Jane McAlevey

Jane McAlevey is an organizer, negotiator, writer and scholar. She is the author of two books, No Shortcuts, Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (Oxford 2016) and Raising Expectations and Raising Hell (Verso 2012). She recently earned her PhD under the tutelage of Frances Fox Piven at CUNY. She is currently writing her third book, Striking Back, forthcoming from Verso.^[1]

Online Training for DSA

Excerpt from Maria Svart's farewell blog dated January 16, 2024:^[2]

"I was nearing the five-year mark as the National Director, my self-imposed deadline to leave, but chose to stay to help DSA navigate the skyrocketing growth. We hired more staff and built infrastructure and processes for new chapters, fielded a large contingent at the Washington, D.C. Women's March against Trump, developed mass campaigns like Medicare for All, and organized hundreds of members to attend the national People's Summit conferences organized by National Nurses United. We also organized the first predecessor of our current Regional Organizing Retreats, a training for southern members paired with a contingent at the Canton, Mississippi UAW organizing rally with Bernie Sanders in 2017.

We kept growing, and then AOC won her upset primary in 2018. It was our largest new member month in history.

By answering Trumpism with democratic socialism, AOC and her fellow Squad and DSA members in Congress and beyond electrified the country and laid the groundwork for Bernie’s second presidential campaign and DSA’s steadily increasing number of local and state electoral victories running democratic socialists to the chagrin of Democratic Party power brokers. We also made major organizing investments, including 14 regional organizing trainings for chapter leaders to build a shared organizing vocabulary and model, and in 2019 I asked Jane McAlevey to do a three part national online training series for members. We also launched our campaign for Bernie’s second presidential run.