Mainstreet Moms (theMMOB.org) Organize or Bust is a non-partisan 501c(3) committed to securing a more viable future for our children through the relentless education, engagement, bite-size action, and leadership of moms & honorary moms everywhere.
Moms have to work on the future because our kids will be there. And times like these call for more of us to be participating & leading, but traditional volunteerism doesn’t always fit into the nooks and crannies of our busy days. That’s why MMOB works to serve it up. We know how to pull a good time out of chaos, we aim for impact, and we are strictly guilt-free. Below is a sampler showing what MMOB works on to build citizen action campaigns:
Prop 16 Education & Outreach
2008 Colorado, Missouri & California Voter Registration Letter-writing
2006 Missouri Votes! GOTV is MMOB’s evaluation of our peer-to-peer letter-writing as a get-out-the-vote tool, run under GetOutTheVote author and Yale Professor Alan Gerber, side-by-side with the evaluation efforts of a like-minded organization, Women’s Voices, Women Vote. In 2004, MMOB members wrote over 500,000 personal letters with voter registration forms and absentee voting information to unregistered mothers.
Through MMOB’s Missouri Votes! test project:
- 13,000 undervoting single women in Missouri received voting info, resources & personal encouragement
- 5 sister “MMOBlets” formed around letterwriting work parties, 3 in new areas
Evaluation results will inform voter outreach campaigns for MMOB in 2008
PollworkersforDemocracy.org (P4D) is a citizen action project initiated by MMOB and launched in coalition with VoteTrustUSA & Working Assets. MMOB’s P4D trained a new wave of concerned pollworkers to help run (and report on) their own elections, and
- Achieved its goal of 5000 participants around the country committed to working the polls in the midterms
- Piloted an organizing structure of leaders at the state and county levels in 17 states
- Generated 100s of detailed incident reports used to produce the 2006 E-voting Report available on the P4D site
- Leveraged county infrastructure to hire, pay and manage on-the-ground volunteers nationally
- Provided detailed training and outreach through teleconferences, MP3s & online training kits
- 74% of participants made contact with their county elections official
- …with 94% of participants enthusiastically pledged to work again and again in future elections!
LeaveMyChildAlone.org (LMCA) is our coalition campaign against No Child Left Behind’s military recruitment requirement, with an emphasis on family privacy to mainstream the issue. LMCA –
- Reached millions of families with information on how to “opt out” of high school military lists
- Assisted 70,000 families taking action to improve federal policy around “opt out”
- Enabled 40,000 students to actually “opt out” of their high school’s military recruitment lists
- Won support from the NEA, PTA, CTA, and WILL – a network of 400 women legislators
- Got “opt out” legislation introduced in 4 states, and successfully through Congress in California
- Changed school policy and practice in at least one hundred school districts
- Successfully encouraged participants to run for – and win – school board seats
Help America Vote….ON PAPER (HAVOP) is a hybrid campaign of film, litigation & letter-writing in coalition with key partners, to help concerned voters push at the county level nationwide against the use of costly and failing touchscreen DREs, or Direct Record Electronic voting machines –
- MMOB instigated litigation with VoterAction/Howard Rice against Diebold DREs in bellwether state, CA
- MMOB coordinators assisted legal team organizing plaintiffs, press, funding & letter-writing
- MMOB partered with EON Media to produce the 18-minute HAVOP organizing video (5000+ viewings)
- HAVOP was distributed to on-the-ground organizers, online, at national conferences, and media outreach
- MMOB volunteers worked with VotersUnite to establish national database of county officials
- MMOB ran letter-writing to officials with “Dump DREs” message emphasizing taxpayers accountability
If you would like to support the work that we do, please make a fully tax-deductible donation here.
