Mass VOTE’s mission is to register, educate, and mobilize voters in order to create a government that is truly accountable to all of its citizens. Mass VOTE focuses particularly on communities that have typically been underrepresented in the past, especially people of color. In mobilizing previously disenfranchised citizens, Mass VOTE’s mission of electoral justice is working towards a larger goal of achieving social, economic, and racial justice.
Mass VOTE is achieving these goals through registering and educating voters while also developing youth leaders in these communities. Additionally Mass VOTE recognizes the power of coalitions, empowering other nonprofits with knowledge, skills, and technology to effect similar change in the realm of social justice.
B500, a partnership between MassVOTE and NAACP Boston, is a civic engagement program targeting Black and African-American voters in the city. The program organizes existing super voters in the community and teaches them to register, educate, mobilize, and turn out 20 voters each. Members of the B500 work where they will be most effective—within their own families, neighborhoods, churches, and communities—helping people they already know to become civically engaged. In its first year, B500 mobilized over 10,000 Black voters in Boston to participate in the November 2014 mid-term election.