User:Delabrede/sandbox/HeatherBoothDraft

Heather Booth is an organizer for progressive causes, helping people to articulate the injustices that they experience and take collective action to redress them. She is also a civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist. Calling her "one of the nation’s most influential organizers for progressive causes," a profile published in 2017 by Pulitzer-winning journalist David Wood says: "Inside almost every liberal drive over the past five decades ― for fair pay, equal justice, abortion rights, workers’ rights, voter rights, civil rights, immigration rights, child care ― you will find Booth. But you may have to look hard. Because she’s not always at the head of the protest march. More often, she’s at a let’s-get-organized meeting in a suburban church basement or a late-night strategy session in a crumbling neighborhood’s community center. She’s helping people already roused to action figure out practical ways to move their cause forward. And always she’s advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values."

Early life and education
Booth was raised in a warm and loving family, living first in Brooklyn and then on the North Shore of Long Island. On graduating from high school in 1963, she spent the summer traveling in Israel and that fall enrolled as a freshman in the University of Chicago. In 1967, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Social Sciences and in 1970 a Master of Arts degree in Educational Psychology, both from the same university.

Civil rights
Booth's opposition to racial discrimination began when she was still in elementary school. She defended an African-American fellow student who was being attacked for stealing another student's lunch money. Years later, she learned that the girl who made the accusation had put the money in her shoe and forgotten it. In a 1985 interview Booth said "I remember having the feeling that you don't do this to people." While in high school she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to help protest Woolworth's lunch counter discrimination in the South. In 1963, soon after enrolling in college she joined the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and, as head of the campus Friends of SNCC group, was student liaison to another coordinating committee, the Chicago Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), that was protesting school segregation in the city. In that role she helped coordinate freedom schools in the Chicago's South Side. A few months later she was recruited to participate in Freedom Summer, in which volunteers from Northern colleges and universities worked to register black voters and set up freedom schools and libraries. In an interview conducted in 1989 she said that the experience reinforced her commitment to the civil rights movement. Confronted by the violent resistance of White Mississippians, she feared for her own life, but also realized that she could leave whenever she wished and was awed by the extraordinary heroism of the black residents with whom she worked. "They had a quiet heroism," she said, "not just by standing up to bullets, but by day to day being willing to go and talk to their neighbors, have meetings in their churches, take people into their homes." She said the work was frightening, but also full of tiring and frustrating tasks, and recognized that it is the mundane everyday work that brings meaningful change.

In 1965 Booth was arrested for the first time while demonstrating at banks that were providing financial support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Shortly afterward, she helped form a number of local groups that sought to learn about urban problems and find ways to overcome them. She left SNCC in about 1968 when its leaders no longer welcomed whites as members and thereafter devoted more of her time to issues related to feminism and the anti-war movement.

Feminism
Soon after she arrived on campus, Booth ran up against the university's bias in favor of its male students. In 1965 she began to set up consciousness raising groups to deal with the problem. These small groups of women met regularly to speak about incidents, both minor and more serious, that seemed to be private but often proved to be shared. In a pamphlet published in April 1968, Booth and two co-writers noted a tendency for women to "see their problems as personal ones and thus blame themselves." In discovering how many ostensibly unique concerns were actually common ones, members gained a sense of the collective influence they might exert toward changing the unfair practices and dismissive attitudes they had previously accepted as cultural norms. She also helped to organize a course on women's studies, began to coach women who were uneasy about speaking up in class, and conducted a study on the disparity of treatment between male and female students in the classroom. Noticing a similar unequal treatment among student activists, she founded a campus group, the Women's Radical Action Program, to document and counter the ways in which women were relegated to subordinate roles in national organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society and SNCC.

In 1965 a fellow student asked whether Booth could help his sister who was so greatly distraught about an unwanted pregnancy as to consider killing herself. By contacting the medical arm of the civil rights movement, she was able to refer the woman to a reputable doctor who was willing to perform an abortion. As word quietly spread throughout the university community she was asked to make more referrals to the same doctor. In complying she made sure that he would not only treat them, but also make sure the patients made a successful recovery. The Jane Collective, or simply Jane, emerged from this early start. Booth formed it by involving like-minded students in a clandestine organization for evaluating doctors, counseling women who contacted them, performing referrals, and conducting follow-up discussions by phone. By 1969 this group, calling itself the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, began to advertise in student and underground newspapers, advising pregnant women who needed help to "Call Jane." The Jane Collective disbanded the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, which effectively legalized abortion throughout the country.

