Attention Organizers

A New five-alarm fire started this week and is spreading like wildfire

Attention Organizers

Most of you found this newsletter because of your work, jobs, career resources, and the talent pipeline. That’s our lane, and we own it.

But today’s issue is for every single one of you. Because what’s under attack in Ohio isn’t just one organization. It’s the jobs. It’s the work. It’s everyone in this community who shows up every day to make democracy function.

This one is personal. Read it. Share it. Act on it.

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A New Five-Alarm Fire

A five-alarm fire started in Ohio last Thursday. Like most wildfires, it started with a spark. But it is spreading — and if you aren’t paying attention, we’re going to lose a lot more than our democratic homes. Even as I write this, we’re getting updates that it has already spread back to Minnesota.

Let me explain.

I was driving from Boston to DC when I stopped for gas and checked my alerts. The FBI had raided the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. Offices searched. Staff homes visited. Electronic devices seized.

My mind went back fifteen years — to Egypt, where I was working for NDI when our offices were raided. In a premeditated, coordinated effort, national police fanned out across the country, hitting 17 offices of international and local NGOs doing voter education, political party organizing, and civil society work. People I worked closely with were pulled much deeper into that drama. By sheer luck, I managed to escape. But I was there. I was part of that team. And what happened that day — and in the months and years after — felt like nothing you could imagine here.

Until now.

I remember standing in Cairo thinking how lucky I was to live in a country where something like this could never happen.

Here we are.

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What Actually Happened

When the news first broke, it wasn’t exactly clear what happened. From briefing calls with our community, we’ve learned much more. First — shout-out to Prentiss Haney — a community organizer for 15 years and a leader with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative — along with Maya Wiley, CEO and President of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and Demario Cooper of Popular Democracy. They are leading the charge. What I learned made it worse.

This wasn’t a small raid. More than 120 federal agents descended across Ohio simultaneously — Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Dayton, Youngstown. Twenty-five agents arrived at the OOC’s northeast Ohio office armed with batons and guns. Staff were followed from their homes. From kid drop-offs. They arrived at the office and found federal agents waiting.

People were held for hours without legal representation. Agents told them they could not call their lawyers. Computers and phones were confiscated. Agents lied to people — directly, blatantly — trying to get them to say what they wanted to hear about voter fraud.

And while that was happening inside the office, over 100 more agents fanned out across the state going to the homes of current and former staffers, volunteers, board members, activists, and civil rights leaders. The goal was political intimidation, plain and simple.

It didn’t stop at Ohio’s borders. There are confirmed reports of agents going to people in California and Pennsylvania. And as I write this, we’re hearing reports it has spread to Minnesota too.

Prentiss was direct: “This is a coordinated attack we have not seen since Selma, where the federal government is being weaponized using the Justice Department in order to suppress voters and suppress our ability to participate in free and fair elections.”¹

He also said this: if you are doing voting rights work right now, you are likely being surveilled. That is not hyperbole.

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What the Ohio Organizing Collaborative Actually Does

The OOC was founded in 2007 and has become one of the most effective progressive organizing operations in the country. They describe themselves as building “transformative relational power with everyday Ohioans for statewide social, racial, and economic justice.”² For nearly 20 years, they have served as a vehicle for everyday Ohioans to have a say over the decisions that affect their communities, their families, and their lives — a powerful multiracial coalition spanning big cities, suburbs, small towns, and rural communities.

In practice, that means voter registration — over half a million voters registered in the last decade, focusing on Black and brown Ohioans, young people, disabled people, and people with low incomes, precisely the communities MAGA Republicans have tried hardest to block from participating.² It also means redistricting fights, ballot issue campaigns, and real policy wins: lowering health care costs for Ohio families, securing more funding for child care and public schools, and removing barriers that keep punishing formerly incarcerated people long after they’ve served their time.²

The OOC has not gotten into legal trouble as an organization.² This is not about voter fraud. This is a deliberate attack to keep Black and brown people from voting — and to control election outcomes. A political party courts our votes. An authoritarian regime tries to stop us from voting.

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This Is Track Two

Marc Elias at Democracy Docket put it clearly: the first wave of Trump’s weaponization targeted high-profile political enemies — James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell. People who had platforms, allies, and media access to fight back.³

What we’re seeing now is Track Two: the same weaponization, aimed not at famous individuals who can defend themselves, but at the unglamorous, under-the-radar organizations doing the daily work of democracy. No single famous face at the center. No 60 Minutes segment. Just organizers showing up every day to register voters, fight gerrymandering, and build power for people who’ve been systematically excluded.

