Our History
In 2008, leaders from the Living Wage Coalition, MoveOn Sonoma County Council, and the Graton Day Labor Center identified the need to collaborate to build community power and galvanize a movement led by working people, tenants, immigrants and youth across the North Bay.
Early on, members of those organizations determined that this new organization would not be a service provider, but rather focus on the structural causes of the economic, social, and environmental inequality confronting working people in Sonoma County. Our community needed a power organization.
Following several hundred one-on-one conversations with leaders and members of other community organizations, bilingual day-long leadership training days, and development of core action teams within each member organization, in 2010, the North Bay Organizing Project (NBOP) was established and incorporated as a nonprofit organization affiliated with Gamaliel of California.
In those early years, NBOP's members were actively building campaigns around immigrant and civil rights, affordable housing, living wages and the right to organize a union, equitable mass transit, and environmental sustainability – key issues that continue today.
In February 2011, NBOP organized its first Leadership Assembly with roughly 400 people from affiliated organizations in attendance. Two key issues took center stage: defend Sonoma County’s immigrant communities against unlawful detainment and deportation, and promote equitable economic neighborhood development and improved public transportation within working-class communities of Santa Rosa.
Every two years since then, our general assemblies set the groundwork of NBOP. Immigrant defense, climate justice, police accountability, tenant protections: we address these issues by building power and leadership in our community.
In 2021, after a process of mutual discernment, Gamaliel of California and the North Bay Organizing Project decided to no longer be formally affiliated. For over 10 years NBOP and Gamaliel of California were co-conspirators in the name of justice. NBOP is proud of that history. NBOP formed its own board of directors in 2021, all of whom represent our member institutions or fiscally sponsored projects. Together, we continue our long democratic traditions rooted in member representation at our leadership council.
For over a decade, the North Bay Organizing Project has won local renter protection policies, defended immigrant communities against detention, deportation and disasters, trained thousands of grassroots leaders and built a coalition of more than 20 member organizations.
Led by transformational organizing principles, NBOP does three essential things:
1.
Unites organizations and institutions with shared values and vision.
2.
Trains leaders of member institutions to step into their power within their organizations and their communities.
3.
Builds inclusive, democratic structures that can address local and regional issues impacting our communities.