In 1969, recognizing the need to counter a strong tendency among feminists to see all organizational structures as oppressive, Booth joined with five other women to found the Chicago Women's Liberation Union (CWLU). They believed that organization was essential for the movement be able to reach out to women who were not already radicalized and for it to develop strategies for winning reforms that would demonstrably improve women's lives. They said a structured approach was needed, including careful planning, the setting of specific goals, and developing strategies achieve these goals. Overall, they were committed to helping women to gain a sense of their collective power. The CWLU organized local chapters, published newspapers, ran a liberation school, and engaged in direct action.

Booth married in 1967 and, with the birth of two sons (the first in 1968 and the second in 1970), she began to experience of family-related issues that most feminine activists had considered to have little or no importance. Finding no local child care centers in the Hyde Park community where they lived, she joined with two friends in an effort to set one up. The bureaucratic obstruction that they encountered led the three to set up a new city-wide organization in Chicago called the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC). Based on the rationale given for setting up the CWLU, to which it was related, ACDC created an organizational structure having specific and achievable goals. A position paper written anonymously in 1972 states these goals as building a power base of women who work together to accomplish specific reforms in childcare policy, with the expectation that each victory will provide an opportunity to expand the power base and bring further goals within reach. The committee did not set up childcare services but worked to overcome legal barriers to the substantial expansion of these services throughout the city. Within a few years it had forced the liberalization of licensing procedures and won a million dollar city investment in childcare centers.

Community organizing
File:Midwest Academy Strategy Chart.jpgMidwest Academy Strategy Chart (example) After earning her Master's degree in 1970, Booth took on part-time editorial work to help support her family. Outraged at her employer's unfair treatment of its clerical staff she encouraged them organize. When they confronted him, the boss agreed to meet their demands but insisted on firing Booth. She sued and in 1972 won her case before the National Labor Relations Board. The next year, using money she was awarded in the suit, she founded an the Midwest Academy, a training organization that taught grassroots community organizing methods based on earlier work done by Saul Alinsky. Booth and the other leaders of the Academy created a highly-regarded tool for the use of the community organizers who came to them for training. Using the tool, Academy instructors taught the importance of establishing organizations to set specific goals for using pressure-group tactics in a formally-structured campaign. This tool, the "Midwest Academy Strategy Chart," instructed students in the actions that must be taken following the articulation of a problem and the methods that must be used for determining the success of the resulting campaign. The steps include setting concrete near- and long-term objectives, identifying individuals or groups that are either committed to solving the problem or likely to become supportive allies, and they include measuring the strength and likely tactics of those who will oppose the change. The chart directs attention to targets&mdash;the specific individuals who hold decision-making power and are able to affect the campaign&mdash;and it asks how these people can be influenced. It focuses on the resources that the campaign can call upon: its budget, its staff, and facilities available to it. And it asks how the campaign can be used to strengthen the coordinating group, what experience its leaders will gain as they conduct it, and whether it offers a good chance to expand into new constituencies and raise additional money.

In 1978 Booth helped to found and became executive director of an alliance of citizen activist and labor organizations called the Citizen-Labor Energy Coalition that worked to reform national energy policy during a time of rapidly increasing costs.

The experience she gained as president of the Midwest Academy and the many contacts she made with people who attended its training programs enabled her to set up a nationwide coalition of local activist groups in 1980. This organization, called Citizen Action, also proved to be successful and by 1989 had a membership of two million people with 24 state affiliates. The issues it took on included plant closings, affordable health care, high energy costs, toxic waste sites, and similar problems, most of them having a degree of bipartisan support. Largely influenced by the negative fallout following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, Citizen Action began to move away from the nonpartisan activism of the other organizations that Booth had founded. Departing from her previous practice, she began to make alliances with labor organizations and take first steps toward entering mainstream politics by helping to defeat Republican candidates for office.

