MarchOnHarrisburg is a grassroots movement fighting to end political corruption in Pennsylvania and build a democracy that works for all of us. We are unshakably committed to a future where power is with the people, and we can come together to solve our problems, meet our collective needs, and thrive!

Whether it is the President taking a half-billion dollar airplane from a foreign government or our State Senate Environmental Resources and Energy Chairman Gene Yaw working a side job as a lawyer for fossil fuel corporations, corruption in politics is deep, thick, and thorough. It is defensive and aggressive, and it takes a massive anti-corruption, pro-democracy movement to get money out of politics, strengthen the accountability of the ballot box, and build a government of, by, and for the people. We operate in one of the most corrupt states in the USA, featuring unlimited gifts, unlimited campaign contributions, unlimited secret Super PAC spending, unlimited side jobs, devastating gerrymandering, and a lack of basic voting rights.

We live in an era of wrath because our political system is oriented toward the wrong golden rule. Instead of “Love your neighbor,” we are structurally oriented toward, “The guy with the gold makes the rules.” Big money special interests legally influence elected officials, then use that purchased public power to pass or block laws to make more money and concentrate more power for themselves. Solving this basic structural problem in our society is MarchOnHarrisburg’s reason for being. We are living in a depression of corruption, and we must take our democracy to new heights.

We believe in democracy, and we aim to make real the words of Alexis De Tocqueville from 200 years ago: "The people reign over the American political world as does God over the universe." The heartbeat of democracy and the function of government is for the people to come together to solve our collective problems. We believe that if we get money out of politics and repair the anti-democratic structures that distort the will of the voters, we will be able to come together as a society and make good decisions to build a better world.

Our goals are sometimes laughed off as ‘impossible.’ But we have built – and continue to build – a statewide anti-corruption, pro-democracy movement that is advancing our Money Out, People In policy platform forward and winning concrete change.

This donor letter is intended to introduce MarchOnHarrisburg and explain who we are, provide organizational updates, and discuss our goal to scale up and build on our ongoing work to meet this moment in history. Thank you for your support.

Who We Are

We have three main goals:

Build Power: Develop a statewide movement of democracy leaders and coalition allies.

Make Corruption Illegal: Ban every form of legal bribery and big money political influence.

Strengthen Democracy: Make elections fair, inclusive, and accountable to the people.

We use these six tactics to win:

Base-building: We grow the movement through strategic and consistent outreach in all parts of the state – flyering, tabling, billboarding, hosting community events, and more.

Leadership Development: Through ongoing political education, we systematically build volunteers into democracy leaders who are clear, confident, connected, competent, and committed.

Lobbying/Advocacy: We meet with legislators to push our anti-corruption, pro-democracy agenda. We also advocate for our bills with call, letter, and community billboarding campaigns.

Marching: We march long distances to deepen our commitment to the movement and raise awareness for our issues, practicing democracy in real time.

Nonviolent Direct Action: We force the encounter and demand change from those in power and make them see our suffering caused by corruption.

Communications: We are regularly featured in the media, and highlight our campaigns through writing letters to the editor, op-eds, and pitching stories to journalists. We are active on all social media platforms, and regularly post videos and educational content.

A (partial) list of our accomplishments over the last nine years:

Marched 333 miles (five long distance marches).

Lobbied all of our 253 State Legislators (many times over).

Conducted over 40 nonviolent direct actions.

Conducted two statewide 20+ town organizing tours, and built a statewide pro-democracy movement.

Passed the gift ban out of its House committee twice.

Helped fully pass vote by mail in 2019, helped force five House and Senate committee hearings on gerrymandering, and helped pass open primaries through the full Senate.

Passed two campaign finance and dark money transparency bills through the full House.

Passed a bill through the full House to prohibit spending by multinational corporations in Pennsylvania elections, often done secretly through Super PACs.

Forced a House Committee Meeting on Ranked Choice Voting and the National Popular Vote.

Helped pass Student Lunch Debt abolition through the State House.

Organizational Growth

The work we do is far more massive than our budget of roughly $170,000 / year, and the work continues to grow beyond the capacity of our two full-time staff. We need to build our staff to match our volunteer energy so we can meet this moment in history with our full might. We built our organizational foundation, and it is now time to build on that foundation and make a break-through push for democracy. Below is our vision of what we will do when we achieve our $1 million / year budget goal.

Everything listed below is to build on a part of our work that we already do very well, that is effective and strategic in advancing our goals, and that we know there is much room to grow into.

