Schools and Communities First
While the wealthiest corporations avoid paying their fair share, schools in California have the most crowded classrooms in the nation and local communities are struggling to respond to the impact of COVID. This November, voters will make their voices heard on Proposition 15, which puts Schools and Communities First by closing corporate tax loopholes and reclaiming billions to invest in schools and local communities.
OCCET is carrying out educational efforts across Orange County to ensure that hundreds of thousands of voters of color and young voters are able to make informed choices about Proposition 15 and other measures that will impact our communities. OCCET volunteers are engaging voters in conversation through phone calls, text messaging, mail and online platforms.
Organizational Capacity Building
OCCET’s ongoing long-term goals are to strengthen our leadership capacity and develop a team of long-term leaders within each table partner, a vision of shifting power in the region, and to build a base of leaders rooted in the community’s values and principles to serve the broader public.
Following multi-year organizational development programs that increased the scale, quality and effectiveness of partners’ community organizing, electoral work, issue education, communications and organizational infrastructure in 2016 and 2019, OCCET is building a new 3-year capacity building initiative in 2020 with an additional focus in the areas of countywide narrative change capacity, data and research, and governance.
Census Outreach
OCCET is engaging the community to represent California by participating in the 2020 Census. Making over a hundred thousand calls in 9 days alone in May, our partners talked with 15,116 voters of color – youth, first-generation immigrants, Vietnamese American and Latinx voters – living in hard-to-count areas throughout Orange County. Of the voters reached, 43% pledged to participate in the Census, while another 55% shared that they already completed the census.
OCCET is continuing to reach out to communities in the region through the Summer and Fall of 2020 to maximize participation in the Census.