Progressive politics
She was an adviser to Harold Washington 's 1983 and 1987 mayoral campaigns in Chicago and subsequently served as field director for Carol Moseley-Braun's successful campaign for the Senate in 1992. Because the headquarters of Citizen Action was in Washington, D.C., her position as its president caused her to make frequent trips there from her home in Chicago. In Washington she was able to make a growing number of connections with the national leadership of the AFL-CIO and the Democratic Party. In 1993 she became outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and coordinator of its National Health Care Campaign. The DNC made her its training director in 1996 and four years later Julian Bond asked her to lead an NAACP voter registration effort that helped produce the unusually large African-American turnout in the presidential election of 2000.

Late in 1999 Booth helped found a new federation of progressive community organizing groups called USAction and was named its vice president for external affairs. USAction absorbed some of the member organizations of Citizen Action and, like Citizen Action, it is a progressive advocacy organization that stimulates and coordinates community pressure groups. In the early years of the new century Booth emerged as an effective political consultant. Having previously worked with the National Organization for Women (NOW) during efforts to obtain passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, she directed field outreach for the pro-choice rallies that were connected to the 2004 March for Women's Lives which NOW helped organize. In 2003 she was lead consultant to the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and subsequently to the Voter Participation Center. She was also the senior advisor to the One Nation Working Together rally held in October of 2010 and consultant to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare a year later. Since 2011 she has been a member of a political consultancy called Democracy Partners.

In 2004 Booth was Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) coordinator for the New Mexico Kerry/Edwards presidential campaign. In 2008 she was director of the AFL-CIO Health Care Campaign. In 2009 she directed the campaign to promote congressional passage of President Obama's first budget.

Booth's work to achieve financial reform and establish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been a highlight of her remarkably successful career. In 2010 she was hired to direct Americans for Financial Reform (AFR), a coalition of about 200 consumer, labor, and special interest groups established in the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the subsequent Great Recession. AFR played a key role in achieving passage of the Dodd-Frank Act later that year. As Elizabeth Warren later explained: "AFR managed to scrape together some money, and they used it to hire a handful of employees, including Heather Booth as executive director and Lisa Donner as her deputy. Creating a small team to organize the overall campaign for reform was a brilliant move. Instead of each nonprofit putting a little time into fighting for this or that provision, AFR coordinated the efforts of dozens of groups, magnifying the work of each one by helping them speak with a single voice. Heather and Lisa and the rest of their crew put out press releases, coordinated briefings on Capitol Hill, and organized groups of volunteers. The staffers and lobbyist and lawyers for the megabanks outnumbered them by a zillion to one, but the AFR people were there&mdash;day in and day out&mdash;hammering on the need for financial reform. They worked their hearts out." Regarding passage of the Dodd-Frank Act Booth was jubilant but did not see the achievement as an end in itself. She wrote: "The big lesson is that if we organize, we can win. The progress we made was because people raised our voices, took the message to the public, to the streets, and to the Halls of Congress, where we were joined in our efforts by some committed elected representatives.... [T]he legislation headed to the President’s desk is a better start than almost anyone predicted was possible in the face of the powerful opposition and entrenched power of the status quo. We won. Now let’s get back to work."

Family
Booth's father, Jerome Sanford Tobis (1916-2012), was a physician who specialized in physical therapy and cardiac rehabilitation. Her mother, Hazel Victoria Weisbard Tobis (1918-2002), was at home during the childhood of Booth and her two brothers and later, having obtained a college degree, was a special education teacher.

Booth was born in a military hospital in Brookhaven, Mississippi on December 15, 1945 during a period in which her father served as an Army doctor. Soon after her birth, her family moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn where she received her elementary education in P.S. 200 in the Bath Beach neighborhood. Later, she attended high school in North Shore (Long Island) after her family had moved to that upscale area. She has two brothers, David and Jonathan. Booth grew up in a warm, loving, and supportive family. Her parents taught her the importance of recognizing injustice and acting to correct it. They were observant Jews, belonging to a liberal synagogue, and showing by example the importance of treating others with decency and respect. From her Jewish upbringing, Booth learned to take on responsibility for building a society that reflects these goals. }

After her family had moved to Long Island, Booth's mother, using Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, made her aware of the growing discontent of prosperous suburban housewives with the conventionally narrow lives they led. In high school Booth joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she realized that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives. She began leafleting against the death penalty and in 1960 joined CORE in a protest against the segregationist policies of the Woolworth's chain. She chose the University of Chicago for undergraduate education in part because it had no sororities and deemphasized sports and there quickly immersed herself in political activism.

