July 01, 2025

Special Episode Part 1: James Mumm, Stephanie Luce, and Bill Fletcher on knowing your target, learning from successful failures, and building a united front

53 minutes

This episode is part one of a two-part special episode. You can listen in any order. Unlike our standard episodes where we zoom in on one particular campaign, we’re zooming out around broader strategy themes. To help us zoom out, we invited five insightful thought leaders, who each recently wrote vital resources for campaign organizers, to talk with Andrew.

In part one, we talk with three guests. First James Mumm grounds us in ‘what is organizing’ anyway, the importance of thinking like a target in power analysis, and why campaigns must contest for mainstream values, pulling from his co-written report The Antidote To Authoritarianism. Then we hear from Stephanie Luce about her co-written book, Practical Radicals, how campaigns relate to her Seven Strategies framework, and learning from “successful failures.” Finally, Bill Fletcher differentiates between ‘campaigns’ and ‘movements’ and makes the case for broad united fronts, from his article in Convergence Magazine, “Campaigns and Movements: How Are They Connected, How Do They Differ?”

James Mumm is the Chief of Institutional Advancement at People's Action Institute. For the past 35 years, James has worked as an organizer with community organizations in Chicago and the Bronx, and nationally and internationally with Greenpeace USA, 22nd Century Initiative, National Training and Information Center, and National People's Action. James also writes book reviews for busy organizers.

Stephanie Luce is Professor of Labor Studies at the School of Labor and Urban Studies, and Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA in economics at the University of California, Davis and her PhD in sociology and her MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of several books on living wage campaigns and the labor movement. Her latest book, co-authored with Deepak Bhargava, is Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, and she cohosts a podcast with the same name.

Bill Fletcher Jr has worked for several labor unions in addition to serving as a senior staffperson in the national AFL-CIO. Fletcher is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the author of several books about organized labor, a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator.

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Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

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