From Campaigning to Governing Effectively: The Progressive Governance Academy

Introduction

THIS CASE STUDY IS ABOUT HOW THREE NONPROFIT CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS CAME TOGETHER to equip elected leaders to govern more effectively in ways that felt true to their values and motivations for running for office. As part of that, the case study explores some practical demands of winning and using electoral power and of collaborative governance (aka cogovernance) in which elected officials and others in government team up with civil society and other allies working outside of government. Beginning in 2016, the three organizations test the potential for impact by piloting training sessions and facilitating strategy conversations, mostly with newly elected local and state officials. Then they make the case to donors for an enduring program. After operating this Progressive Governance Academy for a few years, the partners see both strong demand for their work and also spotting new pressures and opportunities, and they gather to consider the next chapter: Should they build on their model or change it in fundamental ways? Regardless, in the context of an increasingly polarized and extremist political climate, with physical and other threats coming to elected officials, the partners wonder: How do we step up our game? What more do elected officials need that we can or cannot address effectively?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this case study, you should:

1. 1. Understand the distinctive challenges facing leaders in elected roles, especially newly elected state and local officials, as they try to govern consistent with their values and campaign commitments. The case foregrounds the important differences between campaigning and governing but also the parallels between them, for example as elected officials work to build or strengthen coalitions for change inside and outside of government. It also highlights how isolating the experience of serving in office can be, such as when former organizers and movement activists who run and win now have to confront daunting challenges and unfamiliar decision demands in their new roles.

2. 2. Understand what collaborative governance, between public officials and civic organizations and other community voices, looks like, especially to the “inside” (government) actors as they face tensions, tradeoffs, and uncertainty.

3. 3. Understand the kinds of strategic and tactical choices that face collaborative startup ventures, specifically programs meant to build capacity for more effectively pursuing social change.

Case Narrative

THE TEAM COMES TOGETHER

PGA was conceived and launched by the three partner organizations after the 2016 upset election in Baltimore that replaced most of the city council seats with first-time members. But to understand why that moment, and the needs of those newly elected leaders, would come to matter far beyond the city of Baltimore, it’s important to understand the uncommon partners themselves—why and how they started and what brought them together to do something new and ambitious that none could do on their own.

Local Progress was founded in 2012 as a project hosted by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a large grassroots network working to advance racial and economic justice. From the start, Local Progress focused on organizing and linking elected officials, to “build power with underrepresented communities, share bold ideas and policy among our network, and fight to reshape what is possible in our localities all across the country.” Local Progress looked for ways to combine the organized “outside” voice of communities with the “inside” negotiations and other keys to making government a positive and responsive force. From the nation’s largest cities and urban counties to small towns, Local Progress worked to put local elected officials in discussion with each other, supported with policy advice and a community of peers for mutual support. In 2021, Local Progress spun out of CPD and became an independent nonprofit organization. By that point, the network had some 1,148 members serving in 673 local governments and 46 states.

State Innovation Exchange (SiX) is an independent nonprofit with a similar focus and approach that was also launched in 2012. SiX serves state-level elected officials, especially lawmakers. “Our vision,” says SiX on its website, “is to build long-term progressive power and infrastructure at the state level by coordinating and mobilizing legislators around progressive policy and messaging and linking them and their work to national narratives and the broader progressive movement. … We work to advance and defend policies that support working families, protect the environment, promote civil rights, and strengthen our democracy.” Unlike Local Progress, SiX was launched not by a grassroots organizing network but by a university-based center, the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin, in part as the progressive answer to an influential conservative think tank that produced model legislation for state legislators across the country. SiX was originally founded as the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange, known as ALICE, and merged with two similar organizations in 2014 to become SiX.¹ By 2022, SiX reported some 2,000 legislator members in its nationwide network.

