Issue: Principles & Processes

How do we build the power to win? The Lab is constantly working to uncover and share what works (and doesn’t) to help build grassroots power and win equitable solutions through evidence-based advocacy. A common request we receive is for rigorous best practices to grow people power. Last year, the Lab finalized our research vision and research agenda and solicited research project ideas from the Lab community, rooted in how to improve organizing and mobilizing, and grounded in a common conceptual framework.
Today we share results from these six collaborative research projects, and our guidance for your recruitment and mobilizing work, based on the evidence we gathered together.

This new series at The Forge will engage organizers with a deceptively simple question: what’s your power analysis? Powerful actors and institutions are creating and purposefully maintaining unjust political and economic systems for their own benefit. This article series aims for sharper and more shared approaches and language across our movements for describing, measuring, and analyzing power. In this series, this author will talk to organizers and movement leaders — including Doran Schrantz of Faith in Minnesota, Andrea Mercado of Florida Rising, leaders at the New Georgia Project Action Fund, and others from across the progressive movement — about the power analysis that guides their work and their organizations, the power they’re trying to build and exercise, how it’s going, and how they know.