The Progressive Leadership Pipeline at Work

I'm catching up on my reading this week and just caught this post by Matt Stoller of Open Left in which he praises the emerging progressive leadership pipeline.

Good Progressive Movement Happenings:

Today, I learned that Ezra Temko was just elected to the Newark City Council in Delaware. Temko's slogan was 'Economic Progress, Environmental Sustainability, Responsive Representation'. He ran a grassroots campaign and knocked on every door in Newark. He also graduated from college in 2006, and comes out of the Young People for the American Way training program. He is now entering the Young Elected Officials Network, another People for the American Way program.

It takes a long time to develop and nurture talent, to learn how to run campaigns and to build support networks to make sure that progressive policies follow the election of progressives. You can just look at the collapse of congestion pricing in New York City to see how electing Democrats, even progressive ones, and keeping them unconnected to larger networks will prevent us from reaching our goals. Conversely, looking at FISA or net neutrality shows us that the networks we are building become much stronger than their individual parts.

Young People for the American Way and the Young Elected Officials Network deserve a congratulations today. They set their sites four years ago on building the next generation of leaders, and they are here, running organizations, and getting elected. And three other fellows from Young People for America have announced their candidacies for local elections, including a native American in South Dakota.

Building diverse leadership is going to take decades, but the payoff is going to be a kinder, saner, and gentler world. It's what we've all been working towards. If you date the founding of our movement in 1998, with the creation of Moveon, and you look at the creation of organizations like YP4 and YEO just four years ago, you can see that it's really happening. People like Ezra Temko, Daniel Biss, and Darcy Burner are already showing remarkable levels of leadership, and showing all of us that our work, our effort, our energy, our invested money, is showing signs of real impact.

Matt is right that sometimes it is hard to see the consequences of our actions. What we're doing is building power and talent gradually, year by year. But as hard as it is to see at times, it is happening thanks to YP4, YEO, and many many more organizations. We should take the time to highlight these successes as much as possible.

The Young Elected Officials Network has over a hundred candidates in its network. YP4 has hundreds of fellows that are currently enrolled or graduates of its program. GOTV focused groups have turned out young voters in ever increasing numbers for two straight elections. The League and it's partner group Opportunity Maine passed major legislation boosting college affordability and student debt relief for young people in their state.

What other success stories are out there that haven't received their due attention?