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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.
Episodes
21 episodes
S2E6: Ingrid Lakey on taking on the country’s 6th-largest bank and changing the activist culture on climate 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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 6
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1:15:14
S2E5: Nico Amador on fighting gender discrimination on public transit and pivoting gracefully when the campaign got stuck
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...
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Season 2
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Episode 5
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1:13:46
S2E4: Byron Hobbs and Jonathan Hogstad on taking on the corporations funding voter suppression in Michigan
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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 4
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1:14:07
S2E3: Devan Spear on forcing universities to pay their fair share
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 ...
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Season 2
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Episode 3
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57:15
S2E2: Stephen Lerner on Justice for Janitors: A comeback story that continues today
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, ...
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Season 2
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Episode 2
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1:07:46
S2E1: Karina Mireya and Benji Hart on #NoCopAcademy: A Campaign Against Chicago’s ‘Cop City’
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 l...
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Season 2
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Episode 1
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1:07:44
Season Two Trailer
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 c...
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Season 2
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Episode 0
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5:39
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S1E13: Danielle Purifoy & AJ Williams on winning alternatives to policing in Durham NC
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 g...
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Season 1
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Episode 13
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54:33
S1E12: Hannah Sassaman on making Comcast pay, ensuring your victories stick & planning the next campaign before your current one ends
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), co...
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Season 1
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Episode 12
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1:16:30
S1E11: Heather Cronk on disrupting the movement ecosystem to jumpstart a campaign to win federal LGBTQ protections
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 w...
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Season 1
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Episode 11
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1:12:30
S1E10: Katey Lauer on how to grieve when our campaigns get stuck & weathering transitions with grace
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 buil...
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Season 1
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Episode 10
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28:23
S1E9: Justin J. Pearson on campaigning to stop a pipeline headed for a Black neighborhood in Memphis
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 9
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1:10:25
S1E8: Daniel Hunter on never using the same tactic twice, undoing a “done deal” in Philadelphia
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 suppo...
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Season 1
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Episode 8
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42:56
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 campaign...
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Season 1
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Episode 7
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57:02
S1E6: Will Tanzman on ending cash bail in Illinois, how Chicago organizers built a statewide coalition & spent two years defending a legislative win
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 ...
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Season 1
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Episode 6
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59:28
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 mainstr...
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Season 1
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Episode 5
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55:17
S1E4: Mary Hooks & Kate Shapiro on ending bail in ATL & the Black Mama’s Bail Outs
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 ...
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Season 1
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Episode 4
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1:10:54
S1E3: Sasha Wijeyeratne on holding a "hard no" & winning the narrative “on the doors” in the fight against Amazon’s “HQ2”
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 ...
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Season 1
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Episode 3
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54:54
S1E2: Tara Raghuveer on hijacking Kansas City’s elections by being “ruthless” about basebuilding
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...
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Season 1
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Episode 2
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1:09:49
S1E1: Neidi Dominguez on “not listening to DC” & embracing disagreement in the fight to win DACA
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 ...
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Season 1
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Episode 1
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59:14
