community organizing

On the eve of Mayor Nutter's budget speech, Kristin Campbell, an organizer with the Coalition to Save the Libraries, has a piece in Organizing Upgrade that reminds us what the city has learned from last year’s successful fight to keep the Nutter administration from closing 11 libraries. 

Months ago, when the school district first announced that it would be closing William Penn HS, almost no one doubted that that would be the case. However, thanks to the quick and effective organizing of the community around William Penn, the school is going to remain open and there is a new plan to turn it into a cutting edge career and technical school.

The photo below is an indication of how much the media landscape has changed in the past few years. For the pictured event the United Workers emailed only one press release to the daily paper of record and local television media.  The result: Only one traditional outlet covered the event, a far cry from coverage in the past. The other result: Over 500 people marched through Baltimore to the worker-declared human rights zoneat the Inner Harbour.