Community Empowerment

Neighbor to Neighbor

Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts is a progressive organization of working class, multi-racial, and multi-ethnic people working together to build political and economic power to improve the quality of lives in our communities. As members, we lead the change ourselves through education & training, issue & electoral organizing, policy advocacy, alliance building, community-controlled economic development, and holding decision-makers accountable.

We seek to create a powerful movement for economic and social justice that builds a participatory and responsive democracy to transform people’s lives and the political and economic structures that impact them. This movement must be led by working class women and people of color people representing all different racial and ethnic backgrounds in the region.

History

Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts grew out of Neighbor to Neighbor, a national organization which focused on organizing in Central America in the 1980s, and around health care reform in the early 1990s. In the mid-1990s,N2N-MA re-evaluated our mission to focus on building power in low-income communities through an economic justice agenda. We formed the Working Family Agenda Coalition and are working to build a progressive majority in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

2010

• Passed Criminal Record (CORI) Reform into law. With this historic civil rights victory, Massachusetts became only the second state in the nation to prohibit both public and private employers from asking about a person’s criminal history on an initial job application.
• Protected N2N-MA budget priorities despite a massive budget gap, including preventing cuts to the Mass Rental Voucher Program (MRVP).
• Helped to defeat Ballot Questions 2 and 3, which would have repealed the state’s primary affordable housing law (Chapter 40B) and slashed the state sales tax from 6.25% to 3%, respectively.

2009

• Working with our allies, won adoption of a $1.4 billion state plan that will cut greenhouse gas emissions, create high quality jobs in the state’s highest-unemployment communities, and provide up-front financing for low-income families to retrofit their homes for energy efficiency.
• Passed comprehensive criminal justice reform legislation through the State Senate by a vote of 26 to 12.
• Passed a city ordinance in Worcester limiting the use of criminal offender record information (CORIs) in hiring for the city and its vendors.
• Protected our budget priorities, MassHealth dental and eyeglass benefits, immigrant health care access, and the Mass Rental Voucher Program, from being cut from the state budget, despite a massive budget gap and major cuts to many programs.