Latest news with #RunForSomething
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The Mamdani effect: how his primary win is inspiring young progressives to run for office
In mid-July, Erik Clemson signed on to a Zoom call from Honolulu, Hawaii, energized by a mayoral candidate in a city far across the country, to hear how he could run for office himself. Clemson, a 39-year-old machinist instructor who has a YouTube channel where he explains the economy, had long considered a political run some time in the future, but Zohran Mamdani's upset victory provided a push off the sidelines. 'After I saw Mamdani win the primary in NYC, I decided to stop wasting time and try to learn what I can as soon as I can,' Clemson said. Clemson is one of more than 10,000 people with an interest in running for office who signed up for Run for Something – a progressive political organization that helps younger candidates learn the ropes – after Mamdani won the primary. He's part of a surge in young progressives who saw Mamdani's win in June as hope for a different brand of politics and plan to learn from his example. Co-founder Amanda Litman called it the group's biggest organic candidate recruitment surge ever. 'They saw a young person who took on the establishment against the odds and was able to center the issues that young people really care about – cost of living, especially, housing, childcare, transportation – and talk about it in a way that felt hopeful and made people feel like maybe better things are possible,' Litman said. The Mamdani bump blends together excitement about the candidate, interest in leftist policies and zeal for shoe-leather campaigning, both on the ground and online. The organization recognizes that it's not that Mamdani's exact policy ideas should be the focus of campaigns nationwide, but that campaigns should be tailored to and inspired by the people they will directly serve. Clemson said he watched Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary debate, the first time he had watched a debate somewhere other than where he lives. He earned a degree in international business, and his career in blue-collar manufacturing led him to create a YouTube channel called Working Class Economics, where he explains the economy. He has a 9-year-old son, so he said he may run for a school board or the city council. He saw how Mamdani used man-on-the-street social media videos to talk to voters in a way that didn't feel concocted by political consultants. The campaign and its policies didn't feel tailored to the donor class – and the fact that Mamdani was running in the home of Wall Street felt like a rebuke to the system, Clemson said. 'It just seems like he genuinely cares about his city and the people who live there, and it seems like they like him too, which sounds like it should be the case for everybody, but it seems like that's rare,' Clemson said. 'In politics, there seem to be so many people who have very little connection to the areas they represent.' Overall, about 10% of the people who sign up with Run for Something at any given time run for office, usually about a year or so out from when they sign up, Litman said. Run for Something often sees people sign up after elections, including after Democrats' big loss last November. Fear and despair motivate people, but so does hope, she said. Mamdani's win also came at a time of flagging enthusiasm for Democrats and amid soul-searching on the left for a path forward. 'The policies that you campaign on in the New York City mayoral election and the policies you campaign on for literally anywhere else, they're not going to be the same,' Litman said. 'I think the point is that he really ran values-first, voter-first. His campaign wasn't really about him. It wasn't about his personal story, per se. It was about what it meant to be a New Yorker, what it meant to be someone who loves this city and wants to make it better, what it meant to really listen to voters about what they cared about. That is replicable, no matter where you are.' Existing campaigns with similarities to Mamdani – younger candidates, Democratic socialists, economy-focused campaigns – have benefited from comparisons to the New York mayoral hopeful. In Minneapolis, a state senator and Democratic socialist candidate for mayor, Omar Fateh, secured the city's Democratic party endorsement in July after Mamdani's win brought him more attention. Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to the Mamdani campaign, said the campaign resonated because it spoke to the 'urgent need for leaders who will fight for working people' during a time when people are struggling with affordability. 'His campaign showed what's possible when you meet people where they are and offer a clear, bold message,' Rahim said. 'That's why it made history – with Zohran receiving more votes than any primary candidate in New York's history – and why it's inspiring so many others to imagine themselves in positions of leadership. We're thrilled to see that energy spreading, because everyone deserves a government that truly fights for them.' Nick Sciretta, a 35-year-old from Valley Stream, New York, is running for Congress in the state's fourth district, a longshot bid to unseat an incumbent Democrat, representative Laura Gillen. Gillen has called Mamdani 'too extreme' and 'the absolute wrong choice for New York'. Sciretta, who canvassed for Mamdani in south Queens, feels the opposite. He was planning to run for office in April anyway – and then he heard about Mamdani's campaign. 'The first thought I had was, we need more regular guys running for positions of power,' said Sciretta, a longtime International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees crew member. 'Ultimately, he's doing something beautiful, which is getting the rank and file, the regular guys, regular New Yorkers, to believe in themselves more than anything.' Sciretta had 'lost everything' twice, losing work during the writers' strike and then the pandemic, and has moved back home. He is a one-man campaign operation: he's gathering signatures to qualify for the ballot, setting up his own website, tabling in public or sitting in coffee shops with a sign that he's running for Congress. Mamdani, who is a member of the state assembly, still felt like a regular person who you could sit next to on the bus, Sciretta said. That appeal helped others see they could run for office, too, because you didn't need to be a certain age or pedigree to win. 'The people who are like, 'Zohran is bad for the city' … they're afraid of guys like me who want to follow in his footsteps,' Sciretta said. 'Because if there are more Zohrans everywhere in the country, that's when real change happens.'
