Goal: Fund fellowships for students to work on campaigns

Leadership

Organization’s Objective

SNAP PAC’s mission is two-fold: to elect new progressive leaders of today to Congress, and to train the next generation of progressive leaders. We’re tackling two key problems we believe the progressive movement must address if it wants to become stronger and have the power to change our country.

The first problem is the lack of paid opportunities for students to work in the progressive movement during the formative summers during college. We believe that opportunities to work in progressive politics need to be funded for all students. Financial aid at schools across the country is structured such that too many students cannot take on long-term, unpaid projects, like working on a campaign for a summer. This effectively limits the range of people who are likely to become involved in progressive politics in the long term - not just because of what summer experiences and internships provide in terms of knowledge, training and inspiration for future careers, but also because increasingly employers tend to look for these kinds of experiences when hiring staff – not just in the progressive movement but in a wide variety of fields. This means that too few students end up working in the progressive movement, which means there are too few people working in our movement on the whole in the long term – this is what others have identified as the failure of progressives to have the kind of leadership pipeline that the conservative movement has developed over the last 30-40 years.

Second, the lack of paid opportunities for lower-income students means that those who do take advantage of internships and opportunities are overwhelmingly white and from higher-income households, meaning that people from these backgrounds dominate the leadership of the progressive movement. In order to expand and diversify the ranks of future progressive leadership – not only because it is more just, but because without diverse leadership the movement will never have wide appeal or become internally strong and self-critical enough – paid opportunities must be provided to make it possible for students from all backgrounds to have the opportunity to work in progressive politics.