As Maya Wiley said: the FBI does not have to bring an indictment, and a court case does not have to win, for them to accomplish their goal. Sending 120 agents to knock on doors, follow people from kid drop-offs, and hold staff for hours without lawyers — that is voter suppression. The raid is the point.¹

And the timing is not coincidental. Ohio in 2026 has a critical U.S. Senate race where Sherrod Brown is a slight favorite to flip a seat, a governor’s race that’s a toss-up, and several competitive congressional races.³ Trump knows what a Republican-controlled Congress means for his power. He will do whatever it takes.

We’ve seen this playbook before: they lose, they lie, they lash out. When voters reject them, they go after the organizations that make voting accessible.

This is what Prentiss meant when he said Ohio is the tip of the spear.¹ This is a test case. They are fishing in our ecosystem right now, and some organizations are staying silent. Their silence is exactly what this administration wants.

We will not win this in the dark.

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This Means You

If you work in the democracy space — as an organizer, campaign staffer, advocate, or any of the countless roles that build and run the infrastructure of democracy — this is for you. The institutions they’re targeting — the voter registration operations, the redistricting fights, the civic organizing groups — are the connective tissue of everything we do. The attack on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative is a first shot across the bow at all of us. They want us to be afraid. They want us to stop doing our work. They want the whole ecosystem to go quiet.

They want to bury us. They don’t know we are seeds.

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They Want Us to Be Afraid

My heart is with the people who found the FBI at their doors. The staffers who were followed. The volunteers whose homes were visited. The organizers who were held for hours and told they couldn’t call a lawyer.

I am afraid — but not of them. I’m afraid of what our country has become, and what it is becoming. I’m more fearful of where we are right now than at any point in my lifetime. But I am not afraid of fighting back. None of us should be. It’s the only way we can win.

Prentiss said something I keep coming back to: “When we fight, we win. And what we’re fighting for right now is not to get back to what was — it’s to get the opportunity to build anew.”¹

That’s what this is. That’s who we’re fighting for.

In America, voters choose their leaders — not the other way around. Hands off our vote.

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What You Can Do Right Now

1. Register for today’s Know Your Rights training. Sign up now for the 4–5pm ET webinar hosted by Nonprofits Together, the Brennan Center, and the Leadership Conference. Make sure everyone in your organization knows what to do when federal agents show up. That is their strategy: divide and conquer, targeting whoever they think is most vulnerable.

2. Say this is wrong. Publicly. Use your platforms. Write about it. Talk about it. Do not let this become normal. Use this social share toolkit to make it easy.

3. Stand with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. They have not gotten into legal trouble as an organization. This is intimidation. Name it as such.

4. Go on offense. The OOC is launching Freedom Summer — a national voter registration day of action. Join them. Do solidarity actions in your city. Register more voters. That is the answer to intimidation: more people in the process, not fewer. Hands off our vote.

5. Support the fight financially. Movement Voter Cooperative has set up a fund for Ohio. Contribute.

6. Train more organizers. At GAIN Power, we believe this moment demands we build infrastructure that can withstand these attacks. That work starts with people.

This is not a small blip. A hundred and twenty federal agents. Multiple states. Voter registration workers followed from their kids’ school drop-offs. Staff held for hours without lawyers.

We need to be as loud defending the OOC as we are defending any high-profile figure. Louder, maybe. Because they’re counting on us not to be.

Michael Waldman of the Brennan Center said it plainly: “An attack on the Ohio Organizing Collaborative is an attack on every organization working to protect the right to vote.”⁴

Speak out. Show up. Support them.

Because they don’t want us to. And that’s exactly why we must.

More soon. Stay fierce.

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Sources

¹ Popular Democracy community briefing call — Prentiss Haney, Maya Wiley, Demario Cooper (on the record), June 2026

² Andrew Tobias, “What to know about the Ohio Organizing Collaborative after FBI searches,” Signal Akron, June 12, 2026

³ Marc Elias, “The FBI’s raid on free and fair elections,” Democracy Docket, June 15, 2026; Marty Schladen, “FBI searches offices of Ohio voting-rights group,” Ohio Capital Journal, June 12, 2026

⁴ Michael Waldman, “Brennan Center Stands With Ohio Organizing Collaborative Following FBI Raid,” Brennan Center for Justice, June 12, 2026