PLATFORM

Over the past year, we have been relentlessly committed to building DSA Cincy through our work. Under SC candidates' leadership, the chapter has built and repaired relationships with the United Auto Workers local and the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, respectively, onboarded over 140 new members to the chapter, endorsed or organized more than a dozen protests like the People's March in January and the various No Kings protests throughout the year, and have responded quickly and decisively to events that endangered members like the anti-ICE Roebling Bridge protest. The WG candidates have engaged the Labor WG in Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) strike support, led an Ecosocialism campaign research effort to improve Metro bus stop infrastructure and create a Transit Riders' Union, and have spearheaded anti-ICE efforts at the municipal level through the Electoral WG's Sanctuary Cincy campaign.

Beyond public-facing campaigns, our slate also focused on strengthening our internal capacity. Over the past year, Katy Saoud and Sarah Callahan led multiple “train the trainers” programs for working group co-chairs, developed onboarding structures the chapter has never had before, and created clear systems so new leaders can step into roles with confidence. This work has professionalized our operations, reduced burnout, ensured continuity across leadership transitions, and helped transform our large new membership growth into real organizing power.

To sustain our ambitious organizing goals, our slate will continue investing in leadership development and onboarding. Our chapter deserves systems that make it easy to plug in, step up, and succeed. We plan to expand our “train the trainers” model, further refine our onboarding tools, and make sure every working group has the structure it needs to thrive without burning out a small handful of organizers.

We, the Groundwork Slate, hope to be re-elected to the positions above in order to continue this trend of growth and success.

Looking to the Future

We are grounded in the belief that democratic socialism must mean more than rhetoric. It means building a strong framework for our organization, and empowering working people to engage within our democratic process with agency. Groundwork is about building foundations that let ordinary people step into power. Our movement can and must take everyone.

As we enter the second year of Trump 2, the rupture in American society is only growing wider. Mass deportations, a cost of living crisis, and the colonialist genocide in Gaza has generated significant discontent among the American working class. Democratic Socialism hasn't been this popular with the American public since Bernie Sanders's presidential run in 2016, a fact backed up by this chapter's outstanding growth this year. 237 new members can't be wrong, after all. But without specific goals to work towards and campaigns to get involved in, the electric political moment we feel now will have been squandered.

To make the most of this golden opportunity, the chapter should engage in strategic, ambitious campaigns to propagandize in favor of democratic socialism, energize existing members and bring in new ones, and to develop the next generation of chapter leadership. There are a variety of campaigns in the works that can meet this challenge. One campaign already in motion by the Electoral WG is the revamped Sanctuary Cincy campaign that Olivia Merrill and Katy Saoud have championed, and which already has 27 volunteers ready to fight for their neighbors. Through this campaign to end Cincinnati PD's cooperation with ICE, the chapter will develop its skills running a pressure campaign and leave its mark on the political consciousness of the broader Cincinnati public as the organization that fought ICE and won.

Another campaign in the works is the Mass Transit campaign, whose research is being led by Mike Viozzi. This effort aims to shift the paradigm of chapter work from siloed efforts with limited scope and buy-in to campaigns that involve the whole chapter and use a diversity of tactics and skills to achieve their goals. At the same time, the research skills and long-term vision developed by this effort can be effectively leveraged in other areas of the chapter, namely Electoral and CSDAWG, in order to sharpen our strategy and hone our tactics.

But exciting campaigns cannot be the end-all-be-all of this chapter's efforts. We won't be able to win a better future for ourselves without a sense of community, solidarity, and goodwill between members. Some steps have already been taken to this end, including the consolidation of many key chapter functions and the inclusion of some new ones into the Administrative Committee (or AdComm), proposed by Sarah Callahan. Within this body, the chapter will finally have a formal substructure for the recruitment and retention of new members. As the wider world becomes more atomized and lonely, the chapter should recommit itself to building social bonds between its members through fun events and interest groups. Through these efforts, we not only make organizing with DSA more enjoyable, but we strengthen the bond of solidarity into one of a shared community, and lay the foundations for explicitly socialist institutions in the long term. These bonds can be put to good use by the creation of Labor Circles, soon to be introduced by Iris Caton and another Groundworker, Astra A. These circles aim to connect DSA members with other socialist workers in their respective industry or shop. By connecting members, we as democratic socialists can push our labor unions to be more militant, more democratic, and more left, bringing the best organizations for developing class consciousness into explicit political alignment with DSA.

