Clean and Prosperous America PAC

2024 Election Impact

In 2024, CaPA significantly increased the size of our grant program and provided urgently needed resources for organizations to engage voters in battleground geographies across the country. In total, our Strategic Grassroots Empowerment Fund awarded $10.8M in c3, c4 and PAC funds to 318 groups that registered, educated and turned out voters in their communities. 

This incredible growth was thanks to our growing collaboration with donors who are aligned with our mission of supporting community-based organizations to creatively and effectively mobilize voters. In most instances, the donors were selecting the geographies and other criteria to focus their investments on and CaPA was providing guidance on a set of organizations that aligned with those criteria. 

CaPA offered donors the ability to pool resources while charging no overhead or fiscal fees, ensuring that every dollar contributed went directly – and rapidly – to organizations that could effectively deploy the funds to engage voters. This donor-guided giving is something CaPA was well prepared for thanks to our robust Request for Proposal (RFP) process. In 2024 CaPA reviewed and scored voter engagement programs led by roughly 500 organizations; each of these programs was evaluated by CaPA’s Grant Review Committee and scored on their creativity, cost effectiveness, and demonstrated impact, among other criteria.

In addition to funding, CaPA provided our cohort of grantees with a wide range of resources, tools and networking opportunities to strengthen their work. This included free access to Vote.org pro-tools so they could capture back-end data for list-building, nonpartisan and partisan voter guides, relational organizing apps, and cohort calls that created space for groups to learn from each other and share ideas and inspiration. These calls also allowed us to familiarize ourselves with organizations’ work in a deeper way and be better equipped to share their impact with donors.

We were incredibly excited to launch in 2024 the CaPA Connector platform, which elevates the work of the 500+ organizations we learned about through our RFP process, combined with referrals from donors and partners. The dynamic database can be filtered by geography, organization size, target constituencies, engagement actions and more, enabling donors to easily identify organizations that align with their values and priorities. The private version, the CaPA Connector Plus, is only available to trusted donors and institutional givers. It includes more detailed information, including how our grant review committee scored and evaluated their program and a breakdown of their budgets and costs per action metrics. We believe the CaPA Connector Plus will prove a very valuable tool for other institutional givers, beyond CaPA, that are funding groups doing civic engagement and policy advocacy. 

Additionally, CaPA piloted several efforts in 2024 that we anticipate replicating in future years, including:

• Engaging in special elections: Towards the beginning of the year, CaPA made the decision to get involved with New York’s 3rd congressional district special election to fill the vacant seat after the expulsion of Republican George Santos. This highly competitive race appeared to be an investment gap and CaPA quickly helped donors move $96,000 to five groups that were able to make in-language phone calls, knock doors, orchestrate community events, deploy strategic ad placements and send texts to targeted lists. The successful election of Democrat Tom Suozzi marked the first time a New York congressional seat has changed parties in a special election since 2011. 
• Providing critical funding & reporting infrastructure for ballot initiative campaigns. We pooled resources and managed compliance-reporting requirements for organizations in Washington state working to successfully defeat Initiative 2117, which would have repealed the state’s historic Cap & Invest policy. CaPA partnered with The Nature Conservancy and the No-2117 campaign to allocate $675,000 to 29 coalition members to conduct grassroots outreach and education around the initiative. By managing these awards as vendor contracts rather than grants, CaPA was able to centralize the state required reporting and minimize that burden for the grassroots organizations. The defeat of I-2117 ensures that the Evergreen State will continue to be a leader on climate, and lays the groundwork for other states to hold polluters accountable with cap and invest programs. 
• Awarding micro grants to volunteer-led groups: In May, CaPA launched a micro-grant Request for Proposals that invited small, volunteer-led, and often unaffiliated groups to apply for grants of $2,500 or less. We received 80 proposals from groups in need of funds to cover gas for canvassing shifts, lodging for volunteers, stamps for postcards, food for phone banks and other costs to carry out their voter engagement efforts. Not surprisingly, we found these groups to be highly efficient with the funding we awarded, making every dollar go a long way towards turning out voters in key geographies. 
• Growing the impact of the Rural Youth Voter Fund: In 2023, CaPA’s Rural Youth Voter Fund transitioned into a powerful collaboration between CaPA, Rural Democracy Initiative (RDI) and Movement Voter Project (MVP). In 2024, the effort grew into a $10+ million project, providing critical resources to groups engaging young voters of color in non-urban areas. CaPA’s financial contribution in 2024 was $2 million.

While most of the 2024 election results were certainly not as we’d hoped, we are incredibly proud of everything that CaPA – and our community of grantees – was able to accomplish. It is clear a tremendous amount of money was spent on the 2024 elections, with the vast majority of it invested on TV ads that evaporated after airing. The investments CaPA’s donors made in community-focused organizing groups that build and engage their membership year-round around issues that matter to them is a critical, and underfunded, part of electoral politics in this country. The vast majority of the organizations CaPA funded in 2024 will continue to advocate for their communities in 2025 and beyond. While CaPA’s investments were transactional in nature, to help move an electoral outcome, they were simultaneously an investment in organizing power that allowed groups (and their leaders) to gain critical experience, new connections, and strength leaving them better prepared to run future community-focused campaigns. 

Looking ahead to 2025, beyond continuing our grant program, we will be expanding the capabilities and the groups highlighted by the CaPA Connector and utilize this new powerful platform to uplift the work of organizations working to build an inclusive democracy that centers the health and well being of all communities and our planet. We want to continue helping donors large and small, aided by the CaPA Connector Plus platform, expand their investment in person-powered engagement over campaign TV commercials. Thank you for your partnership, and we look forward to working with you in 2025 as we continue our work to advance a Clean & Prosperous America.