All posts in Voting Access

The time has come to get out there and vote!

It’s been a crazy two years since the historic presidential election of President Obama.  Since then, we’ve seen the passage of national health care reform,  the rise of the tea party movement, and the economic crisis strike across the country.  We’ve also seen negative campaign ads, local critical mass, and all kinds of parties to make sure we make it out on election day.  And now the time has come.  A number of our key partner organizations are at the forefront of local and national civic engagement efforts including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, San Francisco Rising, Oakland Rising, and Voto Latino.  Below are some voter resources, including two voter guides from the League of Women Voters & The Ballot as well as organizational voter guides from the Ella Baker Center and Oakland Rising

League of Women Voters

The Ballot

Ella Baker Center for Human Rights Voter Guide

Oakland Rising

Today, October 18th, is the last day to register to vote in the State of California.

If you haven’t already, register through California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s website or through Kapor Foundation key grant partner, VotoLatino.

Already registered?  Check out these California-based voter engagement alliances, Oakland Rising, San Francisco Rising and the California Alliance.

The Nonprofit Voter Engagement Network is hosting a special web training event:

“Voter Education and GOTV for Nonprofits”
Thursday, October 7th
11:00 AM to 12:00 PM PT

The final weeks before the election are a good time to focus on voter education and getting out the vote (GOTV). This webinar will review best practices around voter education and GOTV activities that you can do at your nonprofit or in your community. It will help you decide where and when to conduct these activities and where to find additional resources.

There will be opportunities for question and answers throughout the training.

To RSVP, please click HERE.

Image source: http://pclinuxos.com

Over the last couple of years the city of Oakland has become home to numerous blogs discussing the pressing political, community, and economic issues of the day.  These include Oakland Focus, A Better Oakland, Oakland Local, and Living in the O.  These blogs provide a much needed space for everyday people in the city to connect to each other, engage in city life, and sadly fill the space of our lacking newspaper.  I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about citizen journalism- on the one hand I think they provide an important look into how different people live and experience the city and on the other I feel like they too often mistake commentary with in depth journalism.

That said, last week I was invited to be a guest on OaklandSeen and had a great conversation with Aimee Allison on the state of Oakland.  We had an interesting conversation on issues ranging from the city’s gang injunction to economic development opportunities for the city’s long term residents.  Listen HERE and let us know what you think.

Congrats to Demos, which was praised in last Friday’s New York Times for their critical public policy and advocacy work from a progressive perspective. Demos, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next month, was one of our first grant recipients when we launched the civic engagement focus area in 2007. They remain one of our key grant partner organizations, mostly for their notable work on voter registration modernization and campaign reform.

Keep up the great work (we need it)!

If you haven’t already, it’s not too late to send in your census form and it’s not too late to remind your friends and family to do the same.

Do you already know how important it is for people of color and low-income communities to send back their census forms, but still need some talking points to convince everyone around you? Check-out Color of Change’s census website, www.colorofchange.org/census, to find out how much money each filled out and returned census form is worth to your community (for even more Census numbers, visit the Brookings Institution online).

Want to know what percentage of households where you live have already mailed back a form? See how your neighborhood, and every neighborhood in the United States, is doing at  www.CensusHardToCountMaps.org (courtesy of the Funders Census Initiative, CUNY and our colleagues at the Hagedorn Foundation) or 2010.census.gov/2010census/take10map/ (courtesy of the Census Bureau).

You only get one chance every ten years, so … fill it out, spread the word, claim the money, and build political power in your community!

Local update: Oakland physically divided in Census returns | National update: For all things census, see Terri Ann Lowenthal’s important, informative and entertaining Census Project Blog. And, the Ford Foundation’s Funder Census Toolkit.

Almost four years after Measure O was passed by 69% of voters, Oakland will begin to use instant runoff voting (IRV) for the city’s mayoral and council elections  this November.   We expect the move to strengthen democratic participation in Oakland elections by eliminating the need for June primaries, when voter participation rates, particularly among people of color and youth, have been as low as 15%.