Grow to Win, Win to Grow

While this slate has ambitious goals for the chapter, there are still some obstacles standing in the way of success. The main areas this slate would like to focus on improving this year are operational transparency, low-lift contributions, and membership democracy.

A common complaint from new and returning members is that it's difficult to find out how they can help without attending a WG meeting. The current process typically self-selects the most involved members for chapter work, as they're typically the only ones who know what's going on. This issue can be solved through a few main ways, one of which is already in progress. The first step should be to start phonebanking the membership list regularly to keep them informed of the chapter's activities and to invite them to join in. By meeting the membership with direct asks over the phone, we can not only bring in previously inactive organizers, but strengthen our phonebanking skills that will carry over to future campaigns.

The second change to make is already in progress with the chapter's upcoming Solidarity Tech software pilot that it received through national DSA. Among other useful features, Solidarity Tech allows chapter and WG leadership to break efforts and campaigns into measurable, achievable tasks that are visible to the membership, making it much easier to see what the chapter is working on at any one time. This will help improve operational transparency for members and eliminate the “black box” that defines our current operations. At the same time, encouraging leaders to define tasks of varying intensity will help disperse effort among the membership and create new opportunities for less-engaged members.

Our commitment to democracy also means building clear pathways for members to grow into leadership. Training new organizers, documenting institutional knowledge, and supporting working group co-chairs makes sure our movement is not dependent on a few overworked members, but belongs to the whole membership.

Finally, the slate would like to expand chapter democracy and deliberation to encompass all members of the chapter. While the candidates are proud to have introduced and supported a resolution to improve chapter democracy and deliberation for electoral endorsements, we believe this One-Member, One-Vote process should be expanded to chapter business conducted at general meetings. In short, the membership should be given the opportunity to submit statements and deliberate on chapter resolutions prior to and during a general meeting.

Afterwards, all statements about a resolution should be combined into a document which is then sent out to the whole membership alongside an OpaVote link where members vote on resolutions. Then, the whole membership can follow the various lines of argument, think deeply about their vote, and cast it at a time most convenient to them.

This gives less-active members an opportunity to exercise their agency, and has the potential to reactivate them if a certain campaign or effort piques their interest. We cannot let childcare obligations, an incompatible work schedule, or a disability that makes attending meetings difficult dictate who can and cannot make their voice heard. The bosses have enough power over our lives as-is. As an organization that prides itself on its inclusivity, we must ensure our internal processes actually reflect our values.

Our Strategic Vision

This slate's vision isn't just limited to the next year. Any group that wants to win and wield power must plan further ahead than the next campaign for office, the next strike to support, and the next protest or serve. It is also imperative that the chapter comes to view organizing work through a long-term holistic lens, where different projects and avenues for building worker power are self-reinforcing, not mutually exclusive or zero-sum. Only through Street Power, Strike Power, and State Power can we achieve socialism in our lifetimes; the Groundwork Slate believes that this intersectional framework is the best path forward as we fight for a better future in Cincinnati.

After Donald Trump's inauguration almost a year ago, socialists, progressives, and liberals have been mobilizing to defend against this administration's vicious attacks against the rights and personage of the most vulnerable members of American society. This slate is proud to support DSA's role in this unofficial Popular Front through local participation in the 50501 protests. By participating in these mass expressions of dissent, DSA can represent the socialist pole of this big tent, gain prestige and legitimacy as fighters against this fascist administration, and turn the rapidly-radicalizing bloc of liberals into democratic socialists. It is imperative that we continue and expand the work of resistance for these reasons - abstention is not an option.

At the same time, we must work to build our own institutions of culture and expertise, and put forth a vibrant, positive vision of democratic socialism tailored to the specific conditions found in the Greater Cincinnati area. We should expand our efforts at public outreach by holding more town halls in 2026 on a variety of subjects important to us - Medicare for All, Abolishing ICE, and a Green New Deal, to name just a few. We should also agitate in more general terms amongst the broad working class to build support for democratic socialism and lay the foundation for a new socialist common sense. To do this, we must build a strong research and outreach arm to determine the authentic and particular needs of the Cincinnati working class, and to embark on campaigns backed up by ironclad facts. Let no one say our ideas are pie-in-the-sky or disconnected from the reality on the ground.

