After Deep Canvass Successes in Presidential Election and Georgia Runoffs, People’s Action to Engage People Around Recurring Cash Payments in West Virginia, Arizona, and Missouri

Contact: Johanna Kichton, 240.206.1145, [email protected] 

WASHINGTON, D.C.—People’s Action today announced a new deep canvassing campaign to help secure recurring cash payments in the next COVID relief bill. People’s Action will partner with its member organizations, West Virginia Citizen Action Group, Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), and Missouri Jobs with Justice to check-in with people about how the pandemic has affected them, help them recognize that the government should care about its communities, and spell out how recurring cash payments are a way for the government to support them. People’s Action aims to call people unaffiliated with any political party during the two-month campaign.

“People have been in crisis for months, and one more check won’t cut it,” People’s Action Distributed Organizing Director Brooke Adams said. “Republicans tell people that they don’t deserve more from our government, and that’s dangerous. We’re going to use our powerful deep canvass program to help people understand that our government’s role is to protect and care about all of us. With Democrats in control of the House, Senate, and the White House, there is no excuse to not act.”

This presidential election season, People’s Action’s robust distributed organizing program called more than 47.8 million voters in battleground states and had nearly 300,000 in-depth phone conversations, helping to deliver Biden’s margin of victory. Canvassers moved nearly half of the people they talked to towards voting for Biden. Deep canvass phone calls are candid conversations between canvassers and voters in which participants reflect on the experiences that shape what’s at stake for them. People’s Action released results from a deep canvass experiment it conducted showing that the method is about 102 times more effective at moving individual voters than the typical presidential persuasion program.

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People’s Action is a national network of 40 state and local grassroots, power-building organizations in 30 states, united in fighting for justice. We operate the largest progressive rural organizing project in the country. People’s Action and its member organizations coordinated one of the biggest distributed organizing programs in rural areas this election season.