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Business
- The Guardian
The Mamdani effect: how his primary win is inspiring young progressives to run for office
In mid-July, Erik Clemson signed on to a Zoom call from Honolulu, Hawaii, energized by a mayoral candidate in a city far across the country, to hear how he could run for office himself. Clemson, a 39-year-old machinist instructor who has a YouTube channel where he explains the economy, had long considered a political run some time in the future, but Zohran Mamdani's upset victory provided a push off the sidelines. 'After I saw Mamdani win the primary in NYC, I decided to stop wasting time and try to learn what I can as soon as I can,' Clemson said. Clemson is one of more than 10,000 people with an interest in running for office who signed up for Run for Something – a progressive political organization that helps younger candidates learn the ropes – after Mamdani won the primary. He's part of a surge in young progressives who saw Mamdani's win in June as hope for a different brand of politics and plan to learn from his example. Co-founder Amanda Litman called it the group's biggest organic candidate recruitment surge ever. 'They saw a young person who took on the establishment against the odds and was able to center the issues that young people really care about – cost of living, especially, housing, childcare, transportation – and talk about it in a way that felt hopeful and made people feel like maybe better things are possible,' Litman said. The Mamdani bump blends together excitement about the candidate, interest in leftist policies and zeal for shoe-leather campaigning, both on the ground and online. The organization recognizes that it's not that Mamdani's exact policy ideas should be the focus of campaigns nationwide, but that campaigns should be tailored to and inspired by the people they will directly serve. Clemson said he watched Mamdani in the New York Democratic primary debate, the first time he had watched a debate somewhere other than where he lives. He earned a degree in international business, and his career in blue-collar manufacturing led him to create a YouTube channel called Working Class Economics, where he explains the economy. He has a 9-year-old son, so he said he may run for a school board or the city council. He saw how Mamdani used man-on-the-street social media videos to talk to voters in a way that didn't feel concocted by political consultants. The campaign and its policies didn't feel tailored to the donor class – and the fact that Mamdani was running in the home of Wall Street felt like a rebuke to the system, Clemson said. 'It just seems like he genuinely cares about his city and the people who live there, and it seems like they like him too, which sounds like it should be the case for everybody, but it seems like that's rare,' Clemson said. 'In politics, there seem to be so many people who have very little connection to the areas they represent.' Overall, about 10% of the people who sign up with Run for Something at any given time run for office, usually about a year or so out from when they sign up, Litman said. Run for Something often sees people sign up after elections, including after Democrats' big loss last November. Fear and despair motivate people, but so does hope, she said. Mamdani's win also came at a time of flagging enthusiasm for Democrats and amid soul-searching on the left for a path forward. 'The policies that you campaign on in the New York City mayoral election and the policies you campaign on for literally anywhere else, they're not going to be the same,' Litman said. 'I think the point is that he really ran values-first, voter-first. His campaign wasn't really about him. It wasn't about his personal story, per se. It was about what it meant to be a New Yorker, what it meant to be someone who loves this city and wants to make it better, what it meant to really listen to voters about what they cared about. That is replicable, no matter where you are.' Existing campaigns with similarities to Mamdani – younger candidates, Democratic socialists, economy-focused campaigns – have benefited from comparisons to the New York mayoral hopeful. In Minneapolis, a state senator and Democratic socialist candidate for mayor, Omar Fateh, secured the city's Democratic party endorsement in July after Mamdani's win brought him more attention. Zara Rahim, a senior adviser to the Mamdani campaign, said the campaign resonated because it spoke to the 'urgent need for leaders who will fight for working people' during a time when people are struggling with affordability. 'His campaign showed what's possible when you meet people where they are and offer a clear, bold message,' Rahim said. 'That's why it made history – with Zohran receiving more votes than any primary candidate in New York's history – and why it's inspiring so many others to imagine themselves in positions of leadership. We're thrilled to see that energy spreading, because everyone deserves a government that truly fights for them.' Nick Sciretta, a 35-year-old from Valley Stream, New York, is running for Congress in the state's fourth district, a longshot bid to unseat an incumbent Democrat, representative Laura Gillen. Gillen has called Mamdani 'too extreme' and 'the absolute wrong choice for New York'. Sciretta, who canvassed for Mamdani in south Queens, feels the opposite. He was planning to run for office in April anyway – and then he heard about Mamdani's campaign. 'The first thought I had was, we need more regular guys running for positions of power,' said Sciretta, a longtime International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees crew member. 'Ultimately, he's doing something beautiful, which is getting the rank and file, the regular guys, regular New Yorkers, to believe in themselves more than anything.' Sciretta had 'lost everything' twice, losing work during the writers' strike and then the pandemic, and has moved back home. He is a one-man campaign operation: he's gathering signatures to qualify for the ballot, setting up his own website, tabling in public or sitting in coffee shops with a sign that he's running for Congress. Mamdani, who is a member of the state assembly, still felt like a regular person who you could sit next to on the bus, Sciretta said. That appeal helped others see they could run for office, too, because you didn't need to be a certain age or pedigree to win. 'The people who are like, 'Zohran is bad for the city' … they're afraid of guys like me who want to follow in his footsteps,' Sciretta said. 'Because if there are more Zohrans everywhere in the country, that's when real change happens.'
