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.
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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.
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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. -
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Civic Engagement
Climate Justice
Education Justice
Fair Work Week
Fed Up
Housing
Immigrant Justice Initiative
Immigrant Rights
Local Progress
Minimum Wage & Paid Sick Leave
Organization & Capacity Building
Racial Justice
Voting Rights
Wall Street Accountability
Workers RightsOur Campaigns
At the end of July, millions of families will have $600 less each week to make ends meet if Congress lets the emergency...
Affiliates in the CPD Network have decades of experience winning progressive policy reform and passing progressive legislation at...
People in the United States struggle to receive the healthcare they need. Among nations with similar GDPs, our country stands...
Working families have won important victories on a range of workplace rights and consumer protections, including a...
CPD’s Justice Transformation Program works in collaboration and solidarity with our partners and allies for an end to...
Every day, hardworking people are robbed of the compensation they’ve earned by their labor. Employers steal wages when they fail to pay overtime, pay less than the minimum wage, illegally deduct...
CPD has an extensive record of winning strategic victories at the local, state, and federal levels by building power locally. Our...
Without a movement powerful enough to win bold solutions to the climate crisis, over the coming years, low-income communities and communities of color will bear the brunt of the greatest man-made...
