Styles

Maria Jobin Leeds

Chair, The Partnership for Democracy and Education

Maria Jobin-Leeds is the Chair of The Partnership for Democracy and Education, whose alliance of projects, partners, and staff includes: Access Strategies Fund, Maria’s List, the Schott Fund, When We Fight, We Win, and Impact Investments with the endowments. Together, we support frontline organizations’ leadership and organize funders around shared values and a vision for a vibrant, thriving, and inclusive democracy and economy.

In 2000, Maria founded Access Strategies Fund to develop frontline movements to wield more power and help each community secure what they need to thrive, using our democracy. For 20 years, Access has helped develop movement work’s civic leaders, organizations, and public policies that build power and create justice framed around race, gender, class, sexuality, ethnicity, and immigration status.

After a decade of addressing the racialized gap in neighborhood voting rates, Maria noticed more diverse candidates winning public office. Even so, the rates of elected Women of Color were not adequate. Frustrated by the lack of women’s leadership in local, city, state, and national political offices, Maria collaborated with many politically astute leaders and the Access Strategies Fund to incubate the Women’s Pipeline for Change. And then, in 2010, she created “Maria’s List,” combing the 50 States for champions who will win public office and promote bold social and economic policy, inclusive and representative of the communities most marginalized.

Maria’s List has a special focus on Massachusetts and the leaders we are developing here.

In 2005, staff at MassVote alerted me to Sam Yoon’s campaign for Boston City Council at Large. I remember the patient look on their faces as they watched me compute that our funding and work to expand the electorate had reached the tipping point of impact. The more I thought about it, the more I realized Yoon’s victory was not only possible but it could be predicted.”

Sam’s victory, built on the shoulders of those who came before, signaled a change and an opportunity for people of color to make impactful firsts in public life. Not only because they were people of color, but also because they discussed pressing issues and solutions for low-income communities and people of color. This was our victory too. Sam won the election because organizations like Access Strategies Fund and its many civic organizational partners spent years increasing progressive voter education and turnout.

The time had arrived for us to analyze the candidate development pipeline and recreate it intentionally to produce progressive low-income women from communities of color, too. We couldn’t wait for it to be “accidental.” Before they were candidates, I remember working with Ayanna Pressley, Sonia Chang-Diaz, and Kelly Bates to strategize funding for more BIPOC led civic organizations. At the time, there weren’t even enough black women leading civic and political organizations, never mind running. Our program was designed by 10 civic organizations that saw the need for a culture shift, the structural shifts to get more women from marginalized communities into public life, the Women’s Pipeline for Change. We developed our analysis, developed our skills, raised funds, developed leadership in civic organizations, encouraged each other to dream big, and celebrated the women on whose shoulders we stood.

Our first Women’s Pipeline for Change meeting was at the YWCA on Clarendon Street. Some of the most exciting executive directors and program directors, mostly women, attended. At every table, I could hear, “Oh my God, I’ve always wanted to meet you.” And realized we were so busy leading movements, creating change in our communities, raising families, and more that we lacked time to convene, dream, and co-create the civic structures we all need for a political system that would work for us!

Next up: Maria’s List, a legally separate candidate-funding apparatus for those who have declared their runs for public office. Initially, I kept a list of great candidates like Sam, Ayanna, and Sonia that I kept hearing about; later, we went looking for them, made the list, shared it, made campaign contributions, and invited others to contribute.

Maria’s List candidates were not initially popular with political contributors, but times have changed; we are shifting political culture and expectations, and have expanded our donor groups. Now the candidates we list are better able to raise money, win office, take bold stances, and lead. Our donors are savvier, have multiple sources of reliable information, and are backing some of the most progressive leaders from the municipal level all the way up the ballot to Congress. We provide our donors with researched opportunities in districts most likely to vote for progressive women and people of color that match their community’s needs. We call this Deep Democracy.