Merrimack Valley Project

The Organization:

Founded in 1989, the Merrimack Valley Project (MVP) was formed as a regional power organization to address critical social justice issues confronting the Merrimack Valley area of Massachusetts, one of the oldest industrial regions in the nation and home to tens of thousands of immigrants. In its more than thirty year history, MVP has organized pioneering campaigns that are driven by local leadership through a rigorous application of community organizing principles. MVP’s membership is comprised of 30 churches, synagogues, local labor unions, and community organizations, with chapters in Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill. MVP is a founding member of the InterValley Project (IVP) a New England wide organizing network.

MVP’s goal is to organize broad-based civic leadership and institutional power to influence political and economic decisions that affect the quality of life in our communities. We do this by working to expand our institutional membership base; developing large numbers of civic leaders, in particular grassroots leaders, through formal training and experience-based learning; and building our capacity for mass action through intentional relationship building.

Our major accomplishments include successful campaigns to save over 600 manufacturing jobs; the resident buy-out of Amesbury Gardens, a 160-unit democratically owned affordable housing development in Lawrence; increased public funding for firefighting, community policing, and after school programs; the creation of a City Commission on Immigration in Lowell and a City Task Force on Immigration in Lawrence; and passage of the Massachusetts Fair Transportation Act. Most recently we are focused on immigrant rights, worker justice, and the addiction crisis in the Merrimack Valley.