Portland nonprofit engages with Black voters through community events

With ballots for Oregon’s primary election scheduled to go out next week, civic organizations are working to get out the vote. Imagine Black, based in Portland, aims to engage voters through community events, rather than mailers or door-to-door canvassing. The nonprofit is holding a basketball benefit next month with community leaders and elected officials ahead of primary Election Day, May 19.

Joy Alise Davis is the executive director of Imagine Black. She joins us to talk about voter burnout in Portland’s Black communities and how her organization hopes to make voting exciting again.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Ballots for Oregon’s primary elections are being mailed out next week and civic organizations are working to get out the vote. Imagine Black, based in Portland, aims to engage voters through community events, rather than mailers or door-to-door canvassing. The nonprofit is holding a basketball benefit next month with community leaders and elected officials ahead of the primary election that’s on May 19.

Joy Alise Davis is the executive director of Imagine Black. She joins us now to talk about new ways to encourage voter participation. It’s great to have you back on the show.

Joy Alise Davis: I’m so excited to be here. Thank you so much.

Miller: Can you just first remind us what Imagine Black is, what it does?

Davis: I am a little bit biased, I love this organization. We were founded back in 2009 and we’re really a civic engagement, democracy org. We’re focused on connecting folks around the state to think really critically about how they get involved in civic engagement, and to lead with values, to find opportunities to vote with your values, to encourage elected officials, thinking about the budget, thinking about how we build policy in the state. So yeah, it’s been a lot of fun.

Miller: You mentioned engagement, democracy, voting. You didn’t mention Blackness, Black people. Is that not an inherent part of the mission?

Davis: Yeah, I thought y’all could put two and two together with the name. Imagine Black, we were focused primarily on the African American population. Back in 2017, when I first joined, we made the conscious decision to think about the entire African diaspora and how there’s just so many different folks here. Whether you came through the Great Migration, whether you are an immigrant or refugee, there’s so many diverse, amazing Black folks in the state, working to make it better.

Miller: Let’s turn to the topic for today. What have you been hearing from voters or would-be voters that you’ve been engaging with in recent months?

Davis: I think we’re experiencing a really challenging time for democracy. I think folks are either doom scrolling on their phones, feeling really disengaged and questioning whether or not their vote matters, or that there’s anything they can do in this moment to protect the folks they care about and they love. We try to lead with a lot of imagination here at Imagine Black. And we think about, how do we come together and dream up the world we want to see? That doesn’t stop us from stopping the bad, but we’re super interested in building the new and trying to create the Oregon that I think we all deserve.

Miller: If someone says some version of, “I don’t see how my vote is going to make a difference,” or “no matter who I vote for, I don’t think politicians have my interests at heart,” are you trying to convince them that they’re wrong?

Davis: One of the core tactics we use at Imagine Black is community organizing. And part of that work is trying to have conversations where folks can tap into their collective power. I think sometimes – I’m blanking on the quote – one of the biggest things that we give up is our ability to shape our environment, the power that we have when we speak up when something is not working well, or speak up when we actually have a better solution. So that question you mentioned, sadly, we get it all the time. Folks are not sure. And I think, especially in the Black community and communities of color as a whole, we’re used to voting a lot and not having those dreams come to fruition.

For us, we’re really mindful that voting is kind of the bare minimum, it’s the first step. There’s so much more that we can do to be civically engaged. I think, in Oregon, we actually make it pretty easy. I’m originally from Ohio, just very different politics there. But in Oregon, it is really easy to get a hold of your elected official, it’s easy to show up to a meeting. It could be easier, but it’s a little bit easier to learn what’s happening in your neighborhood, in your city, and to get involved.

Miller: I’m curious if you see generational differences when you ask people about voting?

Davis: Oh, absolutely. I’m thinking about my grandmother. She grew up in Georgia during Jim Crow South, during segregation. And for her, voting is a sense of pride. She knows folks who, sadly, are not with us because they tried to vote, or who were harmed very negatively. I think that energy carried forward in that next generation of my parents.

But I think the value of voting is still there. I think it’s the framing of why we vote has changed a little bit. It’s no longer exciting or no longer motivating – maybe that’s the better way of saying it – to get someone to vote by talking about the fact that people died for you to vote. That’s not a motivating factor for these young folks.

Miller: But that has been a message that you’ve received: “You have to vote because people before us died to give you that right?”

Davis: Oh, absolutely. Growing up, that was a big part of what I remember being instilled with. We talk about the civil rights movement, we talk about women’s rights and all the folks who fought really hard for me to be able to do that.

Miller: So how do you think a 23 year old hears that message today?

Davis: I think it’s a hard message. I just don’t think the generation is motivated by things like that. I think there’s a lot of negative energy given to that generation, but they’re very smart people. They’re just not motivated by that. And I think there’s an opportunity to say, “What would you like the world to look like? Let’s actually start to paint that picture. Let’s find different ways to get there.” And you find that maybe the world you want is not super concentrated on just what the president does. It actually depends on what the county is voting on or what the city is involved in. And I think it’s demystifying different systems of power and how you can influence them.

Miller: I’m glad you brought that up, because we haven’t yet been talking about the spheres, the offices or levels of government that we’re talking about here. But so much happens at the local level or the state level. And yet, media focuses so much on the national level, and to some extent, that’s led to a kind of nationalization of politics, of issues and of conversations that the media is playing into and responsible for. But how do you talk about local issues, local races, local or statewide politics, at a time when so much is so nationalized?

