Anthony Thigpenn, SCOPE

In the early 1990s, Anthony Thigpenn founded Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education to address the range of problems that lower income working people and people of color face in inner-city Los Angeles. SCOPE's strategy is focused on four fronts: grassroots activism and leadership development, the development of proactive public policy agendas, strategic alliances with other other organizations, and public policy campaigns that unite people across social barriers.

AGENDA (Action for Grassroots Empowerment and Neighborhood Development Alternatives) is one of SCOPE's four independent programs. It's a community-led organization that seeks to increase civic participation through voter engagement and leadership development. The genesis of AGENDA's electoral program, as Anthony explains in the video, was California's Proposition 209 which sought to eliminate affirmative action and was put to public vote in November, 1996. Since then, Anthony and his fellow organizers have built a database of about 100,000 voters in the Los Angeles area through ongoing engagement programs across electoral cycles.

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Anthony Thigpenn: Prop. 209 launched SCOPE's electoral work