Connecting LA’s most vulnerable communities with resource, recourse, and organizing know-how.
Ground Game LA is a horizontally-managed, grassroots group, building community & electoral power in Los Angeles
What We Do
Connecting People and Organizations
Ground Game members are volunteers, staffers, and impacted community members across a broad range of neighborhoods, organizations, and campaigns.
We work closely with a wide network of other local grassroots movements, giving us strength through allies and a deep knowledge of how to solve pressing problems in LA. As a result, we’ve staged powerful campaigns to elect progressives, protect the unhoused, and defend the environment.
Want to learn how to get involved? We can help.
Door Knocking
We meet people on their level, both physically and politically. We’re called “Ground Game” because of our passion for mobilizing to talk directly with our community. We canvass for local progressive candidates and regularly turn out dozens of volunteers.
Candidates actively seek our endorsement and door-knocking support, because they know it can help win elections.
We believe that real change only happens when more people are brought into the movement, and that means bringing the movement to them.
Direct Action
As the anthropologist David Graeber put it- direct action is “living like you’re already free”. We seek to shine a spotlight on injustice by placing our bodies and well-being on the line - to face those in power and advocate for positive change in the most direct way possible.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand” – Frederick Douglass
Media Production
Ground Game produces media across the spectrum to call out injustice and spur people to action. We run lean and serve a digital-first audience across social media, podcasts, and video while supporting independent journalism at Knock LA.
Our city is full of incredibly talented people and also everyday people with important stories to tell, living alongside powerful interests invested in keeping the status quo, whose ownership and influence often decides which stories are told and which aren’t. Our mission at Ground Game includes building a worker-owned media cooperative to change that - Join Us!
Trainings & Forums
In the face of overwhelming apathy from the Los Angeles government, we’ve learned how to build tools ourselves to fill in the gaps we find. This has included everything from hosting a City Council candidate forum for an important special election, to holding workshops on how to run for office for grassroots community leaders, as well as numerous trainings on direct action prep, street medic trainings, de-escalation, etc.
What We Fight For
How We Started
A Megaphone for the Diverse Voices of CD13…
Ground Game LA started as a grassroots city council campaign for Jessica Salans for CD13 in 2017. This 100% volunteer-based campaign set out to restore power to the people by reorienting political focus to their needs over the needs of special interests and their special interest dollars. We built a team of researchers and outreach staffers who solicited feedback from all sides to carefully craft policies in an open-door, collaborative process that put a spotlight on the RESIDENTS of CD13.
At the height of the campaign, the Salans’ team had upwards of 60 volunteers knocking on thousands of doors, energizing and motivating residents to get involved in local politics and fight for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice.
The Salans campaign was our starting point; prior to that, many of us had never worked a day in our lives in politics. But we learned the power of change through person-to-person interaction. By genuinely listening to one another about the issues that mattered to each of us, we could support one another in changing our city for the better. We didn't win the electoral seat in 2017, but we didn't lose. For many of us, we built something greater.
On the night the election results came in — when we realized it wasn’t us — we cried, we grieved, and we embraced one another. Even then, we found comfort in solidarity. BUT we all also agreed, even in that moment of despair, the work we started was not going to end there. We decided we were going to keep pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, asking people what mattered to them, and what they thought the government should do about it. We were then, and are now, about building people power. We are about the work on the ground, with the people who are overlooked far too often in our racist and classist society. That night, amidst the tears, feelings of loss, and bitterness of defeat, we resolved to stay right here. Walking one foot in front of the other, rebuilding our city, starting from the ground up.