While resistance to Trump's administration is a key fight to be had, we must also work to build and align working class power to the socialist cause. With the labor movement experiencing a resurgence in recent years, propelled by the reform movements in the United Auto Workers and Teamsters unions, the working class is slowly winning back the power it lost during the decades of neoliberal labor offshoring and governmental strikebreaking. But, as can be seen by the Teamsters President Shawn Fain cozying up to Donald Trump and his fascist administration, democratic reforms and militant unionism is not enough to win a socialist future. As mentioned above, we must push union locals to be more militant, more democratic, and more left. To do this, we must connect DSA members with others from the same shop floor and the same industry in order to organize explicitly socialist reform caucuses and work towards this vision. Again, the labor circles introduced by Groundworkers Iris C and Astra A will be critical to this work. We should also encourage DSA members to get involved in their union's staff positions, as they have significant influence over their union's operations and can pull them into alignment with DSA.

However, we cannot limit our organizing work to internal struggles and administrative work within unions, but must also fight to organize new shops and broaden the struggle. For the former, DSA has a ready-made tool for this in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, or EWOC. It is time the Cincinnati area played its part in this organizing struggle. The Groundwork Slate hopes to create a local EWOC branch by the end of 2027 to meet this goal. Since a branch is not created overnight, the process must begin now by the self-selection of a current labor organizer to begin the journey. Over the next two years, the Labor WG should develop its own trade unionists and search for promising new ones in order to build the organizational base needed to found a new branch. This process will be accelerated as the Labor WG maps the membership and sorts them into labor circles. This will allow our members to act as a cohesive unit inside existing labor formations and become the catalyst for new organizing inside members' own industries. Ultimately, the goal will be to create a fighting organizer training program to accelerate the alignment process between DSA, labor, and the working class.

Finally, we cannot leave state power on the table. Due to America's unrepresentative political structure, many demands that are widely popular (e.g. Medicare for All, ending the genocide in Gaza and the conflict in Venezuela, etc.) are opposed by establishment elected officials, either actively or passively. If our chapter wants to change conditions on the ground locally, we must take hold of as many levers of power as possible. That is why the slate is proud to announce that, pending the chapter's endorsement, Olivia Merrill will run for Cincinnati City Council in 2027. As the largest effort our chapter has ever undertaken, we will need to prepare well in advance to ensure success, meaning our work must start now. In anticipation of Liv's victory come November 2027, this slate believes we must decide how to run our Socialists in Office committee sooner rather than later. Moreover, we must spend significant time researching and creating policy for this campaign. Due to the Hamilton County Democratic Party's iron grip on City Council, their races are essentially depoliticized in favor of paying lip service towards gun control, tolerance, and equality rather than actually working for them. As socialists, we must present our positive vision for the future in concrete terms if we want to win as an independent campaign.

But our work won't stop at municipal government. With the Electoral WG's candidate search subcommittee, the chapter will have a powerful tool to evaluate, develop, and run candidates for Ohio state government in 2028 while supporting the DSA candidate in that year's presidential election. With all eyes on us, we can harness the momentum building since Zohran Mamdani won the NYC mayoral election just a few months ago to win big, both up- and down-ballot. After the biggest electoral push in chapter history, winning in 2028 will be that much easier. Finally, as we round out the decade in 2029 we hope to have developed enough cadre candidates to run a DSA slate for Cincinnati City Council, solidifying worker power and DSA Cincy's place in local politics for years to come.

In Closing

As a platform, this is perhaps a bit wider-reaching than most other slates. And, to state the obvious, the five candidates on this slate cannot accomplish this on their own. We're just people after all, with day jobs and sleep cycles like any other. Ultimately, this slate cannot achieve these lofty goals without the knowledge, expertise, and buy-in of the whole chapter. Through this slate's work in the coming year, we hope to lay the foundations that will let our chapter rise to meet the coming challenges. We hope this vision for the future and this theory of change resonates with you as it does with us. If you want to make your power known and if you want to change this world for the better, we ask that you support the Groundwork Slate in the coming elections.

Solidarity forever,
Sarah Callahan for Chapter Co-Chair
Olivia Merrill for Chapter Secretary and Electoral Co-Chair
Katy Saoud for Member At-Large
Mike Viozzi for Member At-Large and Ecosocialism Co-Chair
Iris Caton for Labor Co-Chair