Craft of Campaigns - TopPodcast.com

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Craft of Campaigns — Education
Craft of 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.

Copyright: © 2022 Craft of Campaigns

Latest Episodes:

S2E6: Ingrid Lakey on taking on the country’s 6th-largest bank and changing the activist culture on climate change May 14, 2024

In our Season 2 Finale, we’ll hear about a group of Quakers who wanted to experiment with campaign strategy to tackle climate change. Their experiment ended up forcing one of the country’s largest banks to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining after a multi-year campaign and hundreds of direct actions around the country. Ingrid Lakey describes intervening in a culture that prioritized personal solutions to the climate crisis and building an organization that was pro-confrontation and pro-system change. They built action teams around the country that shut down shareholder meetings and disrupted business as usual until their demands were met. Although the campaign started as an experimental intervention, it remains one of the most successful campaigns to take on climate finance.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge.

Take our Season 2 Listener Survey and visit our brand new Campaign Strategy Workbook.

Ingrid Lakey is one of the founders of Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots organization working to build a just and sustainable economy using nonviolent direct action campaigns. EQAT’s first campaign succeeded in pressuring PNC Bank to stop funding mountaintop removal coal mining. More than ten years ago, she gave up a career in public radio to follow her leading to be a climate justice activist. Ingrid has been a trainer and facilitator for 25 years, leading workshops on anti-racism, diversity, team building, non-violent direct action, and conflict. She is a lifelong Quaker who was raised in a household where activism and spirituality were intertwined.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S2E5: Nico Amador on fighting gender discrimination on public transit and pivoting gracefully when the campaign got stuck Apr 30, 2024

In this episode, we’ll hear about how a few Philly activists came together in 2009 to take on a policy that was causing harassment and discrimination against transgender public transit riders. This all-volunteer collective used creative tactics, including a drag show and a larger-than-life riders bill of rights to take on one of the largest public transit systems in the country and win. Along the way, they set up a flexible campaign structure and successfully pivoted their strategy when their target was unresponsive.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge. And check out our new Campaign Strategy Workbook for more about some of the tools used in this campaign.

Nico Amador has spent over twenty years in social change movements as a community organizer, facilitator and coach for grassroots leaders working for queer liberation, racial justice and trans rights.

His prior work has included participation in efforts to fight mass incarceration, secure protections for undocumented immigrants, and campaigns for a living wage. As the former Executive Director and lead trainer with Training for Change, he founded a fellowship program for BIPOC organizers and led hundreds of workshops to promote skills and analysis among people working for social change. He's supported several major LGBTQ+ and gender justice organizations, including the National LGBT Task Force, Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Third Wave Fund and the Transgender Law Center, and many local projects across the U.S. He is currently the Director of the Leadership Institute at CenterLink, an international member network of LGBT Centers.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S2E4: Byron Hobbs and Jonathan Hogstad on taking on the corporations funding voter suppression in Michigan Apr 09, 2024

In this episode, we’ll hear about how several Black-led Michigan basebuilding groups responded to the January 6th 2021 revolt and ongoing attacks on voting rights in Black communities. Byron and Jonathan describe the process of researching the corporations that funded election-denying politicians (23:16), and then going after those corporations to create consequences for funding voter suppression (19:12), including a successful campaign against statewide utility rate hikes (40:54).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge, and an article Byron and Jonathan wrote about it.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S2E3: Devan Spear on forcing universities to pay their fair share Mar 26, 2024

In this episode, we’ll hear about a multi-year fight to get some of Philadelphia’s largest property-owners – nonprofit universities and hospitals – to make voluntary payments in lieu of taxes to fund local public schools. Devan Spear describes how the campaign gained momentum by investing in basebuilding (27:05), created action teams on different university campuses (28:18), and used the momentum of the 2020 uprisings for racial justice to quickly move new supporters into action and push their campaign over the finish line (31:06).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge
Devan joined Philadelphia Jobs With Justice as director in 2017. Under her leadership, Philly JWJ collaborated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to launch the NDWA-PA chapter, won a $100 million commitment from UPenn to remediate lead and asbestos in public schools, and launched a new campaign for safety protections for Philadelphia warehouse workers. Devan is the communications vice president for the Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union Women and a member of the PhilaPOSH board of directors.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S2E2: Stephen Lerner on Justice for Janitors: A comeback story that continues today Mar 12, 2024

