RURAL ORGANIZING PROJECT
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Mission Statement
Our mission is to strengthen the skills, resources, and vision of primary leadership in local autonomous human dignity groups in Oregon with a goal of keeping such groups a vibrant source for a just democracy.
About This Cause
Rural Organizing Project (ROP) is a statewide organization that supports a multi-issue, rural-centered, grassroots base in Oregon. We work to build and support a shared standard of human dignity: the belief in the equal worth of all people, the need for equal access to justice and the right to self-determination. Our mission is to strengthen the skills, resources, and vision of primary leadership in local autonomous human dignity groups with a goal of keeping such groups a vibrant source for a just democracy. ROP began as a response to the 1992 Oregon Citizens Alliance’s outrageous Abnormal Behaviors Initiative, which targeted gay and lesbian Oregonians for legalized second-class citizenship. Rural people joined together to form ROP to build the movement for human dignity, to take collective action at the intersections of the issues that matter most to rural Oregonians, and to share organizing strategies, safety tactics, and resources throughout the network. Today, our network includes more than 80 autonomous, multi-racial, volunteer-run human dignity groups in 34 of Oregon’s 36 counties and one tribal community, as well as long-time leaders in all 36 counties. ROP’s challenges to the anti-democratic right have earned us a national reputation for being an effective grassroots organization that takes on the tough issues. Our Community Building Center in Cottage Grove is home to our main office, but staff, local leaders, and 10 Rural Organizing Fellows work and organize from their own communities across the state. ROP’s structure of autonomous groups both enables and requires our organization to focus on supporting and strengthening volunteer leadership to maintain the depth and breadth of work our network is engaged in. Today we are a small staff backed by hundreds of volunteer group leaders, thousands of supporters, Rural Organizing Fellows, interns, and office volunteers. ROP’s priorities are guided by three key principles: Every human being matters Every issue is interconnected It’s all about transformational organizing These three guiding principles can be seen throughout our work historically and today. During the 2007 Cost of War initiative, we held People’s Town Halls in Oregon’s four rural congressional districts, exposing the true financial and human cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. To save rural post offices in a campaign started in 2011, we have worked with long-time organizers and newly inspired leaders to draw the connections between access to basic services, the defunding of public infrastructure, and privatization due to corporate greed. During COVID-19, and the Oregon wildfire crisis, our communities continued to be hard hit but also hard at work setting up dozens of mutual aid networks to feed thousands of neighbors, problem-solve transportation and childcare, set up internet hotspots so rural communities can access telehealth and remote education opportunities, share health and safety information, and make sure anyone who needs help gets it. Rural Oregon is building stronger communities by taking care of each other while also pushing for emergency funding to help the most vulnerable among us, especially those left out of federal relief. While pulling together and sharing COVID survival strategies through our network and allies in other states, we began building our ROP Roadmap to a Thriving Rural Oregon through conversations with each of our member groups and the emerging leaders who have been or are becoming human dignity group members. COVID-19 has allowed the movements we participate in to advance narrative shift and culture change work around economic justice to focus on social safety nets that serve everyone who lives in Oregon. Some of the demands built into the Roadmap are quality and accessible universal healthcare, universal basic income, universal childcare, forgiving rent and mortgages, housing for all, broadband internet for everyone, and fully funded crisis response infrastructure. For decades, rural Oregon has been systematically defunded, resulting in the closing of public infrastructure like schools, libraries, post offices, hospitals, fire departments, sheriffs departments that house county emergency response planning, and 24-hour emergency dispatch. Skyrocketing rents and home costs have pushed more community members into houselessness. Hate crimes and white nationalist activity are on the rise and mainstreaming. Migrants and asylum seekers face escalating violence from anti-immigrant vigilantes and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Rural counties face a higher percentage of community members in removal proceedings than our urban counterparts. The COVID-19 pandemic and deepening recession expose the huge gaps of inequity, including lack of access to safe healthcare, housing, food, childcare, internet and information access. In this vacuum, paramilitaries and white nationalist groups have positioned themselves as the alternative to disappearing services and law enforcement while blaming rural Oregon’s economic crises on immigrants, communities of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and racialized stereotypes of public service recipients. ROP and our member groups are elevating a rural politics of equity, compassion, and human dignity over that of scarcity, isolation, and exclusion. Our relationship-based organizing develops decentralized rural leadership and capacity building to support locally led grassroots groups accountable to their communities. We create intentional space for rural organizers to strategize and work together and foster peer-to-peer learning and organizing across groups, geography and identity. We also share organizing and action opportunities with our broad network through ROPnet emails, strategy sessions, social media, podcasts and other communications. Our member groups engage with the institutions that impact the politics, civic life and culture of our communities at the local, county and state levels, and hold these institutions accountable to the communities they serve. For example, when there is white nationalist activity in town, ROP member groups show up visibly in opposition, with a broad base, engaging town leaders to speak out. Our statewide civic engagement work focuses on bringing rural voices to demand policies that uphold our rural values of protecting the dignity of every person who calls Oregon home. We work with human dignity groups to take positions on every measure that hits the Oregon ballot and to make the impact of those ballot measures clear in accessible language. Those positions go into our Small Town Actions for a New Direction (STAND) Election Guide, along with articles that help break down election rhetoric and dehumanizing dog whistles that dominate the airwaves and headlines in small town Oregon, often driven by national politics. The STAND Guide is written and published by ROP and distributed to tens of thousands of rural Oregonians in English and Spanish by human dignity group leaders in their communities. ROP is accountable to our member groups both formally, in our elected leadership, and informally, every day, in our organizing. Our board is elected by and from our member groups: all 7 members live and are leaders in rural Oregon. More than 150 leaders from member groups convene annually at the Rural Caucus and Strategy Session to elect our board, reflect on the last year, and map our direction for the next year. A central part of our organizing model is that we follow the lead of local groups. All ROP staff were raised in or live and work within rural communities across the state, providing support to the human dignity groups in their area and further. ROP staff are in regular contact with each community for meetings and strategy sessions that shape both the groups’ local work and also the collective direction and work of ROP. The vast majority of this work is done not by our paid staff, but rather by the autonomous, all-volunteer, community-based human dignity groups that comprise ROP’s membership. The leadership of the groups are community members themselves and, in rural communities, groups cannot thrive and survive without being accountable to their communities. Human dignity groups do this by listening to and acting on the issues raised by their neighbors, convening and facilitating public discussions and community engagement, and broadening their membership by neighbor-to-neighbor organizing.