Organizing in the Obama Era

Zephyr Teachout is a visiting assistant law professor at Duke University. She directed Internet organizing for Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign and serves as national director of the Sunlight Foundation

Ai-jen Poo is lead organizer and founder of Domestic Workers United, where she works to win fair pay and legal recognition for domestic workers in the New York metropolitan area.

Zack Exley is an online organizing strategist currently serving as chief community officer at the Wikimedia Foundation and a strategic consultant at ThoughtWorks. As an Open Society Fellow, he was based in Missouri, where he worked to identify “leaderless” organizing models that would enable local leaders, activists, and social service providers to mobilize diverse constituencies that do not normally work together.  

Exley co-founded and served as president of the New Organizing Institute, a progressive political technology training organization in Washington, and was organizing director at MoveOn.org. In 2008, he worked with the Obama campaign as a consultant and researcher, and in 2004, he served as director of online communications and organizing for John Kerry's presidential campaign. He spent much of the 1990s as a union organizer.

Exley has written for the Huffington Post, among other publications, and has appeared on Hannity & Colms, Hardball with Chris Mathews, Scarborough Country, All Things Considered, the Diane Rehm Show, BBC News Hour and others. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times, CNN Presents, Wired News, and other publications.

Bill Vandenberg is the program director of the Open Society Foundations Democracy and Power Fund, a social change grantmaking program housed within U.S. Programs.

Prior to joining the Foundations, Vandenberg lived in Denver for 17 years, where he was the executive director for the Colorado Progressive Coalition and Colorado Progressive Action, the statewide, multiracial nonprofits that he cofounded (in 1996 and 2002 respectively).  Vandenberg led the coalition's work to advance racial and economic justice, with highlights including long-time leadership in the state's pro-affirmative action coalition, stewardship of the organization's immigrant justice and juvenile justice system reform organizing, and lobbying successfully to pass one of the nation's strongest anti-racial profiling laws.

He also led campaigns to raise Colorado's minimum wage in 2006; build community support for a successful referendum fight to roll back the nation's most restrictive and anti-government public investment law; and build the largest non-partisan voter mobilization drive in Colorado history, recognized as one of the nation's top five community-based voter programs.

Vandenberg is a graduate of Boston College and was a 2007-2008 fellow in the Rockwood Leadership Program's yearlong national fellowship for transformative leadership in the nonprofit sector.  In addition to directing the Democracy and Power Fund, he has been convenor for OSI's Seize the Day special initiative and serves on the board of the General Service Foundation; on the steering committee for the Funders' Collaborative on Youth Organizing; and beginning in 2010, on the steering committee for the Funders' Committee on Civic Participation.