Center for Popular Democracy and the Leadership Center for the Common Good to Merge
We are thrilled to announce the merger of the Center for Popular Democracy with the Leadership Center for the Common Good, to create a significantly larger and more powerful Center for Popular Democracy. The new Center for Popular Democracy will have thirty-five excellent staff, offices in New York City and Washington, DC, and staff in California, Minnesota and Illinois. Importantly, the expanded Center for Popular Democracy will have a strong cohort of eleven national core partner organizations and over seventy state partner organizations in twenty-seven states.
Democracy in Crisis
The United States is suffering an acute crisis of democracy, opportunity and equality. Despite rapidly increasing productivity, workers are earning less and are increasingly insecure. Wage theft is rampant. Too many workers must cobble together irregular, part-time jobs without benefits. Private sector unionization has fallen below seven percent, leaving workers and their broader economic opportunity in jeopardy. The new Center for Popular Democracy will promote equity, opportunity, and a dynamic democracy in partnership with base-building organizations, organizing networks and alliances, and progressive unions across the country. CPD will build the strength and capacity of democratic organizations to envision and advance a pro-worker, pro-immigrant, racial and economic justice agenda. We will help our partners to drive, and win, coordinated state and municipal organizing campaigns, and we will help them to build strong, sophisticated and resilient organizational infrastructure and political muscle.
"The new, expanded Center for Popular Democracy is a vitally important addition to the social justice landscape – building much-needed strength, sophistication and scale in community organizing. The new CPD fills an important void - aggressively innovating and replicating public policies that expand rights and opportunities for workers, for immigrants, and for people of color. We are excited to work closely with CPD to protect and promote the dignity of America’s workers."
Richard Trumka, President, AFL-CIO
Strength, Scale & Reach
The merger of the Leadership Center for the Common Good and the Center for Popular Democracy creates new, and badly-needed strength, scale and reach in the field of community organizing. Sharing successful campaign and policy innovations from one geography and campaign to another, and working to confront the challenges we face beyond and across traditional organizing networks is essential if we are going to build the strength of our field and accelerate its evolution.
We also believe that innovation and scale are essential to enable organizations to build sustainable financing and revenue models; to develop and win progressive policy victories; to push the envelope on what is considered possible; to experiment with and implement organizing, training and leadership development strategies; and to build robust, resilient, responsive community-based institutions and government.
The Center for Popular Democracy and the Leadership Center for the Common Good are both successful, rapidly-growing organizations. We have built high-skilled teams of community organizers, policy experts, and attorneys, as well as experts in technology, political strategy, communications and research. The two organizations both have strong relationships with organized labor and together have a network of field partners in close to thirty states. We complement each other and we will be significantly stronger together.
Building Momentum for National Change
Though CPD’s focus will be local, our ambition is national. Through strategic and sustained local and state victories, driven by strong community and labor partners, CPD will help win tangible improvements in working people’s lives and generate the upward pressure and momentum necessary to refocus national policy on the values of equity, opportunity and democracy for all.
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Key Allies Celebrate Our Merger
