VOICES FOR ALABAMAS CHILDREN

Our ultimate vision and purpose encompasses an Alabama where all children are safe, healthy, educated, and economically secure in order to reach their full potential. We work to build strong cross-issue networks that share knowledge, organize constituencies, and engage in high-impact advocacy campaigns for change.

Our strategies to achieve our goals include the following:

1) Decision Maker Education: Run campaigns that continue our education and advocacy to state agencies and use our legislative champions to apply pressure to state agency leaders. Additionally, we engage in relationship building and conducting district visits with budget chairs to educate on the status and opportunity around our campaigns such as Healthy Food Financing and Early Care and Education. Strategies are ongoing in the timeline. District visits take place in October – November 2018 and will incorporate key grasstops who can influence legislative members.

2) Grassroots & Grasstops Engagement: VOICES maintains engagement and support from the Alabama donor community who see our programs as means to a much larger end with regard to community and economic development. Additionally, we contract with grassroots' organizers such as farmers, mayors, grocers, economic development leaders to organize lobby days. As a key part of our community engagement strategy we exhibit and/or present at business led annual conventions. We proactively recruit new grassroots/grasstops supporters to be utilized alongside our current 4,000 plus VOICES CAN grassroots advocates in educating media and key decision makers on strategic asks throughout campaigns. We also host advocacy trainings to build advocates' capacity to engage in campaign work. Lastly, we will continue partnerships with organizations who have been instrumental with generating demand for our programs. 2018 is an election year in Alabama, so we will also plant advocates at candidate forums across the state to pose questions about key VOICES issues as a general engagement and education strategy.

3) Strategic Communications Plan: We will execute the annual organizational strategic communications plan, including: public awareness campaigns including social media, paid social media ads, op-eds, personal story videos; Letters to the Editor, and editorial board visits along with key coalition partners in five targeted media markets in the state of Alabama including Ozark/Dothan, Mobile, Decatur, Birmingham, and Tuscaloosa.