Four years ago we woke up to a chilling new reality. We didn't know where to turn or what to do. Our institutions had failed to stop the worst from happening.

So we turned to each other.

Here in Lancaster County, 300 of us came out to an emergency community meeting.

We didn't know exactly what we would do, but we realized that no one was coming to save us. We grasped that it was up to us to get ourselves organized into a force that could do something.

That was the day we launched Lancaster Stands Up.

We knew we had to mitigate the damage of this Administration. We knew we would have to stand up and raise our voices in the public square. Most of us had never been involved in protests before. But we mustered the courage to step into the unfamiliar.

What you have to realize is that Lancaster County has long been a conservative area. We didn't have much of a culture of protest or grassroots political involvement.

But soon we were turning out unprecedented numbers for Lancaster—first hundreds, and then thousands.

We began confronting our elected representatives wherever they went, especially @RepSmucker, who studiously avoided having to face constituents face to face. We organized Lancaster's first ever sit-in at his office to stop the repeal of the Affordable Care Act.

We realized that we would need to do more than protest. We needed to change who was in power. In early 2017 we began exploring what role we might play in building grassroots electoral power. We held our first candidate forum and started knocking doors to talk to our neighbors.

Trump had won our state by just 44,292 votes. We knew we had to do our part to make up that margin in 2020. We knew we couldn't count on anyone to do it for us. We set ourselves to the task ahead.

But we understood—even in our very first meeting—that we had to do more than just defeat Trump. And even to defeat him, we needed to understand how he won. We asked ourselves hard questions about how an authoritarian like Trump could have gotten elected in the first place.

One factor for Trump's rise that was clear: his strategic use of racism and xenophobia to divide working people. He punched down, blaming immigrants and Muslims for our troubles—instead of the real culprits at the top.

We committed stand up for every member of our community.

Another factor for Trump's rise that we had to confront head-on: the failure of the Democratic Party to stand up and fight visibly and vocally for working people. The "party of the working class" had effectively been captured by big money and political class elites.

As we knocked doors, we encountered so many voters who didn't like Trump or the GOP, but they didn't like the Democratic Party either. Neither party, they felt, gave a damn about people like them.

We came to understand that to win over working people in our community, we would need to shift the direction and leadership of the Democratic Party. We would need candidates who fight for everyday working people and stand up to corporate power. So we started recruiting them.

Our first major campaign was to elect Jess King—a working mom & people's champion—to Congress. Her 2018 campaign knocked over 200k doors and made over a million calls—a huge grassroots operation.

We lost (bc of redistricting), but determined to press on with the power we built.

In 2019 we ran more down-ballot races—city council, borough council, school board, etc.—and helped to flip five borough councils in our county, with progressive candidates who were taking on the status quo. We were getting a foothold.

All the while we were throwing down on issues—at first in reaction to Trump: protesting the Muslim Ban, turning out after Charlottesville. But soon we started developing local campaigns too—like stopping GEO Group from privatizing Lancaster's prison reentry program (we won).

And we threw down in a big way this summer—joining with partner organizations in our community and young people— to assert together that Black Lives Matter.

Along the way, we started comparing notes with our counterparts in other areas of the states: in York, Capital Region, Berks, Allentown, Chester, and Philadelphia. We knew we were stronger together, so we launched @PAStandsUp, a statewide organization made up of groups like ours.

This year, together, and with our allied organizations, we did what we had been preparing to do for four years: we talked to millions of voters across our state—phone calls, texts, and conversations at the door—to defeat the unique threat whose name is Donald Trump. We did it.

Now that it's done, there'll be a lot of pundits with hot takes.

But maybe they should listen to the people who did the hard work of talking to millions of voters.

Our #1 lesson: Most people don't think politics is for them. Because it hasn't been. But we can change that.

The Democratic Party has been bleeding out working class voters in our state for decades.

We came out in force to defeat Trump, who has been a disaster for our country.

Working people delivered for Biden. Now Biden and Democrats in Congress had better deliver big for us.

We are so grateful for every person who has been part of this thing that we have built together, this thing that we call Lancaster Stands Up.

Every one of us should feel proud today.

And we're only getting started.

If you would like to support the work we do, you can donate here: http://Lancasterstandsup.org/donate