Annual Report 2021

Education

Schools were at the forefront of our public discourse this year, as COVID impacted school climate and staffing, and school board elections heated up around issues of health and safety, as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

POWER’s statewide education team spent the first half of the year working to ensure fair education funding would be the priority in Pennsylvania’s budget debate. In May, POWER Metro hosted a “Enough4AllPA--Week of Action” to encourage voters to educate their legislators and their social networks about the need for full, fair education funding. On June 21, Hundreds of Pennsylvanians marched at four locations--in Philadelphia, Pottstown, Lancaster, and Allentown--for “Still Separate And Unequal: 100% Fair Funding Now,” to call attention to the need for equitable funding for the Commonwealth’s public education system and call on legislators to support the Governor’s budget proposal.

Two days later, dozens of POWER clergy and lay leaders staged a sit-in at the State Capitol after they were denied entry to the Senate’s public gallery during meetings of the Senate Government and Appropriations committees. 15, including POWER Executive Director Bishop Dwayne Royster and Philadelphia Councilwoman Helen Gym, were arrested as they called for our legislators to use the year’s surplus to fully fund public education. At a September 20, press conference, the group announced that they would plead guilty to the criminal trespass charges, in order to protest while maintaining that the PA legislature is guilty of the great injustice and harm to hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania children. In response to the decision of the legislature to create a “rainy day fund” with part of the surplus, Bishop Royster noted that “it’s not only already raining — it’s a doggone hurricane.”

In November, the long-awaited trial of the William Penn School District et al. v. Pennsylvania Department of Education et al. lawsuit began, led by the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania and the Public Interest Law Center. On November 17th, POWER led the “Building Education Equity: Day Of Prayer For Liberation” rally, with more than 150 lay and clergy leaders, educators, school administrators, students and their families participating at the State Capitol. POWER regions--Philadelphia, Metro, Lehigh Valley, and Central PA--took turns hosting “Way Overdue Wednesday” rallies on the State Capitol steps in Harrisburg, and will continue to call attention to this important case throughout its duration.

At the local level, POWER leaders worked to educate and engage families and communities in ensuring all children get quality education and safety in our schools. As a contentious school board election loomed, POWER Lehigh Valley hosted a school board candidate forum on April 28, part of a series of virtual candidate forums leading into the May primary election. POWER’s Philadelphia Education team mobilized to demand needed support staff in Philadelphia public schools, in partnership with building principals and PTOs. In the end, the district increased allocations to include an additional position at every K-8 school.

Climate Justice

POWER’S Climate Justice & Jobs team started the year with a four part virtual Strategy Retreat to design and endorse the next three years of our statewide strategy, building on the previous six years of work done by the team. 75 people joined in, and followed up throughout the year with dozens of presentations in congregations, schools and community spaces, welcoming people to bring their pain, yearning and energy into making change.

In Philadelphia, we began work on creating our People's Energy Plan, building on POWER member leaders' values and visions. We developed partnerships for powerful legal representation, expert witnessing and big data modeling so that we can convert our moral narrative into a technical plan to contest for our energy future. We launched our PGW Just Transition campaign working on the enormously complex, long term transformation of Philadelphia's municipal gas utility into a heat service that integrates our values of Affordability, Renewability, Fair Labor, Health & Safety. We escalated our Power Local Green Jobs campaign, engaging with PECO's regulator, the Public Utility Commission (PUC). In our SEPTA Gas Plant Philadelphia campaign we are now at a negotiating table with our city agencies under the auspices of the EPA, which POWER invited in to investigate environmental racism in the air quality permitting of a new gas plant in an Environmental Justice neighborhood

At the state level, we continued to work with partners to build support for policy that further the goals of building energy democracy in a green economy. We joined the work with allies to move RGGI forward in our state, bringing equity concerns into the rule-making and the investment side of RGGI. We partnered on the PA Climate Equity table in developing shared state-wide goals which include creating an Office of Just Transition, working on housing efficiency and moving environmental legislation forward. We partnered on the Thriving PA Green New Deal table to start creating a visionary climate justice platform for the state's movement building and upcoming elections.

