SouthWest Organizing Project

For 40 years, SouthWest Organizing Project’s (SWOP) role in social movements and community organizing has shifted and adapted to the political climate and needs of our communities. We transform alongside our members and partners and prepare for the next strategic moment. As the world changes faster than ever, so does our approach.

SWOP’s mission is to “empower disenfranchised communities in the Southwest United States to realize racial and gender equality and social and economic justice.”

Today, we build power alongside our members, partners, and allies in three main areas:

• Economic Power
• Political Power
• Cultural Power

To achieve our focus, we have strategically created:

• SWOP as an organizing hub for our members, partners and allies
• SWOP as a cutting edge community engagement lab that invests in savvy cultural strategies and infrastructure
• SWOP as a home-based community and movement building institution

We uplift community voices by leveraging strategic partnerships, policies, and systems changes that represent the needs and values of children, families, and our communities.

We develop youth organizers from the barrio to build a thriving community that has economic security, food access and land sovereignty, quality education, respect for culture, and a commitment to equity.

Our cutting edge techniques ensure we are always where the community is now and where they’re going next. We design our engagement to reach people who have been deprived of their voice. True change is achieved when communities identify problems and solutions, and have the knowledge and support to act on them. To SWOP, this means creating intergenerational spaces for in-depth conversations of structural racism and the root causes of inequity, in addition to designing policy solutions by first acknowledging our shared racist, colonial past.

Communications strategies have dramatically shifted over the last decade. From analog to digital. From legacy to social. From linear to networked. But one thing will always remain constant. Social movements must use organizing and communications strategies to forge a shared language and a vision with communities.

At SWOP, we were the first to hire a communications organizer in the US for an organization like ours in the late 90’s, and focused on earned media and experimentation with blogs and the Internet. In the late 2000’s, we built on that work by creating our own content and experimented with social media. Today, we take all we’ve learned to focus on narrative and cultural power to create sustainable change.

Over the last 2 years, we created ArribaNM to work with organizers, designers, artists and technologists to build immersive environments and mobile engagement tools to inspire community imagination and civic engagement. This experiment has informed our communications strategies.

In the next three years SWOP will reach our 40th anniversary, a major milestone as we advance the mission crafted and pursued by our membership over these past four decades. While our current core program areas continue to be environmental justice, youth rights, feminisms, and food justice, these exist to advance our broader work of leadership development, capacity building, and power building to advance equity and sovereignty in low income communities of color.
SWOP's work is built on a foundation of community organizing and mobilization, which means that affected people will continue to identify problems, solutions, and strategies in conjunction with our organizers. Success to us looks like increased community involvement and control over the decision making that affects them. In the next few years this will include advancements in equity for students through policy changes at the district and statewide levels. These issues, like culturally relevant coursework and family engagement, will be advanced through the coalitions we've built over several years and will reflect the Student Bill of Rights that was developed by SWOP youth.

Similarly, our work to make the economy fully equitable will be based in the lived experiences and voices of working families. SWOP and our membership intend to take advantage of progressive leadership changes in the state, including the Governor's administration and the Mayor's administration in Albuquerque. We have a track record of mobilizing community to hold corporations accountable, and to prevent poor policy decisions. This area of work is a consistent partner with our environmental justice work area, as we combine defensive and visionary campaigns to create a more healthy environment for New Mexicans.

Another indicator of success to SWOP is the impact of leadership development practices. Dozens of former SWOP interns now serve in various roles around the state, in government, nonprofit, and private sectors. Many former youth members now lead their own campaigns, and contribute to SWOP every year. New Mexico will rise when organizers of color are well represented in decision making positions at large organizations and national campaigns, as well as community-based issue campaigns. This is a longtime focus of SWOP, and informs our work to this day. We will place homegrown youth and organizers where they can impact a number of campaigns, including the education reforms that will result from the PED lawsuit led by NM Center on Law and Poverty and.
SWOP fuses the efforts of local organizers with broad policy initiatives to have impact across the state's organizing spectrum. SWOP elevates community voice to improve campaigns of all sizes, from the hyperlocal to the global. We pursue victories in our organizing not only to create grassroots change, but also to build the vehicle that carries forward our long-term strategy to unify work across communities.