The third partner, re:power, is the nation’s largest capacity-building organization focused on progressive leadership, framed as “inclusive politics” by the organization, with a strong focus on empowering communities of color and women of color leading in office. Founded in 2003, by 2022 the group reported having served over 100,000 candidates, elected officials, campaign managers, and community organizers from across the country through training, coaching, facilitation, campaigning, and capacity building. “We started off as Wellstone Action,” says the re: power website. “As re:power, we’ve transformed into what we believe the movement needs: an expansion of what justice looks like for our people through a framework of inclusive politics. We’re offering a different narrative of who is a leader, who participates in politics, and what outcomes we are fighting for.” For re:power, enabling transformational leadership via more diverse leaders, not just narrowly “equipping” whomever happens to be in office, was becoming more and more central.

So one group (Local Progress) brought a strong orientation to grassroots community organizing, the second (SiX) was evolving from a policy-support function for elected officials, and the third (re:power) brought a deep foundation in adult learning and how leaders grow through structured learning experiences, not just experiences in their day-to-day work.

TEACHING PEOPLE HOW TO GOVERN: IN BALTIMORE, AN IDEA IS BORN

Before these three groups formally launched PGA, they piloted trainings together, with a special focus on newly elected officials, and began to discuss their shared interests in sparking something bigger and more durable to drive change.

Baltimore, where the first PGA pilot was run, offered a favorable testing ground. First, years of public frustration with local government had produced that upset election and put into office a young group of first-time city council members willing to try new things—and keenly aware that they had much to learn about leading change from inside rather than outside of government. They responded positively to training focused on methods of power mapping and coalition building, for example, all of which asked them to think about their allies and potential allies as being both inside and outside of government.

Second, the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a major philanthropy whose interests included building the capacity to govern effectively, had made a long-term commitment to supporting progressive change in Baltimore and a handful of other cities, along with Puerto Rico. Elizabeth Guernsey, an OSF grant maker with local government experience herself, helped connect some of the players who would grow this pilot program into an important new national program for training elected leaders.

OSF had already been doing preparatory work with candidates for office by building community, encouraging mutual support, and asking where their policy ideas came from, Guernsey recalls.² It was clear that many candidates for office had few trusted, accessible sources to turn to as they developed ideas about what to work for if they won office—an agenda of specific policy changes—or how to advance such ideas effectively.

Local Progress was eager to support the new cohort of city councilmembers in Baltimore. Jessie Ulibarri, a former state lawmaker from Colorado (and now SiX’s co-executive director), was working to develop a new governing program for re:power, so he collaborated to develop the Baltimore pilot.

Adding SiX to the mix began to suggest the potential to link local efforts for more effective governance with the very broad powers available to state governments—where newly elected lawmakers likewise often found themselves supported by tiny staff offices, fielding many requests from particular groups or constituents rather than organized coalitions, and acting without a roadmap for how to govern effectively. Many state lawmakers start out in public life by holding local office, so their perspectives and relationships draw on that local connection.

Faith Winter, a Colorado state senator, is one such leader. She had been an environmental organizer and then worked to help women run for elected office. In 2007, she herself ran—and won, serving on the city council of the Denver suburb she called home. Winter was a founding member of Local Progress, and then she won state office and joined SiX.

Winter had something else in common with the other PGA founders and early trainers: She had been a community organizer before holding elected office. “I see people in government as part of a movement,” says Winter, “not just targets [for advocates]. Not everyone has that philosophy. A lot of traditional approaches to advocacy and activism leave a massive amount of power on the table.”³

Colleagues and friends in Colorado, Winter and Ulibarri had been talking for some time about the need to teach leaders how to govern in office and incorporate some of those fundamental principles in how they approached governing, including working with civic groups as partners. This goes well beyond learning how to administer formal rules for conducting official meetings, say, using Robert’s Rules of Order. Newly elected officials could get that training elsewhere. But what about leading values-driven change? What about all the craft and skill needed for that? What about rethinking who has power and how public officials can build and use it with community allies? (Exhibit 1 shows how the training content’s major topics evolved.)

“Getting into office, getting elected, it’s so lonely and scary,” says Winter. Newly elected officials, especially if they represent “firsts”—the first person of color, first LGBTQ person, youngest person—and a different point of view, can find themselves feeling profoundly isolated in government. “You look around,” says the leader of a civic organization organizing and supporting elected officials to govern progressively, “and you quickly think, ‘This isn’t my crew.’”⁴ Karundi Williams, executive director of re:power and a former Ohio state government official, echoes this: “Elected officials have very few spaces where they can be learners, out of the spotlight, and don’t have to supply all the answers.”⁵

“So there was a need for this,” recalls Winter, “and then Jessie called me in 2016 and said, ‘We’re going to do it.’”

