WHO WE ARE
Progress Champions is an organization that provides training, tech know-how, and digital infrastructure for progressive organizations, advocates, and its own campaigns - all free of charge, to build the movement.
The organization was founded by Tim Ellis, a rave DJ and digital organizer with experience that leans heavily on using the latest technology to connect people and empower campaigns. Tim cut his teeth as an organizer with the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign, where he was part of the persuasion team in New Hampshire and also part of the grassroots upset victory in Michigan. Since then, he has led local, state, and national campaigns in both the US and Canada, and has pioneered innovative techniques at the intersection of technology and organizing. He has consistently worked to share his knowledge and resources with the wider movement, and Progress Champions is the culmination of that spirit - a central hub for him and other progressive & leftist organizers to share their accumulated experience, to innovate together, and to find ways to use technology as a force-multiplier for people-powered grassroots campaigns.
WHAT WE DO
We give progressive activists the skills and tech they need to build power in the 21st century - for free
Progress Champions offers training to progressives on all of the essential skills of movement-building, organizing, and delivering change. We are building a central hub of workshops, resources, and toolkits suitable for organizers at every level, from brand new to the most advanced. And we are unlocking the potential of modern tech to be a force multiplier for low-resource campaigns and grassroots organizers, both through education and through directly building and sharing tech tools that the movement can put to use.
At the same time, we are taking on the professional consultant class and the broken model of hiring high-paid freelancers to advise on campaigns. The incentives of that model are all wrong - consultants face no accountability for losing efforts, and are rewarded for keeping tech knowledge arcane and difficult to access. We're inverting the model entirely, offering all knowledge and resources free of charge and instead relying on grassroots donors to keep the lights on. It's people-powered - the way it should be.