And still, in the face of adversity, the CPD Network is rising to face the moment and standing up for our values and Black, Brown, immigrant, and working families across the country. 

CPD and CPD Action grew significantly, in size, scale, and most importantly, impact in 2017. CPD now has a staff of more than 80 with offices in New York City and Washington, DC, and additional staff in Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Michigan, Puerto Rico and Illinois. CPD, together with our 501c4 sister organization CPD Action, had, at the end of 2017, a combined budget of over $31 million.

At the same time, the CPD’s Network of allied organizations has also continued to grow significantly since our founding. We now have 48 partner organizations, spread across 126 cities and 32 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC, representing a combined membership of more than 500,000 people. We helped build four new organizations in key states, and added ten new affiliates to the CPD Network, adding strength and people power to a growing list of impressive and dynamic partners and affiliates. Notably, 83% of CPD affiliates are led by people of color and 61% are led by women. Since the 2016 election, the CPD Network helped organize over 863 resistance events that mobilized over 500,000 participants. Our network also helped to coordinate more than 15 major civil disobedience actions on issues ranging from healthcare, to taxation, to immigrant rights, with a total of 737 people arrested.

In 2017, our communities faced incredible challenges: the economy continued to fail working families; hate and anti-immigrant vitriol surfaced as a result of the Trump campaign; low-income families faced a crisis of access to affordable, quality housing; and Black and Brown people were routinely murdered at the hands of police. All of these challenges, as ever, were painfully more acute for communities of color and for Black and Latino communities, in particular.

In these turbulent times, the CPD Network is on the forefront of the national movement to fight back, empower, and activate communities most impacted by injustice and inequality. As we look ahead to 2018, CPD continues to drive strategies to capture the upsurge in resistance energy and activity, to catalyze action to the streets, to protect prior victories, to win new progressive change, and to elevate our collective voice and vision for justice. We are doing so with a renewed commitment to building lasting institutions that engage constituencies over time on the range of issues that are priorities for them and to ensuring the safety of our people, our institutions and our communities.