Happy Saturday!
This is Organizing Director Isabel Harper 
If you’ve been following what’s been happening with the audit, any of the ballot questions, or the landmark pieces of progressive legislation destined to die as the session winds to a close, there are lots of ways you can volunteer with Act on Mass! Just to name a few, this summer we are:
- Collecting signatures for local stipend reform ballot questions before the deadline on July 8th (See more below!)
- Getting as many current and/or prospective state legislators as possible to sign the Every District Accountable: Good Government for Mass Pledge
- Supporting our endorsed candidates (see last week’s Scoop)
- Calling our legislators every Tuesday to oppose H.5469 concerning the audit and public records access
As you can see, we have lots of pots on the stove! So, in addition to lots of stellar volunteers, Act on Mass is officially all staffed up! We have two new organizing interns, Ashley and Alena:
Ashley Chamu Charco is a rising senior at UMass Amherst, pursuing a B.A. in Political Science and Legal Studies. Originally from Florida, she now resides in Randolph, right outside of Boston. As a first-generation Latina, Ashley is extremely passionate about basic human rights and civil liberties across the nation. She works with a handful of organizations, school clubs, and agencies that aim to uplift underrepresented communities. In these roles, she actively advocates for more accessible policies that foster an inclusive, welcoming environment. She hopes to expand this work for Act on Mass and the residents of Massachusetts!
Alena Mulhern is a new Grassroots Organizing Intern for Act on Mass this summer. She is currently studying International Relations-Political Science at Wellesley and is looking forward to furthering her involvement in state politics through hands-on experience. Alena is so excited to join the team!
Vol Call!
As you may recall, the state-wide ballot question on stipend reform, one which had already collected 90,000 signatures, was killed in a back-door legal procedure by the Legislature back in May. So, we’re pivoting!
Act on Mass is collaborating with the Coalition to Reform our Legislature to put a non-binding public policy question on local ballots in the following districts:
They are listed by district name (towns/cities) currently represented by
State Senate Districts:
- Suffolk & Middlesex (Boston/Belmont/Watertown/Cambridge) William Brownsberger
State House Districts:
- 15th Norfolk (Brookline) Tommy Vitolo
- 7th Norfolk (Milton, Randolph) Richard Wells
- 10th Plymouth (Brockton) Michelle Dubois
- 15th Middlesex (Lexington) Michelle Ciccolo
- 24th Middlesex (Arlington, Belmont) Dave Rogers
- 25th Middlesex (Cambridge) Marjorie Decker
- Barnstable, Dukes, and Nantucket (Falmouth, Nantucket) Thomas Moakley
- 14th Middlesex (Acton, Concord) Simon Cataldo
- 20th Middlesex (Lynnfield, Middleton, N. Reading) Bradley Jones
- 30th Middlesex (Woburn, Reading) Richard Haggerty
- 32nd Middlesex (Melrose, Wakefield) Kate Lipper-Garabedian
- 29th Middlesex (Watertown, West Cambridge) Steve Owens
- 10th Middlesex (Watertown, Waltham, Newton) John Lawn
- 11th Hampden (Springfield) Bud Williams
The question will read:
Shall the representative for this district be instructed to vote in favor of legislation or rules to reduce the House Speaker’s and Senate President’s control over state legislators’ stipends (extra pay) and to provide stipends only to legislators who do significant extra work that is transparent and accountable to the public?
We still have quite a few signatures to gather before the July 8th deadline, so if you collected signatures for the stipend reform, signed for it last fall, or just care about eliminating loyalty pay on Beacon Hill and have some free time this week and next, please let us know! You can email us at info@actonmass.org. We need all the help we can get.
New guest blog post! – The legislature is an “old boy’s club.” How bad is it really?
New blog post from Act on Mass volunteer and endorsement committee member, Noah Risley.
The legislature is an “old boy’s club.” How bad is it really?
It would be a truism to say that the Massachusetts General Court is an “Old Boys Club” of mostly White men. But what does that mean? Does the demographic makeup of our legislature actually matter?
Unsurprisingly, yes.
