1st Time Drupaling, Civic Action Site

Greetings!

I've put together a civic action site for a nonprofit local govt watchdog group.

My first attempt was with Joomla and its' community modules, which I scrapped for a number of reasons before switching to Drupal. I am using the newsportal2 theme for light page weight and speed (slow servers). I kinda took the "kitchen sink" approach with the modules, and then removed anything that didn't seem to work well.

The idea is that the site be not just a political forum, but a place where a public issue gets discussed for possible citizen action, the possible actions are then put forth by any member of the group, voted on by all members, then sent to a member council to be approved.
Once approved, it then becomes a group project which members are free to track and participate in.

This is my first time using Drupal, and I would appreciate any feedback.

Note: once we have sufficient funding for a relational database, the plan is to also add on the civiccrm module as well.

Thanks!