*Members of MarchOnHarrisburg, National Popular Vote, Common Cause, FairVote, and League of Women Voters after testifying a committee meeting for Ranked Choice Voting and the National Popular Vote.*

Campaign Volume and Intensity:

Our power inside the State Capitol is far outpacing our ability to actually move our campaigns forward. For example, because of our power at the negotiating table, we were able to demand and win a recent House State Government committee meeting on Ranked Choice Voting and the National Popular Vote (to side-step the Electoral College). While we won forward progress on the National Popular Vote through high-level negotiations, we do not actually have the capacity to organize around it and the bill will stall. We have no lobbying materials or policy training to help our people talk to their legislators, no social media or media outreach to educate the public, no public events for it, and near-zero capacity to push it forward with the attention and urgency that it deserves.

This is true for most of our Money Out, People In policy platform, which is our 23 policy campaign roadmap. Out of those 23 policies, we have good campaigns behind three of them (Gift Ban, Stopping foreign influenced corporate political spending, and Ranked Choice Voting), and we have brought four more of them to life in the State Legislature despite not having campaign infrastructure to support them (Campaign Finance Reform, Secret ‘Dark’ Money Transparency, National Popular Vote, and Public Campaign Financing). We need to be waging real campaigns behind all 23 of our policies. We have laid the foundation to open the floodgates in Harrisburg, and it is time to push. This moment in history demands an across the board, aggressive, and coordinated fight for democracy in the Keystone State of Pennsylvania.

Coalition Building:

There is a shocking amount of missed opportunity in our coalition building. This is so obvious that one of our national allied organizations graciously dedicates a decent amount of their paid staff hours to do organizational outreach to support our shared efforts in PA. We organize well above our weight within the following coalition categories, and with a dedicated Coalition Director and an additional Seminary Intern, we could grow our capacity in each category and greatly expand our coordinated statewide democracy movement:

Organized Religion: MarchOnHarrisburg is also a leader in the PA Poor People’s Campaign, and I am a Statewide Tri-Chair and lead the Faith Leaders team. We organize within several denominations and over 50 houses of worship across PA. Some have hosted an event or shared a call to action, and others are more deeply organized into the movement. For example, the York Unitarian Universalist Congregation hosts 2-3 educational events and sermons a year, directs the monthly collection plate to MoH once a year, and plugs two leaders into our ongoing MoH working groups. When there is an advocacy update, they lobby the nine legislators in York county and report back. We need to more deeply engage churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship, develop more leaders within those congregations, and support our movement faith leaders as they pursue justice.

Organized Students: We speak at a few universities every year, three paid interns per year are gifted to us by undergraduate and graduate programs, about a half dozen unpaid interns give us 5-20 hours / week every summer in addition to their other paid work / internships (and a few students every summer stay on as volunteers or return the next year as interns), a group of Penn law students has answered our legal questions for the last six years, and we have never done any organized outreach for any of this support. We have good, award-winning relationships with over a dozen universities and seminaries across PA, and we need to dedicate much more time to campus organizing and leadership development.

Organized Labor: We need to offer our union allies more education about democracy issues and why democracy is the key to building people power and our basic human rights. We need to build on our existing relationships inside the Capitol building with union political directors and better work together on our shared interests.

Issue Based and Community Organizations: We organize with various local groups and networks across the state, and we need to better organize, educate, and mobilize them. For example, our people have been speaking at, organizing, and providing logistical support for the 50501 / Indivisible / Hands-off protests over the last few months.Most of the people involved in these protests are new to activism and organizing. We work with these emerging organizers to develop their leadership, their focus and strategy, and to integrate them into existing movement spaces. We are doing nonviolent direct action trainings, lobbying trainings, civics courses, and general organizational consults for these various groups. There is far more demand for our expertise and experience than we can currently supply.

Democracy Organizations: We need to better organize the various PA pro-democracy groups. We are active members in Pennsylvania Voice and we have good relationships with our democracy allies like Fair Districts, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, and Committee of 70. We need to build our capacity so we can better support our democracy allies and our shared campaigns. And we need to develop a bolder shared vision, better coordinate strategy and resources behind ambitious anti-corruption bills, and move forward together in both the general public and inside the State Capital.

Base-Building and Leadership Development:

Everything that we accomplish is dependent on our base-building and leadership development. To do anything, we need people who know what they are doing. We bring people into MoH and develop their five c’s of leadership: Capable of doing the work, Clear about how our political system operates, Connected to other democracy activists in a statewide network, Committed to putting in the ‘spiritually grueling’ hours, and Confident enough to use your voice. With additional organizers and a political education director, we could substantially increase our membership and our leadership in the following ways:

Onboarding and Mentoring: Andrea Pauliuc, our Internal Organizer and Communications Director, leads our base-building team of six volunteers. Our base-building team puts in the time to mentor new members, connect them with needed training and resources, and plug them into the work. We receive hundreds of new sign-ups a month who want to be organized into the movement, and the team always has more work to be done than time to do it.

