Working Groups

DSA Ventura County is currently composed of various working groups, which attend to the essential functions and missions of the organization.

Revolutionizing Community Safety (RCS)

The Revolutionizing Community Safety Working Group (RCS), formerly known as the Police Oversight Working Group, exists to fundamentally transform how safety is understood and practiced in Ventura County. We know that true safety does not come from more policing, surveillance, or incarceration. Instead, it comes from strong communities that are connected, resourced, and empowered to care for one another.

Policing in the United States has always been rooted in systems of racialized control and colonial violence. In Ventura County, as elsewhere, this manifests through over-policing of Black, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class communities while public resources are stripped from housing, healthcare, and education. RCS seeks to dismantle this status quo by organizing for policies that reduce the power and scope of police and by investing in alternatives that actually make people safe.

Our goals include expanding the power of Ventura County residents in decisions about public safety, fighting to defund and ultimately abolish policing as it exists today, and working to decolonize our community by building institutions that are rooted in justice, dignity, and collective care. This means redirecting resources away from punishment and towards housing, education, healthcare, mental health support, and other community-based solutions.

RCS is both a defensive and visionary project: we resist harm caused by policing in the present while also creating and uplifting models of community safety that are not based in coercion, surveillance, or violence. By developing alternatives, such as restorative justice programs, mutual aid networks, and community-led crisis response, we move closer to a Ventura County where safety is built collectively, not enforced violently.

Labor

DSA-VC Members are overwhelmingly members of the working class. Spread out across economic sectors, a few unionized and many not, our members work for a living. Socialists understand that we can’t build power for our class without building power in the workplace. A key charge of the Labor Working Group then is to have DSA-VC members not only canvass on weekends and join meetings weeknights, but take their socialist politics with them to work and see the workplace as a key site of political struggle. The Labor Working Group is the organizational form in which DSA-VC can carry this out.

Mutual Aid

Mutual aid is a voluntary exchange of resources and services for the mutual benefit of all people involved. It involves comrades coming together to work as equals for the common good by assessing what people need and what people can provide. Mutual aid projects come from and are run by the community rather than nonprofit workers, foundations, or charity programs created by the ruling classes. No one is made to feel inferior for receiving help, as it is fundamentally an organic and egalitarian social relationship, not a material one based on hierarchy, and everyone provides what they can rather than separating into “givers” and “receivers.”

Environmental Justice

There is no denying the scale and urgency of the environmental crisis we face. Climate change, deforestation, pollution, and habitat destruction are all leading to a catastrophic collapse of our natural world that will have devastating effects not only on various ecosystems but on humans as well.

The degradation and exploitation of our environment is a social justice issue. Working class, low income, and marginalized people disproportionately bear the brunt of industrial pollution responsible for destroying the environment. Power plants, landfills, slag heaps and toxic industries are routinely located in their communities. They must endure the pollution yet receive very little, if any, economic benefit from them.

Capitalism is addicted to a perpetual cycle of pillaging natural resources, exploiting the labor of the working class then dumping the wastes of industry on to the people it exploits. The logic of capitalist accumulation works directly against sustainability and efforts to advance environmental protections. Eco-friendly capitalism is not possible. When our economy is judged by growth and the furthering of private profits it is clear that our planet cannot sustain such a burden. We believe that democratic socialism can provide the means to work toward a sustainable environment and an economy that works for all, not just the 1%.

Eco-socialism is a vision for an economy and society that exist harmoniously with nature. One in which natural resources are held in common by all people. In this new economy industry is controlled democratically to ensure that pollution is mitigated and the abundance of the earth is distributed equitably.

Winning this alternative is a long struggle, one that must be fought locally. DSA VC is under no illusion that we’re winning at the moment. Our current work is predominantly defensive. We are fighting to rid Ventura County of dirty industry. We are fighting to end pollution in the working class and marginalized communities who have borne the burden of capitalist pollution for too long.

Healthcare Justice

DSA Ventura County believes that comprehensive, quality healthcare is a human right. As democratic socialists, we believe that every human being is entitled to have his or her basic needs met, regardless of race, gender, orientation, age, national origin, religion, disability, citizenship status or economic status. We reject a healthcare system that is based on profit and results in Americans spending more on healthcare while having the least favorable outcomes compared to other industrialized countries. We reject a healthcare system that is financially unattainable by millions of Americans while a few unregulated insurance and drug companies rake in billions of dollars per year in profits. We are fighting to create an inclusive healthcare system.

DSA Ventura County is committed to the education, training, and organization of the masses to fight for guaranteed healthcare for all Americans. We work in solidarity with a coalition of millions of grassroots and labor organizers who are going door to door, spreading the word and engaging our neighbors to join in the fight to not only make guaranteed healthcare in California a reality, but to also fight for Medicare for All on the national level.

Electoral

The Electoral Working Group is Ventura DSA’s vehicle for engaging in local politics with a clear socialist perspective. While the ruling class uses elections to maintain power, we know that working people can also use the ballot box as one tool to advance justice and build class consciousness.

This group has two primary responsibilities: First, it evaluates candidates seeking public office in Ventura County, making recommendations to the chapter for possible endorsements. Every candidate is carefully assessed on their record, values, and willingness to stand with working-class communities, with the understanding that elected officials must be accountable to the movement, not the other way around. Second, the group reviews and analyzes ballot measures and propositions, studying their potential impacts and making recommendations for support or opposition. A central output of this work is Ventura DSA’s Voters’ Guide, which helps neighbors cut through political spin and understand how each measure affects working people, immigrants, and marginalized communities.

Beyond these tasks, the Electoral Working Group sees elections as an opportunity to grow organizing power. Campaigns bring members into neighborhoods, onto phones, and into direct conversations with Ventura residents about the county we want to live in. Whether canvassing for a candidate, writing about a ballot measure, or creating voter guides, the group builds skills, relationships, and capacity that strengthen every part of the chapter. By grounding our electoral work in the needs of ordinary people, Ventura DSA fights to ensure that politics serves the many, not the few.