The Guardian
26-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Run for Something co-founder: ‘Democrats' reliance on seniority is our downfall'
Amanda Litman spent the past decade building a way for more younger people to run for office. Now, as the Democratic party debates its ageing leaders after the former president's decline led to a bruising loss in 2024, a groundswell of younger Democrats are working to remake the party by challenging incumbents and calling out Democratic leaders who fail to push back against Trump. It's a moment Litman has been waiting for. Litman co-founded Run for Something, an organization that recruits and trains progressives age 40 and under to seek elected office, the day Trump was inaugurated in 2017. Since then, the group has sought to dismantle the gerontocracy, helping to elect more than 1,500 people across 49 states. More than 200,000 people have signed up to explore a run for office, more than 40,000 of whom have signed up since Trump won last November. 'The Democratic party's reliance on seniority is really our downfall,' she told the Guardian. 'Imagine how hard it is to tell your grandparents that it's time for them to stop driving. This is the same: how do you tell someone they're no longer fit to do the thing that they've been doing for decades, but maybe feel called to and derive all their self-esteem and their sense of identity from?' These conversations are 'really hard', but it's vital to have them now, and in the open, because Democrats are seeing the consequences of avoiding the issue for too long, she said. Those younger leaders also have a distaste for institutionsand are more eager to tear it down or propose alternative ways to rebuild the government. Younger leaders are 'very open about what change could look like, and that can be really scary to the people who've been building these institutions for the last 10, 20, 30 years,' Litman said. Three older Democrats have died in office just this year. After the most recent death, Virginia Democrat Gerry Connolly, Litman wrote on social media that 'older Democrats need to retire now and go out on their own terms. Let us celebrate your legacy! Don't let your leadership end in a primary loss or worse, real grief.' Her new book, 'When We're in Charge: The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership,' details how millennials and Gen Z leaders can remake their workplaces and become the kinds of leaders they've always wanted. It's not explicitly about politics, though some people in elected office or other political work are interviewed. 'When we make workplaces better, we give people back their time to do more politics outside of it, like being a better citizen,' she said. 'It's really hard to imagine going to a protest or volunteering for a candidate if you are working around the clock, and you get home from your nine to five and you're just drained. Part of the reason why I want to push this conversation outside of politics is because I think the more we can make work not suck, the better everything else cannot suck too.' She advocates for separating your work from your personhood and bringing your authentic self to work, albeit a modified version she calls 'responsible authenticity'. The same lessons she found across workplaces apply to politicians, she writes and points to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York congresswoman, as someone who strikes the right balance of showing her humanity but maintaining boundaries. 'The members of Congress I spoke to brought up the same kinds of challenges as the lawyers, as the faith leaders, as the business executives and media folks,' she said. 'They all talked about loneliness. They all talked about vulnerability. They talked about the challenges of wanting to be authentic but not wanting to let everyone into all your shit.' As Democrats debate how to rebuild their side of the aisle, Litman expects to see more primaries, something the party has often sought to avoid at the national level, often believing they're a waste of resources. Primaries are more common in the state and local races Run for Something works on, and the group has at times endorsed more than one person in a primary. Primaries are 'clarifying', Litman said. 'Politics, like everything else, is something you get better at with practice. Primaries are how you get better.' Those primaries aren't simply a progressive vs. centrist surge right now, she said. It's more about who is showing they have the fight in them to stand up to the Trump administration, more about who has 'the skills and the stomach'. Beyond primaries, the left should be having open conversations about who needs to retire - Litman said a retirement, with an open race, is much more preferable than unseating an incumbent, which can get messy. 'If we really think that this is a crisis, we need leaders who are going to act like it and be able to communicate that,' she said. 'I'm not sure that Senator [Chuck] Schumer and other older members of Congress are most well-suited to do that. That's not a personal failing. It's just we got to send our best.'
