Crossposted from the NOI blog.

When Judith Freeman and I founded the New Organizing Institute, we knew we wanted to deviate from the traditional DC-nonprofit model. We didn’t have it all worked out perfectly in our heads, but we knew we didn’t want big fixed costs that needed to be fed by constant grant writing and fundraising. So often that fundraising frenzy can overwhelm an organization and subvert the original mission.

We wanted the New Organizing Institute to be driven by members of the organizer community, not by a crew of people who just train. The ideal was that top people in their respective fields would agree to set aside some time from their busy careers to train the next generation—in other words, that our trainings would be driven by current practitioners who had their own stories of trial and error to personally present.

Easier said than done. It took a few tries, but last week at our 2nd annual “campaign boot camp” we saw the model really start working. Roz Lemieux, our E.D. is really the key ingredient that allowed this idea to work. Without her at the center, holding everything together, nothing would have happened. She created the framework in which all this stuff could take off this season, and gave Judith and I the freedom and the time to recruit these members of the community.

Special thanks go to the following leaders in the organizing & technology communities for taking a ton of time out of their schedules to work on the training:

Madeline Stanionis (Watershed Company) who spent weeks planning our email writing day, recruited and prepared some of the best practitioners in the field and came all the way out from San Francisco to lead the day.

Katie Allen (DNC) for planning an amazing field training day. She’s one of the rare people who both has respect for and experience in powerful “old school” field organizing principles and understands cutting edge field and targeting technology. She’s one of the organizers in this country who’s re-writing how this work is done, and so we were really lucky to have her. Josh Hendler (DNC) also helped out a great deal.

Mark Sullivan (Voter Activation Network) for spending two full days with us and our trainees and made it possible for them to get field practice on a live installation of the VAN.

Clay Johnson (Blue State Digital) for providing constant help and support to both trainers and the trainees throughout the week. (Including Bill Clinton and Al Gore impersonation voiceovers for ads some of the trainees made.)

Katelyn Sabochik, Lauren Miller & Chris Stelmarski (Blue State Digital), and Nita Chaudhary (MoveOn) for not only serving as trainers but also coming back several nights of the training to work with trainee teams.

Natalie Foster and Daniel Mintz (MoveOn) for traveling great distances to run one of the most exciting trainee exercises (a detailed comparison of two different live event tools).

Frank O’Brien & Ari Rabin-Havt (OMP), Brent Blackaby (Blackrock), Marc Laitin (Wired for Change), Rachel Allison (Donordigital), Adam Green (MoveOn), Lilia Tam (Iraq Campaign), Hilary Zwerdling (MRSS) for presenting during Madeline’s day-long email writing workshop and staying that night to work with our trainees individually on their writing.

Raj Aggarwal (Join Concepts) and Jordan Higgins (Senate Dems) for providing graphic design and other assistance to our teams.

Josh Hendler for putting a ton of time in with Judith to plan the “Data Track” of the training.

Yair Ghitza & Jason Ost (Catalist), Amy Gershkoff (MSHC), Maren Hesla (EMILY’s List), Keith Goodman (Bullseye), Dan Castleman (America Votes) for taking time out of their busy geek lives to raise a new generation of political data nerds.
And to Dan (America Votes) for being the best SQL-for-beginners trainer in the world, ever!

Mike Podhorzer (AFL-CIO) for putting it all into perspective with his keynote to our data track.

Chris Mann (MSHC), Courtney Dozier (Forward Together PAC) and Marty Stone (Stones Phones) for teaching modeling, volunteer management and the state of the art of phone banking respectively.

Mike Sager (VA Dems) for being the best VAN trainer in the world.

Jamie Tincher (DFL) for coming all the way in from MN to present on the great ‘06 work of the MN Coordinated Campaign.

John Miyasato (Crossroads Consulting) for three things: (1) conducting an amazing GOTV training, (2) for appointing himself as our official social director for the week and (3) working to put the character/personality/fun back into the progressive movement.

