Who we are
Texas Stands Together is a nonpartisan, grassroots effort organized around statewide line item issues, not candidates and not parties.
Across every part of this state, people worry about the same handful of things: the price of groceries, the property tax bill, what happens to the grid next summer, whether the school down the road has what it needs. Those worries do not sort neatly by party, and the people carrying them are tired of a political conversation that assumes they do.
We work on that gap in two ways:
- The Local Radio Debate Project. Texas radio stations host unedited candidate segments built around the ten line items. Each candidate picks five, speaks five uninterrupted minutes on each, and the segment airs in full.
- The Trust Texans Initiative. A proposed Texas constitutional amendment restoring the right of initiative and referendum. We are asking every sitting member of the Texas House and Senate to state publicly whether they will vote yes.
The Temple Stands Together relationship
Texas Stands Together operates as a DBA of Temple Stands Together, a Texas nonprofit corporation with a 501(c)(4) application pending with the IRS.
Temple Stands Together’s core work is local. It is focused on issues specific to Temple, Texas. Texas Stands Together is a deliberate expansion of that same organizing model to statewide line item issues, the ones that land on every district rather than one city. Same umbrella, wider scope.
We are disclosing that here rather than burying it in a filing, because it is the first thing a reporter or a station’s compliance team would want to know, and because we would look foolish asking legislators to be on the record while we were not.
What we are, and what we are not
Neither party fully represents the people carrying these ten line items every day. That’s not a partisan complaint. It’s the reason this project exists.
What we are
- A nonpartisan, grassroots effort organized around specific statewide issues, not candidates and not parties.
- A structure that gives every candidate the same five minutes, the same rules, and the same closing question.
- Backers of one concrete reform: a joint resolution restoring statewide initiative and referendum rights, with real signature thresholds, fiscal review, and an Ethics Commission disclosure requirement already written into it.
What we are not
- Not an arm of either major party.
- Not a PAC.
- Not a partisan scorecard operation. We publish where a legislator stands on one bill. We do not tell you how to vote on the person.
- Not funded by corporations, businesses, or corporate PACs. We do not accept that money.
The pledge tracker follows the same rule. Read how we stay in our lane.
How this is funded
By individual Texans. That is the whole list. We do not accept corporate or business funding, and we do not accept corporate PAC money.
Every gift is accepted by the Treasurer, who consults the Board of Directors when a gift raises a question worth putting to them. Anything the Treasurer will not accept is returned.
How to get in touch
Stations, candidates, reporters, and anyone who just wants to ask a question can write to us directly. We answer.
- info@texasstandstogether.org
- Website
- texasstandstogether.org
- A mailing address is being set up and will be listed here.
The record, as a spreadsheet
Everything we have on file about where candidates stand, in one file, for anyone who wants to check our work or use it in their own reporting. One row per candidate, with their position on each bill and the issues they have answered.