Pearl River      Progressive Maryland is an interesting organization, as I’ve learned over recent years.  It’s statewide, working in Baltimore, Salisbury, and in and around Prince George and Montgomery County, the huge central counties of Washington, DC’s suburbs with their large, diverse populations.  I learned a lot more talking to Larry Stafford, PM’s executive director for the last decade, recently on Wade’s World.

I should flip the calendar back a bit.  Almost three years ago, I heard from Larry out of the blue.  Having been a cold caller for much of my career, I not only answer such calls willingly, but admire people who still make them.  Larry told me that he had worked in and around ACORN from the point he was teenager, helping Project Vote to register new voters, and had long admired ACORN.  He was now the director of Progressive Maryland and was interested in exploring whether adapting the ACORN model to PM might not move them to a different and deeper level as an organization.  As the movie line goes, he “had me at hello.”

Actually, he had me even earlier, because I was actually familiar with Progressive Maryland from its earliest days as an offshoot of our efforts and many others to organize the New Party twenty years before.  ACORN was one of the earlier, founding members of the effort with Danny Cantor and Joel Rogers.  The short story on the New Party was its effort to expand fusion or multi-party endorsement of candidates for minor parties in more states.  The longer story extends to the work of the Working Families Party in New York, where ACORN was also one of the three founding organizations along with the CWA and New York Citizen Action, and now in Connecticut and other states.  Several state organizations were seeded during the New Party’s heyday in Montana, Arkansas, Minnesota, and, as it happens, in Maryland, where the local organizer, Tom Hucker, was instrumental in founding Progressive Maryland.  On the radio, Larry told me that they had also merged with Maryland Citizen Action, so it was an interesting, hybrid organization with a long legacy.

Larry and different members of his staff had gone to trainings ACORN conducted in Baltimore and Philadelphia in 2023 and 2024.  They read Nuts and Bolts.  They asked for reams of additional information.  Larry seemed increasingly serious about adapting the ACORN model in Maryland.  At one point, one of the ACORN staff, tasked with furnishing PM information, took me aside and said, “they ought to either pay for all of this or come into ACORN.”  In fact, Progressive Maryland formally became an affiliate in late 2024.  Craig Robbins, ACORN’s field coordinator, began working with them this spring to help recruit and train their organizing staff.  Now they have an excellent field director, five organizers, and two organizing drives that have launched and several others in progress, which is very exciting stuff.  Larry detailed some of the issues coming from the groups both locally and statewide.  They have already made great progress in a campaign around an incinerator in one of the Baltimore neighborhoods.

The work and progress of Progressive Maryland / ACORN have been exciting to all of us.  With Larry and PM’s help we’re trying to puzzle out how to also scale up the resistance by benefit recipients of food stamps and Medicaid to face the frontal assault from the administration in cutbacks embedded in the Trump big bad budget bill.

What goes around comes around, and finding ourselves 20 years later, working deeply with Progressive Maryland, seems a testament to some kind of great karma and providential fate.