For the past few months, ProgressNow has been on the road listening to your thoughts on how we can keep the energy from the Obama campaign going in Colorado. You told us that you want to stay organized, work on local issues, and determine your own priorities based on your community's specific needs.
With these principles in mind, ProgressNow has designed a program we are calling "Progress Teams:" a community model that will fuse online organizing with traditional grassroots organizing to further expand the progressive movement in Colorado.
Our short‐term mission is to capitalize on the energy surrounding the 2008 election by recruiting teams of activists (or by supporting existing teams) who will work together to create a powerful network for local and state grassroots lobbying, education, and community service.
Our long‐term goal is to create an infrastructure for sustainable, year‐round civic engagement that is not necessarily focused on a specific candidate or ballot issue. This type of infrastructure formerly existed in institutions like unions and churches, but as those institutions have declined, so has people's involvement in their communities. The overwhelming energy from the Obama campaign provides us with an amazing opportunity to kick‐start a new era of community building and civic engagement.
Through Progress Teams, we want to provide you with a set of skills and resources that you can use to work on whatever issues, campaigns, or problems are most important in your community. We believe that if you are working on the things you actually care about and you have a resource like ProgressNow to help you along the way, you are more likely to stay involved for the long term. It's simple: you define your agenda, and we supply the training and expertise to help you succeed.
