Community Organizations Need Year-Round Funding to Win Elections

If Democrats want to win back the House of Representatives in 2026 and the Presidency in 2028, they need year-round funding to support multi-issue, grassroots community organizations engaged in relationship building and electoral organizing. 

The most common playbook during elections involves pouring in massive amounts of money and out-of-state staff and volunteers just a few months before ballots are cast. All of these human and financial resources leave after the election. This approach has not worked in the past and will not succeed in the future. 

Electing good people helps. But alone they cannot solve all our problems.  We need trusted organizations with sufficient funding, leadership, talented, well-paid staff that can win elections, build long-term relationships and campaign on the problems people face every day.    

Many effective community organizations have organized and built relationships with voters for years. They understand the local issues, culture and people, and could sustain these relationships and turn out voters if adequately and consistently resourced.  Unfortunately, these organizations are funded adequately only during election cycles. This requires them to lay off the majority of their organizers and canvassers after each election. In doing so, relationships and potential leaders are lost, and the trust needed to encourage many to vote is also lost.

We require a new investment strategy that funds electoral work aligned with year-round grassroots community organizing and base building.  Year in, year out, not only during election years. 

It’s a relationship!

No one group and no one method will work in all locations. But everywhere, relationships matter. To win elections, we have to build and strengthen powerful community organizations. They not only can help elect good candidates but also hold them accountable to serving the people who elected them!

Adapting to this change is not a technical fix.  It will take a new strategy that prioritizes building and funding ongoing powerful community organizations that have the capacity, culture, and commitment to foster local leadership.

Let’s compare some recent examples:

Out of Towners Come to Swing Michigan

Over October and November 2024, I spent more than a month in Macomb County, Michigan (home of the “Reagan Democrats”) leading teams doing “deep canvassing” with voters. I was among hundreds that traveled to Michigan to canvas for the election, coordinating our work with a community organization.

I met “Jane”, (not her real name) while I was there. Jane is a dedicated activist from the San Francisco Bay Area. Jane was like many volunteers who flew into Michigan for a weekend or a week at most. All trained on site in the “deep canvas” method of door knocking: to engage undecided voters, to listen and then respond with a personal story that related to the voter’s concern.  Each volunteer cost at least $1,000 for airfare, hotels, etc.

When Jane and I went out canvassing, a voter at the door mentioned the high price of housing. Jane responded with Harris’ plan to fund homeownership. To Jane the focus on policy seemed likely a good selling point.  As Jane described the details, I could see the voter, a young working-class white woman, rolling her eyes and stepping back from the doorway.  

Like many dedicated canvassers who flew in, it would take Jane much longer than the few days she had in Michigan to skill up. In addition to practice, observation, and coaching, becoming skilled at deep canvassing also requires a personal inclination to value relationships over ideas, empathy over argument, and a readiness to be vulnerable. Some who came could deeply canvas effectively with a couple days’ training. Many, like Jane, could not.

Even a highly skilled deep canvasser like myself, flying in from Massachusetts, will not be around after the election. There is a better way.

Relational Voting in Milwaukee

Lupe is a volunteer leader in the Milwaukee Chapter of Voces de la Frontera Action (VDLFA).  She is part of their Relational Voter Program (RVP) in which leaders identify 10-20 (or more) neighbors and others they are in close relationship with. This is a good example of the potential canvassing has to support base building. The RVP encourages the RVP leaders, known as “Voceros” (spokesperson in English), to talk with their networks about voting but also talk to them year-round about other opportunities to get involved and stay informed on issues they care about. 

Lupe has built a good list of her neighbors, friends, and family. She makes a point of trying to see them at least once a quarter and either calls or visits them when there is important news regarding matters they care about.  She has been doing this with her neighbors for over five years and has become a trusted messenger and leader in her neighborhood and community.  Lupe has had great success in getting dozens of her neighbors to come to community meetings, to register and vote. 

She has taken the time to get to know her neighbors, to listen and learn about them. As a result, she feels her neighbors have become more friendly, informed and safer.

The key, Lupe says, is to “listen, remember what you learn and then make several in-person contacts so that a connection gets created. Also, it’s very important to follow through if you make a commitment to do something, such as get them more information.”

Lupe’s experience demonstrates the potential of door-to-door canvassing in winning elections.  Who holds these conversations and how they engage impacts the effectiveness and results of the canvas. 

Local is Better

Being a neighbor lends credibility.  When I canvass my precinct in Massachusetts, many tell me they open the door only because I tell them I am their neighbor.   I leave a flyer with my home address and phone number so they can easily contact me. Out-of-towners, even the most skilled, can never bring this ability to follow up.

