About

Top-down, trickle-down systems don’t work. 

But even if they did, no one should be expected to wait patiently on the bottom for a few drops that rarely come while there’s a raucous bacchanal going on up above. Liberation and economic justice won’t be achieved by asking for it from those who are drunk with stolen money and power. Continuing to rely on systems meant to exclude, deny and exploit achieves nothing for sure–except exploitation and subjugation. 

We must upend rule and resource control by the few in every aspect of American life and society: in government & policy, in educational opportunity & knowledge production, in the law, the media and all their related policies, processes, systems & procedures. 

Here’s how we do it…

People’s Action Center

It’s not enough to organize communities at the grassroots (bottom) level. They must be advised objectively and well, and then established as direct & fully empowered decision-makers. 

It’s not enough to rely on dysfunctional and failing political and bureaucratic systems for the delivery of rights or resources.They treat us as adversaries to be denied or “models” to be rewarded by a “merit” system that doesn’t apply equally–or at all–to them. 

Helping only certain individuals piecemeal and requiring them to be model participants–even to get basic needs met–is cruel, coercive and inhumane. But it also does nothing in the aggregate to reduce dependency or move marginalized people, families or larger communities forward toward self-sufficiency and autonomy. 

The methods, programs, processes, administrative procedures & lack of accountability in these systems do far more to harm than help–no matter what positive impact they attempt to show on paper and social media marketing at election time. 

They will continue in this way until the people negatively affected have the direct resources, support systems & influence necessary to freely exercise and enforce their own inalienable rights.

The Action Center levels these playing fields by working directly at the ground level with any individual, group or community engaged in the work of liberating themselves from broken, exploitative, oppressive or unjust systems and structures.

We help devise elegant solutions to impossible problems by:

• Organizing & mobilizing individuals and their communities to advocate and advance their own interests
• Strengthening community bonds and connecting people and groups with shared or complementary needs 
• Helping in conflict resolution, finding compromise or getting over impasse in situations where there are many diverse stakeholders with competing needs, fears and desires
• Identifying & developing sovereign resource capacity toward direct individual and community wealth-building
• Holding elected officials, policymakers and program administrators accountable for grassroots progress on any issue community members decide is important to them. 

You lead & tell us your needs. We advise, consult, coach, facilitate, mediate or negotiate at your request. Then, we help you build and enforce mechanisms for accountability to achieve direct impact at the grassroots level. We do it at no charge to those we help. 

People’s Think Tank

It’s not enough to infuse the existing policy system with greater numbers and intersections of diverse representation in subject matter expertise and leadership in the hope they’ll produce the more diverse, innovative and impactful strategy, analysis or research and data collection required to prove we deserve–much less can achieve–justice. 

They’re never truly given safe and full decision-making authority, nor is their expertise & lived experience truly welcomed or respected. Very rarely do their best and most innovative ideas get implemented or experimented with fully or appropriately, because doing so would actually push us beyond the status quo. 

Instead, more often than not, they’re silenced or censored, tone-policed, tokenized, scapegoated, undermined, harassed and demoralized for doing their jobs with integrity, exercising authority or attempting to solve known problems. With increasing frequency, their livelihoods are uprooted through outright censorship, politically motivated disciplinary actions and the removal of institutional backing. 

It’s not enough to have other people study, analyze, write about & debate you from outside or above. It’s dehumanizing and fundamentally derivative. They do it for their own purposes. But often it’s hard for people overcoming the challenges of daily living or ‘doing the work’ in community to find the time, energy or capacity to produce, share, experiment with & iterate on their own knowledge. 

It’s not enough to tell the stories of marginalized experiences. We must stop tokenizing them or dismissing them as ‘anecdotal’ and instead believe what they’re showing us about system failures. We must then work to correct those failures as quickly & locally as possible–and tell others how we did it so there’s at least a proven pathway to follow.

Our think tank engages people & groups working directly in the community to collect & aggregate ground-level data, identify & analyze patterns and trends within and across grassroots policy, and produce resources to help build and share knowledge and capacity or increase direct impact. 

We do this by:

• Advancing the policy priorities & preferred solutions of those directly affected instead of those with money to manipulate the narrative around issues and skew outcomes in their own favor
• Amplifying non-traditional or non-credentialed expertise within communities, and helping them position themselves for authority & agency in decision-making 
• Disseminating truthful, unbiased, relevant, relatable, accessible & useful information to the public in order to build consciousness and awareness, invite open & candid discussion and aid in problem solving 
• Serving as a platform to host & amplify grassroots political, economic and cultural research, including stories of struggle, that we’ll collect directly from the community by experiencing and witnessing it with them as part of our efforts to help. 

