Working Groups

We are in the process of creating working groups that will each focus on its own specific action or mission. If you'd like to join one of our working groups, please email us at ourrevolutionsomerville@gmail.com with your name and which group or groups you would like to join. Below is a partial list. We hope that as we grow, our members will form new working groups.

Somerville should be a great place for all residents to live, work, play, and learn in an environment that supports our health, safety, and quality of life. Our city should be a leader on measures to minimize the effects of climate change while making sure that residents who bear the most burden from environmental change have meaningful opportunities to speak for themselves and be primary decision makers on issues affecting their lives, health, and neighborhoods.

Good jobs make strong communities. Somerville must address long-term unemployment and underemployment, substandard work, and structural inequities of the economic system by ensuring access to local job opportunities, improved job standards, and support for small businesses and alternative economic enterprises.

Our Revolution Somerville believes that public education is a public good that exists to foster the development of critical-thinking members of society, and that teaching is an important profession in which adults can have a meaningful impact on students’ lives.

Please see our Education Value Statement for more details.

We want to support candidates who support our values. We hope to build an endorsements working group that will engage with the Our Revolution Somerville general membership and the entire community to investigate which candidates support our values and determine which races we should prioritize.

Our Revolution Somerville will work to strengthen the rights of tenants and homeowner occupants, make community planning decisions participatory and transparent, preserve and develop affordable housing, and increase the share of permanently affordable housing that is removed from the private real estate market.

Tufts does not pay taxes in Somerville. Instead, they have what's called a P.I.L.O.T. agreement, Payment In Lieu Of Taxes. The current annual payment from Tufts to the city of Somerville is $275,000, but if Tufts were required to pay taxes, its nontaxable property would have netted the city $6.64 million in Fiscal Year (FY) 2014, according to a city document produced at the Board of Aldermen’s request. Source. The agreement will expire in 2018. How can we make sure that the city negotiates a better agreement with this institution? Read more about what the ORS PILOT group is doing here.

Our Revolution Somerville believes that if we are going to call our city a sanctuary city, it is our responsibility to make Somerville a city that values and supports the immigrant communities here.