Winter helped him organize the pilot, six-month program for Baltimore City councilmembers. Beyond testing out and refining the curriculum content, the pilot began to test a delivery model that relied entirely on current or former elected officials, or in some cases experienced advisers to elected officials, to do the training. The pilot program focused leadership development on a group serving in a place they all worked in together. To build external support for this first cohort of trainees, the partners—Local Progress, re:power, and SiX—worked with Maryland Working Families, a statewide organization focused on civic engagement and progressive, inclusive change. In addition, re:power brought its training expertise, including a focus on the importance of offering actionable, immediately applicable lessons, not abstract concepts about governing.

As part of their overall framework for success in governing, the partner organizations diagnosed a frequent failure of policy campaigns: even where fundamental interests align, there is often a lack of effective teamwork between elected officials on the inside and civic groups and their advocacy strategies on the outside. “That was a common missing piece,” Winters says. “So we made that a central focus.” Williams says: “You can embed that right in the curriculum—organizing while governing, engaging with communities effectively, building power together.”

Ivan Luevanos-Elms, organizing director at Local Progress, had previously staffed elected officials as an organizer and adviser and had staffed central units of local government where he observed many leadership styles up close. “Many outside actors are so focused on holding leaders accountable,” Luevanos-Elms says. “But collaborative governance is more than pressure. Governing with the community to move an agenda takes skill and experience. Some elected leaders are much more effective at that than others.”⁶

For two years, the partner organizations led pilot programs, delivering training for hundreds of elected officials in Florida, Pennsylvania, and other states—each program tailored to the participants but reflecting those core tools and principles of governing—and built a pool of trainers, equipping them with train-the-trainer sessions. Now, they were ready to formalize a proposal. It would, they hoped, become an enduring, widely available program—the PGA.

AFTER THE PILOTS: LAUNCHING THE PGA

In 2019, in their first proposal to OSF for multiyear funding, the partners led with a pointed case about what civic action to make government work was missing: “Donors are spending substantial sums of money to prepare candidates and win elections—but almost nothing is spent on helping new elected officials succeed, learn, and grow once they win.”⁷

Based on their pilots, the founders of PGA felt they had to make a strong case for turning voter engagement and the power of elections into “transformative outcomes,” i.e., in which government delivers because leaders know how to actually make it do so. The team proposed offering at least 40 trainings over the next two years, with an estimated annual operating budget of $1.1 million, and they set out to raise at least two years of funding, or $2.2 million. With support from OSF, the Pipeline Initiative, and an anonymous donor, the partners raised the $800,000 they considered a minimum viable starting budget, aiming to raise the other $1.4 million as PGA operated.

As 2019 and 2020 unfolded, new opportunities and challenges presented themselves. During the Trump presidency, there was increasing demand for work addressing racism and how to help lead critical conversations that actually might produce change, not just airing pain and frustration—as critical as the groups understood truth-telling and learning to be as a foundation for authentic action.

The pandemic quickly forced the program to move from in-person to virtual training, sometimes three offerings per week, available to elected leaders from across the country. On one hand, this generated some cost savings (compared to the in-person trainings the project had budgeted for), but it was a major adjustment for everyone. And the need to find more donors after launching—the PGA team secured half a dozen more since large, multiyear OSF-level grants remained hard to come by across the sector—made financial planning and staffing challenging for the effort, just when elected leaders seemed to need it most.⁸

However, the program’s executive committee—made up of a program director and the heads of the three partner organizations—repeatedly got feedback from participants that being trained by experienced elected officials made the program relatable and meaningful. Kris Burnett, still a Baltimore City council member and one of the early program participants who later became a PGA trainer, emphasizes the fundamentals that current or former elected officials can teach so powerfully to their peers:

First, the need for priority setting, given the limited time available in a term of office and number of things competing for attention, and how to do it. Second, translating broader policy goals into action items that electeds can actually get done. And third, the collaborative governance model—working with outside groups, including working through tensions but not approaching it, if you’re the elected official, as having to be a standoff.⁹

The PGA partners also heard how the program not only taught “how to” but—given its attention to things like defining and pursuing a policy agenda—created precious space for elected officials to do longer term, more strategic thinking.