In this episode, we’ll hear about how tens of thousands of workers lost nearly all of their workplace protections, and then spent two decades campaigning against some of the most powerful Fortune 500 companies to win them back. Stephen Lerner, architect of the campaign, discusses how a realignment of global capital led the union to lose nearly all its bargaining power in the 1980s (17:47), how a few in the union decided to try a different approach (19:26), how they decided which building owners were the most important to target (38:15), and how they used creative tactics to undermine their political and community support, including blocking bridges the leaders of Congress used to get to work (41:27).
Stephen Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers into unions, resulting in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days, and other improvements on the job. He was the Director of SEIU's Property Service Division, served on SEIU's International Executive Board and is the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. He has published numerous articles charting a path for a 21st century labor movement focused on growth and meeting the challenges of a global economy. In 2014 he helped launch the Bargaining for Common Good campaign. Today he is a Senior Fellow at the Kalmanovitz institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S2E1: Karina Mireya and Benji Hart on #NoCopAcademy: A Campaign Against Chicago’s ‘Cop City’ Feb 27, 2024

In this episode, we’ll hear about a campaign to stop Chicago’s “cop city” that recruited dozens of organizations to support an abolitionist effort for the first time. This campaign also helped pave the way for a shift in the city’s organizing landscape that propelled now-Mayor Brandon Johnson to victory in 2023. His administration’s first municipal budget, passed at the end of 2023, includes historic investments in alternatives to policing.

Organizers Karina and Benji explain how the campaign got started with innovative tactics like subway canvassing (20:48) and neighborhood art pop-ups (14:08), and how they recruited support from residents in the part of town where Mayor Emanuel wanted to build the academy (46:14). We’ll also hear their reflections on this campaign’s relevance to Stop Cop City in Atlanta (32:10), and how the campaign’s ripples reverberate in the city’s movement ecology today (52:28).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge. For more resources about the campaign, check out the #NoCopAcademy toolkit. You can also find a documentary trailer and a series of oral history interviews on the #NoCopAcademy website.
Karina Mireya is a digital organizer and freelance photographer intertwining storytelling and narrative building in movements. Raised on the southwest side of Chicago, Karina began organizing around education while in high school and has been a part of No Cop Academy, Treatment Not Trauma, and Cops Out CPS.

Benji Hart is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation, and prison abolition. They organized with the #NoCopAcademy campaign in the role of an adult ally.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

Season Two Trailer Feb 13, 2024

Welcome back to the Craft of Campaigns, a 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 Season 2, we’ll hear about campaigns such as #NoCopAcademy in Chicago, Justice for Janitors in D.C., Defend Black Voters in Michigan, and more. Each episode explores one campaign for key lessons, principles, and practices for organizers today.

Subscribe today so you don't miss our first episode. Season 2 starts February 27, 2024.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E13: Danielle Purifoy & AJ Williams on winning alternatives to policing in Durham NC Feb 28, 2023

In our Season One finale, we hear about how Durham marches responding to police murders and inaction by City Council members led to a successful 2015 effort to elect a local activist (10:56), and then a vote to build a new police headquarters gave rise to a rapid response campaign (12:45) and direct actions educating the public about the municipal budget process (18:57), and then a mini-campaign to deepen the new group's understanding of how to use the budget as a campaign tool (20:47), how other organizers focused on electing more "champions" to the Council (29:18), ending a campaign quiet period to respond to a new push for more police funding (33:13), with a visionary proposal for investment in community safety programs (34:28) learning how to work within and support the "inside game" of municipal government (39:59), dealing with setbacks (39:46) and the current initiatives to stand up even more safety programs rooted in neighborhoods, not city government (44:26).
You can read a writeup of this episode on our website and at The Forge.
Please fill out our Season One Listener Survey to help shape Season Two!

AJ Williams is Durham Beyond Policing’s Co-Director of People & Organizing. His political work has included bailing out Black women, femmes, and gender non-conforming caretakers, striving to end the cash bail system and pre-trial detention with Southerners on New Ground (SONG); and organizing with BYP100 to address gender-based violence and interpersonal harm. In 2021, he ran for Durham City Council, Ward 3, as the first trans candidate in the history of the city, on an abolitionist platform. He served two terms as an appointed member of The City of Durham’s Participatory Budgeting Steering Committee and is on the movement board of The Cypress Fund.

