How "Democracy Centers" are Sprouting Across the South

Place-based year-round organizing aimed at combating voter suppression by meeting people where they live and around their community's pain points.

Where is the movement to strengthen and defend democracy in America most visible to ordinary Americans? That’s the question we’ve been exploring in several recent editions of The Connector, starting in August with “When the Doors You Knock Belong to Your Own Neighbors” which looked at the potential of doing year-round canvassing-style organizing, and then continuing with “Purposeful Places, Community Entrepreneurs and the Defense of Democracy,” which argued for investing in physical community centers designed to nurture generations of community leaders rather than individual community entrepreneurs. Those two posts were followed by “In Search of Democracy’s Movement” and “In Search of Democracy’s Movement (II),” which pondered the potential of “proto-political” community forms like biking clubs and “craftivism” that seek to meet people around a shared hobby or passion and engage them in political action, as well as more explicitly anti-authoritarian local organizing that is emerging in contested purple and red places like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire as small-d democrats contend with book banners and school budget cutters.

Continuing in this vein, today I want to introduce the concept of “Democracy Centers,” community organizing hubs in places with historic records of voter suppression where large numbers of BIPOC people have given up on voting. The Center for Common Ground, a nonprofit organization that focuses on registering and activating BIPOC voters, is building a network of Democracy Centers across the South, starting with Hawkinsville, Georgia in 2020 and then spreading to more than a dozen locations including Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Alabama. Each center has a physical home and a geographic focus, and each combines organizing around local issues identified by local community members with voter registration and civics education.

As Andrea Miller, the founder and executive director of the Center for Common Ground, explained to me last week in an hour-long interview punctuated frequently by her hearty laugh:

“Part of the concept was: make sure that you immediately recognize the community pain point, and then start coming up with ways that you can solve that pain point, which is why some of our Democracy Centers are housed in feeding shelters, places where they feed people. The Hawkinsville Democracy Center has a food pantry. So people who are hungry go there to get food. It's also an African American Historical Society. So they go there to find out about their history. In Florence, the center is in a church, led by a pastor who is very involved with climate. And one of their pastor’s big initiatives was ‘water from the heavens’ since the community did not have clean safe drinking water. So he was making drinking water from solar.”

In Roanoke, the big community pain point is gun violence, which has risen 400% in recent years. In Richmond, it’s the war on drugs and the need to include community input on marijuana legalization and insuring that tax revenue from its sale provides some justice for the community most hurt by the drug war.

Each center has mix of volunteers and paid staff who are typically former volunteers. The Center for Common Ground provides partial funding for staff, rent and technology needs, while local partners—who are essential—provide the rest. In Hawkinsville, a rural town settled by freedmen but subjected to decades of Jim Crow, the Newberry Foundation, a local foundation set up by Dr. Julius Johnson, a seventh-generation community member who came back home after years working for the State Department, is the backbone of their Plow and Pew Democracy Center. The entrance is adorned by the words “Culture, Democracy, History & Music.” Anyone can come to the center to get services, but, Miller says, “your cost, in order to participate and get this free food, is let's check and see if you're registered to vote.” Last week, it ran a free seminar on Medicare access. Below, a photo of volunteers at a recent postcarding party. The main room is lined by dozens of bookshelves on African-American history and table displays documenting the history of voter suppression and organizing in the area.

And the centers are anchoring ongoing community organizing aimed at increasing voter participation, Miller says. In addition to supporting each center’s costs, Miller’s group is spending about $100,000 a year on technology and voter data. In late 2020 during the runoff for the Georgia Senate races, she trained volunteers in Hawkinsville to canvass their community. By January 5th, she says, they had knocked on 2,400 doors and had 2,100 conversation. “We have our own voter file,” she adds. “We use PDI, which gives us two to four times the number of actual working cell phones than we would get with something like NGP-VAN. We set up texting and teach each of our democracy center leaders and volunteers how to use it. We also will set up phone banks if they have people who want to phone bank and now many of the Democracy Centers are doing postcards. Everything that we do is very IT driven. We are training people in low-income communities where 55% of people have pretty much given up on voting. We are teaching them how to use 21st century technology.”

Arguably, the centers are already having a demonstrable impact. The first Democracy Center in Virginia was in Roanoke, and Miller says it’s not a coincidence that early voting there among the Black community surged. “In the Virginia 2021 cycle, in what world does little Roanoke outperform Fairfax by 10 points?” Roanoke turned in an 18.21% black voter turnout for early voting. Fairfax County turned in 8.55%, she notes. In Amelia County, which has a history of severe voter intimidation, early voting among Blacks was over 50%. “Why? Because in Amelia County, they vote in granaries. And there are no laws that say that you have to be so many feet away from a granary, the way that you have laws that say you have to be so many feet from a school if you have a gun. And when the Black voters found out I can go vote tomorrow, and I can avoid all the Sons of the Confederacy out there with their guns, and I can go now, then and went they voted early.”