Public Organizing Events: We do 4-6 public base-building events a month including Rank Choice Voting demonstrations, film screenings, book tour events, tabling, flyering, canvassing, human billboarding, and more. We are ready to be doing many more public outreach events to grow the movement and educate the public.

Educational Events: We do 2-4 educational events a month, including our recent Public Speaking workshop, our ongoing 4-week Money In Politics course, and our 5-week “Holding All Powerholders Accountable” course that we did as part of the Pennsylvania Poor People’s Campaign. In the last year, we have additionally taught a range of courses that our members need, including: Letters to the Editor, Tik Tok production, Nonviolent Direct Action (five week course), March Logistics, Cyber-Security, Lobbying (five week course), and Policy Trainings (Gift Ban, Ranked Choice Voting, Foreign Influenced Corporate Political Spending, Secret (dark) money, and Campaign Finance Reform). We need to be offering more courses with more frequency, we need more teachers/organizers to handle our often overflowing classrooms, and we need more help to properly follow-up with students and better guide them from study into sustained action.

Leadership Retreat: In June, we will be hosting our first leadership retreat in three years. We need to hold an annual leadership retreat.

Organizing Tours: We have done two 20+ town statewide organizing tours in nine years. We need to do a statewide tour every year.

Lobbying:

In the words of one State Representative, we are “One of the most effective groups in the Capital.” Our Legislative team operates like a volunteer-driven lobbying firm. We research policies, write bills and amendments, organize champion legislators behind those bills, meet with and educate all 253 State Legislators and the Governor’s office, and shepherd our bills through the legislative process. We negotiate with top leaders in both parties in both the House and the Senate. We have boots on the ground inside the Capital on most session days, and our people engage in district office lobbying across the state. We are creative, crafty, and fearless in moving our pro-democracy bills forward, and we once even attempted a ‘once-in-a-century’ maneuver on the House floor to force a Gift Ban vote. We also do consults and campaign strategy meetings for our allies to make the State Legislature more navigable and accessible. And, we need to do so much more. With a full-time Legislative Director, we could greatly improve on the following:

Grassroots Lobbying: Better coordinate and support grassroots and in-district lobbying across the state amongst our own members and our coalition partners.

Organize Our Champions: Restart the Government Reform Caucus in the State Legislature. It last disbanded over a decade ago, and we need to revive it so our pro-democracy legislative champions can better coordinate and work together to produce and advance legislation.

Federal Coordination: When a relevant bill comes up in Congress, our national allies look to us to contact and move key PA Congressmen. We are currently unable to make the grassroots pushes on federal issues at the level required of this moment, both for our national democracy coalitions and for the Poor People’s Campaign. We need to become better ‘on-the-ground muscle’ for federal issues.

Marches:

We have marched five times in nine years. Our multi-day, long distance marches on Harrisburg bring new people into the movement, create media and social media hits, generate legislative pressure, and deepen our commitment and community. We need to be marching once a year.

Nonviolent Direct Actions:

We have demonstrated the power of nonviolence to win meetings, move bills, and topple powerful authoritarian legislators. Over the course of 40+ direct actions, we have generated immense pressure, redeemed hearts and minds, and wielded the power that Dr. King called, “The marvelous militancy of the soul.” Our nonviolent direct action works in close tandem with our lobbying and other advocacy tactics, and we need to increase the frequency and intensity of our actions to better advance our pro-democracy narrative and our legislative goals.

Communications:

We appear in print, radio, online, and TV news about 6-8 times per month, and we have impressive social media presences (including almost 25k followers on Tik Tok). With a dedicated communications director, we could do better press outreach, pitch more news stories, appear in more podcasts, and better drive public narratives on democracy. We do press education in one-off conversations, but we need to be speaking at press clubs and organizing press-only educational events about how Harrisburg works (there are a few very knowledgeable Capitol reporters, but statewide there is a deep lack of knowledge, sometimes about basic civics). We could better organize our volunteers to churn out more letters to the editor, and create more graphics, videos, and social media content. Our social media posts currently do very well, even though we post across our various platforms at roughly 10%-30% of what best practices dictate. We need to increase our volume, our quality, and our engagement on social media.

