Stacey Abrams, the New Georgia Project, and Nse Ufot

Stacey Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2014 with one explicit base-building goal: register hundreds of thousands of unregistered voters of color in Georgia. Nse Ufot led the organization's growth into a powerhouse.

Abrams' insight was that there were close to 800,000 unregistered voters of color in Georgia in 2013, the vast majority of whom would lean Democratic if registered and turned out — and that the Democratic Party of Georgia was not going to do the work. So she built an organization to do it.

The New Georgia Project's method was base-building at scale: doors knocked, conversations had, applications collected, follow-up done. By 2018 the organization had registered hundreds of thousands of new voters. By 2020 the broader Georgia ecosystem — NGP, Fair Fight, Black Voters Matter, ProGeorgia, AAAJ-Atlanta, GALEO, and dozens of smaller groups — flipped the state in the presidential race and won both Senate runoffs in January 2021.

Nse Ufot, CEO of New Georgia Project through that period (2014-2022), built the organization into a year-round operation with deep leadership development. Her insistence that NGP was a 'Black-led' (not just Black-serving) organization, with Black women in the central strategic and operational roles, is a base-building lesson in its own right: who is at the table determines whose interests get represented.

Abrams' 2018 gubernatorial run, narrowly lost amid documented voter suppression, became the proof of concept for Fair Fight. The base built across all of these organizations is the same base — many of the same households, the same leaders, the same churches — being moved across the ladder by different organizations playing complementary roles.