Activist Story – Stephanie Anderson

“I met Dave Fleischer [former Organizing & Training director] in the late summer/early fall of 2001. Dave invited me to attend the Power Summit in Chicago in September of that year. I was working on the primary campaign of Phil Reed, city councilman in East Harlem, New York City, and got the chance to immediately put Dave’s training to use in that campaign. I could see instantly the tangible benefits of the skills and tools I acquired at the Task Force Power Summit. Those skills directly contributed to my promotion to campaign manager for the general election (which we won).

“As the field director for a campaign with the New York State Tenants & Neighbors Coalition, I used my new skills to recruit and retain the biggest volunteer base they had ever engaged. I ran a phone bank that surpassed their expectations. All by following some of the simple guidelines that I learned from the Task Force Power Summit: stay focused on a clear objective, ask large volumes of people to work with you toward that goal, explain the urgency and how their contribution will help reach that goal, use people’s time productively so they will keep coming back. Very simple, but very powerful.

"Dave then forwarded my name as a possible campaign manager to the Ypsilanti Campaign for Equality in Ypsilanti, Mich., in early summer 2002. When I was hired to run that campaign in July 2002, Dave came to conduct training for us and other activists in the region. For me, it was a train-the-trainer opportunity as he instructed me in leading some of that training session. His support at the beginning and the end of the campaign with direct hands-on instruction, staff assistance and encouragement helped us earn a big win in that campaign.

“When I volunteered for the Howard Dean campaign starting in the spring of 2003, I applied my skills to get volunteers trained and productively engaged across the state of Michigan. Following Dave’s example, I conducted an all-volunteer all-day training on basic campaign skills. That training involved 80 key leaders from Michigan’s main population centers, 12 cities all across the state. At the end of the day, they all returned home and began leading powerful volunteer and voter engagement activities. Leaders in Ohio brought me to Columbus to provide the same training to their key leaders. Camp Wellstone later brought me to Kansas City to be an instructor for their training there. The Dave Fleischer-inspired training guide that I wrote for Dean volunteers in Michigan was used by the national Dean For America campaign as a basis for their own trainings that they conducted for thousands of volunteers across the country.

“Like anyone, I’ve picked up more skills throughout my career and put my own stamp on what I do. But I have consistently applied the skills and training that I received from the Task Force and Dave in all of my professional life and my volunteer political activities. Those skills keep rippling out and influencing various endeavors from Dean For America and the Michigan Democratic Party; to the environmental movement while I was the field director for the Michigan Environmental Council; to the wider world of immigrant rights, civil rights, civil liberties and human rights groups that I work with now as the deputy director of Liberty & Justice for All and the Rights Working Group.”