For decades, the residents of Medford, Massachusetts voted many of the same people into office time and time again. City politics was, and in some ways still is, defined by long-standing conflicts between individual elected officials and their supporters. Political leadership roles were passed down to family members across multiple generations. Important proposals were approved or denied for who was supporting them just as often as they were for their merits. Facing the dual impact of incredibly restrictive state laws on municipal finance and lack of comprehensive planning and growth of the city’s tax base, Medford’s public infrastructure crumbled and the local government provided fewer city and school services.
After the Great Recession, the public schools cut dozens of positions, many of which never returned. Huge staff cuts in the Department of Public Works means the city outsources basic maintenance of streets and sidewalks. Many of our recreation, school sports, and arts programs are entirely funded by fees or managed by private nonprofits and donors.
All of this in a city where residents were voting for more progressive officials at the state and national level, where residents were seeing our neighboring communities improve far more rapidly, and where more residents were demanding the basic services, support for public schools, and the safe, well-maintained infrastructure they deserved.
These were, and still are, conditions where a movement for change can grow. Does this sound similar to your community? If so, the potential for change may be closer than you think.
Where we live
Medford’s nearly 65,000 residents reside on both sides of the Mystic River five miles from Downtown Boston in a historically middle and working-class community. The city has one of the country’s oldest historically Black neighborhoods in West Medford, and a strong immigrant history with large Irish and Italian communities putting down roots here in the mid-20th century alongside fast-growing Haitian and Brazilian communities today.
Unlike neighbors in Cambridge, Somerville, and Everett, Medford has not grown a large commercial tax base to support city services or public schools and is largely dependent on residential property taxes to fund the city budget. Today, residents face skyrocketing housing costs and decades of underinvestment in streets, schools, and city staff. Hundreds of millions of dollars in deferred maintenance is now coming due, and because of Proposition 2.5, a 1980 MA ballot question that limited municipal property tax authority, high property values don’t equate to more tax revenue to fix these major problems.
Starting from the bottom
Galvanized by the far-right victory in the 2016 national election, a small group of progressive residents founded Our Revolution Medford (ORM) in early 2017 to take action for progressive change at the local level. We developed our own local platform based on city issues, and while we occasionally share invitations and information for statewide and national Our Revolution events, the movement is entirely locally grown and directed and receives no outside funding. Eight years later, ORM has grown from a small backyard gathering to a citywide movement that elected majorities on both the Medford City Council and Medford School Committee.
Our initial conversations in 2017 quickly turned to the need for political analysis, desire to see candidates commit to real policies, and to fill in massive information gaps in a community with little-to-no local news media and scant public space for pre-election discussion and debate. We asked: who can we trust? Who can we influence? We brought together a group of people who could build trust and share the burden of paying attention to city government to help each other analyze what’s going on.
We reached out to lists of local residents we knew supported the Bernie Sanders campaign and movement, community organizations focused on change, and candidates for local office in the 2017 municipal election who seemed to share our values. Our initial membership was deeply intergenerational, from college students to retirees, and stretched across ideologies, including long-time local progressives, young socialists, frustrated parents, people facing housing displacement, and everyday folks who shared our values but didn’t choose a political label.
Three major strategic values soon followed from those meetings: (1) a clear focus on building power, (2) making the necessary preparations for successfully wielding power, and (3) growing our capacity through relationships and trust across the community.
Before 2017, many candidates for local office ran on city pride and local social and family connections. Their campaigns lacked specific policies or opinions on policy. Few discussed strategies to address major long-term fiscal and economic challenges. Our initial efforts to shift power were grounded in information-sharing and transparency, staking out clear policy positions and informing voters about what incumbent candidates believed and supported based on their votes and comments in Council meetings.
Strong support for progressive candidates like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ed Markey in our community showed us that the majority of residents wanted to see progress and transformative change. We decided early on that the best way to build power was to focus on organizing residents around city policy and government by creating grassroots policy campaigns and having a laser-focus on electing new members of the School Committee and City Council so that we could put those policies into place.
