People's Action

This November, voters will face a thousand DOJ monitors deployed to polling places, a president who has refused to commit to accepting the results, and the open threat of military troops or ICE officers at the polls. We refuse to meet that moment unprepared. In this piece, People's Action Executive Director Sulma Arias draws lessons from South Korea's December 2024 victory: When President Yoon declared martial law, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions called a general strike. Lawmakers climbed over fences to enter the National Assembly. And 190 legislators unanimously voted to overturn the order. The coup was over in six hours. The takeaway is clear: broad, nonviolent, coordinated action by organized people can defend a democracy. That is exactly what People's Action is building right now, alongside May Day Strong (500+ organizations united under "Workers Over Billionaires") and the Organizing Revival Networks. 👉 Read Sulma's full piece: https://bit.ly/3Uri1MM #WorkersOverBillionaires #DemocracyDefense

Across the country, grassroots organizers are proving that when working people organize, we win. 🔹 In Illinois, The People's Lobby and ONE Northside helped pass a tax on Big Tech advertising revenue, generating $1.2 billion every year for health care and education. 🔹 In Maine, the Maine People's Alliance helped win a new millionaire's tax. 🔹 In Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Stands Up blocked a sweetheart deal for an AI data center, and the governor just signed an executive order restricting fast-track permitting statewide. 🔹 In Missouri, Missouri Jobs with Justice knocked on 100,000+ doors to defeat two ballot measures that would've gutted income taxes for the rich and shifted the burden onto working families. They lost by a 4-to-1 margin in every single county. 🔹 And in Iowa, Iowa CCI Action is now leading the statewide Election Safeguards Response Network, meeting with election auditors in all 99 counties to protect every voter's right to cast a ballot free from intimidation. Read the full update from People's Action Chief of Organizing Andrea Marta ➡️ https://lnkd.in/ePhcgWdh #OurPeopleOurDemocracy #PeoplePower #EconomicJustice #ProtectTheVote #OrganizingWorks

"Greedy corporations and billionaires are redrawing maps to silence our votes and sending ICE into our communities to keep us afraid and divided. They are doing this because they know what organized people are capable of. This Labor Day, we are making sure working families across this country are ready. Not just to resist, but to win." — Sulma Arias, Executive Director, People's Action Institute. A network of 570 labor and community organizations is expanding its Solidarity Schools nationwide this Labor Day, folding voter defense and nonviolent resistance training into the picnics and parades already on working families' calendars. The coalition is pointing to a converging set of threats: redistricting efforts following the U.S. Supreme Court's Callais ruling, the continued escalation of ICE enforcement in immigrant communities, and legislative efforts to weaken voting access (particularly in Southern states where Black representation is being targeted for erasure). 🔗 Read more via Davis Vanguard: https://lnkd.in/g3gYHAr8 #MayDayStrong #SolidaritySchools #LaborDay #CommunityOrganizing #VoterDefense #CivicEngagement #CoalitionBuilding #WorkersOverBillionaires

Black liberation is never granted. It is built, protected, and sustained. That's the opening truth from a new op-ed in The Progressive by VOCAL-NY leader Charles Brown. He shares how, after being evicted from his rent-stabilized apartment while living with HIV, VOCAL-NY invested in him to attend People's Action Institute's International Transformative Training in Chicago in 2015. His takeaway: "I've been organizing ever since. That's the power of sustained, Black-led organizing." That sentence captures exactly why this work exists. For more than a decade, People's Action Institute has trained thousands of leaders — Black, brown, queer, low-income, and working-class — to turn personal experience into collective power. Charles is one of countless examples. The piece lands at a critical moment. Black August and Black Philanthropy Month arrive together each year to remind us: while billionaires pour record sums into protecting the status quo, sustained investment in Black-led organizing is how we build the alternative. Read Charles's full op-ed 👇 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ebUyQ7Gn And if you're moved by his story, consider investing in the next Charles: support People's Action Institute's organizer training programs. #BlackLiberation #BlackPhilanthropyMonth #BlackAugust #PeoplesAction #Organizing #InvestInBlackLed #GrassrootsPower #PeoplePower

The billionaires spent $70 million against him. He won anyway. In Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed just won the Democratic Senate primary despite the largest dark-money campaign in American history — out-of-state groups outspent him more than ten to one. He didn't win with ads. He won with organizing. Across 150+ congregations and 500 campaign events, hundreds of thousands of volunteers knocked 200,000 doors and made over a million calls to Michigan voters — talking with them about health care, homes, jobs, and hope. Our affiliate Michigan United Action was on the ground making it happen. As our Executive Director Sulma Arias writes in her new piece: when she was a young People's Action organizer in Chicago after the Citizens United decision, a member-leader told her something that's stayed with her ever since: "They have unlimited access to money now, but we still have each other, and our ability to organize." That sentence is the entire playbook. Our affiliates are proving it right now, in Michigan, in Wisconsin, and beyond. Billionaires will spend more this year than ever before. The courts have made it easier, not harder. But 89 million eligible voters stayed home in 2024. If even a fraction of them step into a conversation with a neighbor this fall, we don't just hold the line — we win. From now until November, organize as if your family's life and our country's future depend on it. Because they do. 📖 Read Sulma's full piece: https://lnkd.in/eRyAWbKm #PeoplePower #OrganizingWorks #DemocracyInAction

