Craft of Campaigns

Apr 08 2024 25
Craft of Campaigns Podcast artwork

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

Apr 08 2024 74 mins  
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

S2E3: Devan Spear on forcing universities to pay their fair share

Mar 25 2024 57 mins  
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)

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

Mar 12 2024 67 mins  
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 1980

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

Feb 27 2024 67 mins  
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

Season Two Trailer

Feb 13 2024 5 mins  
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

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

Feb 28 2023 54 mins  
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

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

Feb 21 2023 76 mins  
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 &

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

Feb 14 2023 72 mins  
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 campai

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

Feb 07 2023 28 mins  
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�

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

Jan 31 2023 70 mins  
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 resista