The Campaign Strategist
Dive into the world of advocacy with The Campaign Strategist. Each episode features in-depth conversations with activists and experts who break down their approaches to planning, executing, and winning campaigns. Learn about the strategies that have shaped policies, changed minds, and mobilized communities. Perfect for anyone looking to amplify their impact and drive meaningful change.
New episodes on the 1st and 3rd Tuesdays each month.
The Campaign Strategist
"Anything Else Is Just Busy Work" — Dana Johnson on Strategy, Solidarity, and What Comes After
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"If you're not focused on democracy and holding the line there, anything else you're doing is just busy work." That's movement strategist Dana Johnson, and it's the spirit of this whole conversation — clear-eyed about the moment, and unwilling to retreat from it.
Dana is the founder of Strategic Movement Collective and the former Senior Director of Strategy and Federal Policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice. In this episode she walks through how she actually designs a campaign — from the first "big sky" objective all the way down to the question she keeps returning to: what's missing from this conversation, and who's missing from it? She shares the moment at WE ACT when she realized an emissions-modeling fight was incomplete until they hired someone who could take it down to the level of regions, states, and communities.
From there we go somewhere harder: how the advocacy toolkit has changed under real pressure, why she thinks the movement "missed the mark" on solidarity, and what the people of Minneapolis taught the rest of us about building organizing infrastructure that outlasts a single fight. We close on what it would actually take to rebuild — not the way things were, but for the next fifty years.
What you'll take away: a working method for designing a campaign from objective to messenger to gap; why solidarity is a strategic commitment and not a sentiment; how organizing infrastructure gets built in one fight and repurposed in the next; and a "both/and" frame for rebuilding institutions instead of just restoring them.
Dana Johnson is a movement strategist and founder of Strategic Movement Collective. She previously served as Senior Director of Strategy and Federal Policy at WE ACT for Environmental Justice and sits on the board of Green 2.0.
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Go deeper: full show notes on Substack — substack.tcspod.com
More from Dana — https://www.linkedin.com/in/dana-g-johnson/, Strategic Movement Collective
Green 2.0 - https://greentwopointzero.org/
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