In March, 2006, the Commonweal Institute convened the 2006 Progressive Roundtable, a working group of over 50 leaders in communications, marketing, framing, media, and strategy to make decisions about how to market progressive ideas more effectively and how to coordinate progressive communications. Innovative, diverse viewpoints from across the country were represented during the Progressive Roundtable convening.
The Roundtable members identified six top priority infrastructure needs and are working to see that these needs will be met. Organizations have developed seventeen Letters of Interest (LOI) in response to these priority needs. Following are summaries of fifteen of these LOIs; interested funders may request to see the full Letters of Interest. The Commonweal Institute is coordinating efforts to identify funding for these projects. If you are a funder interested in supporting the development of progressive infrastructure, you may either contact the Commonweal Institute, or get in touch directly with the individual contact listed for a specific project.
Based on its contribution to progressives’ success in Colorado’s 2004 elections, ProgressNow will work with MoveOn and progressive organizers in individual states, to replicate its state-level model through the development of PCNIC (pronounced “picnic”) – the Progressive Communications Network Incubation Center – which will create, nurture and support independent state-level networks in every state in the nation. PCNIC will provide assistance to state-level progressive entrepreneurs by helping them get launched, get funded and become self-sustaining, and by providing services including communications platform, technical, financial and legal assistance. The PCNIC project can quickly be scaled up to build out the most successful elements of these state-level networks across the country. The resulting network of networks will provide a nimble, multi-level communications and advocacy network for the each state’s entire progressive movement. Ultimately this will allow all fifty states to experience the same success as Colorado in shifting from a top-down “one-to-many” approach to organizing voters and progressive communications to a bottom-up truly grassroots “many-to-many” approach.
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Operating on the principle of “connectivity”, the Progressive Media Lab (PML) is a multidisciplinary effort to link organizations and experts in the development and delivery of innovative technologies for grassroots and net-roots organizing, communications development, blogosphere enhancement, and content creation. The PML will create a cross-cutting communications apparatus to address the need for integrated progressive communications strategies and implementations. New technologies and distribution strategies will be created and tested and integrated into the progressive movement through on-site training and an application service provider (ASP) approach. Utilizing virtual connectivity across organizations and a research center for the creation and distribution of innovative technologies and innovative uses of existing technology, PML will facilitate long-term and rapid response messaging; grassroots activation; a disciplined, integrated approach to linking digital strategy and data; and creative content innovation. This unique organization will bring together corporate and technology partners to enable more rapid commercialization of the innovations developed.
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Founded and operated by a former Reuters television producer and a team of seasoned reporters and editors, Public News Service (PNS) proposes building out its network of state-based progressive AP-style news services, which currently provide news used by mainstream, alternative, independent and ethnic outlets, both local and national in scope. Integrating progressive voices with new and existing technologies, PNS’s charge is to build editorial and infrastructure capacity to provide a vehicle to “mainline” progressive content as ubiquitously and quickly as possible. PNS’s expansion will:
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Faith Voices for the Common Good proposes collaborating with The New Press to integrate traditional publishing with innovative online technologies; to expand the number and impact of progressive books; and to facilitate grassroots conversations of progressive ideas, both online nationally and offline in local communities. In partnership with The New Press, using its proprietary software, Synanim, Faith Voices will create an echo chamber effect around new progressive ideas by broadening and more deeply engaging progressive audiences and developing a line of books on progressive religion, as well as developing new forms and uses of social software technologies. Such an integration of traditional and innovative communications strategies will allow for widespread impact of progressive ideas and strategies, which can supplement or bypass traditional, mainstream, broadcast-media marketing approaches. This infrastructure component will influence the way progressive messaging, community building, and mobilization are done in the future, helping to bring about long-term social change.
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Using its empirically-driven, cutting-edge values science, American Environics proposes to conduct annual social values surveys in 2006 and 2007, and to publish its Road Map for a Progressive Majority (currently these are produced every four years), in order to offer progressives an understanding of how values are changing year to year. In addition to producing the reports, American Environics proposes:
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The Commonweal Institute (CI) proposes to maximize the strategic gain of current market research efforts by serving as a bridging organization linking national marketing efforts to the thousands of grassroots organizations that do not currently see themselves as part of the greater progressive movement. The Progressive Resource Center – Commonweal PRC – will
The Progressive Synergy Project proposes to develop a model governance structure for cross-issue coordination, based on some of the progressive movement’s most successful collaborative efforts: the Partnership Project, the Forest Stewardship Council, and America Votes. This governance structure will provide a foundation for effective interaction between electorally-oriented progressive groups, creating a space for the strategic integration of resources and more effective messaging in order to win elections. The Progressive Synergy Network model aims to enhance the effectiveness of the growing progressive political movement by setting a strict standard for assessing the capacity of its member organizations, while encouraging the kind of collaboration that is necessary for long-term political relevance and victory. It integrates the emergence of new funding models, intelligent branding strategies, and democratic decision-making into a model that incorporates methodologies that have already proven successful in other sectors.
