The podcast highlights stories and lessons from issue-based action campaigns.
The Craft of Campaigns podcast highlights stories and lessons from issue-based action campaigns, beyond one-off mobilizations and single election cycles. Campaigns channel grassroots energy to win concrete victories, build winning coalitions, and topple pillars of power standing in the way of justice. In each episode, we interview organizers about how a campaign unfolded, strategy decisions, and lessons for our current moment.
The podcast is by the Organizing Skills Institute at Training for Change based in the United States. You can learn more about the people and story behind the podcast. Each episode includes a transcript and writeup of key take-aways.
Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today. – Andrew Willis Garcés
Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns, a new podcast from Training for Change. In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. In each episode, we’ll explore one campaign, through firsthand interviews, for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today.
E1: Neidi Dominguez on “not listening to DC” & embracing disagreement in the fight to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals DACA
In this episode, we’ll hear an inside account of the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which today protects nearly a million people from deportation. Neidi Dominguez discusses the decision to separate the campaign from a broader legislative campaign, using “inside” and “outside” strategies to force the Obama Administration’s hand, and how leaning into disagreement ultimately helped organizers stay focused and win their campaign.
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E2: Tara Raghuveer on hijacking Kansas City’s elections by being “ruthless” about basebuilding
In this episode, we’ll hear how KC Tenants went from ten people in February 2019, to an organization of 4,300 dues-paying members who have won five citywide campaigns transforming conditions for hundreds of thousands of the city’s renters. We’ll hear how they reshaped the city’s municipal election without spending a dime on partisan electoral engagement; their internal debates that led to the disruption of 911 evictions in a single month; their culture of reflection during the pandemic; and how “ruthlessness about basebuilding” has helped them succeed.
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E3: Sasha Wijeyeratne on holding a ‘hard no’ & winning the narrative “on the doors” in the fight against Amazon’s “HQ2”
In this episode, we’ll hear about deciding not to negotiate, quickly mapping out their opponents and key leverage points, countering Amazon’s & Cuomo’s PR machine “on the doors” in Queens and being willing to struggle with their own members on the issue, how AOC’s recent primary victory influenced their targets “flipping” on Amazon, the influence of this fight on their current campaign against Innovation Queens and learning more deeply the resonance of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s quote, “coalition isn’t home”.
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E4: Mary Hooks & Kate Shapiro on ending bail in ATL & the Black Mama’s Bail Outs
What does it mean to look at an issue like “bail” and “the criminalizaton of LGBTQ people” through the lens of a campaigner? That was the question for Southerners on New Ground in the lead-up to launching their Free From Fear campaign framework, which they used to pilot successful campaigns to end wealth-based incarceration in the City of Atlanta – which reduced the jail population by over 90% – and inspired the Black Mama’s Bail Outs tactic that has since been replicated all over the United States.
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E5: Debt Collective on campaigns against an idea & creating inside leverage with outside pressure
No single executive order by President Biden may be as consequential as the one he signed in August, that may soon lead to forty million people having all of their student debt wiped away. But most of the stories chronicling the path to mainstream acceptance of student debt cancellation leave out the first five years the organizers were largely ridiculed and ignored… until they launched the nation’s first student debt strike, and ended up at a bargaining table with the Secretary of Education. In this episode, we’ll hear about the campaign’s beginning at Occupy Wall Street (16:01) and its “scouting” phases (13:20); how they used crowdfunded medical, bail and student debt cancellation as an outreach tactic ( 13:42); “dropping a bomb” in a red box on Obama Administration officials (29:00); how they kept up outside pressure even when they were at the bargaining table (32:12); how their basebuilding and casework influenced the 2019 Democratic presidential primaries (36:13); focusing on Black women borrowers (43:25) and building a broader coalition to keep the pressure on (43:37).