“Those serving in office can become so reactive and crisis oriented,” says Stephen Smith of West Virginia Can’t Wait, a civic group that partnered with PGA to bring its program to that state.¹⁰ The pressure to focus on the very immediate crowds out the rest, multiple interviewees agreed, and many constituents and interest groups reinforce that focus on the near term, not “where we’re trying to get.” Karundi Williams, executive director of re: power adds, “When the PGA participants come from a single jurisdiction, sometimes they start to work things out with each other right in the room.”¹¹

PGA also offered perhaps the only safe space for elected leaders with aligned values to identify different styles of leadership and place themselves in that picture (refer to exhibits 2a and 2b, Leadership Styles and Roles in Creating Change).

Still, as Jessie Ulibarri, co-executive director of SiX, reflected:

Changing a governing paradigm is really hard. We’re really teaching organizing concepts rather than traditional concepts of governance. For example, [party] leadership may say I can’t go into another member’s district. But from a power perspective, doing so may be critical for learning and for recruiting allies. Governing doesn’t stop with the discussions in the [legislative] chamber, with “my fellow lawmaker said no.” It requires thinking through scenarios on an issue or proposal: What is missing in the way of awareness and support? … And traditionally, there is a cycle of disappointment, of blaming the person in elected office if gains aren’t won. We try to break that. Passage of a bill is not the end. Being responsible for that is deeper accountability, for policy goals actually being achieved.¹²

After 2020, as the country started to live with the pandemic, the peer support—building community among leaders who had never had a chance to meet in person, for example—seemed extra important too.

But these developments also brought into focus some tradeoffs between offering a widely accessible training, for example to elected officials from multiple states and regions, and gathering clusters of them in one place, as PGA did in collaboration with state-based organizations, such as Pennsylvania United, Take Action Minnesota, and West Virginia Can’t Wait. And the demand for new and more specialized discussions, such as among newly elected women of color, was growing too. PGA seemed to have tapped into a broad and deep hunger for leadership development not available elsewhere. But with the startup years now past, the issue was how best to meet such demand. This became more urgent by 2021, when PGA’s one full-time program lead, Y.T. Bell, left to return to voter engagement and organizing work.

What Would You Do?

The PGA partners faced some decisions. By early 2022, with new challenges to governing and government appearing on every front, they had learned enough, and served a wide enough range of elected leaders, to warrant a deep conversation about the future of the program. Each organization had also faced its own challenges to financial survival.

“Everything was on the table,” says Winter, who was then juggling her duties in the Colorado senate with being PGA’s program director and one of its most experienced trainers. Some of the biggest questions concerned who the program should target and how the content should evolve:

• • Clarifying core values: What exactly were the partners’ shared values? PGA had launched to meet immediate demand and seize opportunity. But the partners had not yet worked through and committed to a formal statement of their shared values. It seemed like time to do so—for example, revisiting the difference between merely serving those in office (regardless of background) and emphasizing empowerment of underrepresented groups, such as newly elected women of color.

• • Informing the outside game: Should the program expand its direct work beyond elected officials and also work with civic organizations? As Ivan Luevanos-Elms of Local Progress put it, “There’s still a great lack of knowledge about how government works, of how to move from agitating to wielding an organization’s power through, for example, a budget process or, more tactically, effectively supporting an elected official at a public hearing. Or, there’s even a lack of knowledge around who makes which decisions (the city council or a school board, for example); not knowing that makes it hard to focus on who should actually be accountable for a decision, so pressure can sometimes be scattershot and aimed at everyone in elected office.”¹³

• • Going wide versus deep and place-based: Should PGA do more to emphasize state-based or other clustered training, or maximize the training slots available to participants from everywhere in the country?