We decided early on that the best way to build power was to focus on organizing residents around city policy and government by creating grassroots policy campaigns and having a laser-focus on electing new members of the School Committee and City Council.
These two tactics took on specific forms. For grassroots policy campaigns, we held public events to educate residents about specific issues (for example, pushing to increase the low Payments in Lieu of Taxes or PILOTs from large tax-exempt institutions like Tufts University), discussed topics in ORM meetings, and held city council watch parties over a group chat. The chats help mobilize residents to reach out to elected officials and attend city meetings and connect residents’ everyday experiences to the actions of local government.
Our direct electoral work was even more focused and ambitious. Adapting a model successfully used in Richmond, CA and popularized by the Incorruptibles, we ran a “candidate slate” to help us overcome the financial and structural barriers progressive candidates face.
In Fall 2017, we formed a slapshot slate of candidates who were already running, pitched in personal funds to get some palm cards printed, canvassed a couple of times, and then stood at the polls on Election Day. Four of five of our endorsed candidates won, including one whose narrow majority survived a recount. This showed us that every single vote really mattered and gave us a wedge to grow in the subsequent years. Start small – with discipline and building a culture of organizing, there’s always room to grow.
Building cycles of organizing
Each win built on the ones before, with three School Committee Members and two City Councilors winning in 2019 (one of whom is Zac Bears, co-author of this article and ORM’s first member-turned-candidate), and eight out of nine endorsed candidates winning in 2021, including the first Asian-American person to serve on the Council, and securing majorities on both the City Council and the School Committee. Opponents who didn’t see us coming were surprised. Ten of 11 endorsed candidates won in 2023, including six of the seven who ran for Council seats. Several ORM-endorsed candidates won more than 50% of the vote, a rarity in the past even for long-time incumbents, and the top vote-getters for both Council and School Committee received more votes than the re-elected incumbent Mayor and the most votes for either office in at least 20 years.
While the idea of the platform and slate began with the Richmond, CA Progressive Alliance model, we have greatly expanded it over the past six years. Each election cycle, we conduct an extensive community outreach and editing process to revise the Medford People’s Platform (MPP) and update the endorsement process we launched in 2019. We reach out to dozens of community organizations and major stakeholders, engaging hundreds of residents with surveys and public forums. We hold community workshops on the questions of who is included in decision-making, what are our core values, and what policies we want to see implemented in our city.
The result? A platform that we all agree to work towards, even though most members do not agree 100% with every point. Each successive election, we have expanded the process, engaging more residents and updating the platform to address changing conditions and celebrate hard-won victories. Candidates endorsed by Our Revolution Medford commit to support the platform; the platform shapes messaging and outreach for our coordinated electoral campaigns and provides the basis for a clear understanding of success and accountability after candidates win.
Now in its third iteration, the 2023-2024 Medford People’s Platform is focused on housing justice, racial justice, public health, and a shared vision for a welcoming, vibrant, and forward-looking local government that provides residents with the city and school services they deserve. The two biggest priorities are raising revenue to invest in a new Medford High School and Fire Headquarters and implementing transformative housing production, zoning reform, and economic development plans to fight housing displacement, grow the city’s commercial tax base, and build more vibrant local business and cultural districts.
Our work is purposeful and committed but joyful as well. We have consistently placed a high value on community-building. During each local election cycle, we grow the movement by building stronger relationships and growing our capacity to organize. Each non-election year, we sustain that movement-building through virtual city meeting watches and discussion spaces, and we hold regular general meetings. We focus on city government actions to hold elected officials accountable while supporting the good work done, and we hold social events to be in community with each other.
Historic challenges
Inauguration day in January 2020 was a celebration of our successes. The months that followed showed the limits of our power, and then the limits of government and society. The COVID-19 pandemic struck Massachusetts and Medford hard. After just two months of Council meetings, we were in lockdown and dozens of Medford residents were getting seriously ill and dying, especially in our senior housing facilities. Shock pervaded the community, with highways and skies quieter than anyone had ever experienced. But in less than a month, Medford was able to implement videoconferencing for public meetings and the City Council began to meet again.
