With Your Support - Advancement Project - Advancement Project

With Your Support

On behalf of our national office staff, Board of directors and grassroots partners across the country, we wish to THANK YOU, OUR SUPPORTERS, for your generosity and commitment to (an) inclusive democracy and racial justice. 

 With your support, we’ve executed bold, long-term strategies and rapid response actions to combat systemic racism and inequality in 2018. This year has brought many challenges, but also some of our biggest victories as a movement!

With your gifts to us, sharing our messages/reports/toolkits with friends, colleagues and loved ones, or reposting our social media callouts, you are and have been huge and impactful part of our movement!

As Advancement Project prepares to celebrate 20 years of fighting racism in 2019, we need you with us to continue building our vision of transformation for the next 20 years. 

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We hosted a series of webinars to train grassroots advocates on how to protect the vote in their communities and what to understand about the voting process leading in to Election Day. Take a look at our webinars and get ready for 2020. It’s never too early.

While the voter ID law has not been completely overturned in Missouri, a victory was still claimed in November with litigation we filed challenging the photo ID law on behalf of the Missouri State Conference of the NAACP and League of Women Voters in NAACP v. Missouri.

We also filed suit against the state of Missouri for failing to comply with a federal voting rights law that ensures Missourians have access to voter registration and that their registration records are accurately updated.

We helped to coordinate the nation’s largest voter protection efforts in Missouri where we fielded calls, answered questions and helped lodge complaints and instances of voter suppression on Election Day. We even filed suit against St. Charles County where election officials were not upholding a new voter ID law which allowed voters use any form of ID to vote.

We refused to let Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp quietly suppress thousands of votes in Georgia. We launched a petition urging Kemp to recuse himself from monitoring the very gubernatorial election he was running in. Our team appeared on several news shows calling attention to the issue including interviews on the Rachel Maddow Show and Hardball with Chris Matthews, and Weekends with Alex Witt.

On Election Day, 21 team members from our national office were deployed on the ground to support election protection efforts in Georgia, Florida, Virginia, and Missouri. We monitored polls and made sure issues were dealt with, amplified on social media and in traditional media.

"The democratic process is supposed to ensure that every vote counts, and if every vote counts then we should count every vote.”

-Advancement Project Litigation Director Gilda Daniels

We celebrated with our partners, Voices of The Experienced (VOTE) this year when they scored an historic victory with the passage of HB 265, a rights-restoration bill that reduces the time that voting rights are suspended for as it relates to people on probation and parole for felony convictions. In addition to serving as counselduring the oral arguments in VOTE v Louisiana, Advancement Project national office developed a communications strategy that included the creation of a video of VOTE’s Executive Director, Norris Henderson and national media outreach including placement in SB Nationand HuffPost.

Florida Voting Rights Restoration -We have long supported the work of Florida Rights Restoration Coalition - an organization which we helped to cofound. As a result of this partner work, consistent organizing and public education prior to the 2018 mid-term election, Floridians voted yes on Amendment 4, a voting rights initiative that will restore the right to vote to  4 million Returning Citizens in the state. 

ActionCamp- Advancement Project held its semi-annual training and campaign development space for young people and organizations working to dismantle over-policing in our streets and schools. We brought together more than 100 young organizers of color from across the country to sharpen their tools, share stories and strategies, and build relationships. This year, we expanded the scope of ActionCamp and drove deeper into the interconnectedness of policing, immigration enforcement, and school militarization that prohibits our communities from living free and safe.  

School Policing ActionKit - In response to the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Advancement Project national office and our partners participated in the March for Our Lives to lift up the voices and concerns of Black and Brown students amid calls for increasing police in response to school shootings. We released an ActionKit and launched a petition against Florida’s governor who signed legislation to arm teachers and put more guns in schools. In April, Advancement Project national office joined youth around the country in a school walkout and offered a youth-centered walkout toolkit and webinar.

We supported ActionSTL and other grassroots groups on their campaign to force Bob McCullough out of office with the #ByeBob campaign. McCullough was the St. Louis prosecutor who failed to charge officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown. We also built a website for ActionSTL. 

We sent a team to St. Louis to work with Ferguson Collaborative members who testified during a hearing in front of a U.S. District Court Judge on a pending consent decree. We prepped community members before their testimony, and helped to manage communications needs including helping to place interviews with the Associated Press, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Final Call and NPR.

We also unveiled a website for our partner: fergusoncollaborative.org, which our Digital Communications Strategist helped to build for our partners at Ferguson Collaborative.

"The same culture of imprisonment and over-criminalization that brought us baby jails has been ensnaring immigrants and other people of color in the injustice system for centuries."

-Judith Browne Dianis

Our legal, organizing and communications staff were able to provide on the ground support to families, help faith leaders organize and bring national media coverage to the rural community of Morristown, Tennessee, following an Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid of a local meat-packing plant which targeted and arrested dozens of immigrant workers.

We visited the Eloy Detention Center in Eloy, Arizona, to open contact with immigrants being imprisoned under extremely poor conditions. We did this work in partnership with Puente Human Rights Movement.

We worked with our grassroots partner Juntos, in Philadelphia, to successfully advocate for the city to stop sharing its local arrest database with ICE. We met with the mayor’s office, submitted a letter on the record, delivered it in person to Mayor Jim Kenney, and we sent press releases before and after the meeting to keep up public pressure. Just days later, the mayor announced on Twitter that they were ending the city’s contract with PARS.

Colin Kaepernick and Jesse Williams chose Advancement Project as #10 for10 Recipient of Kaepernick's#MillionDollarPledge  - Before Nike launched its major international campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, he made good on his promise to donate $1 million to organizations and groups promoting racial justice, which included a $10,000 donation to Advancement Project’s national office. It was matched by our board member, actor and activist, Jesse Williams. 

In May 2018, our board member, Jesse Williams, and our Executive Director wrote an op-ed for CNN entitled “Starbucks’ Incident Proves ‘Whites Only’ Spaces Still Exist” to confront this harmful habit. While Starbucks Executive Chairman, Howard Schultz was being interviewed on CNN regarding the anti-bias training, the interviewer asked him directly about our op-ed.

In February 2018, Advancement Project national office began filming a project on policing directed by board member, actor and activist Jesse Williams.The film features actors, athletes and other influencers discussing their interactions with the police and having "the talk" with their families. You can watch a trailer here. 

America Divided- Advancement Project national office was featured on the A&E series, “America Divided,” discussing being first responders to racial justice crises and recent hate crimes and incidents that have garnered national attention.  

The Hate U Give- Advancement Project and partners hosted private screenings and audience talk back discussions of “The Hate U Give,” helping our partners use this opportunity to build their base of young activists. 

We also supported the report Confronting the Education Debt: We Owe Billions to Black, Brown and Low-income Students and Their Schools - with our partners in the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools.

It was your support that made all of this possible. And it is with your support that we can do even more in 2019. Consider making a donation or recurring contribution today.