Instant runoff voting is a voting system where voters rank candidates in order of preference, eliminating the need for separate runoff elections when one candidate does not reach a 50% threshold.  As FairVote explains, “instant runoff voting elects candidates who have majority support, accommodates voters having better choices (alleviating concerns about the dreaded ‘spoiler effect’) and encourages winning candidates to reach out to more people.”  (See a video demonstration below.)

After successfully campaigning for IRV’s implementation in Oakland, one of our key partner organizations, Oakland Rising, and its four organizational members, APEN, EBASE, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and Causa Justa :: Just Cause, will be contacting over 20,000 voters to explain how IRV works in the lead-up to the November elections. As Oakland Rising Executive Director Esperanza Tervalon-Daumont testified before City Council’s 6-2 vote in favor of moving forward with IRV, “We will make sure that Oakland voters know what to do when they step into the voting booth on November, 2010.  Oakland Rising is ready.”

For us, the story of how Oakland adopts instant runoff voting and the impact it will have is one strong example of how election reform and community-based organizing strategies work together to ensure, as the Foundation’s wesbite reads, “that people of color are fully and proportionately engaged in civic processes (organizing and voting) that impact the creation of public policy, and that the integrity of the election systems that we use to select public sector policymakers are robust and trustworthy.”

For our funder colleagues interested in learning more about this area of work, join the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation this Monday for their April First Monday Call, Election Reform as a Strategy for Building Power in Communities of Color.

I’m excited to welcome Mario Lugay to the Kapor Foundation as the Associate Program Officer. In this role, Mario will be responsible for the Foundation’s national VoICE grantmaking and movement-building work. Mario will also work with Carmen on our electoral empowerment efforts in California communities of color.
Mario has an extensive background in civic engagement and community organizing. He and I first became acquainted through his work with the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation (FCCP), the national strategy and affinity group for philanthropy professionals involved with elections and other civic issues. Mario initially joined FCCP and the American Dream Fund as Program Associate and, in 2008, became FCCP’s first Program Director, where he served in this national role until January 2010 (and then we promptly snatched him up!).

Prior to that, Mario worked as the National Coordinator of Racial Justice 911: People of Color Against the War, consulted with Listen, Inc. to help bring a delegation of U.S. youth organizers to the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and was the Development Coordinator for CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities in the Northwest Bronx. Mario has served on CAAAV’s Strategizing Committee and on the Community Funding Board of the North Star Fund in NYC. A native New Yorker, Mario earned a BA in political science from Columbia University.

We consider it quite a coup to be able to work with Mario. Please join us in welcoming him to the Kapor Foundation team!

We’ve just completed a process to identify new key partner organizations. And while the bulk of our funding will support this cohort, I want to reiterate to the broader community that we are still able to consider quarterly grant requests for special opportunities and efforts like convenings and tech-related work.

If you’re interested in learning more, please feel free to check out our regularly-updated guidelines (or keep reading the blog) and contact us to discuss your ideas.

Yesterday I heard a terrific briefing at the Haas Jr. Foundation (Thanks Cathy and Ted!) on the California redistricting process, which stands to be a great experiment in participatory democracy or  a hugely controversial process stunted by our national polarity. Or maybe some of both.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran a front-page article describing the process and the need for a pool of candidates who reflect the diversity of our state. The article drove me to look closer at the selection process for the California Redistricting Commission, which will be comprised of 14 citizen applicants, some randomly selected and others not. Criticisms of the lopsided applicant pool notwithstanding, the selection process alone promises to be thrilling, kind of like a civic lottery. I even checked out the application, which is due on Friday, February 12th. There has been a last minute push to spread the word to communities of color; I even received a video message in my personal email from the Northern California district director of my fraternity encouraging brothers to consider applying if we met certain eligibility criteria required by Proposition 11, which was passed by voters in 2008 to create the commission:

• Are a registered voter and have voted in at least two of the last three general elections.
• Have had consistent voter affiliation for five years.
• Had no conflicts of interest as outlined here.

If you, dear California voter, meet these criteria and are interested in participating in a process that will shape the immediate electoral future of our state, you have a week to get your name in the hat!