My name is Noah Risley, I’m a volunteer researcher for Act On Mass, and I’ll be taking us on a deep dive looking at the demographics of the past two sessions of the state legislature, the 194th and 193rd General Courts, and how our unrepresentative legislature exacerbates the issues of transparency and corruption on Beacon Hill.
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Most commentary about legislative demographics are reserved for the U.S. Congress. When state legislatures do get put under a microscope, almost all analysis is conducted in the aggregate and ignores the real meat of policymaking: committees and leadership.
Dashboards from advocacy groups like Vote Run Lead show how underrepresented women, especially women of color, are in the Massachusetts General Court. The National Conference of State Legislatures only has data on our legislature from 2015 and 2020 (with a decent amount of information missing).
The most detailed reporting obviously comes from local outlets, like this piece from the Globe highlighting recent gains made by lawmakers of color. Yet, even local reporting takes a wide focus on chamber-wide analysis (e.g. “The Legislature is 83 percent white”… “Of the state’s 198 sitting lawmakers, just five are Black women”), missing a deeper picture.
And so, if you wanted to look at the demographic makeup of a specific committee or study it across sessions, you’d need to collect and analyze almost all of the data yourself. So, with help from Drew Bowler of Beacon Hill Compliance Tracker fame and AOM’s fearless leader, Scotia Hille, I did.
…
Some remarkable figures to mention before delving deeper:
- Despite making up only 34.82% of the state population, White men made up 60% of the previous 193rd General Court (GC) and make up 61% of the current state legislature.
- Women of all races make up only 31% of the current state legislature, despite being a majority of the state’s population
- Women of color made up 16.79% of Massachusetts’ population in 2020, but as of 2026 are only 7.53% of the state legislature. That is actually a full percentage point increase, as in the 193rd GC women of color held only 6.43% of seats
- There are no current lawmakers of American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander descent.
Click the link to read the full blog, tackling questions like: which committees feature a disproportionate number of woman legislators?
READ THE FULL BLOG POST FROM NOAH>>
READ THE FULL BLOG POST FROM NOAH>>
What we’re reading this week
Great reporting and writing from around the Bay State this week!
- With TKO, unions’ ballot campaign win streak rolls on by Kelly Garrity for Boston Globe
- Is New England’s new hydropower transmission line paying off by Sarah Shemkus for Canary Media
- SEIU 32BJ & MassBudget release health coverage study on effects of racialized extreme inequality by Viviana Abreu-Hernandez for MassBudget
- The limits of 2½: Override requests surge in Hampshire County communities as costs rise by Sam Ferland for the Daily Hampshire Gazette
- ‘We made a mistake’: After court tosses 2 ballot questions, attorney general defends her record by Adam Reilly for GBH
Missed a Scoop or two? You can find a full archive of all past Saturday Scoops on our blog.
Take Action
As I mentioned above, I have been hosting a phonebank every Tuesday where volunteers and I have been calling our elected officials about H.5469 and then reporting back to each other on the conversations we had.
We will continue to call about this bill until it makes its way to Governor Healy’s desk, but there’s also a multitude of priority bills rushing through at the last minute that deserve our attention!
For instance, the Senate passed it’s version of an omnibus energy bill (S.3143) on Wednesday. While the Senate version sports some major improvements to the House version (H.5175), Senators only has an hour to read this massive bill before it came to a vote in Ways and Means. But I digress. This week, we are partnering with 350 Mass to call our Senators regarding key amendments to the bill such as:
- Halting the expansion of the gas system and protecting workers
- Stopping utilities from charging us, their customers, for advertising
- Removing subsidies for burning trees to make electricity
- Protections from Data Centers
- And more – full list here
The final vote on the bill and its amendments is this Wednesday (July 1st). If you can’t make it in Tuesday, here is an Action Guide for S. 3143. And, as always, feel free to use our toolkit/phonebank script for H.5469, and let us know how it goes! Register for the phonebank here to get the Zoom link.
CALL YOUR SENATORS ABOUT THE OMNIBUS ENERGY BILL>>
Thanks for reading and for supporting Act on Mass! Have a great rest of your weekend.
Isabel
Isabel Harper (she/her)
Organizing Director, Act on Mass