NAFTA inflicted searing pain on millions of people, families, communities, and municipalities in the heartland -- nowhere more than Indiana. Nearly 25 years after it went into effect, Millions of Hoosiers have a personal story of how NAFTA led to pervasive poverty, addiction, depression, and suicide, because the same story unfolded all over. NAFTA incited a surge of plant closures, which dried up small town tax and consumer bases, leading to further job loss. The cascade continued with everything from a swell of car repossessions and home foreclosures to the breakup of families strained beyond their endurance. 
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Likewise, millions of Mexican-born immigrants have a personal story of how NAFTA turned them into economic refugees, searching an all-too-often hostile land for wages to send back as remittances to their families. That story is equally prevalent: NAFTA sent government-subsidized American crops flooding south of the border at sub-market rates, which destroyed a million agricultural jobs in Mexico, sending workers north on a hunt for the dignity and freedom not afforded by economic conditions at home. In immigrant as well as US-born Indiana communities, NAFTA stories are inescapable, palpable.
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If we can create a forum for people to tell these stories, where they might reach the ears and the hearts of other people with their own NAFTA stories, we can create the opposite conditions: immigrant and US-born working class communities can see one another not as adversaries, but as teammates. From this common ground, they will be better equipped to take on a common adversary: the commodity speculators and industrial and pharmaceutical barons who got rich off of NAFTA, off of their forced displacement, off of their joblessness and addiction, off of their pain.
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Started in Spring of 2017, Hoosier Action is a member-owned and -led organization devoted to building the power of Indiana’s everyday families to fight for a small town agenda based on our collective self-interests. In rural Southern Indiana, where the fastest growing population is Latinx, we are uniquely positioned to invite white Hoosiers into new formations and a new vision for our state and country.

We will organize “Shared Stories” dialogues, bringing white heartlanders and immigrant Latinx workers together in union halls, churches, community centers, schools and other venues throughout Southern Indiana’s small towns, to tell one another their stories of NAFTA and its catastrophic effects on Mexican and Hoosier communities. Through deliberate facilitation, these dialogues will foster an anti-racist, anti-corporate analysis of that catastrophe. 
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To consolidate the momentum from the dialogues, we will move people from dialogue into action on a set local, county, and state-wide demands ranging from ensuring access to translation services at a wide range of institutions to fighting for expanded healthcare access and clean water and soil. Moreover, we will establish a training for trainers that develops a group of spokespeople and trainers from the community who will bring the learning around immigration and NAFTA into additional dialogues.

Iowa stands at a crossroads. If progressives continue the Democratic Party’s current approach of divesting from the state’s political infrastructure, it could well look like Kansas soon; if we invest in strategic initiatives now, we have the potential to make it look like Minnesota. The three states’ populations aren’t very different, only the level of development of the progressive organizing ecosystem is. That Iowa is home to the most explicitly white supremacist Member of Congress, Steve King, one so far beyond the pale that the national GOP has censured him, is a testament both to this danger and this opportunity.
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Which way Iowa goes will have national reverberations. Iowa is the first state in the Presidential nominating process, a swing state, and a Midwestern, mostly white state that voted for Obama twice before dramatically swinging to Trump. And there is greater potential for a reversal than almost anywhere: in no state more than Iowa have Donald Trump’s hawkish trade policies hurt the population more -- a population still reeling from decades of corporate agricultural consolidation that has made being a family farmer who grows food to feed people extremely difficult.
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Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI), a community organization with 5,000 dues-paying members, 40 years of history, and a footprint in all 99 counties, is teaming up with the national Working Families Party (WFP) to germinate an Iowa chapter of the WFP. Anchoring this endeavor is Shawn Sebastian of Aimes, previously the director of the Fed Up Campaign at the Center for Popular Democracy, which organizes working class people of color to demand full employment monetary policy at the Federal Reserve.

We aim to build nothing short of a new political party capable of reshaping the state’s political contours, turning Iowa into a nationally influential hotbed of multi-racial populism.
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As a first step, we will elevate a progressive platform in the Iowa Caucuses that shifts the entire presidential field and Democratic party left -- already, we are conducting research and delivering policy briefs to Presidential campaigns in order to push the national conversation. In contrast to the rest of the state’s political organizations, we will do this with an eye toward building a durable progressive base and infrastructure in Iowa that fights for progressive change year-round and long-term at the local, state, and federal level.
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One essential pillar of our long-term political strategy is developing candidates and campaign staff independent of the Democratic Party and the state’s moneyed interests. We recently hosted a “Women Run Campaings” training that drew 30 women (10 women of color, 10 who identified as queer, their ages ranging from 17 to mid-60s) from every corner of the state. Several of them are either running for office or running a campaign. Building on this training, we are planning candidate training forums, Precinct Level Area Network Captain trainings, and intensive courses on running field, communications, and budgets.
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Another pillar is building a base in person, through deep canvassing and events, as well as digitally, using relational online organizing as distinct from social media promotion. We will build not just a list for the coming election but also a set of relationships that last beyond the caucuses. To develop this base into a progressive political bloc, we will undertake a program of political and popular education, both on issues (corporate agricultural concentration, the rural part of a Green New Deal, Medicare for all, and more) and ideological foundations (economic exploitation, structural racism and patriarchy, our broken political system).