In America, voters choose our leaders, not the other way around. But while we struggle to pay rent, afford groceries, and fill up our gas tanks, the wealthy are gaining more power over our elections AND our lives. They are flooding our elections with corporate money to drown out our voices. They are implementing policies that ensure we don’t have enough funds to fight back. And they are criminalizing the organizations that register voters and build power in our communities. Just look at Ohio. On June 11, federal agents raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, seizing phones and laptops, showing up at employees' homes. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative has spent nearly 20 years building a powerful multiracial coalition that has registered hundreds of thousands of Ohioans to vote, focusing on communities that MAGA Republicans have tried to block from participating: Black and brown Ohioans, young people, disabled people, and people with low incomes. This is a deliberate attack to keep Black and brown people from voting, and to seize control of our elections so they can control the outcomes. Ohioans won't back down. And neither will we. We're standing together to tell them: Hands Off Our Vote. ✊ Visit handsoffohio.org to learn what you can do. #PeoplesPower #HandsOffOurVote #HandsOffOhio #Ohio #VotingRights #Democracy #BillionaireTax #Organizing

The conversation about affordability often focuses on what families should do differently. Our new report, released today with Demōs, asks a different question: what has the system done to them? “Solving the Affordability Crisis: A Plan for a People-Powered, Racially Just Economy,” is a comprehensive analysis of how policy choices have allowed housing, healthcare, energy, food, and childcare costs to spiral out of reach, and what it will take to reverse course. The report outlines five pillars for building a people-centered economy: robust public investment, stronger worker power, corporate accountability, racially just taxation, and a stronger democracy. Read the full report: https://lnkd.in/eHkeAfSK

A piece in Shelterforce by Bruce Gottschall—former People's Action board member and founding executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago—tells the remarkable story of how our legacy organizations National People's Action and National Training and Information Center helped build an unprecedented coalition to fight redlining. Led by organizers like Gale Cincotta, community members didn't just protest bank discrimination—they built a table where lenders, regulators, city officials, and residents could work together. The result? NHS Chicago has since loaned $700 million to help nearly 19,000 families purchase or improve homes, house by house and block by block. This is the power of people's action: ✊ Confrontational organizing creates the pressure 🤝 Collaborative partnerships create lasting change 🏆 Community power ensures accountability From fighting redlining in the 1970s to addressing the subprime foreclosure crisis in the 2000s, this "let's-do-it-together" model proved that when we build power together, we can transform neighborhoods and create pathways to homeownership for generations. The lesson for today's movements? Our work isn't just about demanding change—it's about building the power to create it together. 📖 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/eXM9Qwhw #PeoplesAction #CommunityOrganizing #HousingJustice #FairLending #Redlining #CommunityDevelopment #PowerBuilding #SocialChange

"[James Mumm, who is chief of institutional advancement at the People’s Action Institute] suggests a slightly different approach to power research by trying to answer four basic questions about your opponent: what do they want, who do they fear, who has power over them and who do they have power over. The first two questions can help form the campaign’s strategy and test its effectiveness. 'So we’re trying to take what they want away from them and bring what they fear closer,' Mumm said. 'And the only way we know if we’re doing either one of those correctly throughout the course of a campaign is we get a reaction from the target. If we get no reaction from a target, then we have made bad guesses and have to do more research.'" https://lnkd.in/egr48Mj9

This May Day, we showed up. We were in rural towns, suburbs, and major cities with one powerful demand: Workers over billionaires. 📍Charleston, West Virginia | West Virginia Citizen Action Group members marched through downtown with drums, horns, and pots & pans, reminding decision-makers that working families make, while CEOs take. 📍Concord, New Hampshire | New Hampshire Youth Movement & Rights & Democracy gathered at City Plaza demanding action on affordability, college costs, gun safety, and climate. 📍Los Angeles, California | Ground Game LA marched from MacArthur Park to demand L.A.’s housing authority stop federally ordered evictions. 📍Milwaukee, Wisconsin | Citizen Action Wisconsin called on state legislators to pass living wage legislation with a $20 minimum wage by May Day 2027. 📍New York, New York + Upstate | Citizen Action of New York mobilized at the Federal Building in New York City AND in Utica, Binghamton, Syracuse, and Rochester, standing up to billionaires threatening our rights. 📍Phoenix, Arizona | LUCHA members built collective community power at Margaret T. Hance Park because real change comes from organized people, not wealthy elites. 📍Raleigh, North Carolina | Down Home North Carolina organized buses from across the state to the capitol fighting for working families and the most underfunded public school students in the U.S. 📍Austin, Texas | VOCAL-TX & Workers Defense launched the “Billionaire Backers of Hate” campaign with a rally outside Trilogy Software, founded by tech billionaire and White House ally Joe Liemandt. 📍Chicago, Illinois | ONE Northside members gathered at Union Park and led a youth-led action calling on Target to sever ties with ICE. 📍Denver, Colorado | Center for Health Progress urged state legislators to close corporate tax loopholes to fund the family affordability tax credit. 📍Las Vegas, Nevada | PLAN Nevada members built power to lower housing, health care, and utility costs while winning protections for immigrant workers. 📍New York, New York | Community Voices Heard, Our Bronx, and VOCAL-NY joined May Day Strong NYC to demand Amazon cut ties with ICE. 📍St. Louis, Missouri | Missouri Jobs with Justice led an economic boycott of Amazon, Enterprise, Kaldi’s Coffee, Police Commissioners, Starbucks, and Target. May Day wasn’t the end — it was a stepping stone. Our 38 member organizations in 29 states with over 1 million members are continuing to build power, hold elected officials accountable, and fight for: ✅ A Homes Guarantee  ✅ Health Care for All  ✅ 100% Just Energy Economy  ✅ Tax the Rich  ✅ No ICE. No War. Expand Democracy. Join the joyous rebellion: peoplesaction.org #MayDay2026 #WorkersOverBillionaires #PeoplesAction #OrganizingRevival #TaxTheRich #HomesGuarantee #HealthCareIsAHumanRight #NoICE #LaborJustice #EconomicJustice #MultiRacialDemocracy