Campaign Director

The Center for Popular Democracy (c3) and Action for the Common Good (c4) seek an organizer and campaigner of exceptional vision, breadth of experience, and management abilities to serve as Campaign Director, overseeing major issue campaign activities for one of the nation’s largest constellations of community organizations comprising low- and moderate-income communities, communities of color, and immigrant communities.

The Center for Popular Democracy/Action for the Common Good (hereafter CPD) builds organizing power to transform the local, state, and national policy landscape through deep, long-term partnerships with leading community organizing groups and labor unions nationwide. CPD currently has issue strategies in three broad areas of progressive change: structural inequality (e.g. work for racial or gender equity), economy (e.g. workers’ rights, curbing the power of Wall St.) and democracy (e.g. voting rights). Underneath these three broad areas of work, there are at present eight major areas where CPD has campaigns:

Economic justice – Strategies to build a just economy by strengthening labor standards (e.g. minimum wage, paid sick days, fair scheduling), creating jobs, and more;
Racial justice – Current focus is on discriminatory policing;
K-12 education – Campaigning to establish a proactive vision of high-performing “community schools,” and resisting the privatization of public education;
Immigration – Fighting for municipal and state innovation (e.g. municipal ID, state citizenship), while working to implement the President’s recent executive order;
Voting Rights – Working to expand voter participation with a long-term strategy to establish automatic voter registration, while working in cities and states to lay the groundwork through interim campaigns.
Wall St. accountability – Campaigns to reduce the dominance of Wall St. over our nation’s politics and public policy;
Housing – Fighting mass displacement from urban centers by winning next generation housing policies, protecting homeowners.
Climate Justice – Building a new, sustainable economy while fighting the fossil fuel industries blocking a just transition.

In each of these issue areas, CPD has built a campaign support team that ultimately will include campaigners working with many of the most dynamic base-building organization in the United States, supplemented by a cadre of communicators, digital campaigners, strategic researchers, policy support, etc. We seek a visionary and talented organizer to pull together and lead the team of organizers covering this broad terrain.

CPD has certain core values as to how we think about campaigns, and alignment on these principles would be fundamental to the ultimate success of any candidate for the position. These principles include:

A commitment to building transformative campaigns that engage a mass-base within membership organizations, and that envisions a full range of engagement with the base, from leadership development to mass mobilization, from building deep member-engagement committees/structures, to ensuring that campaigns in fact recruit large numbers of new members to participating organizations.
Across our issue areas, we have a deep commitment to race, class, and gender equity.
We have a strong critique of corporate power in America, and a special critique of the role of Wall St.
CPD is committed to methodological and tactical diversity in our campaigns. We run aggressive legislative campaigns at all levels (municipal through federal), undertake sophisticated corporate campaigns, utilize electoral politics as an end and as a lever for our issues (including a commitment to the use of ballot initiatives), and are open to cultural campaigning (though it has not historically been a core competency). We want to deploy the fullest range of effective methods, from direct action campaigning to sophisticated earned media work, from digital campaigning to mass mobilization to grasstops work.

Duties

The Campaign Director will have the following responsibilities:

Supervise the campaign directors in many of the major issue areas and work with those campaign directors to fully build out their strategies, their teams, their fundraising, and to execute their campaign plans to the fullest. Where there is not a campaign director in place, ensure the necessary planning and fundraising groundwork is laid, and recruit the right team to lead the effort.
Develop CPD’s campaigning methodology to be of the highest levels of rigor and impact by developing and instituting clear goals, benchmarks, and practices of the art and science of campaigning. This recognizes too that CPD is an “intermediary” organization, and that it often carries out campaigns through partner organizations that are independent entities.
Participate in regular meetings of various management bodies that support the growth and organizational development of CPD;
Provide high-level strategic advice to the executive leadership on program development in the core CPD issue areas.
Facilitate coordination between the Campaigns team and the other CPD capacity teams including Research, Communications, Digital, and Organizing and Capacity Building.

Qualifications

We are looking for applicants with the following qualifications:

At least ten years of organizing and issue campaign experience, preferable fifteen years or more.
Experience with base building community organizations, as well as with labor and other campaigning organizations.
A demonstrated commitment to racial equity, gender justice, and to empowering low- and moderate-income communities, communities of color, and immigrant communities.
Experience with a wide range of campaign approaches, with a demonstrated experience with corporate campaigns, legislative campaigns, and electoral politics.
First rate management skills, with a proven ability to implement a holistic management system in movement organization context, significant experience supervising large, diverse, advanced teams of organizers, etc.

Location: Preferably DC or NYC, some location flexibility

How to apply

Please submit a cover letter and resume through our hiring portal:

https://cpd.hiringthing.com/job/21175/campaign-director

CPD is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer and actively recruits people of color, women, individuals with disabilities, and members of the LGBTQ community.