Stronger Together: Why We’re Merging with Sister District DC Metro
Diversity Matters decided to bring our voices to the fight for political representation in November 2016, immediately after Trump was first elected. We’re immensely proud of what we’ve achieved since then. But with profound changes rocking our country, it’s time for us to change tactics. We need to strengthen our alliances and our communities. We’re combining forces with Sister District DC Metro Area to do just that.
We’ve been an all-volunteer grassroots group affiliated with Indivisible Network since 2017, but our mission and theory of change have been unique and distinct from many of the other Indivisible groups. We have always been focused on ending systemic racism by exercising our civic duty to vote. As we said, when you change the people in the system, the systems change. We created a Diversity Pipeline Pledge to support candidates who were willing to walk the talk at all levels.
We witnessed the horrific attack on protestors in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. We knew then what we know now: there are more of us than there are of them. We honed our approach so we could get people into state legislatures who actually want to work for us, and we started with Virginia. That’s where we first began working with Sister District DC Metro. We partnered to support the excellent Elizabeth Guzman in her successful run for a Virginia legislative seat. Our victories in 2017 propelled us to double down on this strategy, and our partnership.
We partnered with Sister District DC Metro Area again in Virginia in 2023 to support Lashrecse Aird and Josh Cole, and after their historic wins, we wrote about how Virginia can be the roadmap for America. Virginia’s delegation is the most diverse in the state’s history, thanks to the unprecedented diversity of the Democratic slate of candidates. The state’s changing demographics are showing up in who voters elect. For the first time, a majority of people under 18 in Virginia are people of color. One in ten Virginians is now Hispanic. One in ten Virginians is foreign-born. Residents of color are three out of every four new residents in the state.
The younger generation of elected officials, people like our Pipeline Pledge champions Lashrecse Aird, Elizabeth Guzman and Joshua Cole, are interested in public policy that benefits ALL of us. They bring rich background experience to their elected roles. Now, there are enough of them now to have a foothold to expand opportunities for everyone in this increasingly diverse state, despite the pushback from a Trump-lite Republican governor.
And they will have to be the guardrail against the worst of the Trump regime’s assaults. We will need state governments to be the ones to protect us, ensure we have access to due process and civil rights protections, provide us with free and fair elections, and maintain essential services like health and education. The federal government is being dismantled by the Trump regime. Our ability to restore a pluralistic democracy nationally will depend on whether we can maintain it at state levels.
We believe we can keep winning at state levels, and that the way to do it is to keep nominating people like us- people who truly represent America and all its diverse communities. And Sister District, as a national organization, has built up the grassroots networks, the strategy and the tactics to keep doing exactly that. They share our commitment to recruiting diverse and truly representative candidates. They’ve done the work to show why down-ballot engagement is so important. And they’ve built the tools and connections to help all of us get involved in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood strategy. This helps not just the candidates but the communities that support them, our communities, to build and maintain our political muscle.
You, our members, are our friends and neighbors and we know you’re mostly here in the DMV area, so perhaps you’ve already joined our actions with Sister District, like the wonderful Crossing the Bridge action last year. That action serves as a great metaphor- we’re going to keep crossing that bridge together. Together, we embrace an anti-racist vision of America and we will build the bench to make it a reality for everyone in our diverse and still beautiful country.