About Us

State Voices is a non-profit organization that links together and provides support, shared services, information and resources to the sixteen active state 501(c)(3) voter and civic engagement networks (or “tables”) in the country. Our goal is to foster long-term, collaborative work to engage socially responsible citizens and historically underrepresented communities in our democratic process.

It’s this long-term, collaborative approach that makes us different. Our approach supports movement building over empire building. We are focused on creating strong partners, not a large core. Many state tables grant over 60% to 70% of their annual budgets directly to their partner organizations, while also narrowly tailoring program services to partner needs. A key purpose of state tables is to help put resources and tools directly into the hands of organizations in underrepresented and socially responsible communities. That’s why State Voices encourages direct funding of state networks.

Part of creating strong partners is developing something we call “invisible glue” – the ties that bind organizations together and boost their capacities instead of threaten their livelihoods. This glue exists when members aren’t competing for funds or media presence, but instead are coming to the table to share resources and ideas.

When organizations come together, they can easily identify services that are in everyone’s interest to have but no one’s interest to provide. State Voices fills this role, hosting services that increase efficiency and solve collective action problems. By providing these services to such a large number of organizations, State Voices is able to generate significant cost savings for member organizations, savings they can turn around and put back into their program work.

But funding isn’t just a high priority during major election years. Because we support a model of sustained civic engagement, we believe 501(c)(3) organizations can and should be at their budget peaks in non-federal election years, making them the advance team for the upcoming political season. This means that when candidates do their benchmark polls a year before the election, the issues these organizations care about are at the top of the list. When collaborative work continues from year to year, a socially responsible issue environment is created and multi-issue policy work gets done.

To ensure these aggressive goals are met, State Voices uses rigorous and innovative evaluation, one of the most unique aspects of our organization. In 2008, twelve of the sixteen state tables have successfully worked with partner organizations to build treatment and control experimental evaluations into their work. To learn more about our metrics and evaluations, please see our Measures of Success.

Guided by these principles and thorough evaluation results, State Voices is committed to putting the necessary tools and resources into organizations’ hands so that together, we can increase civic engagement in ways that both strengthen our democratic institutions and encourage public involvement in civic life.