I’ve spent the past two years working as a Community Organizer with the Alliance for Community Services, a worker-consumer coalition organizing around healthcare and human services for all. Most of my work is with Humanize Long Term Care, a statewide campaign to transform long-term care in Illinois. Our work is led by three pillars of policy: supporting people in transitioning out of nursing homes into community housing, stopping the “hospital-to-nursing home” pipeline, and increasing dignity for people in nursing facilities.
For the past year, our campaign has been working with union teachers at City Colleges to offer what we call “Resident Empowerment” workshops. These workshops support people in learning how to use technology to advocate for themselves, talk with others, and access resources. These workshops also educate people on the voting process, how people can make change happen, and who is responsible for the way things are in our society.
The grant we received from AAPD’s REV UP Initiative (Register, Educate, Vote, Use Your Power) in 2026 allowed us to expand our Resident Empowerment project to build leadership among people living in nursing facilities and encourage them to learn from each other about problems affecting them.
We worked with people living in nursing facilities to assign “Voting Registration Captains,” using the relationships we built in the digital literacy and political engagement workshops. These captains went around the nursing facilities they lived in to register people to vote, update voter registration, and educate fellow nursing home residents about their right to vote and possible voting options.
Even though residents have the right to talk to each other about voting, and voting information is publicly available, the biggest obstacle we faced while running this program came from the staff of the facilities themselves. At numerous different facilities, staff told residents they couldn’t ask people if they were registered to vote or help register people.
Their reason? Nursing facilities claim they already help people register. But as people living in nursing homes know best, leaving important tasks “up to the nursing home” often means people miss doctor’s appointments, get told when and where they can go outside, and get treated like a kid.
Many of the people I interact with in nursing facilities do not have access to phones or laptops, and technology. Those who do may not have service on their device. Building real relationships with people, inviting people to community potlucks, tabling together, and helping people access resources gave us the network of community to power our work. This allowed us to push back against the paternalistic attitude in nursing homes — supporting people going to events in the community and not in an institution, and encouraging people to see others as allies and leaders. For many, Alliance for Community Services potlucks are the first and only time leaving the nursing home in a year or more.
Encouraging people to vote and building solidarity and leadership is important because nursing homes have a financial incentive to keep people uninformed and in a bed. I’ve heard numerous stories of nursing facilities trying to stop people from talking to each other.
However, I’ve also heard stories about facilities inviting local candidates to come speak to residents. Candidates running for all levels of office should absolutely visit nursing facilities, group homes, and all spaces where eligible voters live. However, it’s important that candidates engage residents equitably and fairly. Nursing home residents have told me stories about local candidates trying to engage them in campaigning by promising jobs if the candidate took office – this is predatory and illegal behavior.
Voters living in nursing homes have power, yet they often face barriers at every stage of the voting process: from registering, to learning about their choices, to casting a ballot.
Building the power of voters in nursing homes looks like residents having the agency to talk with one another about their own politics, ideas, and rights. These places hold hundreds of people, many of them hoping to find housing, employment, and care options that allow them to live in the community, instead of an institution.
People trapped inside nursing homes are already involved in politics – their signatures put people on the ballot and in office – but until we empower people to talk to each other and build alliances, nursing homes will keep saying they can “take care of it.”
Rosbel Garza (he/him/his) is a community organizer with the Alliance for Community Services and a graduate student in DePaul University’s International Studies program.