Did you attend a rally recently? 100K Project co-founder Tom Tresser and his wife sure did – part of the 200,000+ crowd for No Kings Day in Grant Park, Chicago.
Tom and Merle Tresser with their friends Sid and Cookie – who, between have over 185 years! We met a guy on the subway going home who had flown a drone over the rally.
But we were left wondering – what’s next? How do we harness the energy, time, focus, and money of the millions of people who protested that day? What is our strategic path to power to reverse our plunge into facism, plutocracy, and a Far RIght theocracy?
What follows is an essay by noted culture and educational leader Lauren Ruffin. When she was Co-Executive Director of the arts service organization Fractured Atlas she led the creation and delivery of the Artist Campaign School – which we are shamelessly attempting to duplicate!
When the Protesters Go Home
I’ve spent most of this year watching my partner—an immigration attorney—pull thirteen-hour days stopping illegal deportations without due process. Filing emergency motions. Tracking down stateless clients who’ve been disappeared into detention centers or to countries they’ve never even visited. Every single day, showing up to do the work. Meanwhile, her organization scrambles for funding. The people doing the actual work of protecting our communities operate on fumes while everyone with resources waits for the next viral moment to get outraged about.
Last week, the No Kings protests raised significant funds. People were ready to give, ready to show they care. And I just can’t stop thinking that those tens of millions of dollars would have been better spent on the long term infrastructure Americans desperately need but our political and nonprofit leaders refuse to build.
By contrast, the Leadership Institute—the conservative training machine founded in 1979—took in $45 million last year. They’ve trained hundreds of thousands of people to lead in American public life. Karl Rove, Grover Norquist, Ralph Reed—all their graduates. They have a facility with classrooms, dining halls, and broadcast studios.
The Unglamorous Work That Wins
People forget that Raphael Warnock’s Senate victory in Georgia came from WNBA players organizing against their own team owner. From athletes who spent months registering voters, making calls, showing up at the unglamorous work of electoral politics. Kelly Loeffler owned the Atlanta Dream and expected their silence. Instead, the players endorsed Warnock, wore “Vote Warnock” shirts, and kept organizing even when it would have been easier to stay quiet.
Actual power building comes from unlikely sources. Basketball players who understood that their platform meant nothing if they didn’t use it to change who governs. They didn’t wait for someone else to do it. They didn’t hold a press conference and call it resistance. They organized, and they won.
The People Who Could Lead
When I was co-CEO of Fractured Atlas, we launched the Artist Campaign School. Nearly 70 artists trained between 2017 and 2019. Some ran for office. Some won.
My colleague Tom Tresser has been working in political organizing since 1991. We caught up last week and he shared more about his current work leading the 100K Project—a national effort to prepare 100,000 people from the creative, social work, library, science, and education sectors to run for local office. Working with Dr. Quanice Floyd from the National Guild for Community Arts Education, they’ve designed an eight-week online leadership and candidate training. Twenty-three people enrolled in the first cohort this October.
Twenty-three people.
People say these workers aren’t qualified to govern because they’re too idealistic and too focused on service to handle budgets and policy. But if we take a closer look at what these workers actually do, we’d see teachers who’ve turned shoestring budgets into functioning classrooms, and artists who’ve built community infrastructure from nothing. Across the board, these are people who know how to serve, how to solve, how to build. They’re exactly the sort of people we should want to lead our local communities.
I don’t think this is a conversation about Left vs. Right, or progressive vs. conservative. Politics is far too complicated and nuanced for that level of simplicity. What we’re fighting for goes beyond ideology and instead offers a futuristic, humanistic vision where every American citizen has access to housing, healthcare, education, and a healthy environment.
When my partner fights deportations, she’s defending due process—a constitutional right that belongs to everyone. The Right has successfully branded basic human dignity as radical leftism. We’ve accepted their framing when we should be talking about the future we’re building.
Here’s what we could do with the money that went to last week’s protests: Fund the 100K Project for a year. Cover childcare during campaign meetings. Build mentorship networks. Pay my partner’s organization’s operating budget for three years—no scrambling for renewals, just the security to do the work.
The Window Is Closing
Everything happening right now—the attacks on education, healthcare, bodily autonomy, due process—is happening because conservatives built power and we didn’t.
The 100K Project isn’t asking for complicated theory or massive resources. It’s asking us to invest in training the people who are already doing the work—the attorneys, teachers, social workers, artists, librarians—to run for office. Twenty-three people in the first cohort. Imagine if it were twenty-three thousand. Imagine if we funded this the way we fund Saturday protests that disappear by Monday.
My partner will show up tomorrow for another thirteen-hour day. The teachers will buy more classroom supplies. All the people doing the actual work will keep showing up. The question is whether we’ll show up for them, and with more than viral outrage that fades in a week. They need long-term investment in infrastructure that actually builds power.
Lauren Ruffin is a 2025 Lewis Latimer Fellow building futures-focused technology that centers community knowledge over extractive systems. She founded the Artist Campaign School to train cultural workers for political leadership and previously served as Co-CEO of Fractured Atlas. With a J.D. from Howard University and two decades navigating the intersection of technology, government, and social change, she remains committed to building the civic infrastructure necessary for a more humanistic future.
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