The Civil Rights Press Center - Making Our Stories Heard

Who is doing what this week on the topic of immigrant rights? What’s the latest in the work for marriage equality? Who do you call in Wisconsin to talk to regarding a woman’s right to choose? Who can give you a quote on the latest bill around disability rights?

The civil rights movement is alive and well and covering an ever robust range of focus areas. At any given point, there are a lot of people doing good work in a lot of areas. So many of us, in fact, doing good work, that it can be hard to keep track of the latest news and who to contact about that news. Realizing that our stories would be more accessible to the media if we had a one-stop shop where all forms of civil rights press releases are housed, as well as a directory of communications contacts at a range of civil rights organizations, the National Campaign to Restore Civil Rights has developed The Civil Rights Press Center.

The Civil Rights Press Center will be that one-stop shop for breaking civil rights news and the contact information for the respective communications specialists. This centralized location will help members of the press more easily find up-to-date information, so that our stories can be further amplified.

The Civil Rights Press Center will include two components:

Press Release Library

The Civil Rights Press Center will gather, make accessible, and amplify the reach of civil rights press releases.

Our diverse collection of over 100 partners is constantly making news on a wide range of civil rights topics. The Civil Rights Press Center will give a virtual home to press releases documenting these varied efforts. This home base of civil rights news and information will allow media contacts to more easily learn of the variety of issues presently being worked on, as well as the organizations working on those issues. The center will additionally allow for civil rights organizations to more easily see what their partner, and potential partner, organizations are working on and how they are framing their focus.

Communications Contact Database 

In addition to hosting press releases, the Civil Rights Press Center will also provide a searchable database of communications contacts located at our partner organizations. This database will provide streamlined information, allowing members of the press to search by issue and location to find specialized civil rights spokespeople.

This combination of a Press Release Library and Communications Contact Database will allow the civil rights community to maximize its effectiveness and reach in communicating with the press.

The Civil Rights Press Center can be contacted at PressCenter@NYLPI.org

We look forward to working with all of you to turn this center into as useful of an outlet as it can be. We’re presently reaching out to partners to get added to their press release lists and are building up our press library. Once we’ve built up the library, and are getting up-to-date information from the community, we will outreach to the press to let them know that they can use the Press Center to learn of civil rights news and organizations.

Thanks for your support and engagement with this project. Through our shared efforts, we can see that civil rights news gets the coverage it deserves.