Session Type(s): Panel
Starts: Saturday, Jul. 19 1:30 PM (Eastern)
Ends: Saturday, Jul. 19 2:45 PM (Eastern)
Taking an organization from zero to thriving isn’t easy. Come hear from progressive startup founders across the spectrum of for-profit to non-profit, and early-stage to late-stage: Berim, Upworthy, SumOfUs, UltraViolet, and the Good Fight. We’ll share tricks and tools we’re using to make it. Each of us has learned a ton over the past months and years, and we want to share those challenges and strategies with you—if only so you don’t make the same mistakes we did.
Other sessions: Try this at Home! Tips and Lessons for Building a Racially Diverse Movement
SumOfUs.org’s Executive Director and Founder, Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, is a dual Australian-American citizen. She has experience with online organizing on four continents and at the global level, including at Avaaz.org, GetUp.org.au, and the AFL-CIO. She was born in Australia, currently lives in New York City and enjoys reading science fiction and playing ultimate frisbee for fun.
Other sessions: Try this at Home! Tips and Lessons for Building a Racially Diverse Movement, Living Our Values: Building the Movement We Deserve
Shaunna Thomas is co-founder and Executive Director of UltraViolet, an organization fighting for gender equity and justice, from politics and policy to media and pop culture. Shaunna has had a fifteen year career in progressive organizing, building progressive infrastructure projects and winning critical policy fights at the national level.
Other sessions: The Rise of Janet Yellen: Why the Fed Matters, and How Progressives Fought for the First Female Chair of the Federal Reserve
Ben Wikler was elected chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in June of 2019. Now in his second term, he has led the party through an unbroken string of statewide victories, including Wisconsin’s defeat of Trump in 2020, and built the WisDems to a new level of success and recognition as a force for progressive change.
Prior to serving as Chair, Wikler served as Washington DC Director and Senior Advisor for MoveOn, where he played a key leadership role in the successful battle to save the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, as well as many of the other fights for economic, social, and racial justice of recent years. A lifelong activist, Wikler grew up in Madison, Wisconsin, where he first volunteered in politics at age eleven, stuffing envelopes for the Congressional campaign of his godmother, Ada Deer. In high school and college, he volunteered for then-Assemblywoman Tammy Baldwin, interned for Ed Garvey and Sen. Russ Feingold, and fell in love with his now-wife Beth while putting up posters together for a protest. Ben and Beth now live in Madison with their three children and their puppy, Pumpkin.
Other sessions: LIVE: The Good Fight, with Ben Wikler, powered by MoveOn.org