Removing Barriers to Democratic Participation

To ensure that we stay focused on our mission and are creating and executing programming that fills a gap in Kentucky, we have broken down our work into four categories. The first category is: Removing Barriers to Democratic Participation. Below details what we've done since our organization's launch, and outlines where we are going in the next few years. 

Purpose: 

To address lasting ills of disenfranchisement and to lift more voices to lead on ending poverty

Lead Tactic: 

Voter restoration via voter registration and voter education; organizing in tandem and cooperation with groups and volunteers also doing this work

Original Goal: 

Engage 50,000 Kentuckians with a felony in their past by conducting registration drives, coalition building and statewide mobilization

What We've Done:

From Labor Day 2020 through the 2020 election we: 

  • Held 20 phone banks (4+/week)
  • Our regularly scheduled phone banks had:

         --158,612 dials made

         --400+ volunteer shifts completed

  • Held 16 digital organizer trainings
  • Reached out to 237,737 unregistered voters via email
  • Reached out to 3,631 people via peer to peer texting on the voter registration deadline
  • Volunteers and organizers sent 111,101 texts to voters bout making a plan to vote during 17 text banks
  • Held a virtual music fest that reached 34,528 people and got over 6,000 event registrations (Amazon - 12,147 views, YouTube - 17,036 views, LuckStream - 5,345 views)

From Election Day through March 2021 we: 

  • Held 25 more digital organizer trainings to onboard folks who can push out calls to action to their networks (including voter registration)
  • Collaborated on the Voting Rights/Restoration Team
  • Recruited Kentuckians to join our regional voter registration teams 


Where We're going: 

While we will continue our voter restoration work alongside our partners in the coming years, we plan to lean in on voter registration efforts by activating our very large, active, volunteer base across the state using a relational, distributed model.

We will utilize technology like the grassroots organizing app, Reach, in order to train and deploy organizers in their communities to build this program. 

Currently, we have 11,179 people who have taken some sort of action for Hood to the Holler.

This map marks the zip codes of folks who have taken an action for Hood to the Holler. As you can see, they are scattered all across the state and represent every State House district and every State Senate district in Kentucky.