Craft of Campaigns Training for Change

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 p...

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...

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...

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 thei...

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 owne...

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 cam...