Training the Left to Win

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Both twentysomething women are members of the 2006 class of Green Corps, an elite yearlong training program for grassroots environmental organizers that pays $23,750 a year. In the near future, if all goes according to plan, Mucha, Darwish, and their 11 classmates will be executive directors of advocacy groups, scholars at think tanks, congressional staffers, possibly even elected officials.

That's because, like the hippies who went 'clean for Gene' (Senator Eugene McCarthy, the peace candidate for president) in droves in 1968, these kids have decided that idealism is best pursued pragmatically. They're willing to cut their hair, don a suit, and lobby Congress if it helps win concrete victories for the environment.

Last August, after three weeks of classroom preparation, the students were dispatched across the country to work on campaigns for a variety of green groups, from the Alaska Wilderness League to the Gulf [of Mexico] Restoration Network.

In September, those who had been sent to mobilize public opposition to oil drilling in Alaska helped organize an 'Arctic Refuge Day of Action' in Washington, D.C., that drew busloads of citizens from around the country. Some 5,000 people rallied on the West Lawn, then fanned out across Capitol Hill to lobby their senators and representatives. Considering how close Congress came to passing legislation to open the refuge to drilling last fall, Green Corps' fieldwork is at least partly to thank for saving this pristine wilderness from the oil lobby.

Last February, all the students regrouped in a hotel conference room in Boston's theater district. They spent five days debriefing each other on the campaigns they had just finished, planning for their next eight-week assignments, and polishing their r?sum?s and interviewing skills for the nonprofit job market.

Since Green Corps' founding in 1992, more than 200 people have graduated from the intensive program. Many of them now hold leadership positions across the progressive movement-in organizations such as MoveOn.org, Physicians for Human Rights, Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, Corporate Accountability International, and the office of California Congress member and House minority leader Nancy Pelosi.

Many of the organizations Green Corps works for have been so impressed with the effectiveness of the group's fieldwork that they've reworked their budgets to boost their own grassroots organizing capacity-and often to hire graduates straight out of the program. Physicians for Human Rights 'was way more research-focused when I arrived,' says Gina Coplon-Newfield, a 1997 Green Corps graduate. In 2000 she was only the second organizer hired by the group, which promotes causes such as AIDS prevention and a worldwide ban on land mines. Today, its campaigns department employs 11 organizers-twice the staff of any other unit in the organization.

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