In 2015, Dreama Caldwell had an encounter with the criminal justice system in rural Alamance County, North Carolina, that changed her life. While the charges against her were dubious, she faced a $40,000 bail and months of costly legal wrangling that drained the resources of her working-class family and forced her into taking a plea deal.
Struggling to survive with a criminal conviction, Caldwell went looking for something to help her make sense of the traumatic injustice she had experienced. One day she saw a Facebook ad soliciting poor and low-income people who wanted to talk about their concerns in Alamance County. She met with an organizer named Juan Miranda in a coffee shop and told him about what she had been through.
“What do you want to do about it?” Miranda asked after listening to her story.
Caldwell didn’t know. Miranda told her he worked for a new organization that was looking to grow grassroots power through multiracial movement building. Caldwell eventually joined the group, which called itself Down Home North Carolina. She began her journey in activism by working on a Down Home NC campaign to end cash bail in her county. When angry bail bondsmen started showing up at its events, she began to see the potential of community organizing.
“That was kind of like my understanding of power in that moment, when they showed up pissed off,” Caldwell tells me in an interview. “I was like, oh, this is how you shift the narrative . . . . That was my first entrance into activism and really figuring out there is something you can do.”
Today Caldwell is co-director of Down Home NC.
Down Home NC’s mission is to help build working-class power in small towns and rural areas that have been neglected by the major political parties. It does this primarily in three ways: by endorsing local candidates and working to get them elected, by pressuring elected officials at the local level, and by conducting issue campaigns. The nonprofit uses a decentralized system to maintain its grassroots identity. A staff of about forty people helps oversee a semi-autonomous chapter in each of nine rural counties in the state.
Although Down Home NC focuses on local issues, their get-out-the-vote efforts could have a national impact in a swing state where a small increase in rural Democratic votes could turn the state blue. Beyond that, Down Home NC’s program of helping members become leaders in their community and gain political experience represents an organizing paradigm that could transform the political landscape well into the future, not just in North Carolina, but in other rural Southern states.
“For someone who is not politicized to see changes at a local level, to see a school board flip, to see a city council change, that gives them hope and belief that we can do the same thing on a state or national level,” says Caldwell.
Caldwell’s story highlights the characteristics that make Down Home NC uniquely effective. First, it concentrates on problems that directly affect poor and working families in rural areas. Secondly, community members make the decisions about which problems are most important to them and need to be addressed. Down Home NC uses a process of deep listening to ascertain both their concerns and what they see as the solutions. The third key characteristic of Down Home NC is its bottom-up governance model. Rank-and-file members are encouraged to take leadership roles and are offered training to increase their skills.
Down Home NC is essentially working to build democracy from the ground up. National politics are remote and frustratingly complex, but in small towns the issues are more concrete, and the immediate effects on daily life more palpable. And citizens who bring their concerns to local school boards, town councils, county commissions, and the like often find them open to input from their constituents.
“It is the easiest level of government to co-govern with, to work with elected officials with, to be able to steer the decisions that happen in your community and to say where the money is used,” Caldwell explains. “It’s much easier, because it is local, to be able to go in and sit down and have meetings and to be involved.”
While during the 2024 election cycle it has launched a statewide campaign to defeat Mark Robinson, the extremist Republican running for governor, and endorsed Mo Green’s candidacy for superintendent of public instruction, Down Home NC focuses much of its efforts on supporting its local chapters.
Organizing in the countryside is more difficult than in urban areas. Homes can be spread out, making knocking on doors time-consuming. This is often why the major political parties don’t campaign in rural counties.
“I always tell people, if you are looking to get your steps in, you should definitely canvass with us for a while because these driveways are very long,” jokes Gwen Frisbie-Fulton in an interview.
Courtesy of Down Home North Carolina
Dreama Caldwell (left) is the co-director of Down Home North Carolina.
As the senior narrative strategist at Down Home NC, Frisbie-Fulton has done her share of canvassing. Her friendly, engaging personality and Southern working-class roots have equipped her well for the kind of organizing the group does. “Something . . . I think is huge about rural North Carolina is it’s so relational, and that might be really different than organizing in a big city,” she says.
In other words, people in small towns know each other. That county commissioner you’re trying to influence may have children that go to school with your children. You may attend the same church. In rural politics, personal persuasion may often be a more effective tactic than disruptive protests.
That approach has brought some success, with Down Home NC members and their endorsed candidates elected to several local offices and even the state legislature. Once candidates are in office, Down Home NC leverages its power and influence by constantly monitoring their decisions, a technique the group calls “co-governance.”
Frisbie-Fulton says it’s a big part of its work. “We have members who say, ‘I just sat for six hours at the budgetary meeting of my local community. And they all looked nervous as hell because they’ve never had anyone in there in the last twenty years.’ ”
The co-governance approach has led to achievements like the cash bail campaign that Caldwell got involved in. In Cabarrus County, the Down Home NC chapter pushed the local government to expand an eviction prevention program. When a small community park in Granville County fell into disrepair, the Down Home NC chapter pressured city commissioners to fix it up using American Rescue Plan funding. These may seem like small wins, but such campaigns engage the residents and prove to them that they have the power to make change happen.
Chapter members are all the more invested in their politics because they are the ones who choose the issue campaigns and decide which candidates to support. Listening to the concerns of the community has always been a part of Down Home NC’s DNA. From the very beginning, their canvassing and deep listening sessions have begun with a simple question: “What issue matters the most to you and your family?”
“Whenever we start in a new location, we start by extensive door knocking and listening, holding events where people from the local community come and tell us what’s going on, and tell us what’s on their minds, and tell us what needs to change, and give us their ideas,” says Frisbie-Fulton.