Davis: I think there’s a level of theater that happens at the federal level. It’s not just clickbait, but it’s entertainment, so to speak, for a lot of folks. But when I talk to folks who are most impacted by certain issues in the state, we often talk about, like, “Let’s name the things that are harmful. Let’s name the things that are challenging in your day.” And it could be as small as a pothole, or as big as your TriMet buses not showing up on time, or your line is getting cut and you don’t know how you’re going to get to work.

When we talk about these things out loud, we’re able to not only name the harm, but also talk about what the true solutions could look like and who holds that power. And yeah, you’re right, most of the decisions that I think the average American deals with is happening at the local level. What I think is really sad is that we haven’t been trained or educated to see these spaces as beautiful spaces of opportunity. Instead, it feels like an afterthought.

Miller: Can you tell us about the event you have planned for next month? It’s called Alley-Oop The Vote.

Davis: Yeah, I am super excited about it. Like we talked about before, sometimes voting feels very scary and there’s an alarm, a sense of urgency. We’re not shy to that, we know we can hold that. But what I love is that we can hold multiple things at once. We can hold that voting is important, and also it can be joyous, it can be a celebration, it could be something we do as a community. What I love when I moved to Oregon is being able to vote from home and being able to get that beautiful voter pamphlet in the mail. It’s something I’ve never experienced when I lived in New York or in Ohio. But something I really missed about it was just being around people as I made that vote.

Miller: And it’s not a communal event in general. It’s easy, but it’s not communal.

Davis: Yeah. And I think sometimes that brings a little bit of the tiredness, the burnout energy to it. I’m like, how do we do this together? How do we talk about what is on the ballot? How do we laugh a little bit? How do we dream? And by laugh, I mean how do you see an elected official try to do a layup in the middle of the game and see them as human people? I think basketball is one of those collaborative projects that, just like democracy, requires folks to come together and have a unified goal. We’re excited about it. May 7th’s going to be a good time.

Miller: So you mentioned elected officials doing layups. What is actually going to happen at this event?

Davis: We’re just going to do a simple 5-on-5, full-court basketball. We’re going to be at Portland State University’s Viking Pavilion on May 7. The doors open … I believe we start around 6 [p.m.]. Some elected officials are going to be joining us. They’re going to be doing their best, some of them have been practicing quite a bit. We have some folks from city council, a state rep, some other great folks are going to be there.

Miller: And the idea is that people will bring their ballots and vote there?

Davis: They most certainly don’t have to. We’re going to have some voter pamphlets there, we’re going to be talking about why voting is important. But the idea is to get them pumped up. We know that we want folks to get in their ballots early. So even if they don’t bring their ballots with them, I’m hoping they feel encouraged and inspired, and they go home immediately, they fill that out, they pop it in the mail and get it in before the deadline.

Miller: For years, there have been so many articles, so many think pieces about how we are less used to building community or being in community. The pandemic was a huge piece of that, but 20 years before that, the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam wrote this book “Bowling Alone.” People have been talking about this issue since well before that cataclysmic moment when we all just didn’t leave our houses for a while unless we had to. Do you think that applies or is connected at all to voting?

Davis: I think so. I think there is this feeling of isolation that a lot of us are dealing with right now, and loneliness, and not knowing how to find your people, find your folks, and to talk about issues too. I think there’s so much about civic life that requires us to be in community, to wrestle with ideas, to talk to someone different and to try to find common ground, or to be reaffirmed in your values and why you’re going a certain way. And I think it’s hard to do that by yourself. We recognize that not all folks have the privilege of being able to show up to a basketball game at 6 p.m. on a Thursday. But for the folks who can, we think it’s going to be a really fun time.

Miller: The last time we talked was October of 2023, you had just launched a new social media app called Black Possibilities. The idea was to create a new online space for Oregonians where they can come together to “heal, advocate, and dismantle internal and external anti-Black racism.” How did it go? It seemed like an experiment at the time.

Davis: Yeah, totally experiment. Gosh, I can’t believe it’s already been three years. [We] piloted some great things and we’re still hanging on there, we’re still kickin’ it. There’s folks on the app who sign up every day, who want to try something different, who are interested in coming together, wrestling together and building community. No disrespect to the other apps, I think they serve a purpose. But sometimes it’s a lot and it’s overwhelming. We’re thinking of how we bring some joy, some mutual aid, some care to the space. And it’s been nice.

Miller: What have you learned from that? Among other things, it seems like it’s a chance to organically see what people want to talk about or how they want to engage with each other in this self-created space, as opposed to Instagram, Facebook, X or whatever. What have you learned?

Davis: I’ve learned how important it is to have hybrid spaces for events. I think there’s a big accessibility and disability justice lens to having an event in person and live streaming it to the app, for example, so that folks who can’t be there can still participate, and not just as an afterthought, but as a part of the design. So that was a really big learning tool for us. How do we invest in the infrastructure necessary to connect folks up?

I think we’ve learned that folks really want to be in neighborhood and community groups. So we have a bunch of groups on the app, folks who live even as north as Vancouver, Washington, folks who want to connect up with their neighbors. They want to talk about things that are happening, they want to laugh together. So that’s been a big learning.

Miller: Joy Alise, thanks very much.

Davis: Thank you.

Miller: Joy Alise Davis is the executive director of Imagine Black.

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