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Path to Power

Path to Power is Community Change’s statement of purpose. It is not a vision for one organization, alone. It is an invitation to join us in the unfinished project of economic, racial, and gender justice.

 

Read the Framework

Path To Power

Our Theory of Change

Community Change Action builds power from the ground up to create a multiracial democracy and a fair economy where everyone can flourish.

Photos by Steven St. John for Child Care Grassroots Assembly in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Sept. 2022

Four interwoven strategies create the fabric of this work.

People Power

Building Black, Latino, AAPI, and immigrant leadership and organizations at the center of a multiracial movement

Organizing

Reconstructing a 21st century base-building machine

Politics

Expanding the electorate and bringing hard to reach voters into the practice of democracy.

Governance

Advancing a new economic paradigm alongside political insiders

Our Analysis

The world will be radically different in 2033.

Enormous, interconnected challenges have fundamentally disrupted our politics, economy, and culture. We are increasingly feeling the impact of climate change, concentrated in already marginalized and disinvested communities and contributing to mass migration around the world.

Countervailing powers are challenging U.S. dominance on the international stage, and ethnic and racialized nationalism are on the rise in this country and throughout the world.

The threats and opportunities of automation and artificial intelligence are growing, while the decades-long assault on organized labor continues and disparities in wealth and income increase.

At the same time, accelerating changes in technology and media are challenging our notions of knowing, being, and community.

This period of turbulence calls into question the assumptions that undergird our social economy and our democracy. We can either point the country toward greater inclusion and the realization of our founding ideals or we can allow the hierarchies of class, race, and gender to continue to define our imperfect democracy and exploitative economy.

Bright Spots Point the Way Forward

Periods of turmoil and change—and existential threats like the climate crisis and rising authoritarianism—create

opportunities to reimagine the rules of the economy and advance new solutions that foreground equity.

We are winning the battle of ideas. We are calling forth a new political economy to finally replace the “common sense” of neoliberalism.

Decades of organizing in states like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, and New Mexico are showing the power and possibility of new economic paradigms.

And over the past 20 years, we have built an electoral powerhouse of, by, and for Black, Latino, AAPI, immigrant, and young voters who are poised to change the country’s political math.

We envision a just, equitable, and inclusive economy and democracy where all people and communities thrive. As part of a wider ecosystem of groups and leaders working for social justice, Community Change and Community Change Action aim to define and win a governing agenda by 2025 that would set us on a path to confront structural, generational, racialized poverty. Our agenda must be more than a policy platform; we aim to rewrite the rules of our economy based on ideas that emerge through dialogue across different forms of expertise, rooted in lived experience.

Our vision for the country requires transformation, which will only be possible if we dramatically rebalance power in the United States.

In 1968, in the aftermath of assassinations and a grim election, as the civil rights and anti-poverty movements teetered precariously, the Center for Community Change became a home in the storm for leaders and organizers in the struggle for economic and social justice.

Now, 55 years later, Community Change and Community Change Action face the turbulence of this moment with the strength of hard-won experience and an unwavering belief in the fierce dignity of low-income people of color and in their power to construct a different world.

Our gaze is fixed on this bold, ambitious vision that we firmly believe can be made real. But we cannot accomplish it alone. Community change is only possible in partnership, and we look to the next 50 years with an invitation—to join us in the long work of building power and reshaping the policies and institutions that impact our lives.