‘First you talk to one person … ‘

On one level, organizing social change is simple. 

The story goes that once a young activist asked Cesar Chavez, the legendary founder of the United Farmworkers, “how do you organize?” Chavez replied, “Well, first you talk to one person, then you talk to another person, then you talk to another person ...”

Yet even Cesar Chavez didn’t just “become” an organizer. He was trained, first and foremost by veteran organizer Fred Ross. He learned, by trial and error, from his own experiences. And he passed those lessons on to generations of new organizers

‘After I got sad, I got mad’

Not everybody is a natural born organizer or leader. A dynamic personality, an ability to “read the room,” lack of the fear gene – there are dozens of innate qualities that make one a more effective organizer and leader. 

Yet even Lois Gibbs – the mom and housewife who organized her Love Canal neighborhood to force President Carter to act on the toxic wastes that were making her children and others sick – was so fearful of speaking in public that she hid behind a tree before she gathered the strength to take the stage for the first time.

But Gibbs had one other prerequisite for effective organizing: motivation. Town officials had rebuffed her attempts to persuade them to protect her kids and others from the toxic wastes that were making them sick. “After I got sad,” she said, “I got mad.” The rest is history.

A lever and a fulcrum

Over the last 50 years, The Public Interest Network has made training organizers, advocates and other activists a top priority. The network’s apprenticeship-style training and professional development have helped thousands of new changemakers to perfect their craft. Some have called the network “the activist pipeline.”

Archimedes said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I can move the world.” Find organizers with the right motivation and give them the right training, and they can change the world. 

The Public Interest Network is proud to do all we can to provide organizers, advocates and other activists with the right training.

Video credit: staff

The leadership ladder

Over 50 years, PIRG and the larger PIRG network have provided tens of thousands of young people with their first activist experience – as student volunteers and interns, canvassers and entry-level staff.

Dozens of these new activists have risen up the ranks to become leaders within The Public Interest Network. Here are just three such stories:

PIRG President Faye Park 

In 1990, as Williams College student Faye Park searched for her path in life, she discovered … a MASSPIRG bank survey.

The survey compared the interest rates and fees of the two local banks then available to Williams students. It struck Faye as a practical project that made a concrete, positive impact on people’s lives – exactly what she wanted to do with her life. 

Over the next two years, Faye became more involved in MASSPIRG, learning more about the concept and craft of organizing and meeting mentors such as MASSPIRG Executive Director Janet Domenitz.

“Janet and I once shared a car ride from Boston to Williamstown,” Faye said. “MASSPIRG had just suffered a setback on a recycling initiative, so I asked her how she stayed motivated. She said, ‘I focus on what I can control and influence and on doing it better today than I did yesterday.’ That conversation, and many others like it, stuck with me and helped show me how to make a difference.”

Faye has continued to apply that lesson as a campus organizer and organizing director with CALPIRG Student Chapters; as a canvass director; as executive vice president of The Public Interest Network; and as president of PIRG.

Student PIRG National Political Director Dan Xie

Dan Xie also got her start with PIRG as a college student, staying involved in CALPIRG for her sophomore through senior years.  

After graduating from the University of California at Davis in 2008, her rise up the ranks has included stints as campus organizer in California, organizing director in New Jersey, and canvass director and regional canvass director in multiple states.

Each of her previous experiences has prepared Dan for her current role: political director for the Student PIRGs. She coordinates strategy for dozens of campaigns, with a focus on youth voter turnout, climate change and single-use plastics.

Her choice of career path, she says, is based on two factors. “We take getting results very seriously and I want to be on the winning team. I also want young people to feel like they have agency over our democracy. We’re one of the few groups out there that give people the skills and resources they need to experience victory on a social issue in college.”  

Environment America President Wendy Wendlandt 

After graduating from Whitman College in 1983, Wendy Wendlandt’s desire to get involved in politics took her to an obvious landing place: Washington, D.C.

