We keep funding ads. The organizing that actually moves people is base building. Here's how to start.

Personal capacity post. My personal opinions, not Common Cause Georgia's.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation evaluated their $36 million Local Base Building initiative across 35 states. The finding was unambiguous: base building — the slow, relational work of bringing community members into collective action — is what drives durable policy and systems change in BIPOC communities (Center for Evaluation Innovation, 2025).

The pandemic made it worse. Organizing went episodic. Relationships went surface-level. The infrastructure that lets a coalition turn a problem into a winnable strategy got thinner.

Then Callais v. Landry came down in April 2026 and re-drew the legal terrain under our feet (Supreme Court opinion).

We need basebuilding infrastructure now. And we need it in the South, where every philanthropic dollar per person between 2011 and 2015 was 56 cents per person, and only 30 cents per person for structural change work (Philanthropy Network, 2019).

We don't get to wait for the funder strategy to update.

That's why we're building this course.

Digital Organizing for Town Halls: A Step-by-Step Guide. Six 20-minute modules. The case study is Georgia redistricting and the post-Callais landscape. Each module ends with a working template you can use the same week.

Module 1 — theory of change. Why a town hall? What outcome are you actually trying to win? Module 2 — eight weeks of planning, walked backward from the event date. Module 3 — recruiting county captains. The job, the map, the ask, the pipeline. Module 4 — the legislator accountability scorecard. What goes on it. How to research it. How to present it. Module 5 — day-of execution. Run of show. Facilitation. Capturing commitments on camera. Module 6 — the 48-hour follow-through. Where most town halls quietly fail.

The course is free.

It's free because the organizations that need it most — small county coalitions in Georgia, base-building groups in the rural South, naturalization circles in Gwinnett — cannot pay for a $1,500 town hall consultant.

If you take the course and run a town hall, the way to keep it free for the next coalition is to take one of our paid courses, or donate. Either subsidizes the catalog.

I'm building this course now. Drop your email at DatosLab and you'll be the first to know when it launches.

Track the course as it builds