If Kelly and Gary Talarico of Germfask, MI had lived across the street, they might not have faced severe financial distress. When Kelly received a medical diagnosis that required them to keep medical equipment plugged in at home, their electric bill skyrocketed. Across the street, residents could get their energy from an electric cooperative, but the Talaricos were stuck paying up to four times as much to get theirs from Upper Peninsula Power Company (UPPCO), a British hedge fund-owned firm with its history of charging exorbitant rates -- sometimes highest in the continental United States.
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Residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are not wealthy to begin with, but the bitter winters force them to use energy that, at UPPCO’s rates, many simply cannot afford. Customers have been organizing for over two years to get UPPCO to offer fairer rates: they’ve tried working with UPPCO directly, pressuring the Michigan Public Service Commission to take action, and asking elected officials to help, all to no avail.
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Now, they are ready to take their energy needs into their own hands, and one organization is uniquely positioned to help bring power to the people. We The People - MI launched in 2017 with the goal of bringing together communities who have faced struggles in isolation -- rural white communities, native communities, new immigrants, black and brown communities in Michigan cities.

We will launch a fight to take on the British hedge fund stealing from rural Michiganders and turn UPPCO into a cooperatively-owned electric service provider, inviting people motivated by the need to lower their energy bills into a fight against a corporate opponent, built on demands for economic, energy, and climate justice.
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Transforming UPPCO will require us – and give us an opportunity – to heal from the divide-and-conquer politics in the region that has pitted indigenous and white working class communities against each other. The campaign’s core leadership team, which includes two members of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians, is committed to embracing and applying indigenous ecological systems and practices and ensuring new renewable energy infrastructure be built and maintained by union workers who live in our communities.
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More broadly, We The People is supporting an environmental and energy justice vision lead by Indigenous leaders in the region. We must not only move away from antiquated and unsustainable systems and practices, but acknowledge that we all exist in relationship with each other and the planet — that we are a part of larger ecosystems — while we shape the future.

The Ohio River Valley is plagued by an interlocking set of threats, from the drug war and overdose crisis, to rampant petro-chemical pollution, to housing insecurity, unemployment, and low wages. To make matters worse, the national political parties have all but abandoned us, leaving communities that feel alienated, suspicious of the government, and resigned to a life of hardship.

Too often, the wrong people are using the wrong messaging to reach the populations that could create progressive electoral and legislative outcomes. Too often, political actors advance a narrative of large urban centers vs. rural communities, which leaves out the small towns that are vital to changing Ohio’s political landscape. Too often, working class Ohioans are accused of voting against their own interests, when really they have been systematically isolated and disempowered, and so understandably no longer trust the system and frequently just don’t vote.

River Valley-Voices in Action builds the political power of the most marginalized and stigmatized people in the towns, small cities, and rural areas along the Ohio River Valley. Our volunteer-led chapters drive our youth outreach work, civic engagement, political education, harm reduction and more, to win economic and racial justice, environmental safety, and humane changes to the criminal legal system. We aim to transform the political landscape in Ohio by creating vehicles for collective action, building bridges between small towns and big cities, and spearheading a robust voter registration, engagement, and turnout program.

RV-VIA is dedicated to changing how political organizing is done in Ohio. By training organic leaders in the most marginalized populations to organize a variety of vehicles for collective action, RV-VIA confronts these narratives, insists on the dignity of lost and forgotten communities, and puts forward a new vision of what Ohio can be.

On one hand, we organize around issue areas separately, in order to enable people to get involved in fights over the issues that matter to them the most -- be they children of incarcerated parents, club dancers out of work from the pandemic, or neighbors being poisoned by the Heritage Thermal hazardous waste incinerator. On the other, we try to draw the connections between them: the most polluted areas are also the most over-policed and the most poverty stricken, with the lowest voter turnout.

The US Supreme Court’s rejection of Wisconsin’s marquee Gill v Whitford partisan gerrymandering case, along with its 5-4 ruling dismissal of cases challenging partisan gerrymandering in Maryland and North Carolina, leaves us with one option for dismantling the house that Scott Walker built: political organizing. Only breaking Republican dominance in unlikely districts can un-rig the state and keep its Senate seats and Electoral College votes out of the hands of white nationalist politicians. That means we need a sea change in small towns and rural areas.
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Perhaps the greatest impediment to this badly-needed transformation is the prevalence of racist narratives that drive a wedge between working class white communities and their black and brown counterparts. The landmark Race and Class Narrative (RCN) study illuminates a path toward moving that wedge so it instead separates working class white communities from the wealthy interests dominating their lives. A successful pilot RCN implementation program in Minnesota was built on deep research into the state’s shared values, and a communications strategy that exposed racist dogwhistles, gives us a template for how a Wisconsin-specific version of the program might look. 
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Wisconsin has a long history of left populism to draw on, not just in its populous Milwaukee-Madison southern corridor, but also in more far-flung GOP-run regions. Reviving that will take direct grassroots outreach, relational canvassing, aligned local campaigns, town halls on pressing issues -- and a major narrative shift around race and class.

Citizen Action WI is anchoring an effort by a diverse coalition of statewide actors to implement the findings of the Race and Class Narrative research together. Citizen Action’s innovative co-op model, which has brought a growing organized presence to areas of the state where progressive political infrastructure has been extremely scarce, positions them ideally to test new messaging ideas in tough political terrain. While their work will venture into the electoral sphere, they will be building narrative unity with strictly issue-based organizations as well, including the Wisconsin Farmers Union, and Voces de la Frontera. Additionally, the effort will include labor unions, local volunteer-led groups across the state, and ultimately dozens of partner organizations.
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A central component of Heartland Rising’s partnership with this effort will be establishing a membership scholarship fund to help Citizen Action’s rural co-ops expand, especially among members for whom affording dues is a major challenge, in the lead-up to the 2020 coalition effort.