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Our Collective Voices Can Make a Difference.
Our parents fought for the right to vote. Now we must take our political involvement to the next phase. Just voting is not enough.
If you are looking for an easy but effective way to get more involved in politics.
The Political Party that gets the Majority of the Black votes takes us for Granted. The other Major Party ignores us Except for a Visit to a Church during the Campaign Season-
Let’s Make our Voices Heard
We can’t wait on our So-called Leaders to Speak for Us.
The Next Phase
The Mission
The purpose of the next phase is to make our elected officials aware of the issues and ideas that are important to African Americans in the Houston and surrounding area. This email network will facilitate the active political engagement and expression of the thoughts and concerns of African Americans Houstonians. The goal is to provide a conduit for communications of a collective African American political agenda. The email network will provide the means to collect, concentrate and address political issues important to the African American community in Houston and to communicate via email, phone and snail mail the issue specific agenda to the member’s individual elected representative in a none time-consuming and simple manner. The goal is simple; to facilitate communications between African American in Houston and their elected officials. The network will provide communications on the local, state and national level.
An additional function of the website will be to collect and document the voting pattern of our elected representatives on the issues of importance to the email participants.
Does direct contact with elected official work?
On August 19, 2002 almost 400 teenagers were arrested for trespassing at a Kmart parking lot in southwest Houston. The final result of this incident was the firing of a HPD captain and the dismissal of the charges for most of the teenagers.
A few months ago, a conservative congressman proposed a bill that would reduce the federal funding for the public broadcasting by 45%. Moveon.org members fought back with 1 million postcards and more than 40,000 calls to tell Congress to save Big Bird and Mr. Rogers.
IN then end, the House approved the Obey-Leach-Lowey amendment that would restore 100% of the funding by a final vote of 287 to 140. Eighty-seven Republicans joined 200 Democrats and independents to restore funding to public broadcasting.
Republicans Back Down from the "Nuclear Option" (May 2005)
President Bush, Bill Frist and the radical right-wing of the Republican Party failed in their attempt at seizing absolute power and the "nuclear option" is off the table. MoveOn members helped make the difference by: Writing 59,645 Letters-to-the-Editor; Making 118,016 Calls to Senators;
Excerpts from Moveon.org
House Ethics Reversal (January 2005)
House Republicans wanted to loosen ethics rules to protect their plagued leader, Rep. Tom DeLay. But your phone calls in select Congressional districts embarrassed them into reversing course. DeLay is likely to be indicted in a corporate campaign fundraising scandal in Texas. Republicans did make it harder to investigate House members' conduct, but your calls forced a major retreat by the leadership.
Victory on Overtime Pay Vote (September 2004)
MoveOn members asked their Representatives in Washington to stop a proposal to take away overtime pay from 6 million Americans. Thanks to your calls, the House of Representatives passed the Obey-Miller amendment to protect overtime, 223-193. Overtime isn’t safe yet, but we sent a strong message of public support.
On June 16, 2005, Congressman John Conyers delivered 560,000 petition signatures to the White House—including more than 360,000 from MoveOn members—demanding that Bush address the evidence in the "Downing Street Memo." After holding nearly four hours of hearings about the Downing Street Memos on Capitol Hill, the Congressman went over to The White House accompanied by a dozen leading Democrats. Thanks in part to your pressure and Congressman Conyers' high profile hearings and petition delivery, the media finally began to cover the scandalous Downing Street Memos—we counted 1,600 news stories in Google the day after the petitions were delivered. The Seattle Times, Denver Post, Boston Globe, CNN, ABC and hundreds of other media outlets have been forced to report on the memo.
"Established seven years ago, the site is a nonpartisan, grass-roots movement that promotes democracy by giving 'ordinary' citizens a say in local and national politics,” said Colleen E. Kelley, associate professor of communication arts and sciences in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie.
MoveOn.org’s chief strategy is to convince online members to sign petitions that are immediately sorted and logged by state, allowing users at the local level to donate to a range of causes and combine their individual cyber-dissent into a groundswell of collective activism, Kelley noted. "Once MoveOn.org's electronic constituency comes to a decision, it can move with lightning speed to deluge congressional offices with hundreds of thousands of phone calls and petitions in a few days," said Rod Troester, associate professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State Erie.
The events listed above are all examples of grassroots activitism. Specifically, in each of these examples the grass root activity that changed or influenced the final outcome has been direct contact.
In the case of the infamous Downing Street memo to-date there has not been an investigation into the incidents described in the memo but we also want to be able to look our grandkids in the eyes and say that we made our voices heard. We didn’t just sit back and watch. Success won’t happen each and every time.
Below is excerpt for the online political news service- Hillwatch.
Quantitative, or broad-based grassroots programs, emphasize the number of participants. Associations that use this approach seek to involve as many members as they can who are willing to call or write their legislators. Firsthand knowledge of, or relationship to, the elected official is inconsequential. The key element is members' willingness to communicate with their elected officials when asked.
Grass Roots Mobilization: There are a number of factors that distinguish organizations with highly effective lobbying programs, but the most critical is an engaged and active membership that periodically, and at critical times, makes its presence felt directly on decision-makers.
Grassroots and Grasstops lobbying work on the fundamental premise that public policy is made by those who bother to show up!- Hillwatch
In recent years, grassroots lobbying has become the most important and effective means of actually affecting the votes cast by Members of Congress on pending legislation. Members always keep an eye on reelection and how the people back in their district react to issues. Communication from constituents, especially voters, is the most effective lobbying technique today- Hillwatch
In particular the success of the conservative Christian right is a model for the type of grass root activity that can be duplicated.
The Best Example of Activism.
The group with the single largest impact on the local, state and National political scene is the Conservative Christian right. The Christian right is responsible for much of the educational reform you see today. It is responsible for the faith based initiatives we are seeing our government promote today. It is responsible for the extremely conservative positions our elected officials have sided with in recent times.
I am sure many of you have sent a letter, email or made a phone call expressing an opinion to an elected official. But what the Christian right has done is provided those individuals which think a certain way on particular issues an easy but thorough mechanism to
1) Provide timely up-to date information on the status of issues of importance that are being debated or considered by their elected officials.
2) Provided the data base to make contacting government officials at the local state and national level as easy as entering a zip code.
3) Provide a prewritten message that individual my either print and mail or email to the elected official.
4) Provide a phone number so that the participant may contact their representative.
This works because the means is provided to easily and quickly get the individuals desired message in direct contact with the elected official.
How the Next Phase will Function
The next Phase will be a website for education and advocacy. Issues, Opinions and ideas can be posted on the website but primarily the network will serve as a facilitator of direct contact between the individual and his/her elected official.
The email network will send out email alerts to subscribers of the network to notify participants of a particular issue (state or national congressional or senate legislation; Houston city council ordinance or Harris County ordinance) that is being address by our elected representative or that should be addressed. These will be issues that the participants have written into the website as issues of importance or issues that or inherently important to African Americans. The issues do not have to be unique to African Americans. Issues written into the website will be priorities based on the number of participants that express support for an issue.
