Founded by veteran organizer Horace Small, the Union of Minority Neighborhoods (UMN) is a small community-organizing project started in 2002 to increase activism in communities of color in Boston. As a startup organization, UMN had little money to spend on database software and they initially kept track of all their records in Microsoft Word and Excel documents. In 2003, they were introduced to ODB. Small described it as "the first database I could really use." UMN is now a "power user": in just over a year their ODB database has grown fivefold to 853 records and 150 donors. In 2004, UMN used ODB to turn out 350 people to the first true public hearing on the controversial proposals of Mitt Romney to eliminate affirmative action for women and people of color in Massachusetts, resulting in a retreat by the Republican governor.