• • The context for leading: Should the pool of trainers expand to become more diverse, such as representing elected officials with experience in rural communities? PGA’s trainers had served primarily in urban settings, but the program—born in Baltimore City but evolving to serve a wide range of places—was seeing new demand from rural communities and their leaders.

• • The craft of governing: How should the curriculum expand, with what most important additions? As a practical matter, how much could it expand, given limited time available for busy elected officials?

What would you do and why? Whose feedback, from past or potential participants in PGA programs, might you prioritize? How would you consider the changing political climate in the country or differences across states or regions?

Exhibits

Exhibit 1: Progressive Governance Training Modules & Sessions (through 2021)

Transitioning to Public Leadership

This module helps ground elected officials with self-reflection and explaining why this work is valuable to them and the constituencies that they represent, including clarity about their vision and purpose within public leadership. Participants discuss their issues, interests, and values in serving in elected office. The module also helps legislators understand how their issues and interests align with the needs of their constituents.

Governing Tensions and Leadership Style

This module explores different leadership styles through real-world scenarios. Participants then explore their own leadership style and how they most authentically show up to the job of being an elected official. The participants then work collaboratively to discuss the strengths of their own leadership style and tensions that can arise, such as within group dynamics, and also how to build teams with different leadership styles. The module discusses how part of avoiding burnout and staying in the movement is building strong teams.

Collaborative Governance

Achieving transformative governance outcomes requires: 1) organizing, coalition, and ally building and 2) mapping, understanding, and moving (influencing) powerful actors in your community. This session will give participants the opportunity to think about how to act as organizers and include communities most impacted by policy change in legislative campaigns. This module moves participants from being policy writers to organizers and movement builders.

Power Mapping

This helps participants understand power and various faces of power as well as how to effectively map power in their capacity as an elected official. This tool will be used to identify supporters and individuals and groups that oppose the elected official’s efforts to evoke change through the passage of legislation, programs, or initiatives.

Setting an Agenda

In this session, participants will discuss how to balance competing priorities, set an overall agenda, and determine specific policy outcomes related to broader goals and objectives. This session will also give participants the opportunity to begin to think about how agenda setting can facilitate organizing and coalition building around key issues and also learn how Local Progress and SiX can be a resource to local and state elected officials.

Self-Care

This module addresses the very real issue that has become even more apparent during the pandemic that elected officials are stretched thin and expected to achieve big goals all while often being treated meanly. PGA often trains elected officials that are the “first”—first BIPOC, first LGBTQ person, or youngest to serve in office. In order to keep these dynamic leaders in the movement, we have to talk about how self-care isn’t just pedicures; it is planning for care and taking care of the mind, body, and spirit.

Source: Progressive Governance Academy, Program Materials, 2022

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Exhibit 2a:.

Leadership Styles and Roles in Creating Change: Main Styles

Source: Progressive Governance Academy

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Exhibit 2b:.

Exhibit 2b: Leadership Styles and Roles in Creating Change: Required Competencies

Source: Progressive Governance Academy

How It Turned Out

At their strategy retreat in February 2022, the PGA partners confirmed core commitments and effective elements that the program should work to preserve, decided on some key changes to be more responsive to changing demands on the leaders the program worked to serve, and put a third group of ideas in the “examine more closely and develop best options” category.

Preserve: The program would maintain a focus on elected leaders training each other, with its pool of current and former elected officials as the foundation and a tested train-the-trainers program to help sustain it. For now, it would also continue to offer a mix of place-based and multi-regional trainings to further the impacts of each.

Innovate: The three-organization PGA team, which had been adapting the curriculum more or less since the effort’s inception in the scrappy days of running a one-city pilot, decided it was important to not only embrace continued innovation but actually commit the program’s expanded staff capacity to double down. Innovation was, they felt, a key part of remaining responsive for all three organizations, two of which were member based. For example, Local Progress had found that the program surfaced previously unrecognized needs, one of which had led to a special offering to support newly elected Black officials called “Governing While Black.” The partners also agreed to build out several new modules for the main program, responding to feedback from training participants and the much larger membership across the country. The new offerings would include:

• • Building a Team

• • Integrating Racial Justice Into All the Work

• • Negotiations

• • Crisis Management

Examine further and develop best options: As the summer approached in another highly contentious election year, this time for the congressional midterms and many state and local races, the PGA partners and many other civic organizations grappled with the public’s ongoing mistrust of government—what one state-based partner described as “the basic feeling that the government doesn’t belong to us, to the people.”¹⁴

There was also the issue of how best to support women of color leaders, such as by creating cohorts specifically of and for them, perhaps on a national basis or otherwise pooling across a broad geography.

