The cornerstone to successful joint community labor campaigns is research designed to support organizing.

CLU is committed to maintaining a strong in-house research capacity that also reaches out and both leverages and adds to the research capacity of our partner organizations. CLU’s research model maintains that research plays an important, but supportive role to the needs of the organizing campaigns.

To this end, CLU crafts its research around the goals of the organizing campaigns and in collaboration with its partners and organizers. In addition to maintaining both strong in-house and partner-networked research capacities, CLU is making use of Greater Boston’s wealth of colleges and universities and has developed partnerships with the University of Massachusetts–Boston and MIT. 

CLU’s research will include, but not be limited to, two main areas of activity: Framing Reports and Campaign Support. The idea behind the Framing Report is to layout the political, economic, and social landscape in the region available for organizing community labor campaigns. Over time, CLU will revisit its main Framing Report and update it. CLU’s research staff will produce additional reports that zero in on parts of this Framing Report to describe a specific organizing landscape for, say, redevelopment planning in a specific community. These reports are Focused Framing Reports which are nested in the political, economic, and social framework of the regional framing report, and can be used to layout a narrow organizing framework around which specific organizing campaigns can be undertaken.

CLU’s research staff will also engage in research tailored to supporting successful organizing outcomes. 

In December 2006, CLU released its first Framing Report, entitled The Hourglass Challenge: Building an Equitable Economy for Greater Boston. The report demonstrates that low and moderate-income residents and residents of color have borne a disproportionate share of the pain in Greater Boston’s restructuring into a service economy built primarily on financial, business and professional services, educational and medical sectors. This economic harm has been exacerbated by policy decisions that have undercut local governments’ capacity to provide the supports and subsidies that low and moderate-income working families need to thrive in our region.

TAKE THE FRAMING REPORT TO YOUR COMMUNITY!

You can take CLU's Framing Report to your membership and your community. Our organizing and research staff, in collaboration with our Strategy Committee, has created a PowerPoint presentation and group exercise as a complement to the Framing Report and a way to bring its information and analysis to the people. Both the presentation and the exercise are attached below. Please feel free to contact CLU staff at 617-723-2639 if you want assistance in leading the presetation and exercise with your members or community. We are offering these materials for community use, but we ask that you kindly give CLU the credit for preparing and producing them.