Action institute nc is a community organization and citizen action group that educates, organizes, and mobilizes residents of low-wealth communities to represent their own interests on issues of social and economic concern. Through grassroots outreach and base-building, training and leadership development, and strategic campaign planning and execution, residents work together to determine their priorities and make action plans to win concrete improvements. Our issues include but are not limited to public education, health care access, financial justice, employment and wages, affordable housing and tenant rights, immigrant rights, voting rights, and local investment and development. Through house meetings, community meetings and forums, participation in public hearings, and direct action, residents take their concerns directly to public officials and private sector decision-makers and wage campaigns for specific reforms and a greater voice in decisions that affect them.

Health care: we have worked to implement the affordable care act and oprganized many public events and actions in 2017, on our own and in coalition with other activist groups, to defeat the various attempts by congress to repeal and replace it. We also organized a number of events to highlight threats to medicaid and medicare coverage, to promote the expansion of medicaid in north carolina, and the adoption of a universal health system nationwide, and to beat back efforts at the federal level to dismantle the affordable care act through administrative rather than legislative action. voting rights and engagement: we have organized in support of greater voting rights and voter participation, and in opposition to voter suppression legislation and other legal measures designed to reduce ballot access. We register voters, conduct non-partisan get out the vote drives, provide poll monitors for election protection, and are active in work to eliiminate illegal gerrymandering and turn north carolina's redistricting process over to an independent commission less likely swayed by partisan considerations. In 2017 we again registered over 8000 voters in mecklenburg county, targeting infrequent new american majority voters. We also continued to contribute as plaintiffs in a lawsuit to enforce compliance with the national voter registration act at the north carolina department of motor vehicles and department of health and human services. gender equality: we have supported, promoted and helped build a coalition around a stand with women platform that focuses on economic opportunity and security issues of concern to all women, and especially to lower-income women and women of color, and in support of health care and reproductive health care access, including in opposition to any further restrictions on access and to contraception and abortion services. We turned 500 people out for our annual women's equality day event in durham, organized a women's lobby day attended by over 100 women of color in july 2017, and two events devoted to structural racism and its impact on women of color, attended by over 250 persons in durham in march 2017, and almost 150 in charlotte in november. Our gender equity organizing provides the bulk of community support we have used to work on healthcare reform and financial justice issues, especially those that relate to raising wages and adopting more family-friendly policies in the workplace.