Action Institute NC

Voting rights and engagement:action Institute NC works on its own and with allies on voting rights, redistricting, and electoral reforms. We continued to work with a coalition that monitors legislative developments on voting rights and redistricting. This same coalition continues to push for an independent redistricting commission, but we were at the same time educating voters about the existing redistricting process and the likelihood that partisanship would again infect the maps produced by our general assembly. In doing so we helped created a groundswell of activism against the extremely gerrymandered maps our legislature first drew, which now in 2022 have been altered to be much less skewed. We also are working with other groups to remove the prohibition of voting for persons who are currently barred because they remain on probation or parole.

Civil rights:our civil rights organizing work falls into several broad categories- criminal justice reform and police accountability, immigrant rights, and racial and gender equity. On criminal justice issues, we worked with community partners and city leaders on funding and implementing violence interruption and crisis intervention programs that we had proposed for inclusion in the charlotte and mecklenburg county budgets. Our immigrant rights organizing included support for a deportation defense project we launched early in 2020 to boost legal representation in the local immigration court, along with actions we organized for passage of the dream act, and a path to citizenship for daca recipients and essential workers. Our racial and gender equity initiative organized monthly meetings with women across the state on healthcare access and black maternal health issues, criminal justice reform, covid prevention and addressing inequities in our state's response to the crisis. We built new rage cohorts in several eastern north carolina counties as part of our drive to expand organizing capacity and advocacy in underserved, high-poverty rural areas.

Social safety net:healthcare access remains a major focus of our grassroots organizing work, with our priority issues being medicaid expansion, lowering prescription drug costs, and expanding the reach of the affordable care act. We are active with coalition partners in statewide work on medicaid expansion, and with national partners on lowering drug costs and in making the temporary healthcare provisions of the american rescue plan more permanent by including them in a reconciliation bill in congress. We also continue to lead on black maternal health legislation here in north carolina, and to promote reproductive justice at the state and federal level. We have also run a 15-person covid education canvass crew in mecklenburg county which started last may 2021, and an eastern north carolina covid education project with three coalition partners that cover much of the northeastern and southeastern portions of the state. We have encouraged vaccination participation, and organized a number of events where vaccines and other mutual aid like food distribution is available.

Economic justice:the core of our economic justice work is organizing to raise the minimum wage to a living wage and to win fairer workplace policies for women and families. We also organize to increase the availability of affordable housing and to ensure stronger enforcement of tenant protections against evictions, substandard living conditions, and abusive landlords.our tenant organizing and resource center was busy fighting illegal evictions while they were still prohibited during the pandemic emergency, and working with tenant groups around the state to extend the eviction moratorium and get rental assistance out to those who qualified but were having a hard time getting it. We also created a hotline for tenants to call in mecklenburg county, and helped organize a court watch program to assist people facing eviction in the housing court.