn’t get passed because they pack it full of extremist or dangerous unrelated policies, then our neighbors again can’t get healthcare. We’ve been more than clear: Don’t play politics with our healthcare.
This win, and the fight ahead, makes one thing clear: we need to keep building our power. Until working people write our own budgets and pass our own laws, we’ll still have some distance to go. But our fight and victory on Medicaid expansion reminds us: when we listen to working class people and build campaigns around our issues, we can win. When candidates run on real issue campaigns that draw contrast to right-wing culture wars, we can win. When we organize–with a broad multiracial base of working people, with endurance and with a lot of elbow grease–we can win.
And now, while we fight our next fight, we’ll have the healthcare we deserve. We'll be getting to work enrolling our people, and bringing them into a powerful, strong, and growing Down Home North Carolina. Thank you Down Homies, let’s keep it going.
HOW TO WIN THE CIVIL WAR
Featuring Steve Phillips and Airlift Partner Group LUCHA
MAY 4, Thursday, 5 pm PT/ 8 pm ET
Steve Phillips, national political leader who founded Democracy in Color, bestselling author, and columnist, will share with us leading insights from his newly released national bestseller: How We Win the Civil War: Securing a Multiracial Democracy and Ending White Supremacy for Good.
Steve will be joined by LUCHA, which is featured in Steve’s book. For more than a decade, LUCHA has made a huge difference in securing a multi-racial democracy in Arizona, and will be a critical player in the 2024 elections
Join us for a scintillating conversation!
PERSISTENCE, PATIENT MONEY, AND YOU
What can we do now in order to be able to do tomorrow
what we are unable to do today?
--Paolo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Again and again, we’ve seen the grassroots deliver–usually not overnight, but with the kind of steady persistence that builds power to win elections and create lasting progress. At a recent California Donor Table gathering, a woman spoke of how happy she was to support organizations from their inception, and to now see the fruits of their labor. She called her investments “patient money.” And that’s exactly what it takes to realize the many wins we’ve achieved so far, and those we must continue to fight for. Impatient for change? Put your money to work now so we can win in 2024. Better yet–make it monthly! Here’s how:
Donate by Check. Set up automatic payments to Airlift with the Bill Pay service at your bank, or send a check directly to: Airlift, PO Box 617, Corte Madera CA 94976
Donate Online at ActBlue. Just click the button, and click again to Make it Monthly!
If you became a monthly donor to Airlift on ActBlue before February 2023 you can update your monthly donation to the new Airlift partner group portfolio for 2023 and 2024 by going into your ActBlue account, cancel your current monthly donation, then use this link to make your monthly donation to the new groups. Just remember to Make it Monthly!
If you need help, contact carol@airlift.fund.
For Tax-Deductible Giving. Email Ruth Jaeger at ruth@airlift.fund.
Spread the word! Tell your friends and family about Airlift and our events. Share this newsletter and our website.
HOW TO COMBAT THE CORROSIVE RIGHT-WING PROPAGANDA MACHINE
Does Fox disinformation drive you crazy? Do the lies of the MAGA-verse make you nuts? Disinformation is a pervasive problem that threatens the 2024 elections and the future of our democracy.
Airlift has joined a large coalition of groups led by 31st Street Swing Left to launch a grassroots anti-propaganda initiative that will kick off April 26 on Zoom:
This dynamic conversation will introduce you to a growing number of smart media projects designed to better ground in reality the non-news consumers most susceptible to propaganda and voting for Republicans -- if they vote at all. (No need to bring a credit card – this is not a fundraiser.)
As Dan Pfeiffer says, it’s time to focus less on the message and more on the megaphone:
The Fight against MAGA Media: Mobilizing the Grassroots
Wednesday, April 26, 12 noon ET / 9 am PT
FIELD NOTES
Michigan Liberation believes in Care, Not Criminalization. Community navigators build out compassionate, community-driven responses to drug use and overdoses in Macomb, Wayne, and Oakland counties.
Down Home North Carolina sounds the alarm on GOP state legislators’ proposed "Don't Say Gay" bill. Read more.
Durham for All, a Carolina Federation affiliate, has H.E.A.R.T. Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams respond to nonviolent crises such as a mental health issue, a suicide threat, or an elderly person in need with unarmed trained professionals. The program enhances community safety, trust, and care while reducing people’s interactions with police. Durham for All is lobbying for increased funding in this year’s budget after a successful pilot.