FUSD evolved from Turnout Sunday, a 2014 voter mobilization partnership among the eight historic African American church denominations, leveraging their collective power to educate, protect, and turn out the Black Voter in Tuesday elections, based on voter-readiness plans made after church services on Sunday. Turnout Sunday, coordinated by Dr. Barbara Williams-Skinner, President of Skinner Leadership Institute, partnered in 2018 with Rev. Jim Wallis, Chair of the Georgetown Center for Faith and Justice, and Rev. Adam Taylor, Sojourners’ President in Turnout Sunday-Lawyers & Collars. Through this effort, clergy in sacred collars teamed up with hundreds of volunteer election protection lawyers, coordinated through the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, at vulnerable voting locations to protect Black voters facing restrictions of their voting rights. 

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Faiths United to Save Democracy (FUSD) was launched in 2021 as a project of Turnout Sunday following the horrible public death in 2020 of George Floyd, as a voter protection campaign expanded to protect the rights of vulnerable voters of all races and backgrounds. Through FUSD, a partnership was formed with Jewish, Muslim, Hispanic evangelicals, Black Church, Asian, and Mainline White Church leaders as national partners. Collectively, they reflected a nonpartisan, interfaith, multi-racial, and intergenerational effort to overcome the unprecedented assault on democracy with the dramatic increase in voter restriction laws. FUSD is committed to neutralizing mounting efforts that make it more difficult for people living in poverty, vulnerable voters, including targeting voters of color, the elderly, students, and the disabled, to exercise their right to vote in free, fair, and safe elections. The campaign is built on the strength of the Black Church’s long history and experience in voting rights protections, with a broader effort to protect the voting rights of all voters in FUSD priority states at polling sites serving vulnerable voters.