She and Paul Booth married in July 1967, shortly after she graduated from college in 1967. They had met at a sit-in protesting the University of Chicago's cooperation with the unfair policies of the U.S. Selective Service System whose local boards were then drafting men to serve in the Vietnam War. The couple had two sons, Gene and Dan, born within a few years of their marriage.

One of the founders of SDS, Paul Booth was national secretary of the organization when they met and later served in administrative positions with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, retiring as Executive Assistant to the President.

Political opponents and critics
As an activist on the national scene, Booth has drawn considerable criticism from political opponents. In 1978 Congressman Larry McDonald (R. Ga.) claimed that Booth and the Midwest Center were associated with the Communist Party USA. A year later he quoted an article claiming that: "The founder of the Midwest Academy, Heather Tobis Booth, and her husband, Paul Booth, were top leaders of Students for a Democratic Society in the mid-1960s who decided like many other S.D.S. activists that the way to create a socialist system in the United States was to organize a 'hate the rich' campaign under cover of a 'populist' movement for those who have incomes near or below the poverty line." In a book published in 2010 conservative author Stanley Kurtz called Booth "arguably the queen of socialist politics in Chicago" and said she was determined "to drag modern American socialism, kicking and screaming, into the heart of America's mainstream institutions." In 2011, in an online article entitled "Union Gangsters," Matthew Verdun, senior vice president of the conservative think tank Capital Research Center called her "one of the better connected labor thugs in Washington, D.C." and accused her of using "stealth and subterfuge to achieve a socialist transformation of America." The article appeared in the online right-wing journal, FrontPage Magazine.

In an undated dossier on Booth, a website called Discover the Networks said that, "notwithstanding her commitment to incrementalism," she advocated a "revolutionary showdown" toward the achievement of socialism. In 2009 contributors to KeyWiki began compiling a wiki page on Booth. Begun by conservative author and activist, Trevor Loudon, KeyWiki aims at "Unlocking the covert side of U.S. and Global politics." The article uses largely neutral language in giving a chronology of her career. It associates her with left-wing and socialist organizations; tags her as "leftist" and an advocate of socialist, anti-corporate, and progressive policies; and mentions her commitment to "grassroots political action for economic and political democracy." In 2013 a right-wing journalist, Paul Sperry, said she was a leading figure among the "socialist activists and their front groups [who] played a shockingly outsized role shaping and passing the monumental financial reform legislation that authorized the creation of President Obama's powerful consumer credit watchdog agency."

Honors and awards

 * On June 16, 2009, the Washington, D.C., office of AVODAH held a "Partner in Justice Event" honoring Booth.
 * On May 9, 1987, Booth received the Thomas-Debs Award at a dinner in her honor held by the Democratic Socialists of America.
 * On July 6, 2013, during the national conference of the National Organization for Women, Booth accepted the Victoria J. Mastrobuono Women’s Health Award on behalf of the Jane Collective.
 * On September 23, 2015, the Chicago Abortion Fund honored Booth and the Jane Collective at its 25th anniversary celebration.
 * On October 19, 2016, United Vision for Idaho gave a reception honoring Booth in conjunction with a showing of Heather Booth: Changing the World. This was one of quite a few receptions of like nature that were held in conjunction with the showing of the documentary film.

Documentary films, TV appearances, and podcasts
• In 1989, as coordinator of Mobilization for Women's Lives, Booth appeared in television coverage of the 20th Anniversary Celebration & Conference of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.

• In June 1990, as president of Citizen Action, she participated in a televised panel discussion concerning post Cold War strategies hosted by the Institute for Policy Studies. The topic was "Informing our Activism After the Cold War."

• In October 1990, as director of the Coalition for Democratic Values, she led a televised panel discussion hosted by the coalition on its formation and its goal of pressing the Democratic Party to retain progressive values.

• She was interviewed as part of the 1994 film Freedom on My Mind, directed by Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford, written by Michael Chandler.

• She was interviewed in the 1995 film Jane: An Abortion Service, directed by Kate Kirtz and Nell Lundy (Chicago, Juicy Productions, 1995).

• In April 1996, as training director of the Democratic National Committee, she gave a televised address to the National Association of Social Workers on "Women and the 1996 Elections."