Adam Klaus (Working Assets) for putting up with our technical difficulties and demonstrating the national voter registration widget at the NOI on the same day that it was officially launched.

James Hannaway (DFL->Obama), Tate Hausman & Alex Zwerdling (John Hall for Congress), Jamie Henn (Step it Up), Kevin O’Brien (Tester), Adam Green (MoveOn), Beka Economopoulos (Greenpeace, Not an Alternative) and Robert “Biko” Baker & Jennifer England (League of Young Voters), Erin Hill (Act Blue) and Cammie Croft (Iraq Campaign) for taking the time to reflect on and present their recent cutting edge campaigns.

Phil de Vellis (Murphy Putnam) for giving our class a thrilling ride through the possibilities of online video.

Josh McConaha (DNC) for showing off how Party Builder can be used to boost small campaigns.

Jessica Vanden Berg and Steve Jarding (Maverick Strategies) for giving us an incredibly inspiring and open view into the Webb campaign.

Jane Hamsher (Fire Dog Lake), Laura Packard (Michigan Liberal), Cliff Schecter, Jesse Lee (The Gavel) and Robin Marty (Minnesota Monitor) for participating in our blog panel. And also Cliff Schecter for doing a media training workshop.

Andrea Johnson (Richardson) and Aaron Myers (Edwards) for taking time that they really did not have to talk about presidential Internet campaigning.

NOI Fellow Matt Stoller (Open Left) for spending pretty much the entire week with us, teaching and hanging out with our trainees. (Some of whom were actually pretty star struck!)

Lori Metcalf and Beth Hanley for working behind the scenes to make sure we all were fed and housed. Ute Pannen for volunteering a week of her time to help out with logistics.

Bernie Pollack, Ben Waxman, Kate Stayman-London, DJs Shred and ReeHee who packed MCCXXIII for a fundraiser to benefit this class of NOI bootcamp trainees.

Dave McGonagle, Susan Markham & Kellie Dupree (EMILY’s List) for mentoring and materials. And Susan especially for surprising us by marking up everyone’s resumes by hand. (They really appreciated it Susan!)

Amy Pritchard (Democratic GAIN) for connecting dozens of potential employers with our trainees, then taking time out to talk with them one-on-one about how to land their dream job, as well as donating hundreds of GAIN training manuals. Heather Muchow, Kari Lundstad-Vogt (EMILY’s List), and Courtney Sieloff (Jobs That Are LEFT) for waking up early on a Sunday to do mock interviews and prep the trainees for the career fair.

And our sponsors, for providing many of the resources to make the training possible, and especially for not expecting anything in return (except a look at the resumes of our grads!): AFL-CIO, Astro Data Services, Beaconfire, BlogAds, Blue State Digital, Care2, Democracy in Action, Dupont Circle Communications, Fenton Communications, Free Range Graphics, Indelium, Joint Concepts, MoveOn.org Civic Action, MSHC, NGP, Trellon, Voter Activation Network (VAN), Watershed

And especially:

Google’s Ginny Hunt, Bob Boorstein, Peter Greenberger & Benjamin Weisberg for holding a special lunch event on AdWords, as well as Jeff Keltner for putting up with some scheduling changes on our part and teaching our trainees how to use Google Apps for their campaigns.

Karen Ackerman (AFL-CIO) for helping us remember what we’re fighting for with an inspiring talk on economic justice and the AFL-CIO’s political program.

Darcy Burner (Darcy Burner for Congress) for coming all the way out to DC from Seattle just to provide some inspiration to 60 future campaigners. And inspire us she did! (Did you know she was the lead project manager for Microsoft’s .Net???)

Marshall Ganz (Harvard) for giving a talk about the narrative, emotion, risk and craft of organizing. From the start to the finish you could hear a pin drop. Several of the trainees told me afterwards that one talk changed their lives and changed their minds on the spot about what kind of job they would seek coming out of the training.