Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Campaign for Community Change (CCC)

It was mentioned in a previous entry that a group called Campaign for Community Change donated an "in kind" donation of $9000 to Promise Arizona en Accion from which Jerry Lewis' campaign benefited.

Who is Campaign for Community Change?  Based on their title, you can be sure it is some kind of leftist, activist organization.  They like to use words such as "change" and "community".  The only word missing is "justice".  These groups function just like every other leftist organization.  They are intertwined amongst multiple organizations with similar names.  This is intended to make it impossible for the average person to decipher where the money came from and where it went.

The Campaign for Community Change is the action arm of the Center for Community Change. The Campaign seeks to educate and empower marginalized communities to influence the public policies that affect their lives; increase their ongoing civic participation; and help them build the political will for reform. We equip low-income people and people of color with the tools to take a more active role in advocating for public policies and pushing for change. It's time for a progressive movement that raises up the authentic voices of people most affected by social and economic injustice. The Campaign for Community Change helps build this movement.

Center for Community Change $$ -> Campaign for Community Change $$ -> PAZ

At least the acronyms are interchangeable.  CCC

Now, who are the board members of Campaign for Community Change?

Deepak Bhargava Executive Director
Prior to becoming the Executive Director of CCC, he served as the
 "director of public policy for seven years at the Center for Community Change. In that capacity, he worked on housing, budget, tax, immigration, welfare, and other issues affecting low-income people. He also directed the Center’s National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support,
 a coalition of grassroots groups established in 2000 to give low-income people a voice in the reauthorization of the federal welfare law and other areas critical to poor people. Prior to joining the center, Bhargava was the legislative director at the
  Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), where he gained broad experience in community reinvestment and housing finance issues."

Who is Deepak Bhargava?

On Obama's Poverty Agenda.

Three ingredients necessary for transformational change to happen.
(6:17) "We do need visionary leadership that's capable of building durable coalitions.  We need crisis, economic, foreign policy or otherwise, that force the breakdown of old paradigms and old ways of seeing the world.  And most importantly, we need independent social movements that create public will to generate ideas that will deliver votes."

Deepak Bhargava on immigration.  

And another on immigration.
"...a group of immigrant leaders approached me and the Center for Community Change with the idea of doing a national campaign to win legalization for the growing population of undocumented people in the US. At that time, the topic was unspeakable in polite Washington conversation discourse—no politician, no national advocacy organization would tackle it. Partly because of the extraordinary quality of the leaders that approached us, and partly because it was so clear that we couldn’t be an anti-poverty organization without tackling immigration, we decided to go all-in.
We helped to form what was the earliest pro-legalization coalition in the country,
 and we’ve been in it ever since."

He continued with 5 key lessons learned:

1.  We built a whole technological platform—a phone bank system, an online system, a text messaging operation

2.  We went to work building new organizations, new leadership, through movement building trainings   FLASHBACK: "Increase the vote (?) of civic engagement within the under represented minority Community and change the political landscape of Arizona by developing new leaders, educating through house meeting, voter registration training and movement building training."


3.  Engage a much more diverse coalition of forces. So we invested much more deeply in building relationships with African-American leadership, with Evangelicals, with local law enforcement, with business leaders

4.  We organized a massive Latino and immigrant voter mobilization effort in 2008

5.  Communications is central to our strategy.  We built up a new organization, America’s Voice, with new capacity to communicate to the broad public, as well as to targeted audiences