As we move into 2022, all of POWER's Climate Justice and Jobs campaigns are focused on supporting our base in co-creating pathways towards racial and economic justice on a livable planet.

Economic Dignity

POWER continued in 2021 to build public support for repeal of Pennsylvania’s state preemption of local minimum wage standards. Working with core project partners Pittsburgh UNITED, PowerSwitch Action, and Bellevue Strategies we have identified nearly 70 cosponsors in support of preemption repeal legislation in the Pennsylvania state House. Weekly coalition meetings, early-stage education efforts with lawmakers, and public education efforts around what preemption is and the impacts of preemption repeal for our communities, have been key to this work.

An MLK Day press conference and public roundtable discussion on preemption kicked off our year-long effort to boost visibility and increase community support around this issue and why it matters to our communities. The rest of the year was filled with webinars about the raise the wage struggle. Webinars have included speakers like Colorado State Senator Dominick Moreno, who helped pass their state’s preemption repeal legislation in 2019. Our April 13 webinar presented the findings of POWER partner PowerSwitch Action on corporate interference in preemption repeal efforts. Our programming wrapped up in September with another press conference, as we headed into election season. By de-mystifying preemption laws and the processes that lead to tangible policy change, POWER and our partners have educated members of the public about what is at stake, resulting in active civic engagement from residents in the form of outreach to elected officials and increased support from lawmakers. 

In addition to our preemption work, our team formed a new affordable housing committee to conduct a listening campaign and identify partners already working to increase the number of affordable housing units in Philadelphia. In 2022, we look forward to convening a citywide coalition or join an existing one, to organize residents and work with elected officials to create housing policy that benefits all Philadelphians.

We partnered with the grassroots Philadelphia Public Banking Coalition to promote the establishment of a public bank in Philadelphia. After securing a champion in Councilmember Derek Green in 2020, the coalition worked in close partnership to draft and refine the bill throughout 2021. Organizing and community engagement included an intense social media campaign that helped to get 12 council sponsors leading to approval of Bill 210956 in January 2021. The coalition launched and hosted 12 monthly Facebook Live public events with Councilmember Green, Financing Philadelphia’s Future, a very successful town hall

in September, and a three-hour Visioning Summit featuring national experts and

representatives from three other cities pursuing public banking legislation.  All of this culminated in an updated bill receiving unanimous approval from the City of Philadelphia Finance committee in December 2021, after a long day of passionate testimony from organizers, advocates, and experts. We anxiously await a full council vote where we hope to announce Philly as the first U.S. city to pass this major milestone in reclaiming city wealth from wall street to support the city’s people and neighborhoods.

Civic Engagement

As in years past, POWER trained and employed community advocates in 2021 to educate and engage potential voters in their own communities. Our advocates reached out to nearly 300,000 voters and engaged more than  20,000 individuals in conversations about the importance of local elections, ballot initiatives, and the issues that matter most to them. Our team also worked closely with POWER campaign staff throughout the year to emphasize how ongoing civic engagement strengthens our collective power around all of our campaign issues.

In May, our Black Bikers Vote event energized both clergy and community around voter registrations. POWER partnered with six congregations and 10 local Black motorcycle clubs to draw attention to the need for universal voter registration, and to help eligible voters complete or check their registration status. 

September and October brought more voter registration events, including a Voter Registration Drive in Philadelphia on October 1st, and a last chance voter registration community pop-up on October 16th in Carlisle at Memorial Park. Our team was on hand to register voters, answer questions about the voting process, and provide information on voting rights to the public. We registered more than 500 new voters and encouraged many more to get out to the polls.

As we head into 2022 our focus will be on redistricting and midterm elections, and we’ll continue to educate and engage new and already-registered voters to protect our democracy, our communities, and our planet.