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E6: Will Tanzman on ending bail in Illinois, building a statewide coalition, & defending their win
You’ll hear about how this campaign grew out of a national conversation sparked by publication of The New Jim Crow (7:59), the initial local campaign targeting a Chicago prosecutor (11:12) which then got a boost from uprisings against the murder of LaQuan McDonald (12:26), shifting to targeting a local judge (20:26), and then building a statewide coalition to take on the State Supreme Court (24:06), how they handled the growing pains within the coalition that came along with that (32:51), how they channeled energy from the 2020 uprisings to win a historic vote (35:53), and then fought back against a targeted misinformation campaign in 2022 (43:16).
Will Tanzman is executive director of The People’s Lobby, where he’s been an organizer since 2008. During his time there The People’s Lobby’s has successfully raised the minimum wage in a number of Cook County suburbs from $8.25 to $13 and led a campaign of mass actions and civil disobedience that played a role in the closure of $125 million in corporate tax loopholes in Illinois. Will grew up in Chicago and began organizing as a high school student in the Chicago Public Schools, where he started an organization of students across the state working for a more just education system, successfully changing citywide standardized testing policies and practices.
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E7 Caitlin Breedlove on fighting price-gouging & campaigns as political identity formation moments
In this episode, you’ll hear about how an observation at a Walmart led to a short campaign against Amazon (10:02), about how Caitlin started to reconsider the idea of working “wide and shallow (26:54) and how Women’s March thinks about campaigns as “political identity formation moments” (30:34), works to combat elitism (36:02) and the difference between “sprint feminism” and “marathon feminism” (52:11).
Caitlin Breedlove is the Deputy Executive Director at the Women’s March and also serves as the Movement Strategist in Residence at Auburn Seminary. Since 2003, she has been organizing, writing and building movements in red states: working across race, class, culture, gender, sexuality and faith. She is a current board member and the former Co-Director of Southerners On New Ground (SONG), and is also the former Campaign Director of Standing on the Side of Love at the Unitarian Universalist Association. Caitlin began her work in the South doing popular education and organizer training at the historic Highlander Center in Tennessee. and is the former host of the podcast ‘Fortification‘, which interviewed movement leaders and organizers about their spiritual lives.
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E8: Daniel Hunter on never using the same tactic twice, undoing a “done deal” in Philadelphia
In this episode we hear about how billionaire casino developers were threatening two working class neighborhoods (7:39), leading to a new campaigning organization to try NOT directly organizing against casinos but instead to win over more support by focusing on a lack of transparency (9:25), and doing it by designing tactics that used “show not tell” principles to create drama and suspense (11:11), and then designing subsequent short campaigns around possible leverage points to keep casinos away (20:15), but refusing to give up when they lost repeatedly in the courts (24:10), and why it was important to refuse to hold a march or rally and limit themselves to new tactics rather than use any that had worked in the past (27:34) and how a 17-year-old campaign feels especially relevant today (38:35). For a description of each Casino-Free campaign you can read their direct action manual, and calendar of Operation Transparency actions. You can also check out Daniel’s book, Strategy and Soul.
Daniel Hunter is the Associate Director for Global Training at 350.org, where he has developed numerous open source training materials available in many languages. He has trained thousands of activists, from ethnic minorities in Burma, pastors in Sierra Leone, to independence activists in northeast India, and has written multiple books, including the “Climate Resistance Handbook” and “Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow,” and he was an architect of Choose Democracy, a campaign to stop a coup in advance of the 2020 election.
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E9: Justin J. Pearson on campaigning to stop a pipeline headed for a Black neighborhood in Memphis
You’ll hear about how Justin’s grandmothers’ stories inspired him to fight (9:02), the history of Boxtown in Southwest Memphis (11:31), what happened when two oil companies proposed to build a pipeline through that part of town (13:30), and how they tried to avoid answering questions until they started to get blowback for calling the neighborhood “the point of least resistance” (16:27), why five people at a rally against the pipeline decided to start a new organization (18:13), how going door to door and working the phones helped them finally find homeowners who wanted to take on the companies (21:56), and partnered with largely-white climate groups and legal advocates to point of leverage to stop the pipeline (31:33), and even though the companies’ put a local NAACP leader on the payroll (35:15) ended up finally activating local elected officials to get involved (36:29) and even national influencers like Al Gore (39:46), what it felt like to “get the call” they had won (56:48) and how they successfully passed new laws to keep out future pipelines (58:15). Justin J.
