Battle Born Progress

In the midst of the pandemic and the 81st legislative session here in Nevada, Battle Born Progress continues to fight for Nevadans’ rights and encourage active participation in local and state politics on progressive issues. 

Battle Born Progress (BBP), a local nonprofit organization, serves as the communications hub of the progressive movement in Nevada. Their mission is to use strategic communication efforts to empower, engage, and mobilize Nevada voters to build a state where everyone has a fair opportunity to succeed.

To accomplish this, BBP focuses heavily on voting rights and issues related to voting. Working with partners like Silver State Voices and the Let Nevadans Vote Coalition, they support legislation and mobilize people to help pass bills in the state. They also educate people about their voting rights, voter registration, and other information related to voting. 

They even provide people a nonpartisan voter guide to help voters get a clearer picture of candidates and their policies. This way, people can make an informed decision on which candidate they want to vote for. View the voter guide at VoteSmartNV.org.

They base the information on a standard survey sent to all candidates running in a given election. The candidates share their responses, or, if no response, BBP identifies that the candidate declined to answer. From there, people judge for themselves on which candidates support progressive issues or issues they care about. 

Together with their partners, they conduct various events throughout the year. They also provide resources and opportunities to people to participate in their state and local politics and help make decisions for their communities. 

Growing The Community Through Collaboration

Aside from voting rights, Battle Born Progress generally works on running campaigns and assisting other organizations in running theirs. In particular, BBP fills a niche in the community by focusing on media outreach and digital programming. The organization also conducts its work from a lens of grassroots training and community organizing. 

“The gap that needed to be filled at the time we were established was an organization specifically devoted to communications within organizations,” said Will Pregman, the Communications Director for BBP. “Other groups do education, development, and so on, but not a lot focus on media outreach or digital know-how.”

One of the main reasons for BBP’s founding involved offering itself as a communication shop. Today, it continues to do this while also helping partner organizations learn and grow their own communications departments. 

For instance, Pregman shared a recent experience of helping the Nevada Conservation League organize an upcoming press conference. Their communications manager hadn’t worked on an event of that size before, and BBP helped them plan it.

Impacts of the Pandemic on Battle Born Progress

Moving Online

Like most organizations, the pandemic affected Battle Born Progress with their in-person events. 

“It was definitely tough,” Pregman said. “Though, we were well-situated to modify our work to suit what was happening since we do so much in a virtual space already. Pulling everything back to being purely online and from home wasn’t too much of an adjustment.”

Despite the ease of moving online, he reported that their summits and events were trickier to conduct; they had to figure out how to host everyone on a Zoom call and recruit people to events. All this with everything up in the air as far as planning went. 

To make up for the inability to do in-person events, BBP started conducting virtual live-stream events to continue their work. 

“Since the pandemic started, every Thursday night, we do our “Out in Front” event,” Pregman explained. “Since we couldn’t go inside of the legislative building because of COVID, Annette Magnus, our Executive Director, posted up outside the building and did live streams with fellow activists and legislators.”

BBP continues this program weekly, collaborating with elected officials, partners, and other organizations to join them and talk about their work and how to support them. 

“I don’t know if we’ll continue it post-COVID or not,” he said. “But, it’s been a decent thing for our engagement with people.” 

Providing Mutual Aid Resources

Aside from that challenge, BBP also shifted their focus to providing direct aid to the community. 

“We actually ended up creating an 80-page resource guide with the help of our partners. We even translated it into Spanish!” he said. “It included information for food banks, clinics, free food giveaways, and anything we could find when the state first locked down. We have it in a document to help be a resource to the community.”

They shared the document with partners who then encouraged others to share. Within the first few months of the pandemic, several thousand people accessed it, especially the Spanish version. With a high population of Spanish speakers in Nevada, this document helped even more people who might not have had access to resources or information otherwise.  

In addition, Pregman said BBP used a texting program called Hustle to message a list of subscribers. They conducted welfare checks with people to see if they needed anything or if they were okay.

