Novel strategies employed in the South promise to transform the voting landscape, and America with it.
For the People
Can you imagine an America in which everyone votes?
The record voter turnouts expected for 2024 could be off the charts if strategies employed in the South for 2020 go national. In just two years, Nia Weeks and Damien D. Smith built a coalition that successfully engaged 500K voters, nearly doubling voter turnout in Louisiana. With their integrative strategies at the forefront of national civic engagement efforts over the next sixteen months–and beyond–we could see an end to historically low voter turnout, accelerating the journey to an America that truly is for the people.
Urgent Need for New Strategies
If the last seven years have taught us anything, it’s how fragile America’s democracy is. In what felt like moments, we watched civil liberties that we took for granted reversed right before our eyes. Those behind the scenes know better how long it takes for this sort of sociopolitical regression to take place. Civic strategists and politicians plan these outcomes decades in advance, fighting for them tooth and nail until they are won. Even if it takes 248 years.
Since the Declaration of Independence rooted America’s identity in the idea that “all men are created equal”, delivering on this implied promise became the work of everyone whose identity was not represented on the founding “team”. In the legacy of mobilization for expanded voting rights, Detangled, Weeks and Smith’s platform for civic engagement, provides a novel blueprint for making America equitable again.
Democracy is understood to be a government of the people, for the people, by the people. How can that reality be made manifest in a country where nearly 40% of the voting age population is not involved in the electoral process? A 62.8% voter turnout can not possibly deliver a government representative of all Americans.
The regression of rights we’ve seen over the last several years is due to a toxic cocktail combining limited civic intelligence among those desirous of equality with heightened engagement of those who are not. Mass engagement of low propensity voters, with thoughtful, creative civic education strategies, could change the voting landscape permanently.
The New Way
Getting low-propensity voters to the polls has been a low priority for most politicians. Weeks and Smith recognize that this could be a secret key for making America more democratic in 2024, and beyond, increasing the success of candidates truly driven by a commitment to transformative service.
Detangled offers this possible future as a strategic mobilization platform specializing in effective mass engagement. Through a combination of social events, film screenings, university forums and much more, they were able to enter the hearts and minds of Americans of all ages, embedding a civic intelligence that galvanized voters for mass civic participation. This is social change at scale.
The Detangled philosophy that everyone’s voice deserves to be heard, and that democracy can truly make that happen, is evident in their teachings from Continuing Legal Education packages to Facebook live shows to youth programming. They have mastered the art of cultivating community around shared goals, recognizing that all humans seek authentic connection and representation through stories that reflect their experiences and hopes.
The company was founded by Nia Weeks and Damien D. Smith as a result of their massive success mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Louisiana citizens for systemic change.
Inspired by a 2018 incident in which a student was removed from a Louisiana school due to her hair style, the collaborative that would become Detangled crafted a plan to end such discrimination. For three years, Weeks’ Citizen SHE (fiscally sponsored 501(c)3) and Citizen SHE United (501(c)4) partnered with Smith’s 4910 Rosalie Productions to develop a novel approach for maximizing civic engagement at scale.
Weeks is a civic strategist and attorney who has led universities, government agencies and private entities in strategic campaign development for policy change and civic engagement. Smith is an award-winning filmmaker using strategic storytelling to inspire and provoke social change at scale, working with brands such as MAC and Estee Lauder to cultivate connections designed to deliver equity.
How they Made it Happen
The integrated campaign strategy leading to these historic wins involved a multi-pronged storytelling framework keyed on deep listening. Their implementation would include a strategic application of informative social media lives, docuseries, panels, posts, debate watch parties, debates, weekly facebook live shows, law review articles and a documentary.
Through their multi-pronged strategy and ingenious coalition building, Detangled was able to activate a diverse cross section of 500K Black women across Louisiana, mobilizing voters to drive a collective policy agenda. For the 2020 election, they increased voter turnout from 157K to 270K among Black women, a record 70% increase.
Their work was funded by the Packard Foundation, Ms. Foundation, Southern Poverty Law Center – Voice Your Vote Fund, the Kellogg Foundation, Facebook, the Kaplan Fund, the JLH Fund, Greater New Orleans Foundation and various individual donors across the world.
The reach and visibility of their Road to 300K campaign for voter engagement drove the successful passage of Rep. Candace Newell’s CROWN Act-inspired bill immediately after the 2020 election. This historic human rights bill, passed first in California, bans discrimination based on “skin color, facial characteristics, hair texture, natural hairstyles and protective hairstyles.”
The legislators who voted to approve the bill were moved by Detangled’s film, Free to be Free, through which Louisiana women and girls voiced the nuance and trauma of the policing of Black hair. Detangled’s massive campaign to promote this bill demonstrated the strategic acumen through which they uplifted the sensitivity of Black hair to address human rights issues and to get hundreds of thousands of citizens more civically engaged.
Toward 2024
Building on their success in the South, Detangled continues to collaborate with communities and organizations across the world seeking to mobilize for mass action in pursuit of common goals. From NOLA to Ghana, they’ve cultivated public and private partnerships to deliver equitable futures to the most marginalized through integrative re-education and social connection at scale.
Their unique intersection of expertise, particularly their ability to use film to mobilize citizens and activate legislators, creates a blue ocean in which mass mobilization of low propensity voters becomes incredibly accessible.
Candidates, campaign development institutions and organizations seeking to drive civic participation on a massive scale have a tremendous opportunity to benefit from Detangled’s custom tactics. In “giving a heartbeat to a piece of paper”, Detangled’s approach to civic engagement is thoroughly visionary, offering the possibility of a fully engaged American populace come 2024.
With the right partnerships, this novel framework could drive a major movement to help America live up to its promise of a truly democratic government, engaging citizens not just on their voting rights, but also on their power to hold elected officials accountable.
In order to deliver a government of the people, for the people, by the people, the vast majority of Americans must understand how their government works, what their rights are and how to enforce the delivery of their rights. Deeply thoughtful, highly effective civic engagement strategies are critical for making this happen. In order to save America come 2024, we will need to see such strategies applied at the highest levels and in the deepest trenches, connecting the average citizen to their governing structure in ways that fortify the connections and protections articulated by the founding fathers.
With forty-plus years of combined experience delivering communities access to reparative justice, Nia Weeks and Damien D. Smith have written a new chapter in the civic engagement gamebook. Their massive success with transformative legislation and voter turnout inspires new hope for what is possible in our planet’s most venerated democracy. With Detangled’s framework applied across the nation, there is no doubt that America will finally live up to her greatest potential.
