Black leaders unveil Project 2025 counteroffer

Black leaders are presenting voters with an alternative to Project 2025, the controversial plan prepared by conservative groups to guide the next Republican administration. 

Project FREEDOM — orchestrated by Until Freedom, Live Free, MPower Action, Woke Vote and KAIROS DEMOCRACY PROJECT (KDP) — will canvass, engage in calls and run pro-democracy digital campaigns to help engage voters of color in the days leading up to the election. 

The initiative has four demands: the freedom to live, the freedom to learn, the freedom to vote and the freedom to thrive. The project will target seven states in particular to mobilize communities of color: Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Ohio and New York.

Michale Blake, founder and CEO of KDP, said the project targets “the work that has to happen to mobilize our country and our communities.”

“We have been listening and being told that they are policies that are not aspirational, that there's not a vision that people can align around. And we want to say it's the complete opposite,” said Blake. “We're very clear that we have permission to dream, we have permission to live out our policies, and we have permission and a declaration to be free.”

Blake added that the project is not about any candidate or even any party, but “about our people.” 

“This is not just about this election, it's about things that are so much bigger and beyond it,” Blake said. “It is giving us ourselves permission to dream about the democracy that we deserve.”

Project FREEDOM has 16 policy focuses, including an end to gun violence, mass incarceration and police brutality. It calls for lawmakers to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and to end the wars in Palestine and Sudan. 

“People know about Project 2025 but there is a void in this moment,” said Tamika Mallory, co-founder of Until Freedom. “They need something else to be able to say no, this is what America should look like. These are the things that we should be fighting for. Out with Project 2025 and in with Project Freedom. I believe that we will see many people who have been sharing information about Project 2025 saying, Hey, I found this other platform.”

The platform also demands that Black history be protected amid a growing number of limitations on what aspects of Black history are taught in school. Organizers call for student loan debt to be canceled and for reparations for slavery. 

With a focus as well on voting rights, Project FREEDOM says that it envisions a nation that will pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act and launch automatic voting registration. These changes would tackle larger concerns Black-led organizations including the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus have expressed around voter suppression. 

“We have an opportunity to regain control of the narrative and remind U.S. voters that – despite what they hear on Sunday morning talk shows or read in their social media feeds – that casting their ballots is still the only way to determine the outcome of this election,” said Mallory.

Though they say it offers a counter to Project 2025, organizers made clear that their platform was in the works long before the conservative plan was released. 

“It became very clear that what was happening was not enough and we were not doing right by our folks by sitting on the sidelines and not bringing our power together for this purpose,” said Blake, though he added that the launch of the project was “accelerated by the greater attention that's happening around Project 2025.”

But it is also in connection with several anniversaries, said Rev. Stephen A. Green, Chair of Faith for Black Lives, a faith-based social justice organization.

“The is about also celebrating the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer, when Fannie Lou Hamer and [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] organizers and others moved to Mississippi to organize and strengthen the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” said Green. “We recognize also that we're on the precipice of the 250th anniversary of the nation in 2026. So this is not a 100 day campaign. This is a campaign to lead us for the next 100 years, really the next 250 years, of American democracy.”