The democracy ecosystem has spent decades building collaborative infrastructure.
There are C3 tables and C4 tables.
There are donor collaboratives.
There are communications tables.
There are state tables.
There are issue-based coalitions.
There are civic engagement networks.
There are data collaboratives.
There are resistance and Fight Back infrastructures.
There are organizations dedicated to coordinating strategy, funding, messaging, voter contact, policy, and advocacy.
These investments exist because we recognized that some challenges are too important for organizations to solve alone. So we built shared infrastructure.
But one critical function remains fragmented.
Talent.
The one thing every organization depends on.
Every campaign needs talent.
Every nonprofit needs talent.
Every union needs talent.
Every consulting firm needs talent.
Every advocacy organization needs talent.
Every movement depends on talent.
Yet there is no equivalent ecosystem focused on helping the broader democracy sector recruit, develop, support, connect, retain, and advance its people. Instead, thousands of organizations independently solve the same workforce challenges every day. They recruit separately. Train separately. Develop leaders separately. Manage turnover separately. Preserve institutional knowledge separately. The result is duplication, inefficiency, burnout, and lost capacity across the entire movement.
We have built collaborative infrastructure for communications.
We have built collaborative infrastructure for donors.
We have built collaborative infrastructure for data.
We have built collaborative infrastructure for issues.
But we have never built collaborative infrastructure for people.
GAIN Power exists to fill that gap.
Because talent is not a campaign challenge.
It is not an issue-area challenge.
It is not a state challenge.
It is a movement-wide challenge. And movement-wide challenges require movement-wide infrastructure.
"GAIN Power is a unique and vital part of the progressive ecosystem. I've made countless connections at GAIN events and GAINed knowledge that has made me a more effective practitioner."
— Matt Mawhinney
"I'm sure more than half of the progressive movement got their jobs from GAIN Power, and we would be F#@%'d without it."
— Manny Espitia, Run for Something