I never remember a moment where doing movement work
and service-oriented work was, like, divorced
from voting rights,
because I was raised in Montgomery.
Every other month, there's the anniversary
of some event related to desegregation,
Selma Montgomery March, Bloody Sunday,
there's always a reminder.
I don't ever remember it not being a part of our culture
and, and discussions at home.
My name is Evan Milligan,
and I'm executive director of Alabama Forward.
Our goals are to spread pro-democracy values
to every corner of the state.
I was born into an artist, activist family.
My parents had day jobs, but in their off time,
they were starting organizations.
They were giving me things to pass out in the community.
They just inspired a sense of belonging and connection
to people that cared about Black people,
about their neighbors.
And when I got old enough to choose a career,
I was just motivated to be around people
that reminded me of that vibe.
And so doing community-based work
is a direct way to do that.
[protester] Can't stop the revolution!
[crowd chanting] You can't stop the revolution!
Voting rights is the solution!
Voting play a role of checking authoritarianism.
So if we don't have members of a society
that feel empowered to say, say, 'No,' to say, 'Stop,'
to say, 'This is a barrier; this is a boundary,'
you need to go further.
Having the right to vote,
it helps to continue to condition us to speak to power.
It's not always the easiest place to do pro-democracy work,
so we have to use many different tools and tactics
to communicate our messaging and our values
to people of all ages to inspire us.
We mainly anchor ourselves in the work
by focusing on voter registration,
mobilizing and inspiring our neighbors
into deeper levels of civic engagement,
and that means voting.
That can mean mutual aid, and that can mean volunteering
with any of our 30 plus member organizations.
Really helping people to find the right type
of engagement that works for them
so that they can be serving, learning, and contributing
to a community-based movement
where they are here in the state.
The culture of Alabama makes, makes our work pretty cool.
As much as that's a culture that we sometimes
are working to change, maybe we're criticizing,
it's, like, you know, death penalty,
the violence in the prisons, the reliance on prisons
for mental health, autism, drug addiction,
all that kind of stuff.
So you're going to places where people who have differences
of opinion and lifestyles tend to gather.
It's just more fun to me
playing this role with civic engagement
and working around public policy issues.
It's such public-facing work.
We have this program called Shake the Field.
One way of shaking the field is when you own where you are,
you own who you are,
and wherever you're engaging, you're showing up
ready to move your values, and your agenda, and your
sense of presence in that space.
But it's a football state.
Before you take the field, and you're amping each other up,
like, before you go into battles,
it's that type of metaphor to shake the field.
So for us, we wanted to say, shake the field
to 18 to 49 year old Black Alabamians, students,
workers, LGBTQ, new Americans, everybody living here
who wants to see more freedom
and more, more choices for themselves
and the people that they care about.
To say it's not enough to stay here complaining.
It's not enough to be from Alabama
and move to another place, lose our accents,
and feel like we are kind of gaining
some, some, some deeper deeper quality of life.
That's fine if we need to do those things,
but there are other options that we have.
If we own our identity
and own the fact that speaking out
and, and building, digging in our roots here
while we're still branching out,
can actually change the dynamics
that we don't like here in this state
and protect the ones we do like,
that's shaking the field.
A change-maker is somebody that shakes the field.
I've been known to be a change-maker at times.
Change-maker is when you recognize
there's something going on that you either like or dislike
and you want less or more of it,
and then you figure out how to make that happen,
either through your personal strength
or figuring out how to scheme, plot, strategize,
influence other people around you to achieve that outcome.