About Us: Our Vision

The Center for Progressive Leadership is dedicated to developing the next generation of progressive leaders, from high school and college students to activists and future candidates. Our goals include:

Build a Leadership Development Infrastructure

There is a paucity of programs for supporting emerging progressive leaders and an underinvestment in recruitment and early career support for minority and women leaders.

Conservatives have built a well-funded infrastructure for long-term political leadership development. Through a series of political training institutes, conservatives recruit, train, and support candidates years before they are ready to run for office, activists early in their political careers, and students as they are forming their political views.

The Center for Progressive Leadership is aggressively working to build a parallel recruitment and training infrastructure to develop the next generation of progressive political leaders.

Build from the States
The Center for Progressive Leadership relies on a state-based organizational structure with a strong base of staff, volunteers, advisors, and donors in key regions that have the potential for a surge in progressive leadership.

Focus on New Leadership
The Center for Progressive Leadership invests heavily in engaging new leadership by drawing from diverse communities and targeting leaders who are not traditionally involved in electoral politics. In addition to engaging young progressives, we provide progressive leaders in the business sector, military, legal world, nonprofit sector, and government with a bridge to political careers.

Innovate and Apply New Training Strategies

Fellowship training and “executive coaching” models have been used to great success in the business and nonprofit sectors. These training models maximize training impact and ensure long-term support for trainees. In order to maximize the impact of our training investments, the Center for Progressive Leadership incorporates these innovative methods into our programs.

Develop Messengers

The Center for Progressive Leadership is developing cadres of effective and inspiring messengers who connect directly with voters to communicate a powerful progressive platform.

By the end of this decade, the Center for Progressive Leadership aims to catalyze the development of a robust 501(c)(3) political leadership pipeline in 20 states with at least $25 million in funding and thousands of newly engaged and successful progressive candidates, youth, and activists each year.

If you would like to be a part of creating the infrastructure to support the next generation of progressive leaders, please go to our Get Involved section.