Danielle Purifoy is a Black queer lawyer and geographer at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the racial politics and legal dimensions of development in Black towns and communities. She is an alum of Black Youth Project 100 and has been a member of Durham Beyond Policing since 2016. She is the former Race and Place editor of Scalawag a media organization devoted to Southern storytelling, journalism, and the arts.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E12: Hannah Sassaman on making Comcast pay, ensuring your victories stick & planning the next campaign before your current one ends Feb 21, 2023

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 appetite” for different demands from storytellers, coalition members and potential Council allies (38:19), what she wishes the coalition had done after winning (1:01:45) and how the campaign influenced fights in other cities (1:07:36).
For more about this campaign and Philadelphia's progressive movement infrastructure, check out:

Hannah Sassaman is the executive director of the People's Tech Project. She was previously policy director at Movement Alliance Project (MAP), helping to build and shape coalitions and networks working across issues of injustice, particularly around the intersection of technology, race, and inequality. She is also a member of the board of directors of Fight for the Future and a national coordinating committee member of Leftroots. She lives with her family in Philadelphia.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E11: Heather Cronk on disrupting the movement ecosystem to jumpstart a campaign to win federal LGBTQ protections Feb 14, 2023

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.

For more resources on different social change roles, discussed during the episode, check out:

Training For Change handout: Four Roles in Social Change
Commons Library: Movement Action Plan & Four Roles
Waging Nonviolence: What role were you born to play?

You can read a write-up of this campaign on our website and at The Forge.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E10: Katey Lauer on how to grieve when our campaigns get stuck & weathering transitions with grace Feb 07, 2023

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.
For further reading about this campaign and Katey's current work:
WV Can’t Wait Awards 40 hometown heroes $2k each
Grist: What happened to the war on coal?
ACE: Community-based water-testing
Huffington Post: Protesters shut down Obama-backed mine

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.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E9: Justin J. Pearson on campaigning to stop a pipeline headed for a Black neighborhood in Memphis Jan 31, 2023

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.
Read a summary of this campaign on our website or at The Forge.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E8: Daniel Hunter on never using the same tactic twice, undoing a “done deal” in Philadelphia Jan 24, 2023

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 this calendar of Operation Transparency actions. You can also check out Daniel’s book, Strategy and Soul.
Read more about this episode on our website and at The Forge.
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.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E7: Caitlin Breedlove on taking on Amazon’s price-gouging, using campaigns as “political identity formation moments” Jan 17, 2023

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.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E6: Will Tanzman on ending cash bail in Illinois, how Chicago organizers built a statewide coalition & spent two years defending a legislative win Jan 10, 2023

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.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E5: Debt Collective organizers on crafting campaigns against an idea and generating “inside game” leverage by keeping up “outside” pressure Dec 13, 2022

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).
You can watch some of the Debt Collective's actions, referenced in the episode, on their website.

Ann Bowers is a former Corinthian Colleges Inc student and organizer with the Debt Collective.

Eleni Schirmer is a writer, educator and organizer. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nation and Boston Review, and elsewhere. She currently works as a research associate with the Future of Finance Initiative at UCLA's Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, and organizes with The Debt Collective.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E4: Mary Hooks & Kate Shapiro on ending bail in ATL & the Black Mama’s Bail Outs Dec 06, 2022

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.

In this episode, we’ll hear about how they realized they were “doing the most” in their first campaign in Durham, NC ( 13:44), organizing around ‘quality of life’ vs life or death issues (15:30), how agitation from organizers in Ferguson encouraged them to start their own campaign in Atlanta (19:22), ‘glitter bombing’ a judge during a campaign against fines and fees (25:55), landing on two regional demands via a debate between SONG members (35:06), developing a new tactic to help SONG chapters test campaign work and learn more about bail (35:49), how campaign work makes a different kind of community-building possible (1:04:10), the importance of making campaigns “a street fight” (58:21) on grassroots organizers’ terms and avoiding getting “out-paced” by advocates and attorneys (52:06).
Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. Growing up in a family that migrated from Mississippi to the Midwest, Mary’s commitment to liberation is rooted in her experiences and the impacts of the War on Drugs on her community.

