Craft of Campaigns

In this episode, Hannah talks about first learning of a once-every-fifteen-years campaign opportunity (7:21), learning how Comcast had been secretly fighting against paid sick days and “running the Chamber of Commerce from the back” (10:46), coming up with campaign demands that were “legally impossible to get” (15:54), “learning how to count to nine” Council votes & the legislative “sausage-making” (38:02), and “testing the app...

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...

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 wh...

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 pipeli...

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 sho...

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 Dep...

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 pa...

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...

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 O...

A week after the 2018 midterm election, Amazon announced it would spend over $5 billion – matched by billions in tax breaks from Gov. Andrew Cuomo – to build an East Coast headquarters in a working class neighborhood in Queens, NY. Some of the city’s most influential labor unions enthusiastically supported the deal, along with what looked like most of New York’s political establishment, as did many of the neighborhood’s  working cl...

On Election Day two weeks ago, Missouri was not on the list of states progressives were paying attention to – but it should have been, because it was the site of an unprecedented ballot initiative victory won by a working class tenant union. In this episode, we'll hear about how KC Tenants went from ten people sitting around a borrowed conference room in February 2019, to an organization of 4,300 dues-paying members who have wo...

In this episode, you'll hear an inside account of the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which today protects nearly a million immigrants from deportation and gives them the right to be legally employed, beginning with the fight to win undocumented student protections in California that came before the Dream Act and DACA (11:04), the decision to separate the campaign to win protections for immigrants brough...

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. Subscribe today so you don't miss our first episode, coming November 15, 20...