Political science research indicates that neighbors can be more effective than out-of-town canvassers. Melissa Michelson, Professor of Political Science at Menlo College wrote: 

“This (being a neighbor) is something we studied as part of the California Votes Initiative (268 experiments between 2006-2008) and detailed in Mobilizing Inclusion. The answer is that being a neighbor matters (emphasis added). It makes the GOTV (Get out the Vote) visit more powerful.”

They share many of the same problems, breathe the same air, deal with the same pot-holes, pay the same local taxes, and may share networks and hold other things in common that give them more credibility than any out-of-towner.”

A skillful canvasser can also find new potential leaders (maybe one out of 30 they door knock in my experience), people who are willing to volunteer in a variety of ways, including asking their neighbors in for “coffee and conversation.” 

If I had a nickel for every person who said to me, “You are the first person who ever knocked on my door and asked me what I thought” I would be a rich man.

It’s also important that canvassers are focused on real issues impacting the people they’re talking to. “Bill,” a Black organizer, when door knocking, he started by asking, “Have you even racially profiled?  Stopped for driving while Black?” Then, when he got a positive response (which he frequently did), he led people into a conversation to think about how an election or candidate might affect their real-life experience.

This organizer knows many do not see voting as a solution. Many find it fruitless because electing candidates has often NOT made any difference in their experience. Local organizers who are grounded in local issues can make the difference.

Turnout Starts Before GOTV

Like Lupe in Wisconsin, Ron Bell’s work with Dunk the Vote in the Black wards of Boston showed significant results through face-to-face, relational, local organizing.

Ron and Dunk the Vote increased voter turnout in three majority Black wards in Boston from 2012 to 2020 for a State Representative race. 

The 2020 turnout increase was 279% compared to 2016 and the increase from the uncontested primary in 2012 was 392%. 

“Don’t wait until the last minute to start GOTV efforts,” Ron cautions. “Doing only ‘Drive By Visits’ by candidates at Black Churches during GOTV weekends is not enough.”

The approach involved registration and canvassing training for staff and volunteers, working with clergy, community-based organizations, colleges, and companies and identifying key individuals in each church as outreach workers. Ron said, “Relationships are crucial for effective voter turnout. Trust is built over time through consistent presence and action. And start early, at least a year before the election.” 

Political science research indicates that local and state-wide Independent Political Organizations (IPOs)are most effective at increasing voter turnout. 

A 2025 study of voter turnout by Independent Political Organizations notes: “Hundreds of randomized controlled trials in the last twenty years continue to signal that mobilization efforts through repeated direct person-to-person contact – and especially that achieved through known social contacts and relational networks – is the most effective way to increase voter turnout.”

The Need For Year-Round Funding

Progressive leaders are grappling with the difficult reality, laid bare in the 2024 election, that many grassroots groups are not actively engaged in building organized bases of multi-racial working-class people that we need to win. Political scientist Theda Skocpol and the late labor leader Jane McAlevey documented the decline of organized bases that are truly active, and the impact of this on movement building and governing power. 

The funding support for base building has also severely diminished. Movement Voter Project (MVP), a widely respected intermediary that funds year-round base-building organizations engaged in electoral organizing, goes through a “boom and bust,” cycle. Big money flows in election years and then virtually turns off after the election. 

For example, in 2021, they could raise only $5 million. In 2022, they raised $20 million. In 2023, about $9 million. For 2024, $70 million. And their $70 million pales in comparison with the billions the Harris-Walz campaigns raised that leave no infrastructure or organized base after the election. 

Todd Zimmer, co-director of Down Home North Carolina, said:

 “The ‘boom and bust’ cycle of funding makes it very difficult to hold onto good staff and plan how to do our voter out-reach work. We have to basically double our staff in election years and then lay them off just after the election. We lose not only staff but good leaders and the potential to build a base of leaders who can make a big difference in voter turn-out. If we had consistent year-round funding we could likely double our voter turn-out among voters who normally do not vote.”

Voces de la Frontera Action in Wisconsin had a similar problem. 40% of their funding for electoral work came in 4 to 6 weeks before the election in 2024 creating challenges for planning and cash flow.

In order to effectively address the authoritarian crisis we find ourselves in, we need to (re)learn how to invest in organizations that effectively build powerful bases of engaged members. Rather than sending in out-of-town activists to “swing” districts a couple months before the next election, we have an opportunity to start finding, training, and developing local leaders and volunteers. They can have conversations with their neighbors about all the issues that matter. From local to global.   

Without building an ongoing and trusted relationship, there is little hope of getting disillusioned citizens to vote by canvassing a month or two before the election. A much deeper and long-term commitment is needed to build trust by focusing on the problems people face year-round and funding those organizations that do this!

Contributions from: 

Mary Ochs is a long-time community organizer & activist.

Ron Bell is the founder and leader of Dunk the Vote in Boston.

Corita Brown, PhD, is a consultant, facilitator and coach who works nationally and globally.

Andrea Lynch is an independent consultant and facilitator based in Philadelphia, PA.