ACTION NC

Civil rights:our civil rights organizing work falls into several broad categories- criminal justice reform and police accountability, immigrant rights, and racial and gender equity. On criminal justice issues, we worked with community partners and city leaders on funding and implementing violence interruption and crisis intervention programs as well as programs for addressing community violence through established grassroots groups already working in high-crime areas. Our immigrant rights organizing included support for a deportation defense project launched in 2020 to boost legal representation in the local immigration court. While not immigration work per se, many of our immigrant leaders also participated in a campaign to win self-determination for puerto rico, and to protect islanders' pensions from demands made by the fiscal oversight management board for excessive and unjust debt repayment. Our racial and gender equity initiative organized monthly meetings with women across the state on healthcare access and black maternal health issues, criminal justice reform, covid prevention and addressing inequities in our state's response to the crisis. We continued to build rage cohorts in north carolina counties as part of our drive to expand organizing capacity and advocacy in underserved, high-poverty rural areas.

Social safety net:healthcare access remains a major focus of our grassroots organizing work, with our priority issues being medicaid expansion, lowering prescription drug costs, and expanding the reach of the affordable care act. We are active with coalition partners in statewide work on medicaid expansion, and with national partners on lowering drug costs and in making the temporary healthcare provisions of the american rescue plan more permanent by including them in a reconciliation bill in congress. We also continue to lead on black maternal health legislation here in north carolina, and to promote reproductive justice at the state and federal level. We have also run a 15-person covid education canvass crew in mecklenburg county starting last may 2021, and an eastern north carolina covid education project with three coalition partners that cover much of the northeastern and southeastern portions of the state. We have encouraged vaccination participation, and organized a number of events where vaccines and other mutual aid like food distribution is available.