IN THE NEWS

“Corruption is this core virus in our system that prevents us from having things like healthcare and roads without potholes in them.”
— Rabbi Michael Pollack, Executive Director of MarchOnHarrisburg

Development:

Our grant-writing team is me and a part-time undergraduate intern. We submit 1-2 grant applications a month. All other fundraising and donor outreach work falls to me, and there is a lot of missed opportunity. For example, we recently held our first in-person fundraiser since 2019, it went very well, and we need to be doing more. We operate at $170,000 / year because we have never had a paid development staffer. We need a full-time development staffer to increase our ability to connect with current donors, recruit new donors, increase our grant writing capacity, organize more paid public speaking appearances, create a culture of donating within MoH, and organize in-person fundraising events (please consider hosting an in-person ‘meet and greet!’).

Praise for MarchOnHarrisburg

“There is nothing like you all in any state. MarchOnHarrisburg is a gem. I wish you were in every state.”

— National Democracy Organizer

The work that MarchOnHarrisburg does is essential, and we are very good at it. We need to be better at communicating this with supporters. To start, here are a few pieces of feedback that we received just in the last month.

A State Senator called me her hero, and explained to a few of her voters that seeing MarchOnHarrisburg in the “Dome of Corruption” is the best part of her day.

A nonprofit Executive Director wrote to me, “When you speak it makes me proud to be Jewish.”

A national democracy organizer that is active in most US states told us, “There is nothing like you all in any state. MarchOnHarrisburg is a gem. I wish you were in every state.”

An organizer at an environmental advocacy nonprofit wrote to us, “I highly appreciate the work y'all do with March on Harrisburg. I'm appalled by how often bribery is just open and normalized, and how everyone I'm surrounded by sounds absolutely defeated/laughs it off uncomfortably because they don't think it'll ever end. It feels really draining, and while I think I have a lot of internalized hope since I've been organizing, I'm constantly shocked. So, really, thank you so much for what y'all do.”

An environmental nonprofit executive director wrote to us, “March on Harrisburg is almost every other video on my TikTok these days - great job getting on my algorithm!”

A national democracy organizer shared with us that they have worked in many state capitals, and they had never talked with State Capital staff before who spoke so highly and respectfully about a grassroots organization.

A union leader told us in the Capital, “Your group does the best protests.”

A donor told us, “You are a tornado, but a calm tornado.”

We have generated a remarkable amount of momentum and success with our limited two-person staff and the massive energy of our volunteers. As we work toward a  $1 million / year budget, we will first hire a development director, and subsequently hire a number of full-time staff members in order to build the capacity we need to win the fight for democracy.

We build the democracy movement, develop leaders, and pass pro-democracy, anti-corruption bills. We advance the belief that power should be with the people, that every voice and vote matters, and that we can come together to solve our problems and create a world in the image of love. Sometimes our work seems impossible, but we have faith in our tactics, our strategy, and each other. And we believe that the right time to advance forward and win democracy is precisely when it seems the most difficult.

George Lakey, the legendary Pennsylvania Quaker activist, teaches that society is like a rigid iron rod. Only when the forge is on, the fire is roaring, and the temperature is up can the rigid iron rod be shaped into anything else. It is precisely in polarized times when it feels like the world is on fire that a violent society can be forged into a peaceful one: Or, in the words of the prophets Micah and Isaiah, a spear can be beat into a pruning hook and a sword can be turned into a plowshare.

There are those who are pounding as hard as they can to transform our society into something so much worse and more unspeakably violent. And it is on us to hammer away with nonviolence at the scale, duration, and intensity necessary to forge democracy: As Gandhi wrote, “True democracy can only be the outcome of non-violence.” We can either move deeper into fascism and violence, or we can construct democracy and peace. We choose democracy, we choose life, and we fight so that, in the words of Lincoln, “Government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

We have built and won so much, and now is the time to scale up and win big. Thank you for your support, our work depends on it.

For Love and Democracy,

Rabbi Michael Pollack

Executive Director, MarchOnHarrisburg. Statewide Tri-Chair, Pennsylvania Poor People's Campaign

PS: In addition to donating, please consider:

Telling your friends, family, co-workers, and various communities about MarchOnHarrisburg.

Hosting an in-person or virtual ‘meet and greet’ event where we can present MarchOnHarrisburg, discuss our work, and make a brief fundraising pitch.

Connecting us directly with anybody who may be interested in our work.

Donation Information

Our 501c3 is March On Harrisburg Education Fund
EIN: 85-0791124

Donation instructions and various ways to donate can be found at:
www.march-on-harrisburg-education-fund.org

Please mail donations to: March On Harrisburg Education Fund PO Box 243 Cheltenham, PA 19012-9998

Our 501c4 is March On Harrisburg Inc.
EIN: 82-2598652

Donation instructions can be found at www.mohpa.org/donate

Please mail donations to: March On Harrisburg Inc. PO Box 243 Cheltenham, PA 19012-9998

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Marching Forward To Democracy