However, her first job, in political consulting, left her wanting more – to work on the issues and causes she cared most about. Wendy returned to her native Oregon and set out to look for work in social change. She found and was hired for a position as campus organizer with WashPIRG – and drove to Montana the day after she accepted the job to start training.

Since then, Wendy has served as an organizer at Evergreen State College and ran the Seattle summer canvass office (despite only having two days of canvassing experience). She became executive director of WashPIRG in 1986, helped create the grants and political departments for The Public Interest Network, ran multiple electoral projects, served on the boards of Green Corps and Green Century Capital Management, and is now president of Environment America.

Few people work as hard or as long as Wendy, on such a wide variety of projects, yet her energy level is unflagging. Which is perhaps no surprise – when she hasn’t been organizing, she has scaled mountains throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as Mount Kiliminjaro, Machu Picchu and to Base Camp at Mount Everest. 

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The Public Interest Network leadership includes dozens of other “up from the ranks” leaders. They include Andre Delattre (senior vice president, started as a PIRG student), Susan Rakov (senior vice president, started as a campus organizer), Andy MacDonald (Student PIRG national organizing director, started as a canvasser), and Emily Rusch (vice president, started as a fellow).

Photo credits: Banner - staff. Faye - staff, CBS; Dan - staff, staff; Wendy - Solar Rights Alliance, Staff

A commitment to the craft

For more than 40 years, each August a group of recent college graduates and others have stepped into a classroom, a hotel conference room, or a Zoom call, with only a vague idea of what it means to organize for social change.

A week or two later, they leave those real or virtual rooms with an introduction to the building blocks of running and winning grassroots campaigns. And in the process, they’ve also met people who have been practicing and mastering these skills and strategies for years.

That, in a nutshell, is what has become known within The Public Interest Network as Social Change 100. And it’s only one “course” in a much larger curriculum designed to provide aspiring changemakers with the theory, skills and practice they need to master their craft.

Sitting in a room or in front of a screen as an expert organizer or advocate lectures is just one part of The Public Interest Network training experience. It also includes:

Introducing students to activism

Over 50 years, the Student PIRGs have trained more than 2 million college students in the skills of effective civic action. PIRG campus organizers have taught students to investigate social problems, research and write reports, earn media attention, lobby public officials and other decision-makers, and wage grassroots action campaigns.

Running a canvass 

Among the most valuable training experiences for PIRG and Public Interest Network staff is learning how to run a citizen outreach canvass office. In the classroom and in the field, entry-level staff learn how to recruit and manage other staff, raise money, manage an office, and mobilize grassroots action and support for a campaign – all invaluable skills in the nonprofit world. 

Especially during the summer, when college students are on break, the work is intense, the hours are long, and the task list never-ending. Yet the people who have succeeded at running a canvass earn a self-confidence that few other experiences provide. If you’ve built and managed a team that can go out day after day after day to knock on doors in any weather for a cause and a campaign worth fighting for, you can do almost anything.

Green Corps

Founded in 1992, Green Corps is a one-year training program for aspiring environmental organizers. The program combines intensive classroom training with in-the-field experience on real environmental campaigns with partner groups – all of which prepare Green Corps graduates for placement in organizing positions in the environmental and public interest movements.

More than 400 organizers have taken part in the Green Corps program. Nearly all are still at work for the environment or the public interest. 

Community Action Works

While most network training is designed for staff and college students, for 35 years Community Action Works has been training people in the community to tackle local environmental problems. Founded in 1987, the project grew out of a MASSPIRG-led ballot initiative campaign to clean  up hazardous waste dumpsites across Massachusetts.

In addition to holding annual conferences for local environmental activists across New England, the training provided by Community Action Works has helped local activists win hundreds of other local victories, including shutting down a coal-fired power plant in Holyoke, Mass.; cleaning up contamination around a school in Hamden, Conn.; and blocking the use of pesticides in Vermont’s Lake Iroquois.