We’re an incubator for innovative policy ideas, a proving ground for solutions to ‘wicked’ problems and an aggregator & amplifier of grassroots data, voices, diverse and non-traditional experts, approaches and best practices. We do it at no charge to those we help.

People’s Policy & Career Training 

It’s not enough to increase the number of marginalized people in policy fields because the playing field isn’t level and being on the team doesn’t mean getting to play–much less be captain. Even being on the bench is a privilege inaccessible to most because they lack the money and resources (or privileges) to be visible enough to get scouted. 

It’s not enough to provide internship or early-career fellowship training run by traditional policy institutions or expensive consultants. Even the most prestigious think tanks and academic institutions notoriously lack equitably accessible or administered, organized & results-driven training, professional development and coaching capacity. In fact, in many cases, the sum total of their job-specific training for junior staff is an assumption they’ll learn by osmosis. In any case, they do a lot of thinking and writing, but very little doing. The lack of long-term change among the causes they care about frustrates them and turns the most mission-driven people away from our most vital and noble professions.

Our Policy & Career Training approach offers personalized & tailored, passion & interest driven, on-the-job training in both the theory and praxis of liberation policy, law and governance. Here you learn by doing it with us–whatever it takes; and, “you” are anyone who comes to us and expresses an interest in learning & deploying our mission and methods to solve a problem that you or your group is facing, or because you’re interested in any career where our approach would make you more impactful or valuable on the job market, in community service or elected office. 

Our interns and fellows participate fully–and equally–with us in our work. We work with them to identify particularly useful policy areas, specific topics or job & skill functions they’d like to develop. We then give them opportunities to apply what they’ve learned in service of local communities and their causes. No ivory towers and gated communities here. We’re in the street, helping people who come to us.  

While they’re here, our fellows and interns help shape our organization and have a voice in the work it does each day. We don’t hide our most experienced, expert and visible people behind hierarchies–or bury the next generation and their brave ideas under them. 

Our established experts freely share what they know with those in training, brainstorm & pressure-test creative ideas before implementation, solve hard puzzles, and make the full range of their competency and skill available for use. 

Our job is not to take credit but to give it wherever it’s due, and use the full weight of our institutional platform and personal reach to amplify the good ideas and expertise of our interns and fellows while moving them forward on the career path they want to follow. 

You won’t get all this in any other policy training program. The only credential you need is a genuine desire to learn, develop, act and make change. We do it at no charge to those we help. 

The People’s Impact Model

We don’t advance top-down initiatives so we don’t measure impact the way the top does. We don’t do donor reports and box-checking exercises. We don’t produce stuff just for the sake of producing it. We work with people at the grassroots level to help them achieve their own, specific goals and we perform whatever type of policy work or action is necessary to achieve them. Our impact is measured by how well we did that–according to them. By popular reception.

This is why we measure our impact with a variety of direct, frequent, formal & informal 360-style feedback from all the stakeholders and community members we engage. 

Our reputation with those who work with us directly is the only one that matters to us. We aggregate and report this feedback in a variety of ways and formats transparently and openly on both an ad hoc and annual basis. 

The People’s Nonprofit Model

As long as anyone is economically dependent on the government, corporations or any kind of charity for their basic needs or inalienable rights, it’s not enough. Help is too political, too slow and too poorly administered by those with little incentive to act quickly, proactively–or at all. The determination of rights is not for sale. Meanwhile, the bloated, competitive and siloed nonprofit system has proven itself more effective as a complex tax shelter and gatekeeper than as an aggregate problem solver or guarantor of justice. 

It’s not enough to talk about justice, reparation, diversity, equity or inclusion and how we might theoretically implement it from the top down. It’ll never happen unless someone stands up a grassroots model that can be tested and proven. This is ours.

Our Nonprofit Model is designed specifically as a prototype for a nonprofit and organizational model that can actually achieve social, political, environmental, legal and economic justice in the real world, and use its resources directly toward those outcomes at all times. 

We don’t take money in exchange for specific programmatic work or to advance pre-determined ideas or positions. We don’t do performance and politeness. We don’t debate policy on paper and then spend all our energy trying to get it into the hands of ‘someone important’ who probably won’t read it anyway–much less ever act on it. 

We aren’t a middle man for knowledge and implementation. We’re a direct-service provider. 

All gifts made to us directly funds these activities to makes these functions & benefits accessible at no charge to marginalized and historically excluded people, groups and communities who shouldn’t have to pay for their own liberation. 

It’s also open source, constantly iterating in real time, and we’re happy to discuss its challenges & opportunities transparently with anyone who’s interested in learning about, building or improving on our model–or exploring and acting toward their own. We do this at no charge to those we help.