ORM-endorsed elected officials pushed hard for state and federal support, implementation of strong pandemic responses to protect residents from serious illness and death, resources and training for online learning to minimize the unimaginable disruption of the pandemic on kids, protection for residents facing housing displacement, and provisions for public meetings to continue to occur in a safe manner.
From 2017 to 2021, serving in the minority or with a slim majority meant we needed to build coalitions and consensus within the City Council and School Committee, and many of our more ambitious and long-overdue policy proposals were stymied before reaching passage or rejected as too ambitious by the mayor or city and school administrators who hold outsized power compared to the elected legislative bodies under our city charter.
With many progressives now in elected office, we see conflicts between people fighting to maintain the status quo and people who want to see the city grow and change play out constantly, with persistent arguments that people who have lived here across decades and generations and those who own property have more of a right to the city than residents who arrived more recently or who rent.
Transformation is in the details
The progressive majority elected in 2023 has brought a major change in the tone and approach of the City Council. For the first time ever, the Council has created, voted on, and published a governing agenda for the 2024-2025 term that outlines major initiatives. A new Council committee structure helps clarify when and how the Council develops ordinances and conducts administrative oversight. Meeting agendas, schedules, and files are published through a new online portal. Updated Council rules contain a table of contents, guarantee remote participation by members of the public through hybrid meetings, and no longer contain arcane language to make the rules clearer and more accessible to the public.
Transformative initiatives and ordinances are moving quickly, with the Council voting to create an independent Department of Elections, passing the first Zoning Ordinance Recodification in 60 years, as well as passing ordinances updating snow removal policies to improve sidewalk access, several environmental and civil liberties ordinances, and a new budget ordinance that formally establishes an open and transparent budget process as city law.
We’ve also faced new, unexpected barriers. Our budget cycles lay bare the major short-term and long-term budget crisis facing Medford. Prior to 2023, budget cycles had a similar rhythm. Mayors would submit a proposed budget close to the June 30th deadline, some years riddled with errors. Councilors would demand accountability and attempt to set the facts straight during budget hearings held with less than ideal information to make decisions. Councils would attempt to hold strong and often would win small improvements, but year after year, residents would see service cuts to city departments and Medford Public Schools.
In FY24, the Council once again had serious concerns about the use of one-time federal funds for permanent operating budget positions as well as the lack of a long-term plan to fund the giant liabilities the city faces for school buildings, city facilities, streets, sidewalks, and our water and sewer infrastructure. While a budget plan released by Councilor Bears and supported by Councilors Collins and Tseng did not move forward in its entirety, major pieces were secured by an agreement reached between Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn, Council President Nicole Morell, and Councilor Bears and ratified by a June 2024 Council vote to approve the Mayor’s budget.
Since then, the City Council passed the city’s first-ever budget ordinance and in collaboration with the Mayor and School Committee leadership placed three referendum questions on the November 5, 2024 election ballot to raise revenue for the first time in the city’s post-Proposition 2.5 history. If voters approve these anti-austerity ballot questions, they would enable the city to raise revenue necessary to increase funding for the Medford Public Schools, build a new Fire Headquarters, and fund an in-house sidewalk and pothole repair crew in our Department of Public Works.
Planting seeds of change in your community
You are reading an unfinished story. We have won great victories by bringing together residents in a collaborative, joyful, and values-based political movement, and we also understand that single victories will not automatically create the positive change we want to see in our community.
We hope our model can help you build the progressive community you want for yourself, your family, your neighbors, and your friends. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch with us so we can fill in the gaps and help you learn more about what we’ve built here in Medford.
Jessica Farrell can be reached at [email protected]. Zac Bears can be reached at [email protected].
Featured image: Our Revolution Medford endorsed candidates and supporters hold a final get-out-the-vote rally in Medford Square on November 3, 2023. Phot by Zac Bears.