For over three years the DPI Organizing Lab has studied the work that base-building organizing groups undertake to build the power they need to achieve policy, electoral, and ideological impact. On this panel, leading practitioners and funders discussed what we have learned so far and what it will take to shift our sector to a clearer focus on building power.

Our political industry in the last few decades has come to treat citizens as consumers and not participants, with an increasingly market-driven approach to politics. The impact on research, learning, and metrics has largely been to target citizens as atomized individuals, to measure treatments delivered to these individuals, and to evaluate the impact on an individual basis with voter turnout and partisan support the primary indicators. However, in this learning community, we are focused on growing a healthy, multiracial democracy: driven by and working for powerful grassroots organizations. What does research, learning programs, and metrics look like when our focus is the health of our democracy and power rooted in democratic practice? In this session we will share innovations from the DPI community in the last year around researching and measuring organizing inputs, collective capacities and power in practice. In a case study, Color of Change will share their progress and challenges as they work to put the civic leadership of their members at the center of their evaluation and metrics.

What forces shape the political environment and create political “weather?” What role can and does organizing play? Drawing on an in-depth case study of a state-wide campaign to protect democracy in Michigan in the wake of the 2020 election, this session surfaced lessons about how groups can insert themselves in larger power struggles and build the structures and strategic capacity necessary to anticipate and counter well-funded and media-savvy political opponents.