Your Congregation Can Mobilize Voters in the mid-Atlantic Now! 

The Reeb Voting Rights Project and UUs for Social Justice have pooled resources and talents to hire Kelsey Cowger jointly for the 2020 election season as our Reeb/UUSJ Voting Campaigns Organizer. Kelsey will help mobilize and engage UUs in our shared mission of fighting voter suppression, working on ballot access issues, and helping people register to vote.

The elections in Georgia and Wisconsin have made it starkly clear that the progress of American democracy can often hang on the tiniest of details.

For our joint project, we have targeted four states in 2020 as part of our dovetailing with UU the Vote: North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Georgia each of which brings different challenges and requires a different set of organizational approaches.  No matter where you live if you want to support a progressive impact in these states, join the session to learn about our project.

States:

• In Pennsylvania, we’re encouraging voters to opt-in for PA’s new mail balloting system, which, for the first time ever, doesn’t require voters to have an excuse to vote from home.

• Virginia is also adopting a system of mail-in ballots, but as in Pennsylvania, the process is new for many voters and they will likely require education on the mail ballot request process and encouragement to return those ballots.  Virginia has also seen a steep dropoff in voter registration with the advent of COVID-19, ground which will be important to make up by the election.

• In North Carolina, voters are being purged from voter rolls at a record pace, legislation designed to make it harder to vote is making its way through the court, and new, toss-up districts are being drawn after the previous gerrymandered system was struck down by the Supreme Court: as such, there are many places where the intervention will be critical.

• In Georgia, we’re being guided by UU the Vote and UU collectives on the ground as we assess the needs and partner potential.

Celebrating our successes so far:

• 114,000 calls made to voters in TX during General Assembly with UU the Vote.
• 20,000+ postcards written to voters in TX, NC, GA and FL by Reeb/UUSJ congregations since April.
• Reached out to voters to have conversations about racial justice with Standing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ).
• Participated in National Vote By Mail Day, which reached 3.6 million voters by text and 54,000 voters by phone.
• Voting rights/electoral organizations activated in fourteen UUSJ-affiliated congregations across the DMV, all working on projects to help combat voter suppression!
• Establishing actionable non-profit (501c3) partnerships with:
  • UU the Vote 
  • Reclaim our Vote
  • Forward Together NC
  • Showing Up for Racial Justice
  • NextGen
  • EarthDay
  • CASA
  • Faith in Public Life.

Questions:  kelsey@uusj.org

• Targeting Areas of Greatest Need: This year, we have committed to working in four states: VA, PA, NC and somewhat in GA. This “levels up” the voter mobilization work of both Reeb and UUSJ of prior years!

• Building UU Congregational Capacity: We are working with individual UUSJ congregations and Reeb referred contacts to identify their current capacity and develop their own groups internally, including matters of outreach within the congregation and fundraising.

• Making Connections With Partner Organizations: Because we are primarily working outside of the DC-metro area, it is critical to be able to work with partner groups in the states that we’re targeting. We have identified some and are approaching others.

• Developing Relationships With UUs in Other States: We are working with UU State Action Networks (SANs) to make connections with UU congregations in targeted states around our shared values and shared work. In the absence of a SAN, we are beginning to develop relationships in a congregation-to-congregation way, working with individual clergy and lay leaders to help build electoral organizations within their congregations and leveraging UU the Vote networks.

• Projects! We’ve just begun an exciting postcarding project with Reclaim Our Vote (ROV), the electoral wing of the NAACP. We’re coattailing on several congregations who have already been doing this important work, but these projects are reasonably easy to spin up (even with small groups) and thus, are a great way for congregations to begin to organize their own electoral efforts. We are also looking for other partner projects.

We thank the generous donors that have made this possible for UUSJ! Your support has been essential and is facilitating needed work!