HEATHER
​BOOTH

Leadership: If You Organize You Can Change the World! But Only if You Organize!

​This session will inspire you to take action--engage others you work with, find allies and build your organizational power to win. The session will screen a 1 hour movie about a lifelong organizer who has been a loyal friend to UNAC/UHCP.  It is called "Heather Booth: Changing the World."  This will be followed by 30 minutes for discussion/q and a. The movie follows organizing, struggles and victories in civil rights, women's movement, labor alliances, shows the importance of training, and elections.  This is a leadership building session, focused on organizing and encourages patient advocacy as well as advocacy for the rights of all people. And it underscores the message, that if we organize, we can change the world--but only if we organize. 

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:
At completion of this session, the participant will be able to:

• Describe examples of the positive impact of organizing for a social change perspective
• Demonstrate the importance of training to learn organizing
• Demonstrate the importance of building alliances and the connection across issues
• Employ confidence and spirit to organizing in order to change the world for the better

Heather Booth is one of the leading strategists about progressive issue campaigns and driving issues in elections in the United States.
 
She has been an organizer starting in the civil rights and women's movements of the 1960s.
 
Heather was the founding Director and is now President of the Midwest Academy, training social change leaders and organizers. She has been involved in and managed political campaigns and was the Training Director of the Democratic National Committee. In 2000, she was the Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund, which helped to increase African American election turnout by nearly 2 million voters. She was the lead consultant, directing the founding of the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2005
 
In 2008, she was the director of the Health Care Campaign for the AFL-CIO. In 2009, she directed the campaign passing President Obama’s first budget. In 2010 she was the founding director of Americans for Financial Reform, fighting to regulate the financial industry. She was the national coordinator for the coalition around marriage equality and the 2013 Supreme Court decision. She was strategic advisor to the Alliance for Citizenship (the largest coalition of the immigration reform campaign).She recently lead the field effort to stop the tax cuts to the wealthy that will lead attempts to cut in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. She has been a consultant to many organizations including the Voter Participation Center and MoveOn.