Rural Organizing in a Divided Land

For 25 years, Marcy Westerling has been a leader in organizing rural communities in the Pacific Northwest to respond to violence, bigotry, and injustice. For her Open Society Fellowship project, Westerling is mapping progressive infrastructure in rural localities in four American states as a means of identifying potential allies for social change. She is also working on a series of collaborations—including a documentary film, an oral-history project, and a series of workshops—that will record and preserve her work and that of the Rural Organizing Project, which she founded in 1992.

The model of community organizing Westerling helped create is deceptively simple: she and her colleagues would begin by “mapping” and contacting every civic organization in a given area, identifying potential allies and resources in regions where progressive groups were rare.  They would then engage entire communities in a discussion about democratic values, and in this way help local grassroots groups overcome their isolation, pool resources, and acquire skills to achieve lasting social change.

An alumna of Smith College, Westerling was selected by the Ford Foundation  in 2003 to receive a Leadership for a Changing World award.

Bill Vandenberg is the program director of the Open Society Foundations Democracy and Power Fund, a social change grantmaking program housed within U.S. Programs.

Prior to joining the Foundations, Vandenberg lived in Denver for 17 years, where he was the executive director for the Colorado Progressive Coalition and Colorado Progressive Action, the statewide, multiracial nonprofits that he cofounded (in 1996 and 2002 respectively).  Vandenberg led the coalition's work to advance racial and economic justice, with highlights including long-time leadership in the state's pro-affirmative action coalition, stewardship of the organization's immigrant justice and juvenile justice system reform organizing, and lobbying successfully to pass one of the nation's strongest anti-racial profiling laws.

He also led campaigns to raise Colorado's minimum wage in 2006; build community support for a successful referendum fight to roll back the nation's most restrictive and anti-government public investment law; and build the largest non-partisan voter mobilization drive in Colorado history, recognized as one of the nation's top five community-based voter programs.

Vandenberg is a graduate of Boston College and was a 2007-2008 fellow in the Rockwood Leadership Program's yearlong national fellowship for transformative leadership in the nonprofit sector.  In addition to directing the Democracy and Power Fund, he has been convenor for OSI's Seize the Day special initiative and serves on the board of the General Service Foundation; on the steering committee for the Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing; and beginning in 2010, on the steering committee for the Funders' Committee on Civic Participation.