Kate Shapiro was born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she still lives with her daughter. She has had the great honor to work in the service of US Southern freedom movements for gender, sexual, racial and economic justice for the last 16+ years. She is a grassroots organizer, trainer, popular educator and strategist. She has worked at Women’s March since 2020 and was on staff at SONG in a variety of roles for 8 years before that.
SONG’s Atlanta campaign team wrote a reflection about the campaign. Kate Shapiro and other SONG leaders also developed the organizing curriculum "We Don't Want to be Stars," which they discuss in the interview.
Check out a writeup for this episode on our website or at The Forge.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E3: Sasha Wijeyeratne on holding a "hard no" & winning the narrative “on the doors” in the fight against Amazon’s “HQ2” Nov 29, 2022

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 class tenants, initially. And yet over four months, a small coalition of basebuilding organizations stuck to their “hard no”, and derailed the country’s most powerful corporation.

In this episode, we’ll hear about deciding not to negotiate (12:02), quickly mapping out their opponents and key leverage points (15:09), countering Amazon’s & Cuomo’s PR machine “on the doors” in Queens (27:17) and being willing to struggle with their own members on the issue (29:15), how AOC’s recent primary victory influenced their targets “flipping” on Amazon (32:02), the influence of this fight on their current campaign against Innovation Queens (47:40) and learning more deeply the resonance of Bernice Johnson Reagon’s quote, “coalition isn’t home” (49:05).

Sasha Wijeyeratne is the Executive Director of CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities. Most recently, CAAAV kicked Amazon’s headquarters out of Queens, helped pass New York’s historic 2019 rent laws, and is currently fighting for a community-led rezoning that would intervene in speculation and displacement on NYC’s waterfront. Sasha has also been part of various kinds of queer and trans organizing, racial justice organizing and political education projects, including the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), DC Desi Summer (DCDS), No New Jail Coalition in Dane County, Asians for Black Lives and hotpot!.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge. This campaign was run by a coalition of many neighborhood-based, city-wide, and state-wide organizations, including CAAAV - Organizing Asian Communities, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Central Corona, Queens Neighborhoods United, Make the Road New York, New York Communities for Change, ALIGN, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and others.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E2: Tara Raghuveer on hijacking Kansas City’s elections by being “ruthless” about basebuilding Nov 22, 2022

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 won at least five citywide campaigns that have radically transformed conditions for hundreds of thousands of the city’s renters. We’ll hear about their first campaign to radically reshape the city’s municipal election, without spending a dime on partisan electoral engagement (13:35); the debate inside the organization (42:12) that led to the disruption of 919 eviction hearings in a single month (47:15); how they built a culture of nurturing reflection during the pandemic (52:30); and how “ruthlessness about basebuilding” has helped them succeed.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

Tara Raghuveer is the Housing Campaign Director at People’s Action. She is also the Founder/Director of KC Tenants, where she organizes poor and working class tenants in Kansas City, and the Kansas City Eviction Project, a multi-year research project on evictions in the Kansas City metro area.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

S1E1: Neidi Dominguez on “not listening to DC” & embracing disagreement in the fight to win DACA Nov 15, 2022

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 brought as children from a broader legislative campaign that caused "all hell to break loose" inside the immigrant rights movement (23:37), using "inside" and "outside" strategies to force the Obama Administration's hand (33:26), and how leaning into disagreement ultimately helped organizers stay focused and win their campaign (28:28).
Neidi Dominguez is the Executive Director of Unemployed Workers United (UWU), a movement project to organize precarious and jobless workers. Neidi is a national immigrant and worker's rights activist, and organizer. Most recently she was the National States Deputy Director of the U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, and previously worked for multiple labor unions, and in Los Angeles, was co-director of the CLEAN Carwash campaign that successfully unionized hundreds of workers in the country. Formerly undocumented herself, Neidi was a central leader in the campaign to win Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge: https://forgeorganizing.org/article/lessons-campaign-win-daca.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

Season One Trailer Oct 27, 2022

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, 2022.

Support the show

Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

Related Podcasts