CNBC
22-05-2025
- General
- CNBC
Millennial founder's best career advice for Gen Z: 'You don't get what you don't ask for'
Amanda Litman was just 26 when she co-founded Run For Something, a political organization that recruits and supports young, diverse candidates running for down-ballot office, in 2017. As Run for Something grew, Litman found that in order to become the kind of leader she wanted to be — compassionate, transparent, effective and accountable — she would have to look outside traditional models of leadership. Millennials and Gen Z are more diverse than previous generations, "so our leadership quite literally looks different," she says. "The models that worked for the old white men of the last three centuries don't necessarily make sense for us." In the eight years she's served as president of Run for Something, Litman, 35, has watched fellow millennial and Gen Z leaders make fundamental changes to workplace culture as they rise to top positions. Litman drew on her own experiences, as well as interviews with other millennial and Gen Z leaders like Snap Inc. CEO Evan Spiegel, comedian and producer Ilana Glazer, and activist David Hogg, for her new book "When We're In Charge: The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership." Here's her advice for the latest crop of leaders. According to Litman, the best professional advice she's ever received is "You don't get what you don't ask for." This advice rings true no matter where you are on the career ladder, she says. For leaders, clarity is crucial when setting expectations for employees. "You have a responsibility to make it clear what you are expecting, what you need, what you want out of people, and you want to make it as easy as possible for them to satisfy your demands," she says. On the other end, Litman encourages early-career professionals to put themselves out there: "If you want help from someone, if you want time on someone's calendar, if you want to have coffee with that person you've never had a chance to interact with, you need to ask for it." "The worst thing that happens is someone says no," she says. "The best thing that happens is they say yes, and you don't know what doors might open for you." Litman is heartened to see emerging leaders taking charge and making changes in the workplace. One crucial difference she notices between today's leaders and previous generations is that the younger generation of leaders is particularly focused on creating a healthy, supportive work culture. The Gen Z leaders Litman spoke to "really thought about the well-being of their teams," she says. "They thought about how to bring a sort of joy to the work in a way that I found really refreshing." Though Gen Z is often stereotyped in the workforce as lazy, unreliable, or difficult, Litman pushes back against those perceptions. "I think Gen Z wants a better balance between work and life, because they have seen how work can let you down," she says. "The career ladders that we thought we could climb no longer exist. The institutions that you thought you'd be able to work for are going through rolling layoffs. So why make your whole life about your job?" She advises Gen Z leaders to "take what works and leave what doesn't" when developing their leadership philosophies. "Don't assume that the way things were done yesterday has to be the way they're done tomorrow. You should know how things were done yesterday, but that doesn't dictate the future. You actually have a lot of agency over what could happen," she says. ,
Forbes
13-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Interview: Amanda Litman Offers Advice For The Next Generation Of Leaders In Her New Book ‘When We're In Charge'
Amanda Litman Barb Kinney 'Everything would be better if we blew open the model of what good leadership looks like,' says founder and executive Amanda Litman, whose new book, When We're in Charge: The Next Generation's Guide to Leadership, came out today. With an increasing number of millennials and Gen Zers taking on positions of power, the book serves as a timely, much-needed resource that encourages the next generation of leaders to transform outdated leadership models and workplace cultures and to lead in new ways. Litman is the cofounder and president of Run for Something, the nation's premiere candidate recruitment organization, which supports young, diverse progressives running for local office. Since their founding in 2017, Run for Something has launched the careers of thousands of millennials and Gen Z candidates, many of whom are women and people of color, helping to shape the future of leadership across the U.S. When Litman founded her organization at the age of 26, she realized there were very few resources for young execs like her and decided she wanted to provide new leaders with, as she writes in the book, 'the advice I wish I'd had over the last nearly ten years.' In the book, Litman candidly shares her own personal experiences and lessons learned as a founder, executive and mom of two, while also drawing on conversations with more than 100 next-gen leaders across politics, business, media, tech, education and more, including Versha Sharma, editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue, Maxwell Frost, first Gen Z member of Congress and Evan Spiegel, CEO of Snap Inc. among others. I had the opportunity to interview Litman to find out more about the book and her thoughts on how young leaders can show up differently and create a 'compassionate and effective' workplace culture that 'gives people their time back and their autonomy back,' the importance of having diverse teams, the surge in young people wanting to run for office, what gives her hope right now and more. Marianne Schnall: Who is When We're