Craft of Campaigns

Training for Change

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.

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Top 10 Craft of Campaigns Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Craft of Campaigns episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Craft of Campaigns for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Craft of Campaigns episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

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

Craft of Campaigns

11/15/22 • 59 min

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.

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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

Craft of Campaigns

02/14/23 • 72 min

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.

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S1E13: Danielle Purifoy & AJ Williams on winning alternatives to policing in Durham NC

Craft of Campaigns

02/28/23 • 54 min

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.

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

Craft of Campaigns

02/07/23 • 28 min

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 eachGrist: What happened to the war on coal?ACE: Community-based water-testingHuffington 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.

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

Craft of Campaigns

01/31/23 • 70 min

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.

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

Craft of Campaigns

01/17/23 • 57 min

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.

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

Craft of Campaigns

01/10/23 • 59 min

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.

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

Craft of Campaigns

12/06/22 • 70 min

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.

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

Craft of Campaigns

02/21/23 • 76 min

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.

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S2E2: Stephen Lerner on Justice for Janitors: A comeback story that continues today

Craft of Campaigns

03/12/24 • 67 min

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

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FAQ

How many episodes does Craft of Campaigns have?

Craft of Campaigns currently has 21 episodes available.

What topics does Craft of Campaigns cover?

The podcast is about Podcasts, Education, Strategy and Organizing.

What is the most popular episode on Craft of Campaigns?

The episode title 'S1E12: Hannah Sassaman on making Comcast pay, ensuring your victories stick & planning the next campaign before your current one ends' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on Craft of Campaigns?

The average episode length on Craft of Campaigns is 57 minutes.

How often are episodes of Craft of Campaigns released?

Episodes of Craft of Campaigns are typically released every 7 days.

When was the first episode of Craft of Campaigns?

The first episode of Craft of Campaigns was released on Oct 27, 2022.

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Craft of Campaigns

Training for Change

Top 10 Craft of Campaigns Episodes

FAQ

How many episodes does Craft of Campaigns have?

What topics does Craft of Campaigns cover?

What is the most popular episode on Craft of Campaigns?

What is the average episode length on Craft of Campaigns?

How often are episodes of Craft of Campaigns released?

When was the first episode of Craft of Campaigns?

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