Grassroots Engagement Quotes

Labour has to be a big tent that appeals to everyone - not just its activists.

At the organisational level, our party has to really develop a new style of connecting with the people. We have to also look at the way we project our programmes, our policies.

Hillary Clinton is driving across Iowa in a van. It's to get to know the people she'll never, ever see again in her life.

If you want to get elected, shake hands with 25, 000 people between and November 7.

No matter what the issues are, it has to be handled at the grassroots. When you take part in something, even though that movement may lose, the juices start flowing and you feel you count. You count. Well, that's pretty important.

I decided to become a community organizer ... Change won't come from the top, I would say. Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.

A political movement must keep in touch with reality and the prevailing conditions. Long speeches, the shaking of fists, the banging of tables, and strongly worded resolutions out of touch with the objective conditions do not bring about mass action and can do a great deal of harm to the organization and the struggle we serve.

A social group can, indeed must, already exercise 'leadership' before winning governmental power (this is indeed one of the principal conditions for the winning of such power); it subsequently becomes dominant when it exercises power, but even if it holds it firmly in its grasp, it must continue to 'lead' as well.

I think that if the political and social movement groups and organizations that operate in this country today had the same kind of energetic commitment that the medical marijuana people have, many things could change in this country.

Certainly, my advice is that communicating, lobbying, fundraising and engaging the public in policy and politics is far more exciting and inexpensive via the Internet. Old guard organizations like Common Cause had to evolve to embrace this new environment.

I am an organizer, not a union leader. A good organizer has to work hard and long. There are no shortcuts. You just keep talking to people, working with them, sharing, exchanging and they come along.

Under Ed Miliband's leadership, we are changing both our party's structures and culture.

Work can be undertaken to create an authentic independent political party, a real party, based on popular participation from the ground up, not a top-down candidate producing organization like the two official parties, working from school boards to state legislatures and beyond. Not easy in the regressive U.S. political system, but not impossible.

Hillary Clinton is now in Iowa. She's spending every waking minute of her day meeting ordinary people, and it's to prepare her for a job in which she will never again meet an ordinary person.

Even though mother's issues are not front page news, they touch us all personally, some more than others, and I believe passionately in the power of grassroots engagement.

That's why somebody like a Tim Ryan can go to a bar in Youngstown just as well as in Congress and talk to working people. Democrats know how to carry the message. We just have to take some telephone new voices and bring them forward.

Presidents cannot lead if they don't know what's going on in the life of the average American.

I'm the same Nina Turner, whether I'm on MSNBC or talking to my hometown newspaper or CNN.

I very much believe in values-based leadership, and that the values that I believe in and try to govern by are transcendent values. They have nothing to do with race or even with political parties. Secondly, I think nothing substitutes for the power of the grassroots by showing them the courtesy of going to them where they are and inviting them to take part in the political process.

I like the grass roots people the most.

It's the people who are doing the nonviolent organizing at the grassroots that make me think there's still hope.

I'm very cautious and very concerned about what I have initially seen, but I also believe we've got to organize like we have never organized before.We talk about it, but realistically, we've got to organize at the grassroots level.

I think we should all be accountable to our parties, but I also think that accountability should be a process of engagement: that MPs do engage with their constituency parties, do engage with their constituents, and MPs do change their minds on things because of local opinion.

My style will be management by being on the street, management by walking around. Third persons won't have to tell me what's going on in our city. I'll hear it, I'll see it, I'll touch it myself.

What we have ignored is what citizens can do and the importance of real involvement of the people involved - versus just having somebody in Washington make a rule.