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

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

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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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.

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undefined - S1E5: Debt Collective organizers on crafting campaigns against an idea and generating “inside game” leverage by keeping up “outside” pressure

S1E5: Debt Collective organizers on crafting campaigns against an idea and generating “inside game” leverage by keeping up “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).
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.

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S1E7: Caitlin Breedlove on taking on Amazon’s price-gouging, using 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.
Check out a writeup on this campaign at our website and at The Forge.

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

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: In this episode, we’ll hear about how just two weeks ago, Illinois became the first state to end money bail, or wealth-based incarceration. Wait, no, scratch that. Just as we did with our last episode, on the campaign to cancel student debt, we’ve had to change this intro several times based on late-breaking news. As of today, January 7th, 2023, the Illinois Supreme Court is going to review the constitutionality of ending cash bail, one more time, now two years since