• In November 2000, as Executive Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, she participated in a televised discussion held by the fund concerning "African-American Voter Turnout" in that year's elections.

• In 2007, as director of the AFL-CIO health care campaign, she participated in a televised discussion on "Health Care Reform" hosted by the AFL-CIO.

• She appeared in the 2008 film The Coat Hanger Project, written, directed and filmed by Angie Young and featuring Loretta Ross, Heather Booth, Mildred Hanson, Vicki Saporta, and Jeannie Ludlow ([Washington, D.C.], Coat Hanger Project, 2008).

• She appeared in the 2013 film Feminist Stories From Women’s Liberation: 1963-1970, directed, edited, and narrated by Jennifer Lee, and featuring Robin Morgan, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Aileen Hernandez, Ruth Rosen, Vivian Rothstein, Kathie Sarachild, Heather Booth, Frances M. Beal, Himilce Novas, Eleanor Smeal, Sheila Tobias, Sonia Pressman Fuentes, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Jacqui Ceballos, Mary King, Richard Graham, Karen DeCrow, Eve Norman, Ivy Bottini, Chude Allen, Alix Kates Shulman, Byllye Avery, and Betita Martinez (New York, Women Make Movies, 2013).

• She was featured in the 2014 feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry, a film by Mary Dore, Nancy C Kennedy, and Mark Degli Antoni of the International Film Circuit (New York, She's Beautiful Film Project, Cinema Guild, 2014).

• She appeared in the film This little light of mine : the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer, by Robin N. Hamilton with Leslie Burl McLemore, Dorie Ladner, Heather Booth, and Rev. Ed King (New York, Filmakers Library, Imprint of Alexander Street Press, [2015]).

• She was the subject of the documentary Heather Booth: Changing the World, directed, written, and produced by Lilly Rivlin (New York, Just Luck Productions, Women Make Movies (Firm), [2016]).

• On February 6, 2017, she was interviewed on the Ben Joravsky Show on radio station WCPT in Chicago, available as a podcast from SoundCloud.

• The appears on a podcast of March 14, 2017, by Wylie Chang, a student at Bowdoin College, "This Way Forward, Episode 1" (Bowdoin Commons, Bowdoin, Maine).

• She is the subject of a podcast by Anna Greenberg, "Heather Booth" (That's What She Said, May 13, 2017).

Writings
The following are Booth's contributions to books, pamphlets, and blog posts as sole author, joint author, or contributor. • Heather Booth, Evie Goldfield, and Sue Munaker,Toward a Radical Movement (Boston, New England Free Press, April 1968).

• Harry C. Boyte, Heather Booth, and Steve Max, Citizen Action and the New American Populism (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1986).

• Heather Booth (ed.) ''Midwest Academy Records : Heather Booth's Personal Files, 1964 and 1984 [e-book] (Bethesda, Md. : University Publications of America, [2014]). Summary: "The papers were assembled by Heather Tobis Booth, co-founder of the Midwest Academy in Chicago, Illinois and concern in large measure the Mississippi Freedom Summer project of 1964. Documents date to 1964, with a few documents from 1963 and one newspaper retrospective supplement on the Freedom Summer from 1984. Document types include personal and professional correspondence; membership literature and statistics; Freedom Summer brochures and background information on race relations and politics in Mississippi; speech transcripts; newspaper clippings; and internal and external reports as part of administrative and organizational records." &mdash; Provided by publisher.

• Heather Booth, Obama Is Right to Fight for Real Financial Reform: Let’s Organize to Hold Big Banks Accountable, HuffPost (weblog), March 30, 2010.

• Heather Booth, Is the Senate Afraid of Ghosts?, HuffPost (weblog), April 7, 2010.

• Heather Booth, Beware Frank Luntz’s Lies and Rein in the Big Banks!, HuffPost (weblog), April 10, 2010.

• Heather Booth, Bipartisanship Is Not a Substitute for Real Reform, HuffPost (weblog), May 3, 2010.

• Heather Booth, The Two Rules of Real Financial Reform, HuffPost (weblog), May 12, 2010.

• Heather Booth, Bankers Swarm Capitol Hill Because They Love You, HuffPost (weblog), May 19, 2010.

• Heather Booth, It All Comes Down to This, HuffPost (weblog), June 23, 2010.