“Annette set up a food pantry in her garage and worked with other activists to do a triage of food donation requests. They went to Costco, bought lots of easily transported and preservable food, set up in her garage, and used an intake form to process requests. She was doing that for several months.” 

To help her with this, people with means to donate and transport came out to help at Magnus’ garage. They also conducted deliveries and brought in more volunteers to create a mutual aid network for the community.  

Going Virtual for the All-Staff Conference and Progressive Summit

Originally known as ‘Progress Nevada’ when founded in 2009, BBP went through a rebranding a few years ago. An affiliate of a national organization – Progress Now – with affiliates in several other states, BBP collaborates with a vast network of different organizations to work on various related projects and the legislation both at the state and national levels. Once a year, all the affiliates meet for an ‘All-Staff’ conference. Last year it held this meeting virtually in August due to the pandemic.

Pregman shared that in addition to the All-Staff conference, Battle Born Progress does an additional event every year in January called the Progressive Summit. Activists, community leaders, and elected officials in the state meet up yearly at this event rather than the affiliates, focusing more on the state itself. The two-day long summit includes guest speakers, panels, and workshops with partner organizations. 

Generally, the summit switches off every year between Las Vegas and either Carson or Reno for the location. This year though, they conducted their summit virtually over the course of a week due to the pandemic. 

“It wasn’t quite the same,” Pregman said. “We’ll have to see about next year.”

Despite the difference, there was an advantage to it being virtual this year; people from all over the state could join who might’ve otherwise missed the event. 

“It was very successful.”

The 81st Legislative Session and Beyond

For the next month, BBP’s biggest focus is the present legislative session here in Nevada. Pregman spoke about some of the legislation that they’re most focused on at the moment. 

“We’re working on bills to expand voting rights, including an effort to extend mail-in voting to everyone in the state to increase access to voting,” he said. “We’re also working on a bill to ban ghost guns ahead of federal action by Congress and the Biden administration on these devices.”

In addition to these bills, BBP is also working with various partner organizations on other various legislation. These include bills related to moving away from fossil fuels and protecting the environment like AJR3 – the Protect 30 by 30 Initiative; bills with criminal justice reform like AB395 to repeal the death penalty; and bills for bias training for law enforcement like SB236.

Aside from that, for the long-term, BBP plans to involve itself with the upcoming redistricting in the fall. The redistricting will be based on the 2020 Census data.

“We’re going to be working with Silver State Voices to make sure that the distribution of districts is the fairest to the community; no gerrymandering,” Pregman said. 

Story Banking Program

Recently, BBP began working on a new way to expand its organizing capacity. To accomplish this, BBP works on the development of spokespeople through their story banking program. 

Brenda Rodriguez, the story bank organizer, devotes herself to working with individuals impacted by issues BBP works on. Through the program, Rodriguez builds a list of people to activate to speak their voice to the media, testify at a public hearing, write an op-ed or letter to the editor, and otherwise advance change on various issues. 

In particular, they focus on gun violence prevention, clean energy, stopping pollution, and healthcare – especially relating to medication costs and the need to expand Medicare. 

The idea behind this program is that people can be more persuasive across party lines at the state level.

“When people struggle from things, it’s almost always from some sort of policy failure,” Pregman said. “The more we encourage people to engage with these things, the more we can address those failures and make society more equitable and provide more justice and standard of living to people.”

Plans for the Future

Regarding BBP’s outlook over the next five years, Pregman said he hopes to see more deeply entrenched relationships between the organization and more local media organizations. This, in part, involves strengthening existing relationships as well as building new ones. 

“We’re also working on broadening our organizing focus to where we’re able to connect with lots of different people who are all media-trained so they can effectively talk about the issues they’re working on,” he said. The story banking program is a major part of this focus moving forward.

Furthermore, Pregman said they want to always be able to cover virtually any issue they’re working on with spokespeople personally impacted by those issues. BBP also wants to be able to work on its own digital platforms. This ensures consistent growth and engagement as they move the needle on big policies in an effective and relatable way.