Ohio Partner Organizations
Meet Flip the Vote’s Ohio Partners
The Freedom Black Led Organizing Collaborative (The Freedom BLOC) builds Black political power in Ohio and equips the Black community with capacity-building tools in civic education, civic engagement, campaign management, and leadership development. Their work ignites and fosters greater electoral turnout in Cleveland and Columbus, as well as smaller urban centers in Northeast Ohio – Youngstown, Toledo and Akron. The Freedom BLOC is a vehicle for collective Black political expression, educating the electorate and the broader community on issues impacting their lives, and mobilizing them to turn out to vote on issues and candidates that support and enforce equitable policies for Black Ohioans.
Rural Organizing.Org (RO) is working to build a rural America that is empowered, thriving, and equitable. RO supports rural organizing, messaging, policy, and communications capacity using state-of-the-art rural opinion and movement research, focusing its efforts on increasing wages, decreasing daily expenses, and improving the quality of life for millions of people across rural America. RO helps trusted messengers develop relationships in local rural communities that have been left out of traditional campaign politics. RO is a national organization with a very strong state-based grassroots program in Ohio. One of their taglines is “boldly progressive, proudly rural.”
Red Wine & Blue (RWB) harnesses the power of suburban women from diverse socioeconomic, racial, and cultural backgrounds, providing them with resources to organize in their communities and beyond. Founded in Ohio, RWB focuses on engaging women who have not been politically active in the past and supports them to higher levels of political involvement around relevant issues, including reproductive rights.
Why Ohio is Crucial in 2023 and 2024
There is a chance in November 2023 to ensure reproductive freedom in Ohio, through the “Ohio Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including Abortion Initiative.” The initiative would amend the Ohio Constitution to protect the right to make and carry out one’s own decisions about abortion, contraception, fertility treatment, and more.
Building on the resounding August 8 victory rejecting Republicans’ attempt to thwart abortion rights, an intensive get-out-the-vote effort is now underway to support the reproductive freedom initiative. Voters whom our partner groups engage in 2023 are likely to remain engaged for crucial elections in 2024 and beyond.
In 2024, Ohio’s Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown faces a tight race for reelection in a red state, and his seat is essential for Democrats to hold the U.S. Senate.
Three U.S. House seats, currently held by Democrats Greg Landsman (CD-1), Marcy Kaptur (CD-9), and Emilia Sykes (CD-13) are expected to be very competitive and are must-holds for Democrats to be able to flip the U.S. House in 2024.
Ohio has enacted draconian voter suppression laws, resulting in thousands of people purged from the voter rolls for not voting regularly. A law passed this year limits acceptable IDs, shortens voting timelines, and restricts curbside voting and drop boxes, which makes it even more important that grassroots groups provide timely and accurate information to voters about registration and voting timelines and rules.
What Flip the Vote’s support means for 2023 and 2024:
Republicans currently control both the legislature and the executive branch in Ohio, but Republicans’ denial of reproductive rights is unpopular. This moment presents a real opportunity for our partner groups to reach out to people who haven’t been very involved before and who don’t think of themselves as political. As RWB puts it, “Not Political? No Problem!” All of our partner groups are on the ground right now, educating potential voters about how political issues – and the 2023 and 2024 elections, in particular – have a palpable impact on their everyday lives.
Flip the Vote has chosen to work with Freedom BLOC, RO, and RWB because of their individual strength as organizations, and because together they have the power to use relational organizing to activate three complementary and potentially game-changing demographics in Ohio: Black communities organized by The Freedom BLOC; rural voters organized by Rural Organizing.Org; and suburban women organized by Red Wine & Blue. These three organizations also collectively cover geographies that are essential for holding Sherrod Brown’s Senate seat and three key U.S. House seats (CD-1, CD-9, CD-13) in 2024.
Support from Flip the Vote now enables each of the groups to reach broadly and deeply, making real, one-on-one connections with people in their communities to educate them about the stakes of upcoming elections, to enlist them in taking action, and to provide a political home where they can stay involved for the long term.
We have to connect voting to people's everyday lives. . . People are getting evicted from their homes. People are losing their jobs. The last thing they think about is voting. The way we talk about voting — we talk about voting for the president, which is so detached from people’s everyday lives. We have to begin local education campaigns around voting and tie voting to people’s everyday way of being.
— Rev Ray Greene Jr. Executive Director of The Freedom BLOC