Ten years of empowering women to run for political office

Vote Run Lead is a nonprofit organization dedicated to training women and gender-expansive candidates to run for office. Having trained women candidates for ten years now, their numbers and new initiatives show how successful they are in getting women into office. In 2022, 363 women ran for office with a 68% win rate. In 2024 so far, Vote Run Lead alumni have a 76% win rate in state legislatures. Due to the demand, Vote Run Lead also recently launched their “Victory Series” workshop, a webinar series that aims to reach more women of different abilities. 

New York Nonprofit Media spoke with Erin Vilardi, founder and CEO of Vote Run Lead, about the work the organization has done training women to run for political office, its current initiatives and whether America is ready for a woman president. 

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Tell me about your vision for Vote Run Lead.

Vote Run Lead is now a standalone c3 at 10 years, and we have been a training powerhouse for women, seeding the new face of leadership. We have six women who’ve been through the training programs that are in Congress – five of whom are women of color – and that's from our White House project days. Now, we have women in the state legislatures. We have 139 women in the state legislatures. We have hundreds of women at the state and local level, like city councils and mayorships. And some places, there are elected dog catchers, and there are all sorts of elected positions. We just help women realize their own political voice and lead a political life. 

Since the beginning, we have worked to make sure that our community and our training are reaching folks who are often outside the party system. So it's overwhelmingly women of color. We make a real effort to get into rural communities to make sure that rural women have the resources they need. It's critical to us that we are creating inroads for women and gender-expansive people to get a foot in the door of how to run for office, of how to run a campaign without having to sort of subscribe to a political party or feel like they were getting these resources in exchange for aligning in a certain way. We trust women to make their own decisions about their political leanings. We trust women to make those decisions for themselves.

Could you tell me more about your Run/51 initiative?

Run/51 comes straight out of that vision for women as the majorities and reflective democracies, and it's laser-focused on the state houses. Our assemblies and our legislature are very much the new power center for American democracy. Many things are being pushed to the states. And of the 7,383 legislative seats, we only have a little over 2,000 women. There's real room and real ability to grow that number to get to 51%. We're operating in about 10 states where we are sort of tracking how many women are there. We have data on all 50 states, and not just for women and not just for women of color, but we go deep and say, “How many Black women are in this state senate? How many Black women are in this state house? How many women of Asian descent are in the state senate? How many are in the state house? How many Latinas don't match the population that that state actually has?” It's really critical that we go that layer deeper around race and ethnicity and make sure that all of our communities are represented in our legislatures. 

The other thing about the importance of Run/51 is that it creates a farm team for future leadership. More than a third of the women in Congress actually came out of the statehouses. It controls trillions of dollars, and it goes through our state legislatures, and we must have women allocating those resources, and especially the big issues of the day – reproductive health and justice, our voting rights  and our taxes – are all happening at the state legislative level, particularly as the Supreme Court continues to push decisions down to the states. You'll see environmental policy now following the Chevron case. There's an opportunity for states to maybe bolster some of their environmental policy, their climate policy, because the federal legislation has been weakened. So we believe that the state houses are where a lot of political power is held and an opportunity for women to make a real mark.

As you’re training these women, especially women who are the first to represent their district, what kind of challenges do you see them face? And how do you help them to overcome those challenges?

One of our signature pieces of curriculum is our stump speech, our storytelling workshop, and we really dig into the experiences that women have had over their lives. Oftentimes, and this is learned as girls and women in the world, we don't really look back at our life and go, “Oh, these were the times that I really showed up as a leader” or “These were the times that I dug in and used a different set of skills” or “This is the time I overcame something that other people don't overcome.” We use this exercise where we make you answer a set of questions where you're really looking back at your life's work and figuring out those times in your life where you have showed up. That is how we then sort of pivot to talking about the dynamic leadership that you've exhibited and move those examples into stories that can be told on the campaign trail. And not just talk about the things that you care about and for the race you're running, but to connect how you have shown up as a leader to how you will show up as a leader for the people once elected. 

It was a remarkable way for women to own their power and feel comfortable making that transition into talking about it in an electoral way. And of course, we always have them end in the ask that says, “I need you to vote for me” or “I need you to give me $25” and we practice that a lot, and it's been really freeing. Our whole methodology, our whole message, is called “run as you are” because we are not trying to take women and gender-expansive folks and put them through a machine. We believe these women are already diamonds, and we're just finding the right setting for them and helping them shine. 

What about money? Money is a big part of running for office. What challenges do women face when it comes to fundraising and how do you help women raise the money to run for office? 

We talk a lot about women's relationship to money. We really turn to what's called a traditional fundraising bull's-eye. G to your friends and family first. But if you're the first in your family to go to college, and you're the one that's made it and you're sending money back to your family, then you're not asking your friends and family. Having honest conversations, as we think about who  that fundraising bullseye was actually built for versus what are the ways that you have pockets or means and currency within your community who are a handful of wealthy folks that you need to connect the dots to get to. We also talk a lot about how women's networks are closed. The storytelling ties into this. Running a campaign might be talking to strangers about why they need to invest in you. That's how you get people who you don't know excited about you. But when we're in person with women, we really help them through raising money for themselves. Women are great fundraisers. We just have to turn it inward.

A poll reported that sexism still ranks as the biggest hurdle facing women in elected office. Are you surprised that this is still an issue in 2024?

Unfortunately, it doesn't surprise me. I've been doing this for 20 years. It's a strong thread. It has also been pushed by some of our national leaders as an acceptable way to talk about women in politics. In fact, I think in some ways it's taken a turn in which there's an element of harassment and violence in our politics today that I have not seen at this level, and that is deeply disappointing, but it is also really powerful to see women stand up in the face of that. The sexism, the threats and the harassment are aimed at actually getting us to be quiet. They aim to get us to not run for office. They aim to keep us out of this place of power. And in fact, women are saying no to that. 

Do you think America is ready for a woman to be President?

Hell yeah! America was ready for a woman president with Hillary Clinton. She won the popular vote. Our work at Vote Run Lead’s amazing partner groups like Higher Heights and the New American Leaders Project have been putting forward across the country hundreds and hundreds of women and women of color that American voters have been able to vote for since 2016. The waves of women who have won are doing fantastic things for our country. And I think it's becoming normal now to vote for a woman, to vote for a young woman, to vote for a woman of color, to vote for a queer woman into public office in a way that we've rapidly accelerated as a sort of sisterhood of organizations working on this in the last seven, eight years. America is very, very ready.