OHIO CITIZEN ACTION

Our goals are to break down complex issues, effectively communicate them to Ohioans and provide people with training and opportunity to exercise their rights as citizens and advocate for themselves.

Our strategies include: deploying professional, full-time organizers to reach people both door-to-door and by phone with information on our campaigns and opportunities to help; digital organizing; lobbying in the legislature and at regulatory agencies and preparing regular citizens also to do so; working in coalition with other groups to develop strategy to accomplish common goals.

We've been blessed with massive human capital. Our top leaders not only have decades of non-profit administration and organizing experience, but have all come from field or phone canvass backgrounds. We understand the power of canvassing to make change, because we've all done it. That long history of organizing in Ohio has also led to development of relationships with other consumer and environmental leaders, both statewide and nationally. These relationships form the basis of our successful coalition work that has allowed us to claim victory on 75% of campaigns undertaken in the last 10 years.

Though we've worked on dozens of different issues since 1975, our recent work has been about energy, partly because it encompasses both our environmental and consumer focuses. In 1999, when the Ohio legislature voted to de-regulate the electricity market, we saw a threat to consumers and worked to insert language into the deregulation bill that would allow consumers to choose their provider in the new, competitive market. Since then, we've leveraged customer choice to not only save consumers millions of dollars, but also to guide aggregated communities to request 100% renewable energy from their providers. In the last two decades as well, we've:
* won a lawsuit against American Electric Power, requiring them to spend $4 billion on pollution reduction at its coal-fired power plants, blocked a 1,000 MW coal fired power plant from being built in Meigs county, the fifth such plant in a 12 mile radius; * worked with state and national allies to close 22 of Ohio's oldest, dirtiest coal boilers; * defeated coal plant bailout proposals at the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and Federa Energy Regulatory Commission; * and stopping fixed rate increases proposed by AEP and Duke that would have charged customers $120 and $192 more per year respectively, regardless of usage.