A group with chapters in 35 states and Washington, D.C., the Center for Popular Democracy is working to ensure the advancement of community-based change that will lead to equity and opportunity for all. The group, founded in 2012, is committed to fighting for a more democratic system with a just economy and more responsive political institutions.
“The powers we are going up against—organized capital, fascism and authoritarianism—are not going to stop to recognize who is in the labor movement or the civil rights movement,” the group’s president and co-executive director, Jennifer Epps-Addison, told Blue Tent. “They’re coming after all of us.”
Toward a politics of solidarity
The core of CPD’s work is letting people know they’re not alone, Epps-Addison said.
“The only thing that ever transformed our country is people’s collective actions,” said Epps-Addison. “Not politicians or policy—people coming together and realizing their struggle is collective.”
Epps-Addison has been with the group since the beginning. She started her work with CPD as the executive director of the Wisconsin affiliate of Action for the Common Good, which merged with CPD in 2014. She moved to Los Angeles to work with the group, and took on a more substantial role as the organization sought more representative leadership reflecting CPD’s primarily Black and brown base.
Her first day at the head of the organization was President Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017.
“It felt critical to me to return to organizing” in the wake of the election, Epps-Addison told Blue Tent.
Innovating change
By using a combination of legal and technical work with community organizing and advocacy, CPD is firmly in the tradition of a number of similar groups like Project South and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. The group also uses local-level advocacy to fight for change from the bottom up.
“We are working really hard to see ourselves in context of other movements,” said Epps-Addison. “We see ourselves as an additive to the broader movements of social change.”
With a focus on organizing campaigns and policy agendas, CPD aims to shift the focus around progressive change from a purely electoral or movement basis into a kind of hybrid model that allows for systemic change. In that respect, CPD sees itself as part of a collective of larger umbrella groups like MoveOn, Peoples’ Action, and Indivisible.
“We’re trying to direct our infrastructure to direct the movement when the people need us to,” Epps-Addison said.
Funding
The nonprofit giant, which operated in 2018 on a budget of $34,289,145, relies on a number of philanthropic donors. Among the biggest donors was the Ford Foundation, which gave $20,160,000, and the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, which contributed $16,273,090.
The generosity of that funding has allowed the group to grow four times its size in the past eight years, said Epps-Addison, and maintain a staff of over 100. That scale is only possible from the deep investment of philanthropic groups and individuals who have provided generous operational funding.
But at the end of the day, Epps-Addison said, the group realizes that systemic change does not come from checks from foundations. CPD is working to find ways for those in lower-income communities to support their work through a series of self-sustaining canvasses and virtual gatherings, like a recent three-day event that raised $100,000.
“The people most impacted need to be the funders of their own liberation,” said Epps-Addison.
