What We Learned on our Field Trip to Florida with Civic Health Build Grantees
written by NWHF Program Manager Cleo Tung
In early October 2025, Civic Health Build grantees, NWHF staff and peer funders traveled to Delray Beach and Miami, Florida to explore how organizations in the state are aligning their strategies to build collective political power. The purpose of the trip was to learn from existing shared infrastructure models and explore what might be possible in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Below are highlights from two of the organizations the group got to be in community with and learn from.
Statewide Power Alignment
Our visit in Miami centered on Florida for All, a statewide coalition of organizations coordinating to shift economic and governing power toward racial and gender equity.
Florida for All formed in 2014 when organizations that had previously collaborated, mainly during election season, recognized the need for deeper, year-round coordination. Early efforts faced competition and tension as groups often vied for funding and visibility. Over time, they recognized that long-term power building required setting aside individual organizational brands and egos in favor of a collective statewide strategy.
This long history of collaboration and trust has allowed them to make decisions effectively together. Each organization in the coalition has one vote, and leaders have been meeting weekly for over 12 years to maintain relationships and sharpen strategy.
Since 2016, organizers and volunteers with Florida for All have knocked on six million doors, made nearly twenty million calls, and held more than 1.8 million voter conversations. By working together, they’ve won statewide victories, including restoring voting rights for 1.4 million people with prior convictions and legalizing medical marijuana. They also came close to passing an abortion rights ballot initiative, earning support from 57% of voters (just shy of the 60% threshold required under Florida’s highly restrictive state laws).
Florida for All demonstrates how a deeply aligned coalition can experiment, adapt and organize across structures to build durable political power, even under highly challenging conditions.
Local Power Alignment
In Delray Beach, we met with The Set Neighborhood Alliance, a local coalition focused on building political power and economic regeneration for Delray Beach’s historically Black neighborhood.
The name “The Set” reclaims language once used by the city to describe the area as the “Negro Area” or “Settlement.” Today, the neighborhood remains home to most of Delray’s Black residents, who make up roughly one-fifth of the city’s population. Intense redevelopment pressures now threaten the community’s very existence, and The Set is organizing to, in their words, “save the soul of Delray.”
The Set is made up of multiple organizations whose work intentionally reinforces one another. A core element of this alignment is shared political education. All member organizations participate in training with the Racial Equity Institute, which builds common analysis and shared language around structural racism. This shared grounding allows members to approach complex issues with deeper trust and more aligned decision-making.
The Set is also explicitly relationship-first. Leaders from the table meet weekly and view organizing as a lifestyle rather than a profession.
A neighborhood tour brought this work to life. We saw the lasting effects of redlining and disinvestment, but also saw signs of community resilience in buildings that had housed small businesses for decades, keeping the local economy alive despite barriers. We also learned about The Set’s efforts to actively reverse these harms, including pairing longtime residents with developers to build homes on family-owned land. These projects have transformed intergenerational properties into lasting community assets.
Two of my key takeaways from this trip:
Shared analysis and political education build trust. When people share a clear understanding of power, history, and vision, it becomes easier to trust one another even when there are disagreements about tactics. Both Florida for All and The Set invest deeply in collective learning, creating a shared lens that allows diverse organizations to act in coordinated and strategic ways.
Relationships are infrastructure. Durable power comes from the trust and care between people, not just formal agreements or organizational charts. Spending time getting to know one another and working together in practice is as important as any operational system.
Many thanks to our hosts, bus drivers, grantees and funder peers who made this trip possible and so meaningful. We are grateful for the generosity, honesty and leadership shared with us, and we carry these lessons forward as we continue exploring what collective power building can look like closer to home.