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By focusing on skill-building for key progressive leaders, the Rockwood Leadership Program proposes to organize national and regional think tank leaders and facilitate collaboration in visioning, messaging and program across the boundaries of organization, issue focus, and geography. Drawing on training methodologies from community organizing, private sector leadership development programs, and its deep experience facilitating progressive social change, Rockwood delivers intensive workshops that help key leaders create the visioning, partnership and implementation skills associated with highly successful public policy campaigns. The stages in infrastructure-building, in the Rockwood model, begin with:
Since 1999, Rockwood has convened and trained more than 1,500 advocacy leaders, including the leadership of networks and coalitions focusing on prison reform, habitat protection, corporate accountability, human rights, public health, media reform and climate change.
Recent events make it clear that the energy exists within the Hispanic community to enable Hispanics to reach their full political potential, which, if managed correctly, can sustain the progressive movement and help it grow. However, in order to be successful, progressives must communicate effectively with the Hispanic population through an approach that can deliver messages utilizing new technologies at the neighborhood level. Iowa, a bell weather of politics and demographics, can serve as a testing ground for on-going engagement with the growing Hispanic population. Housed within the Center for Civic Participation, which operates nationwide in a number of states from its Minneapolis office, the Iowa Project is an expansion of the strong and targeted community-specific work that has been done in Iowa's Hispanic community. Hispanic civic participation is critical to the lasting implementation of progressive agendas; The Iowa Project is a long-term strategy that can achieve rapid intermediate results, with the possibility of subsequent expansion into other Midwestern states, as well as those states with large Hispanic populations.
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A vibrant network with diverse membership and a strategic plan for growing and formalizing their work and increasing their impact, the Progressive Communicators Network proposes to increase its capacity by hiring its first two regional organizing and program staff people in late 2006 or early 2007, with two more regional staff added each year through 2010. The Network will continue with its proven approach of national and regional work on:
The scale of the work, however, will change with increased financial resources to add people power and program resources.
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The Progressive Roundtable℠ was initially established by the Commonweal Institute to bring together progressive leaders to begin to develop the marketing and communications components of progressive infrastructure. Based on an outcome-oriented model, the Roundtable has fully integrated pre-convening, convening, and post-convening phases, with its performance measures based on outcomes achieved in the post-convening phase. Building on the momentum of the first Roundtable, the Commonweal Institute proposes to establish the Progressive Roundtable as a permanent convening body to promote on-going coordination by progressive leaders on various components of infrastructure and long-term strategy, as well as around specific issues. The Roundtable will convene progressives, link them through on-line data-sharing, build collaborative networks, increase connectivity among leaders, build trust, and focus on outcomes. The positive response of participants in the initial 2006 Progressive Roundtable has clearly demonstrated the demand for this ongoing convening capacity.
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The lack of a coordinated communication network is a great liability to progressives when it comes to acting in concert to influence public opinion and public policy, and maximizing the gains of grassroots organizing and electoral campaigns. This LOI proposes to map progressive organizations and networks, and to use this data to create a web-based database listing communication vehicles, organizations, and networks willing and able to coordinate message distribution. Specifically, the LOI proposes:
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A stronger and better connected infrastructure will enable progressives to communicate their ideas and values more effectively to a variety of audiences, to collaborate more effectively, and to move the political agenda to be more receptive to progressive candidates and programs. In collaboration with renowned network analyst Valdis Krebs, the Commonweal Institute proposes to increase substantially the connected capacity of the progressive movement by mapping and analyzing the social and organizational networks that presently exist among progressive infrastructure organizations and individuals, then intervening in specific ways to strengthen and “weave” those networks. These activities will include targeted networking events to increase connectivity, the creation of a public engagement networking site, the development of a messaging echo chamber via network connections, and education and promotion to encourage network involvement.
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To revitalize a progressive religious movement as an identifiable moral backbone for the overall progressive movement, Faithful America and Faith Voices for the Common Good are seeking support to create a joint information-delivery and technology infrastructure to reach mainstream religious people with progressive messaging through innovative social software, such as Faith Voices’ unique, interactive Synanim technology (Synanim.org). This collaboration will expand the current reach of the two organizations for optimum messaging and coordination of work to engage both clergy and laity in more active participation in providing moral frameworks for the progressive movement. This linkage will broaden their reach by growing www.faithfulamerica.org from 100,000 to a target of 500,000 members and Faith Voices from 20 to 50 organizational members to support Faith Voices’ Gather Heart messaging system for clergy, which enables clergy to create sermons online with Synanim. Between them, the two organizations have potential access to 86,000 clergy and 45,000,000 Christians. The joint infrastructure will provide world-class clergy leadership training and a dynamic and centralized online service for growing a progressive religious movement. It will engage persons of faith in public debate and enable interactive discourse on progressive values, thereby strengthening the moral public voice of the progressive movement.
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