Pearson is President and founder of Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) and co-founder of Memphis Community Against the Pipeline which is a Black-led environmental justice organization that successfully defeated a multi-billion dollar company’s crude oil pipeline project that would have poisoned Memphis’s drinking water and stolen land from the community. He is the Co-Lead and the Strategic Advisor for the Poor People’s Campaign: National Call for Moral Revival. And one week ago he won a special election to replace Tennessee State Representative Barbara Cooper, who passed away last year and was an early ally to MCAP in their campaign. Next week he’ll become one of the state’s youngest elected officials.
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E10: Katey Lauer on how to grieve when our campaigns get stuck & weathering transitions with grace
In this episode, you’ll hear about a series of connected direct action climate campaigns that crested in 2013 (8:55), all focused on getting the Environmental Protection Agency to implement specific policies multiple organizations had been building towards for years (9:47), and what they did instead of acknowledging they were “stuck” (15:59), how the “turning on each other” she sees today feels similar to that moment (20:50) and what she wishes they had done, in hindsight, instead of “forcing something that wasn’t there” at a movement-wide strategy summit (18:42), and what West Virginia Can’t Wait is doing now to navigate a similar moment with those lessons in the foreground (22:56). You can read more reflections about this campaign on our website and at The Forge: https://forgeorganizing.org/article/g….
Katey Lauer is an organizer, facilitator, and trainer in West Virginia, with a deep love of place. She has formed and led grassroots organizations in the Appalachian mountains for fifteen years, as Coordinator of The Alliance for Appalachia, Lead Organizer of Appalachia Rising and The March on Blair Mountain, and founding Director of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. Architect of the WV Can’t Wait movement, Katey currently acts as Co-chair of this statewide formation that’s out to win a people’s government in the mountain state. Katey is also a Core Trainer at Training for Change.
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E11 Heather Cronk on disrupting the movement ecosystem in a campaign for federal LGBTQ protections
In this episode, Heather describes learning about how the military had become an especially important place for working class queer and trans people (31:45), and how a campaign against “don’t ask don’t tell” was conceptualized as a pathway to win a federal law banning employment nondiscrimination (34:57), how Obama gave lip service to the movement’s demands and how campaigners realized he could be moved on their issues (29:43), but most national organizations wanted to avoid “turning up the heat” on his administration in a midterm election year (42:04), their attempt to use “outside game” leverage to get a repeal inserted into the annual federal military funding bill (45:42), teaming up with and learning from undocumented organizers (59:36) and learning a hard lesson about not being able to work collaboratively with “inside game” advocates.
Heather is a community organizer with experience working with LGBTQ liberation, immigrant solidarity, and racial justice movements. As Managing Director of Care in Action, she supports the work of caregivers, domestic workers, and others who are committed to creating a new “care economy” to translate people power into political impact. Prior to joining Care in Action, Heather served as co-director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), focused on organizing white people to undermine white supremacy, in alignment with Black- and other people of color-led movements. Previous to her work with SURJ, Heather served as co-director of GetEQUAL and Chief Operating Officer for the New Organizing Institute. A queer, agnostic seminary graduate, she serves on the board of The Open Church of Maryland and Faithful America.
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In our Season One finale, we hear from Durham Beyond Policing organizers AJ Williams and Danielle Purifoy about how a rapid response campaign against a new police headquarters led to a strategic focus on the municipal budget process to fund community alternatives to police, ultimately diverting more municipal funding to noncarceral approaches to community safety than any other Southern city.
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In this episode, Hannah Sassaman talks about the campaign to force Comcast to make historic concessions to working class Philadelphians, and change the city’s relationship to its largest company, which had been working behind the scenes to oppose paid sick days and other progressive proposals. She also describes many of the lessons campaigners learned, which are now being incorporated into new fights for a just Philadelphia.
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