in Charge for, and what made you decide to write this book now? Amanda Litman: The book is specifically talking toward millennials and Gen Z who are thinking about becoming a leader one day or are currently in leadership positions. But it's not exclusively for either of those audiences. I really think it's for anyone right now thinking about what it means to run a space, a community, a workplace, a team that is compassionate and humane and genuine and also effective at whatever the goal is. I started Run for Something in 2017 when I was almost 27 years old. I had never done something like this before. I kept realizing that I was the youngest person, or one of the youngest people, in a lot of rooms I was in. And the challenges that I was experiencing were very different than the ones that many of the other executive directors or CEOs were experiencing. Fast forward to 2022, I started hearing from political reporters who reached out to me to say, 'Hey, a bunch of the Run for Something candidates seem to be making national headlines. What do these folks have in common?' And I realized many of them were, like I was, trying to lead differently. They were trying to do things differently. They were showing up in spaces not meant for people like them and breaking a new mold. That seemed to me like a new path for leadership that no one had quite put pen to paper on, so I decided to. Schnall: How do we empower people to model new paradigms of leadership that are more authentic to them, rather than the outdated ways it has been modeled to us that no longer serve us or maybe never served us? Litman: In the political realm, for example, there was a period of time where every woman running for office would have to wear a pantsuit and would have to sort of model male masculinity leadership styles. That is no longer the case. In the last couple years, we've seen that there are now a number of ways in which women can run for office and show up as themselves. And the same is true across the private sector, education, the legal field—we're blowing up the number of ways you can show up as a person in charge. And that really does expand our imagination of what is possible. I think it's really exciting, but it's also really scary and really hard. It is really important to think about what it means for leadership to look like a whole bunch of different things, not just the older white guy. And that is a really powerful driver for what change could look like across the workplace. Everything would be better if we blew open the model of what good leadership looks like. What if it didn't have to be like 'beep bop robot boss,' and working hundred-hour weeks, hustle-grind culture? What if it didn't? What if that didn't serve us anymore? What could come next? Schnall: How does the workplace culture need to change to be able to support successful leadership? And what are your highest hopes for the next generation of leaders? Litman: I'll be the first to name that we need more than just workplace changes—we need broad cultural shifts in what it means to live a full life and the kind of support that we give people. Workplaces shape how people spend a vast majority of their waking hours, so it's really important that these be places where people have really strong guardrails. What I'm hoping, what I am already seeing, is that next-gen leaders can show up and think about running their spaces in a way that gives people their time back and their autonomy back: that we could imagine a world where everyone has a four-day work week and paid time off and paid time to care for their families, to care for new members or elderly members; making sure that workplaces are family friendly or people friendly, that you can have time to be a full person outside of your job; that people have sabbatical policies and generous benefits; that people are paid well for the work that they do, and also can do it in a way that gives them dignity, but doesn't demand more of them than they are willing to give; that understands that the core nature of a job is an economic transaction, which doesn't mean it also can't be meaningful and provide a whole bunch of other goods, but that the expectations really meet reality. All of this is about making sure that you can live a good, full life and that as leaders, the people running these places, we can take advantage of those things too. I think that sometimes gets lost in the conversation, like, 'Oh, I want to do these things for my team. I want to do these things for the people I lead. But I also want to do these things for me because I don't want to be miserable either.' Our suffering doesn't serve anyone. And beyond that, especially right now with what's going on, making sure that every space we are in is really compassionate and humane, and that people are treated like people first and workers or contributors to the cause second, because I think that makes everything a little bit easier and everyone's lives a little bit better. Schnall: Can you talk a little bit more about the importance of leaders both providing and taking family leave? We're one of the few countries that doesn't have these policies in place. Litman: Again, we've got to fix that on the cultural and societal level. And this was really personal for me. I have a toddler and a seven month old, so I've now taken maternity leave twice as the boss. When I was doing this with my first kid, I really struggled through it. And there wasn't a really clear how-to manual for that; everything I Googled was just how to ask HR or your boss for leave. I write in When We're in Charge the thought process that I went through, what my memo looked like, how I handed things off and how I negotiated that reentry to work, which is just as hard as taking