For twenty-five years I have watched the same thing happen in this city every cycle.
The churches organize. The fraternities organize. The sororities organize. Block clubs, reentry organizations, neighborhood groups nobody writes a press release about — all of them out there. Registering voters. Knocking doors. Working phones. Feeding people. Driving people.
And almost none of them knowing what the group across town already had covered.
That is not a shortage of effort. Cleveland has never been short on effort. That is a coordination problem, and coordination is not some small administrative detail. Coordination is the whole difference between a hundred people working and a hundred people working together. One of those moves a city. The other one wears good people out and hands us the same result in November.
So we put everybody in one room. realpower.tv
What happened in that room
Just under a hundred people came out to Mt. Sinai Baptist Church on Woodland — Rev. C. J. Matthews’ house — for the first Get Out The Vote Breakfast. Concerned citizens. Organization leaders. People who came alone, and people who brought their whole team.
Council President Blaine A. Griffin spoke. State Representative Terrence Upchurch MC’d and kept the room honest about what is at stake this year.
Marsha A. Mockabee, President and CEO of the Urban League of Greater Cleveland, spoke. William Tarter, Jr., President of the Cleveland Branch NAACP, spoke. Two of the oldest civil rights institutions in this city, at the same table, on the same morning. That does not happen by accident, and it does not happen often enough.
Then Congresswoman Shontel Brown walked in. Nobody announced her. She was not on a program. She came in, welcomed the room, and reminded everybody what kind of year this is. The energy in there changed. You could feel it move.
But the speeches were not the part that mattered.
We went around that room, and every organization said out loud what they are actually doing. Who they are registering. Which wards they are working. Where they are knocking. What they have covered — and, more importantly, what they don’t.
That is the first time I have seen that in this city. Not a rally. Not a photo op. An inventory. People eating breakfast and telling the truth about their capacity.
You cannot build a turnout operation on enthusiasm. You build it on knowing exactly where the gaps are while there is still time to close them. realpower.tv
Then the room set a date
Here is what I did not expect, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.
Before anybody left, the whole room committed to the same thing.
October 6. The first day of early voting in Ohio. Every group in that room — organizations and individuals both — committed to bringing at least twenty-five to fifty people with them to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that day.
Do that math across a room that size, and you understand why it matters.
Day one of early voting is not a symbolic date. It is the day the county starts counting, the day the press writes its first turnout story, and the day everybody watching Cuyahoga County decides what kind of year this is going to be.
Numbers on October 6 set the narrative for the entire month behind it. People who plan to vote and people who are seen voting do two different jobs, and we need both.
Nobody had to be talked into it. It came out of the room on its own, which is how you know it is real. Every group also committed to keep meeting and keep comparing notes — not one breakfast, not one push, but a standing table.
That is what a coordinated operation actually looks like. Not a slogan. A date, a place, and a number everybody signed onto. realpower.tv
What we are building behind it
I got up and laid out what comes next, because a breakfast that ends in applause is just a breakfast.
A canvass program. Open to the organizations in that room. If your group is already knocking doors, there is a structure to plug into now instead of running parallel to everybody else.
Paid phone banking. Going forward, these breakfasts do not end when the plates are cleared. We eat, we hear from the speakers, and then we break into phone banking — and we are paying people for that work, at twenty dollars an hour. This labor has value. We are going to treat it that way.
Phone bank stations across the city and the county. Not one location downtown. Sites on the East Side and out into Cuyahoga County, so people can work from where they already are, with their own people.
Let me be plain about why that structure matters.
Every cycle, somebody with money decides Black Cleveland turnout is a line item. They fly in a vendor, rent a room, run a program for six weeks, and leave. The relationships walk out the door with them. The infrastructure never stays.
We are building the opposite. Local organizations, local people, paid for their work, in a structure that still exists in December. That is not a campaign. That is infrastructure — and infrastructure is the only thing that compounds. realpower.tv
Breakfast #2 — Saturday, September 19
Saturday, September 19 · 10:00 AM – 12:00 Noon, Mt. Sinai Baptist Church, 7510 Woodland Avenue, Cleveland
Free breakfast. Special guests. Community mobilization.
RSVP at realpower.tv — the form is right on the front page.
Three things before you come.
Bring somebody. Do not come alone. This table gets wider every time we set it. If the first one was worth your Saturday, put somebody else in a chair.
Everybody is welcome. I have heard the question, so let me answer it plainly: this is not a men’s thing. It never was. Women, men, young people, elders — if you care who shows up at the polls in this county, there is a seat with your name on it.
We want organizations. Fraternities. Sororities. Churches. Block clubs. Nonprofits. Business associations. Reentry groups. Youth programs. If your organization touches people who vote — or people who should be voting and are not — we want you at this table.
And to be as clear about what this is: no candidate, no party, no endorsement. This is about turnout and nothing else. Every organization that moves people to the polls has a seat here regardless of who they like. realpower.tv
Why I wrote this down
Because rooms like that one disappear if nobody records them.
We had just under a hundred people, two civil rights institutions, a council president, a state representative, a member of Congress, and a room full of groups that had never once compared notes with each other. Then everybody went home — carrying the same date.
The question that decides whether that morning mattered is whether the second room is bigger than the first, and whether October 6 looks like what we said it would.
September 19. Ten o’clock. Woodland Avenue. RSVP at realpower.tv, and bring somebody with you.
I break down how power actually moves in Cleveland — who is deciding, who is getting decided about, and what it means before it hits the news. If that is useful to you, subscribe. The work continues here.