How did Alamance County members of Down Home North Carolina, part of the People’s Action national network of grassroots groups, defeat planned cuts to essential services? They organized!
It turns out a LOT of people in Alamance think libraries, EMTs and domestic violence support are essential to their community so hundreds of them showed up and joined forces to stop the planned cuts.
“It gives us hope, and frankly, we’re not going to stop,” said Teresa Draughn, a Down Home organizer who lives in Alamance.
“We also built our base while we were doing it, a coalition of people who are like-minded, and who are willing to fight for all of these things,” she added. “So I guess it shows how much public power this coalition, and Down Home, have in this county.”
Back in April, the five members of Alamance County’s Board of Commissioners sought to cut funding from the county’s domestic violence service, the Family Justice Center. Their reason? Because one of the Commissioners – a MAGA diehard – didn’t like that the group included the words “inclusion” and “Latinx” on their grant application.
So Down Home organized a vigil at the Courthouse, where community members told their stories of surviving domestic violence. And the commissioners backed down.
Then Down Home got word that the Commissioners were trying to underfund the school budget by $12 million, after instituting a property tax the year before specifically to increase funding for public schools. On top of this, they wanted to close public libraries and slash EMS services, all to further cut their property taxes.
Down Home started a signature campaign, and quickly gathered over 400 signatures. They also built new alliances with members of the Alamance-Burlington Association of Educators, Save Our Libraries and NeighborUp Southern Alamance.
On June 2, more than 300 people showed up for a County Commission hearing at the Alamance County Courthouse. When they were shut out of the hearing, they rallied outside and shared stories.
The Commissioners agreed to roll back some of the cuts from $12 million to $4.4 million. Then at a special meeting, the school board unanimously decided to force the Commissioners into legal mediation, because they were so underfunded. The Commissioners quickly changed their tune, and came up with an additional $2,700,000. Then, mysteriously, they came up with an additional $1,300,000 for School Resource Officers, all but erasing the cuts they had initially proposed.
“It means our teachers, kids and our staff are safe, in healthy working environments and getting paid a living wage,” said Draughn.
It also demonstrates, she argues, that organizing works, and that Down Home’s efforts to elect two of its members – Tameka Harvey and Seneca Rogers – to the Alamance-Burlington school board have paid off in their ability to defend funding for services the community needs.
Down Home is just getting started in Alamance. They’re already planning a town hall with elected officials on July 26, and organizing to resist any efforts to pass any cuts to federal funding down to the local level.
“We’re going to keep organizing. Because now we’re going to talk to our people, and our people’s people, and the public at large, about these cuts and how they will absolutely affect us here in Alamance, and what we need to do to make sure they don’t happen.”