the time off in the first place. This is a relatively new problem, especially for women. But I would point out that it should also have been a problem for a long time for new parents, for new dads who should also be taking paid leave. It's part of your compensation, it's part of your benefits, you should take the time. It makes you a better partner, a better parent and a better leader. So I'm really glad to be able to give people some real concrete steps on how to think about it, knowing that the process of doing that makes your whole organization more resilient to any kind of absence, not just having kids. What can I do to prep for any kind of emergency, or good thing, happening? Schnall: With your book—and this has also been a big part of Run for Something—you talk about having more women and diversity in leadership. With many DEI programs being rolled back, what can we do to fill in the gaps? Litman: Part of it is taking a stand and refusing to back down. Diversity, equity and inclusion is both a moral good and also a business imperative for nearly every kind of space. It is good to hire diverse teams, to build heterogeneous spaces. It gets you better outcomes. Generative conflict is a good thing; it combats groupthink. And there's a reason you see this in basically all advertising, all Hollywood and media marketing programs; they know that diversity is a net good for business. And we're seeing this in reverse too: when companies have rolled back their DEI efforts, see Target, they have felt it on their bottom line. It's often hard to know where to start, and I write about this quite a bit in When We're in Charge. There are so many different ways that equity and inclusion programs could look, some of which are really meaningful. And representation is just one of many tactics in service of that goal. There are a whole bunch of things we can think about—from hiring goals to compensation to creating psychological safety in the workplace to being welcoming and really clear about the kinds of lines that we want to draw. Part of being inclusive and creating inclusive spaces is being exclusive to bigotry and hostility. And that can be a little counterintuitive, but it's really, really important for leaders to be clear-eyed about what kind of space you want to create and who you need to keep out in order to create it. Schnall: You announced recently that Run for Something has surpassed 200,000 signups from people ready to run for office since launching in 2017. And that since the 2024 election, Run for Something has seen a surge of interest in running for office: nearly 40,000 people, 20% of the total pipeline, have reached out just since election day. What do you think is driving it, and how can we support this trend? Litman: I think there are so many things driving it, which is what makes it really exciting. Part of this is a frustration with the current leadership, and I mean that across both parties. These are not the people fighting for us, and if they're not going to fight for us, we have to fight for us. I think there's a frustration among certain issues. We're especially seeing people show up around housing, childcare, book bans and public education. We're seeing people who've gotten laid off from the federal government, or whose friends and partners have gotten laid off, and are saying, 'I want to fight for public servants.' One of the best ways we can help this new generation of leaders is to encourage more of them, create permission structures for them, give them money if you want to see them run and lead and engage in these local elections in particular. Also, think about the people in your life who would be amazing public servants if only they were asked—and then ask them. And be willing to knock on doors for them, write them a check, show up for them. Running for office in particular, like any leadership task, is both really hard and requires incredible courage and is not done alone. So any way that you can help someone in your life who's thinking about doing this by encouraging them and then being there for them, it's huge. Schnall: What is your call to action right now? Litman: Right now one of the most important things we can do as leaders is to show up in a way that is compassionate and effective, to refuse to see those two things as mutually exclusive. Because we're going to need a little bit of both. To get through this period, we're going to need to be both really clear-eyed about what we're trying to accomplish and also really humane in how we're trying to accomplish it. In every possible space we can, we've got to make it feel good and also get the thing done. Schnall: Are you hopeful? Litman: I am so hopeful, and I think part of this is because my day job is so future oriented: Run for Something is trying to build long-term sustainable power and do it in a way that looks and feels different than what came before. The 40,000 people who have signed up in the last five and a half months just since the election, they are just ordinary people who are willing to even consider doing this extraordinary thing and putting their name on the ballot. I want a little bit of their courage. I want a little bit of their bravery. And I've seen over the last eight years what it looks like when ordinary people do the extraordinary: it can change lives, it can build homes, it can make insulin cheaper. Even outside of politics, it can make work more compassionate. It can give people their lives and their dignity back. That matters. And I think it will continue to matter, and I think we're going to see more of it and not in the places you'd expect, which is even more inspiring. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. For more about Amanda Litman and her work, visit
