About Us

The Georgia Strategic Alliance for New Directions and Unified Policies (Georgia STAND-UP) provides research, strategy, technical support, and resource development for grassroots community organizing and non-partisan voter education. Founded in 2005 as a labor/community partnership, STAND-UP has emerged as a champion of community empowerment and progressive advocacy across the South. A tax-exempt, 501(C)3 non-profit, STAND-UP has earned the Guidestar Platinum Seal of Transparency.

STAND-UP operates on the principle of seeding communities with movement-building skills. Its goal is to identify and elevate grassroots leadership, an investment in people that creates durable capacity; that is, human infrastructure tailored to the community in which it operates. That infrastructure represents permanent capacity to confront issues, as well as the political savvy, networking ability, and communications know-how to handle them. It enables marginalized communities to effectively confront policies and trends that threaten their wellbeing.

Relying on collaborative strategies, strategic partnerships, and aggressive grassroots organizing, STAND-UP helped initiate innovative campaigns to champion equity and inclusion, including the use of transit-oriented development as a mobilizing issue in the Atlanta region. By employing intensive voter education and superior organizing skills to win large scale victories ”such as regional transit expansion”STAND-UP has distinguished itself as a visionary advocate for change, setting the stage for its own continued growth as a vital, digitally savvy progressive force throughout the southeast.

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Deborah Scott

Chief Executive Officer

Deborah Scott, CEO of Georgia STAND-UP, a “think and act tank” for working families, and a 2012 “White House Champion of Change,” is an accomplished advocate of economic inclusion, community empowerment, and progressive civic engagement. A master organizer, strategist, and highly skilled trainer, she has been on the front lines of progressive social transformation for more than 25 years. Deborah has shaped and molded a generation of social activists.

Her motivational talks and workshops in leadership, basic organizing, public policy analysis, civic education, and non-partisan voter mobilization have fueled numerous conferences, rallies, demonstrations, and direct actions, advancing the causes of social equality, economic equity, and respect for basic human rights. Her impact has been felt across the spectrum of leading progressive issues: civil rights and race discrimination; voting rights and voter suppression; workers rights, affordable housing; environmental justice and health equity, job training and employment; and criminal justice reform, among others. She is a builder of partnerships and collaborations, uniting neighborhood groups, labor organizations, academic

institutions, business interests, environmentalists, and government agencies into working coalitions to advance policies and programs that lift up working families, neglected neighborhoods, and historically underserved populations.