BakerRipley Empower Case Study

Written By Ebony Wiggins

BakerRipley Relational Organizers from the Golfcrest-Greater Hobby area getting trained at the Houston Art Center, October 2024 

BakerRipley is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Houston, Texas dedicated to community development. For more than 119 years, the agency has carried on its mission to bring resources, education, and opportunities to neighbors. BakerRipley delivers coordinated, community-driven programs that advance economic mobility, lifelong learning — from early childhood through adulthood — and career-focused training and support for youth, adults, seniors, and families. 

One such program is Civic Engagement. For more than a decade, this dedicated team has led community-based programming centered around increasing civic engagement and voter participation in Greater Houston. Since the program’s inception, the team has worked tirelessly to activate neighbors, cultivate leaders, and help people get a seat at the table. As a trusted community presence, BakerRipley is uniquely positioned to engage residents in ways partisan or political get-out-the-vote efforts cannot.

Their efforts have resulted in over 1 million voter touch points, over 10,000 voter registrations, and hundreds of neighbors receiving leadership development training. 

In the summer of 2024, the Civic Engagement team began training neighbors to leverage their own personal connections to increase voter turnout in local, down-ballot elections. What started as a community-designed pilot program with a dozen volunteers at a local church has blossomed into the region’s leading relational organizing initiative, with over 100 organizers and reaching thousands of low-propensity voters each election. 

This trusted, relationship-based outreach via the Empower app significantly increases voter participation. In both the November 2025 and March 2026 elections – each historically low-turnout – this program was deployed in 2 neighborhoods, reaching thousands of neighbors and resulting in a nearly 10% increase in voter turnout each election.

For context, large-scale stranger-to-stranger outreach typically increases voter turnout by an average of 0.29% (Schein, 2020). In our case, each voter touchpoint from a relational organizer increased the odds of voting by 20%. In select communities, as many as 10% of all voters who cast a ballot were contacted by BakerRipley relational organizers prior to showing up to vote. 

Dot map of the thousands of relational contacts in Harris and Fort Bend County, March 2026 

Thanks to Empower’s partnership, BakerRipley will continue to invest in relational organizing. The agency aims to triple the scale of its program for the November 2026 election and expand to at least 2 more neighborhoods. Moreover, commencing in 2027, they aim to implement a relational approach to community development, and incorporate the same strategies used for voter engagement in other programs. 

Bar chart showing the differences in turnout between contacted and uncontacted relational contacts, indicating a statistically significant effect in both 2025 and 2026 

“Being a relational organizer has really been an eye opener for me… I was surprised that some people you would automatically think would vote didn’t, and those you thought didn’t care took it seriously once they understood more… Now I have people coming up to me and asking about voting! 

This program makes me feel like I have made a difference.”  

– Minister Veronica Sanchez, Richmond-Rosenberg Relational Organizer 

To learn more about the successes of BakerRipley’s relational organizing programs, please review the following reports detailing and evaluating their activities: 

Ebony Wiggins
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