This election will directly affect housing, health, education, workers’ rights and jobs in our communities. This is OUR chance to push back against the tide of displacement and to secure the resources that our communities need to access medical care and housing, and combat homelessness and illegal dumping.

Check out our Voter Guide and take this cheat sheet with you to the polls!

Through phone-banking, field canvassing, and texting, we will talk one-on-one with thousands of voters from our base — immigrant, working-class, and communities of color — about ballot issues and getting out to vote. Our field and phone campaign will focus on educating and mobilizing infrequent, unlikely and new voters primarily in Oakland’s low-income, immigrant and communities of color in the flatlands neighborhoods over the seven weeks leading up to the General Election.

Concurrently, we will run our youth voter engagement campaign through which our hired team of five youth will get out the vote to Black and Latinx youth. Partnering with Power California (a merger of Mobilize the Immigrant Vote and YVote), this Fall’s campaign will be our second this year specifically focused on increasing voter engagement among millennials of color. With a hired team of high school and college-aged young people, this newest program utilizes texting and calling for peer-to-peer outreach.

Our civic engagement work is our bread and butter through which we elevate and advance our long-term progressive platform. Through these efforts, we have historically increased voter turnout among our IDed voters by 9-13% over the county turnout rate. One key to our success is that we employ, train and support voter outreach workers who live in and are from the neighborhoods in which we work. Staffed largely by Black and Brown residents of East Oakland, we prioritize hiring those who have been previously incarcerated and who are most impacted by the issues at hand. While the majority (50%) of our team will be returning workers, we also plan to hire people from our partner organizations and other community organizations as part of our commitment to the continued workforce development of residents from the flatlands.

Contacting over 9,500 voters, we expect to identify 75% of them as committing to vote. For the first two weeks of the campaign, our team of 20 paid voter outreach workers will have personal conversations via phone banking. Over the remainder weeks leading up to the election, 100 volunteers will talk to voters at the door during our volunteer walk days. (Sign up to volunteer!) And our hired team of five youth will text and call Black and Latinx millennials to remind them to vote and to provide them with their polling place over seven days leading up to and including Election Day.

While this is a significant portion of Oakland’s underrepresented voting population, a larger number of voters will be contacted by our sister c4 organization, Oakland Rising Action (ORA). For reporting reasons, we are moving much of our fall campaign work to ORA to generate a strong and focused voter mobilization effort around Yes on Prop 10, No on Prop 5 and several local ballot measures around economic justice. If passed, Prop 10 would build on years of our mobilization work around tenants’ rights by restoring the power of local communities to pass rent control. Prop 5, if passed, would work against our 10 years of organizing to reform Prop 13 by closing corporate property tax loopholes, and would instead expand loopholes to certain homeowners, taking $2 billion per year away from our schools and communities. With so much as stake this election cycle, we believe that our efforts combined with those of ORA to educate and mobilize those who traditional are left out of the democratic process will lift up solutions that prioritize racial and economic equity and change the outcomes of this election.