The idea for Democracy Centers, Miller told me, came from a paper she wrote back in 2015 with that title that she gave to Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, Keith Ellison, Raul Grijalva and John Nichols at the Progressive Congress annual meeting. “It was all about going deep into communities, finding trusted members of the community, and then working with them to build their community. At the time, this is pre-pandemic, our goal was for Democracy Centers to be placed-based. We wanted people at a physical space that had internet.” Miller was concerned that progressives were spending too much time talking to themselves, an experience she witnessed running the Progressive Round Table on Capitol Hill from 2013-2015, where Members of Congress and  leaders of progressive organizations would get together every month and talk about legislation and ideas that they were trying to advance, wanting to make sure that the public understood them.

“My concern was the only people that are getting this are really well-heeled, white, elite progressives, and we got to get this out in the ‘hood. And until we go to the ‘hood, we're going to be talking to ourselves. One of the things I would tell my students when I taught organizing, you aren't organizing until there's a group of people you're looking at, and you're getting ready to talk them and you realize personally, you're feeling a little uncomfortable.” She came from a very politically engaged family in Chicago, with two uncles that were alderman and part of the Daley political machine, as well as parents who were both strong union members. In addition to seeing how her uncles organized in their precincts, Jesse Jackson’s Operation Breadbasket had impressed her with its focus on direct community service. So out of this mix was born the idea of Democracy Centers, she said.

“We’re changing voting from the notion of you're voting for prom queen or king, where there's going to be absolutely no benefit to you, to we are voting to be able to get this or stop this,” Miller says. “And then after the election is over, now we go into training mode. Here's the civics training. Now we're doing civic literacy, policy advocacy, because if this is what we want, we know these people have the power to give it to us.”

Right now, the Center for Common Ground is mainly supported by its remote volunteers, some 47,000-strong who mainly live in blue states like California and New York, and who have been the backbone of the center’s letter-writing, post-carding and texting campaigns aimed at disenfranchised BIPOC voters. Miller would love to expand its seeding and support of Democracy Centers. Their most expensive center gets $4,100 a month in subsidies, which covers rent, utilities and staff for three people. For a half-million a year, she could back ten more. Which is a fraction of what Democrats spend on TV ads alone. If you want to support this work, donate here.

Bonus link: For a deeper dive into the Democracy Center program, including the path to establishing one, go here.

Odds and Ends

—There’s still a lot of Democratic consultants making money off of siphoning the money out of the pockets of gullible small donors, as I wrote about here in the case of Marcus Flowers, who has raised more than $10 million in his quixotic campaign to unseat Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Nazi). And the hysterical emails begging for money keep coming in. But here are two brighter signs: First, John Fetterman’s Pennsylvania Senate campaign went public, calling out an ActBlue page run by Scott Dworkin, for raising money using Fetterman’s name but doing “NOTHING” to support his campaign. That made some waves. (Dworkin has a history of grifting off of popular causes, unfortunately.) Second, I was pleasantly surprised by a recent email from JoeBiden.com asking me “do you want fewer emails?” in its subject line. Why, how kind of you to ask. Maybe that’s a sign that the DNC’s online fundraising team is realizing that the constant dunning for dollars is backfiring?

—Speaking of online fundraising, Republican consultant and anti-Trumper Tim Miller had a rousing opinion piece in the New York Times last week arguing that the internet was breaking democracy because of how many politicians were ginning up their demagoguery in order to raise millions in small donations, but I beg to differ. We had toxic politics well before the Internet, and these days it’s the insatiable paranoia and prejudice on the right that makes online demagoguery so profitable, not ActBlue.

—Here's a gift link to Greg Jaffe’s fascinating Washington Post profile of Starbucks founder and CEO Howard Schultz, the billionaire whose company is experiencing a wave of unionization efforts and who just can’t seem to understand why his paternalistic and controlling style is losing to young people who don’t think $17 a hour is enough to buy their devotion. One could write a whole book about the rise and fall of Starbucks, as good a symbol of corporate liberalism as any I can think of.

End Times

—The members of the 1.5 million-strong Political Humor subreddit aren’t taking too kindly to Texas’ new (and likely unconstitutional) law that seeks to force social media companies to host content they don’t want to host.