Training never stops

All staff in their first year with the network attend a series of trainings, starting with Social Change 100. Staff in the second year and above may attend shorter sessions, running as long as a few hours to a few days, focusing on a single issue or skill set, from global warming to consumer protection, from running corporate campaigns to working with the media.

And every day network staff give each other feedback on how to improve our work. As Janet Domenitz told Faye Park decades ago, we strive to stay focused on doing the work better today than we did yesterday.

Photo credit: Stefan Klapko Photography

A leadership legacy

At some point, every staff person in The Public Interest Network makes a choice: whether to stay and keep working for their team or organization or leave and do something different.

Among those who have chosen other paths, we’re happy to report that hundreds (at least) of PIRG alumni have continued to make a positive difference for the public interest, the environment, political action and community service. All credit goes to them, but we hope that their training and experience with PIRG and other groups in our network helped prepare them for the challenges they’ve faced so successfully. Here are four of these alumni, all of whom have been the recipients of our network’s Alumni Achievement Award. 

Ceres President Mindy Lubber

In photos above.

For Mindy Lubber, her career of activism got its start when she joined her campus NYPIRG chapter as a business student at SUNY Buffalo. 

By combining her business background with her passion for the environment, Mindy has become a leading presence in the world of social finance. After more than two decades with the PIRG network, as a lobbyist and program director of MASSPIRG and the founding president of Green Century Funds, Mindy joined the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1995 as a senior policy advisor and was named regional administrator for New England in 2000. 

Since 2003, Mindy has been president of Ceres, a nonprofit that mobilizes investors and business leaders behind a sustainable global economy. In 2015, Vogue Magazine recognized Mindy as a “Climate Warrior” for her role in organizing business support for the Paris Agreement on climate change. 

“My Public Interest Network training has truly helped me in everything I do,” said Mindy. “How do you change something that’s not working out there? The Public Interest Network teaches people how to change something.”

Mindy is shown above in her work with Ceres and her earlier work with MASSPIRG. Left photo courtesy Mindy Lubber. Right photo by staff.

Consumer Attorney Pamela Gilbert

Pamela Gilbert began her career at Ralph Nader’s National Citizens Committee for Broadcasting, where he correctly predicted that she “would never leave public interest work.” 

While attending New York University Law School, Pam worked for CALPIRG during her first law school summer. After graduating, Pam came on full-time as U.S. PIRG’s first-ever consumer advocate, authoring and lobbying successfully for passage of the federal Art and Craft Materials Labeling Act, which regulated toxic ingredients in school art supplies.

After leaving PIRG in 1989, Pam applied her training and experience at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) under President Clinton

As of 2022, Pam is a consumer attorney with the Washington, D.C., law firm Cuneo, Gilbert & LaDuca, where she has been a partner since 2003. “Not only is Pamela one of the nation’s leading safety champions,” said veteran consumer advocate Rosemary Shahan, “she is an incredible joy to work with. If she were a rock star, she’d be tops on all the charts. Instead, she quietly works away, out of the limelight, to the tremendous benefit of the entire American public.”

Image credit: C-SPAN

Organizer Adam Ruben

Adam began his professional organizing career in 1992 as a member of the inaugural class of Green Corps. 

As one of the “stars” of that first Green Corps class, Adam was offered and he accepted the position of Green Corps organizing director in 1995. He later became the U.S. PIRG national field director, expanding our reach in Maine, Texas and other states. 

After leaving PIRG, Adam became the field director and political director at MoveOn.org, a role he held for nearly a decade. He spearheaded MoveOn’s 2004 Leave No Voter Behind campaign, an effort that combined cutting-edge online technology with the old-fashioned offline activism he learned and mastered with Green Corps and PIRG. The campaign reached into 10,000 communities to mobilize over 400,000 voters on Election Day. 

In the years that followed, Adam consulted with organizations ranging from the Voter Participation Center to Global Zero. As of 2022, Adam is the campaigns director at the Economic Security Project. 

Photo credit: staff

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For more on Public Interest Network alumni and their achievements, visit our website.