Poder started in 2013 under the name “Center for Neighborhood Leadership,” with a focus on immigrant rights and youth leadership. We were held down primarily by young Latinx volunteers from mixed status families who were doing what they could to keep their families safe in the wake of the passage of SB 1070 in 2010. We thought we could do this in two ways:
- Build relationships with politicians so they’d fight for policies that protected our families
- Build relationships with police so they wouldn’t deport our people
We learned early that having access to power didn’t mean we had the power to change our conditions. Time and time again, when these politicians got into office, they put politics before people and failed to fight for the policies we needed. We also learned the hard way that having relationships with a couple police officers didn’t stop them from profiling, harassing, brutalizing, or arresting us or our loved ones.
Over the next few years, we worked with partner organizations to stop deportations, keep public schools funded, and pass policies to protect our communities. But when Trump got elected in 2016, everything changed. Because of his immigration policies, we were no longer able to stop deportations in the same way. Anti-immigrant sentiment in Arizona was ramping back up to levels not seen since SB 1070 and we were under attack from the largest deportation force in the state- the Phoenix Police Department.
We took a hard look at our work and the future we wanted to build, and we knew we had to make a shift. Police, police funding, and criminalization were at the root of so many of the issues our communities were facing. We decided we needed to strengthen our work on policing, that we needed to be bolder and more unapologetic in our fight, and we needed an organization more reflective of the people and places we do our work. From this place, Poder In Action, and our sister organization, AZ Poder were born.