The team also continued to explore other fundamental needs, going beyond training or leadership development. Helping civic activists and advocacy organizations better understand government, including how to size up civic partners for PGA trainings, what working with those partners signaled to others on the political landscape, and how to mobilize outside support, not just pressure, in the most effective ways—to help government work for the people—were all high on that list.

STRENGTHENING THE OPERATING AND RESOURCE MODEL AND WORKING BEYOND PGA

To better support the content and outreach choices, the partners also made some critical operational choices at their retreat. They implemented them in 2022, building on crucial lessons learned from the run-it-as-you-fundraise startup period.

That experience had been doubly challenging, they realized, because the project involved three organizations with different operating systems and day-to-day program priorities, rather than a single organization in startup mode. So the partners decided to base the project’s budget and staff at one organization—re:power, the partner focused solely on leadership development—rather than each holding some funds.

In terms of core staffing, Heidi Gerbracht joined PGA as full-time program director in the summer, bringing a background in organizing and policy advocacy campaigns, recruiting women and other underrepresented candidates to run for office, and staffing elected officials in local government. Gerbracht leaned into the range of content and impact development questions the partner organizations and trainers had discussed, realizing she had inherited a strong core program but one poised to contribute in new ways over time, such as by starting to address how an elected official’s leadership support needs change over their time in office:

Maybe you’re a year in[to holding office] and starting to experience safety and security threats because you’re now perceived as effective. Or you’re a Black woman and being targeted. Or you become a caucus chair. How do you lead from that position most effectively? … There are longer-term questions too: Like how do we hold the wisdom and knowledge [these leaders] have, for the movement, after they leave office?¹⁵

So many possibilities, and one constant refrain was accountability for progress: finding ways to help leaders gauge their progress and results after exposure to PGA training.

But the PGA partners agreed to manage the program’s future growth according to the pace of successful fundraising—not to let their aspirational vision outpace their operating capacity, especially the small number of dedicated PGA staff. And they adjusted the target annual operating budget upward, based on actual costs of the program, and set a goal of expanding the core staff by at least several more people, to support Gerbracht and the program executive committee.

Finally, as special as it was, PGA was just one core element of each partner organization’s body of work and approach to leadership. Intensive internal work and the dynamic and often contentious election year pushed each partner in new ways. Some of their new hopes and efforts directly reflected the PGA experience, for example by suggesting ways that law-making rules might be reformed to help elected officials and civil society allies govern better. To name a few highlights:

• • Local Progress, marking just over a year as an independent organization, after months of intensive discussion among members and staff published a new strategic framework in fall 2022. The framework named four “pillars of transformation”: racial justice as the beacon of justice for all; collaborative governing to build, shift and maintain the balance of power those historically marginalized by our laws, our institutions, and our culture; values-aligned elected officials as an organized force; and adaptive change from the ground up.¹⁶

• • Over the course of the election year, re:power focused on asking broader questions about how to not only fight voter suppression and get more people to vote but how grassroots leaders, elected officials, philanthropic donors, and other supporters could make civic engagement a mechanism for building power, especially for BIPOC communities and, with that, bring about transformative change in people’s lives.¹⁷

• • SiX’s milestones included the release, in December 2022, after the election, of a major “State of State Legislatures” report aimed at the hundreds of newly elected state officials, their electoral allies, and other nationwide stakeholders, such as news media.18 The report called out inadequate staffing and, for many states, the meager salary levels provided to lawmakers and their staffs. The report also offered six principles to make state legislatures more productive, responsive, and accountable—as well as more representative of their communities.