CPD and the Workers Defense Project recently launched a collaboration to develop organizing to scale in Texas. WDP has successfully built up a member base of over 1,000 workers in Austin, TX and is expanding its membership to Dallas.

Each year, WDP serves thousands of individuals through its wage claim and injury work, workers’ rights education, ESL, leadership, and computer classes. WDP is now looking to “scale-up” to organize more workers and win even more victories while solidifying its current leadership and member base. Together, CPD and WDP are refining WDP's programs to expand membership participation, retention and growth, and to develop new leaders. We are working to create an organizational structure and management systems to foster WDP's growth and support the organization's goal to be a powerful voice for workers in a historically anti-worker state.

An element of this strategy will be to leverage the legalization process, if immigration reform is enacted, as a vehicle for building the membership and capacity of WDP. In particular, CPD is working with WDP to develop an ambitious, multi-state project that will facilitate access to non-predatory legal and financial services for thousands of immigrant families, generate significant new revenue streams for the community-based organizations that serve them, including WDP, and build capacity and infrastructure for the field of immigrant worker organizing. Through this project, CPD will coordinate and support partners such as WDP to build direct services capacity and leverage technology to meet the immediate need for naturalization-related information and services, simultaneously helping build organizing and organizational capacity.