Our Work

The Center for Popular Democracy works to create equity, opportunity and a dynamic democracy in partnership with high-impact base-building organizations, organizing alliances, and progressive unions. CPD strengthens our collective capacity to envision and win an innovative pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda.

  • Organizational Capacity


    Building the Capacity of the Field

    It is essential that we build the strength and capacity of democratic, base-building organizations working for equity, opportunity and racial justice. But, sustaining community-led organizing, winning ever more ambitious victories and “scaling up” work to maximize its impact requires sophisticated management, fundraising, technology, work-planning and evaluation, communications strategies and infrastructure. In addition to strengthening organizations on the ground, it is also essential to build new alliances, coalitions and organizations collaborations to fill gaps in the social justice landscape. CPD works directly with community organizations to increase their capacity, and to coordinate and anchor cross-organizational infrastructure development.

  • Strategic Networks


    Building Strategic Networks

    The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) helps build the capacity and strength of the progressive movement through the development of dynamic networks. Through the sharing of strategies, tactics, and policies and the coordination of campaigns across geographies, these networks build and deepen power and act as vital elements of movement infrastructure.

  • Economic Justice


    Winning Economic Justice

    Workers continue to face daunting challenges, from stagnant wages and outright wage theft, to budget constraints and corporate profiteering. CPD provides organizing, strategy, communications, research, policy and legal support as communities fight to win concrete improvements on the job, and new policies at the city and state level that promote economic justice, and to build a broader workers’ movement for social justice. We accomplish this through:

      • Organizing support through new worker organizing and coalition building support;
      • Policy advocacy and strategy support for multiple campaigns, including minimum wage, wage theft, paid sick leave, and innovative policies to raise job standards; and
      • Raising the profile of economic and community justice issues by advancing policy and organizing campaigns and developing publishing reports illustrating abuse in a range of working sectors.

  • Community Justice


    Fighting for Community Justice

    Low-income communities persistently lack decent housing and adequate community infrastructure, threatening families’ most fundamental well-being and making daily hardships even more challenging. The Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) is working on integrated approaches to improving community conditions and confronting community debt, providing critical support for campaigns on a range of issues, including housing, economic development, and financial sector accountability. With a deep connection to a strong base of impacted communities and constituents, CPD brings a unique perspective to coalition work on community justice issues.

  • Immigrant Rights


    Advancing Immigrant Rights

    Immigrants face persistent and deep challenges, ranging from punitive federal immigration enforcement measures that tear apart families to systematic inequalities in the provision of services and legal protections at a state and local level.

    By working in partnership with innovative community-based organizations, local and state networks, and progressive unions across the country, CPD is confronting these inequities by:

    • pursuing a robust immigrant integration agenda at the local and state level by to protecting the rights of immigrant residents , at the state and local level, in the areas of labor, civil rights, language access and access to legal services and educational opportunities;.
    • supporting the national campaign for comprehensive federal immigration reform;
    • advancing state and local campaigns to challenge destructive federal immigration enforcement policies; and
    • exploring new strategies for expanding access to legal services for immigrants and connecting service-delivery to community organizing.

  • Racial Justice


    Promoting Racial Justice

    Changes in the racial and ethnic makeup of the nation's population demand policies that account for the needs of communities of color as well as the increasingly central role such communities will play in driving economic growth in coming years. A “new majority” of people of color are displaying electoral and political power, and reinvigorating the movement to advance a proactive racial justice agenda at the local, state and federal levels.  The Center for Popular Democracy provides critical policy and organizing support to base-building organizations across the country to ensure that the growing strength of this new majority is solidified, expanded, and harnessed to achieve tangible improvements in working people’s lives. We believe the theory behind our approach is that full equity for communities of color can only be achieved if, as a progressive movement, we replicate our success aggressively in order to effectively bring them to scale and generate new, cutting-edge policy ideas that expand the scope of our demands for change and equity.

  • Public Education


    Strengthening Public Education

    CPD is committed to ensuring that all children have access to strong public schools that provide high-quality education, address the full-range of student needs, engage parents, teachers and community members in decision-making and are both transparent and accountable to the communities they serve. To this end, CPD is provides support to grassroots organizations in cities across the country that are fighting for stronger, more effective public schools.

  • Voting Rights

    We have seen growing challenges facing our democracy—restrictive voting laws, criminalization of third party registration, increased barriers to the ballot box, and corporations exerting an ever-larger influence on who wins elections. In this political context, our work to strengthen democracy and develop an electoral system that is open and accessible requires we use all available tools to drive impact—including innovative policy research and development, grassroots mobilization, and coalition-building.