• Heather Booth, When the public is watching, the Senate is forced to side with Main Street over Wall Street, HuffPost (weblog), June 29, 2010.

• Heather Booth, Big Victory in the House, but Big Fight Remains, HuffPost (weblog), June 30, 2010.

• Heather Booth, V-I-C-T-O-R-Y !!!, HuffPost (weblog), July 15, 2010.

• Heather Booth, Fasting for Families: When We Act, We Can Change the World, HuffPost (weblog), December 2, 2013.

• Heather Booth, To My Progressive Friends - About Tim Kaine, HuffPost (weblog), July 25, 2016.

Organizations
This is a chronological list of organizations that Booth has founded, directed, or otherwise participated in.

• Early in her high school years she participated in anti-death penalty action via the American Friends Service Committee.

• In 1960 she joined CORE and participated in picketing Woolworth's because of that retail chain's discrimination against African Americans in the Southern states.

• In 1963 or 1964 she joined with Chicago Council of Community Organization members who were attacking the segregationist policies of school superintendent Ben Willis. He refused to address overcrowding in black schools and rather than integrate students, he sent black children to mobile classrooms on the playground.

• Between 1963 and 1965 she became head of the campus Friends of SNCC organization, worked in mental institutions, tutored students in Woodlawn, and helped coordinate South Side freedom schools.

• In 1964 she helped register voters and taught in freedom schools during Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

• In 1965 she was arrested for the first time. She later said: "My first arrest was at an anti-apartheid effort, in 1965. There was a consortium of 10 U.S. banks that bailed out the South African apartheid regime that would collapse otherwise, so there were demonstrations at those banks."

• In 1965, she formed Women's Radical Action Program.

• In 1965 or 1966 she founded the Jane Collective, a clandestine abortion counseling and abortion service that performed 11,000 abortions prior to the Roe v. Wade court decision in 1973.

• In 1967 she helped to found the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.

• In 1967 she left SDS, during a disagreement over tactics. She later said she was committed to "old new left" and believed in better strategic planning than the "new new left" was advocating.

• In 1968 she left SNCC when new leadership made it clear that whites were no longer welcome.

• In 1970 she participated in the Women's Strike for Equality and joined NOW.

• In 1970-72 she won a suit for unfair labor practice from a business that had hired her as an editorial consultant.

• In 1973 she used the monetary award from that suit to set up Midwest Academy.

• In 1980 she founded and became executive director of the Citizen-Labor Energy Coalition.

• In 1980 she was named the deputy field director for the Mayor Washington campaign.

• In 1980 she organized Citizen Action.

• In 1984 she helped found Jewish Fund for Justice.

• In 1987 she received the Eugene Debs Award from the Chicago branch of Democratic Socialists of America.

• In 1987 she worked on the re-election campaign of Harold Washington.

• In 1989, having moved from Chicago to Washington, D.C., she served as president and  head of the national office of Citizen Action.

• In 1992 she headed the field operation for Carol Moseley Braun's Senatorial campaign.

• In 1993 she became outreach coordinator for the Democratic National Committee and coordinator of DNC National Health Care Campaign.

• In 1994 she joined the advisory council of the Women's Information Network.

• In 1996 she was named training director of the Democratic National Committee.

• In 1999 she helped found and has variously served as vice chair, board member, executive committee member, and senior advisor to USAction.

• In 2000 she became director of the NAACP National Voter Fund.

• In 2003 She was the lead consultant in the founding of the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

• In 2003 or later she was consultant to the Voter Participation Center.

• In 2004 she was get-out-the-vote coordinator for the New Mexico Kerry/Edwards campaign.

• In 2005 she joined the board of the Center for Community Change.

• In 2007-2008 she directed the AFL-CIO campaign for universal health care.

• In 2009 she directed the field campaign for passage of President Obama’s first budget.

• In 2010 she was founding director of  Americans for Financial Reform.

• In 2010 she was senior advisor to the One Nation Working Together rally.

• In 2011 she became a consultant to the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare.

• In 2011 she joined the Democracy Partners consultancy.

• In 2011 and following years, she has been an advisor to the Alliance for Citizenship and during various years she has served as consultant with NOW, MoveOn.org, the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, the National Council of La Raza, People's Action, the Center for Community Change, and other progressive nonprofit groups.