Unlike the national political parties that might show a token interest in rural areas during the run-up to an election, Down Home NC organizers are in the community year-round, constantly probing to uncover the concerns of their constituents. Based on grassroots input, four broad issues have come to the fore and have been incorporated into their 2024 organization-wide platform: the economy, housing, health care, and education.
“The top issue that people are talking about in 2024 is absolutely housing,” Frisbie-Fulton explains. “Housing is a huge issue. I think it’s often thought of as an urban issue, but it’s absolutely gutting rural North Carolina right now. It’s very top of mind, followed by health care and health access issues and public education.”
While identifying problems is arguably nonpartisan, the process of proposing solutions is where ideology usually rears its ugly head. Down Home NC avoids this trap by advancing solutions that originate with the people most familiar with the local social and political terrain—members of the community. During listening sessions, after identifying a person’s concerns, a standard follow-up question is, “What do you want to do about it?”
Frisbie-Fulton says their members are all over the board when it comes to political alliances, but figuring out what actually works is what unites the group. “You’ll find in rural North Carolina that people are just really open to listening because they’re looking for solutions, and whoever’s bringing them, they’re going to get behind.”
Although each county chapter has a full-time organizer, most of the hard work of researching solutions and organizing the community is in the hands of the rank-and-file members. Consequently, Down Home NC is big on leadership training for both staff and volunteer members.
“Down Home is a vehicle for leadership development, but the truth is that the real leaders are the people who live in the community,” says Caldwell. “If we can give them the skills to be able to lead and organize in their community, this is how we build a bigger ‘we’ . . . I think all of our ultimate goals that work in the movement is to build a bigger ‘we.’ ”
In addition to a wide range of training, Frisbie-Fulton says members are offered opportunities to connect with broader movement structures that might not be readily accessible from their small towns: “That means paying for our members to go to conferences, paying for our members to fly places and meet other organizers, and expanding their reach.”
To see how a Down Home NC chapter operates, I visited a small town in Johnston County, or JoCo as the locals call it. Just a few miles southeast of Raleigh, the county is dotted with small family farms and tiny hamlets.
“You can go thirty minutes that way and still be in the county and be in West Bumbahoo,” laughs Liz Lynn. “It’s really spread out.”
Lynn is the full-time organizer for Down Home NC’s chapter in Johnston County. I spoke with her at the chapter’s headquarters, a fixed-up storefront on a bustling main street in the small town of Smithfield. A lifelong resident of Smithfield, Lynn is young, energetic, and passionate about her job. She learned about Down Home NC from a cousin who was a long-time organizer in another county.
Courtesy of Down Home North Carolina
Liz Lynn (second from left) canvassing with her son and members of Down Home North Carolina.
“They were trying to start a chapter in Johnston County, and they weren’t having any luck finding somebody that was crazy enough to want to organize this community,” she says.
While she had been an advocate for various issues, attending protests and outreach events, she had no experience as an organizer. “They took a chance on me, really,” Lynn tells me.
After a lot of training, she says she was able to hit the ground running, initially reaching out to acquaintances and then bringing in other county residents. Two years later, the chapter continues to grow, with forty-five active members.
As I talked to Lynn, a diverse collection of members began to filter in for their monthly meeting. There were a few older people who perhaps had moved to the county to enjoy the rural lifestyle after retirement, but there were clearly some working people, too. Lynn’s mom was still wearing her uniform from her shift at the Food Lion.
The evening’s agenda called for going through a prescribed process of endorsing local candidates. An endorsement meant the group will work to support their candidacy by holding events, doing mailings, knocking on doors, and phone-banking. One by one, members of the co-governance committee presented detailed reports based on an in-depth interview they had done with a candidate. Occasionally, during a discussion period that followed each presentation, a member would speak up to vouch for a nominee they knew personally. After the voting was over, the group had endorsed five local candidates: two for school board, two for the North Carolina house, and one for the state senate.
As everyone cheered and applauded their accomplishments, I marveled at their optimism and determination. After all, in 2022, every one of their endorsed candidates had lost except for one. Though they had knocked on nearly 11,000 doors, at that point JoCo had only been an official chapter for less than four months, and most members were doing electioneering for the first time. Since then the chapter has grown, and its members have gained training and experience.
Yet, even if their chosen candidates lose again in this conservative county, all their work is building something powerful. I wondered how many of these people even knew the names of their school board members or state house representatives before Down Home NC came to their county. Now, they are learning how to do a dive deep into government policies, run meetings, organize their neighbors, and politicize their community.
Caldwell told me Down Home NC is currently knocking on a thousand doors a night across North Carolina. In a state that Donald Trump won by a mere 1.4 percent in 2020, and where low-income voters made up nearly 44 percent of the vote share, all this energy can’t help but have a wider political impact.
Other progressive groups are working hard to get out the vote in North Carolina, but Down Home NC is notable in looking beyond this immediate election cycle to building long-term, working-class power in rural parts of the state. The confidence, skills, and training that people are acquiring to take control of their communities can’t be unlearned. Caldwell calls this a “leadership pipeline” and says Down Home NC is building a “generational intervention.”
“It’s nothing for our canvassers to be out and about, and their children have learned the script with them,” she says. “It’s just planting all these seeds of a movement that will continue to grow.”
Down Home NC has plans to be a big part of that movement by expanding into more rural North Carolina counties. Back in Johnston County, Lynn is excited about what the future holds for her community.
“I feel like change is going to happen,” she enthuses. “It’s inevitable, and I can’t wait. I can’t wait for us to continue to expand, to reach people, for folks to understand we can come together.”