Amanda Litman on How Real Change Happens

What if real change doesn't begin with institutions, campaigns, or capital — but with the people we invite into our lives?

In this episode, Eric sits down with Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something and author of When We’re In Charge, to explore how small, human-scale actions can spark transformational impact — from politics to parenting to how we rebuild our social lives post-pandemic.

Amanda has helped 225,000+ people raise their hands to run for office — and she’s just getting started. In this candid conversation, she breaks down how we show up, lead, connect, and fundraise in ways that build community rather than extract from it.

Episode Highlights:

[00:00] What if real change starts with people — not policy, profit, or programs?
[02:49] Amanda’s three-pronged theory of social change: electoral power, workplace culture, and human relationships
[04:25] The power of “casual hosting” to rebuild adult friendships and community
[07:11] Why digital connection often feels empty — and what we can do about it
[09:12] Designing invitations people can say “yes” to — both in life and in leadership
[11:58] Fundraising is broken. Here's how we fix it without losing integrity
[14:48] “Don’t treat your supporters like crap.” Amanda on the ethics of political messaging
[18:48] How millennials are redefining leadership in the workplace
[21:29] Why personality — not brand — is key to breaking through on new media
[24:18] What keeps Amanda going when everything feels impossible
[26:21] The origin story of Run for Something and what’s coming next

Notable Quotes:

“If work sucks less, people can be better parents, partners, and citizens.” — Amanda Litman [03:20]

“Don’t treat your supporters like crap. If you’ve told them the sky is falling for ten years — what now that it’s actually falling?” — Amanda Litman [16:05]

“I only drink the poison I have the antidote for.” — Amanda Litman [25:06]

“Organizations can’t really tell a story. A person can.” — Amanda Litman [22:43]

“We make it easy to say yes — whether it's dinner or running for office.” — Amanda Litman [09:12]

P.S. — Struggling to align your message with your mission? We help social impact leaders like you build trust-building brands through authentic storytelling, thoughtful design, and digital strategy that works. Let’s talk about your goals »

Full Transcript

Eric Ressler (00:00):
How does real change happen? That's a question I've been wrestling with lately. When we look at our biggest problems, what are the most effective levers we have to pull?

The first and arguably the most important is government — the idea that we create change together through our public institutions, but that belief is being tested right now, not because the idea is wrong, but because there are deliberate efforts to reshape the very theory of government happening in real time. We see agencies being dismantled, budgets being slashed and disinformation being sown, and when the government is sidelined like this, it makes it impossible to deliver on its promise. Then there's the free market — the argument that change comes from competition, from innovation, from the power of business that where government fails, the free market has better and more efficient solutions as long as there's money to be made in the process.

And then there's us — the third way, the social impact sector here to take on the problems. The first two sectors are unwilling or unable to solve, but our sector is exhausted and right now it's struggling, but what if the answer isn't about choosing one of these levers? What if the real engine of change is something more fundamental? A force that underlies all three of these paths but isn't about policy or profit or programs, it's about people. To explore what that looks like in practice. I wanted to talk with someone who has put this theory into action at a massive scale, and that person is Amanda Litman. Amanda is the co-founder of Run For Something, an organization that has recruited over 225,000 ordinary citizens to run for office and helps more than 1,500 of them win. In her latest book When We're In Charge charts a new course for leadership and our relationship with work. In our conversation, she answers the very question I've been wrestling with in a digital culture that feels increasingly transactional. How do we build authentic human connection and how do we focus that connection on powering meaningful social change? I'm Eric Ressler and this is Designing Tomorrow and now my conversation with Amanda Litman.

Eric Ressler (02:15):
Amanda, thanks for joining me today.

Amanda Litman (02:17):
Thank you for having me Eric.

Eric Ressler (02:19):
So I'm really excited to have you on the show here for a number of reasons. I think the thing I really would love to dig into first is just understanding how you think about how change happens, especially right now in this moment in America, and we can look at this from politics, but I'm really also just curious about just social change in general. You have a lot of thoughts on this. In your opinion, what's our best strategy for actually bringing about the changes that we want to see?

Amanda Litman (02:49):
I think there are lots of different avenues for social change, which sounds like a million mouth answer, but I think you need all the different avenues in order to actually get progress. So I think there's obviously electoral, that's the work that I do at Run for Something where you're trying to get people elected who can be different kinds of decision makers who can move the needle, especially on the local level, cities, states, counties, that kind of thing. I think in these small scale way, I think business leaders can have a really big way to make a difference in people's lives. I had a book come out in May called When We're in Charge about female leading differently and one of the arguments they make in the book is that actually if work sucks less, it creates more time for people to be better partners, parents, friends, citizens, community members, and that can actually transform society if enough business leaders operate in that way. And I think there's ways in our relationships with one another that we can move things forward thinking about how to be a better friend, how to be a better parent, a better partner, which if we are all making collectively little decisions in service of that, it adds up to something big.

Eric Ressler (03:56):
One of the things I've been really interested to follow you on Substack is this idea of casual hosting, which is something that actually really resonated with me. I'm also a parent, I have some young kids watching the rapid deterioration of my social life. Being a young parent has been an interesting and unexpected side effect and my wife and I are trying to navigate this as well. How did that first come across your experience and I'd love for you to just share your experience there a little bit. So

Amanda Litman (04:25):
Most good things in my life, it's because of my husband. So my husband is a therapist, he works in mental health all day long. He was listening to some podcast I think at the end of last year. My second daughter was born in September, so right now I have a two and a half year old and a 10 month old. We're deep in it, but we were at that point still in the newborn trenches and he was listening to some podcasts and they were talking about Shabbat dinners, hosting people every Friday to have them around your home and the beauty and the tradition and the ritual of that, and he got it in his head that he wanted to do something similar, but with two little kids with busy jobs, the idea of Friday night felt like unimaginable, our kids go to bed pretty early, thank God.

So we decided that he was going to make a New Year's resolution to host people in our home every Saturday in 2025, and I thought this was absolutely insane. I was like, all right baby, whatever you want to do, I'm down for a good time, but we can try. We have since done it every Saturday in 2025, we have either hosted people for dinner or gone over to someone else's home for dinner a couple of times. Once or twice we did it on Sunday, Judaism, Passover, we had a Seder on Sunday instead of Saturday. But every weekend this year we've had time with adults and occasionally little kids to eat to hang out, and what we've learned is that it's both transformative for our social life, way lower stakes than you need it to be and so meaningful to take people from acquaintances to friends, which is I think the hardest thing to do. I have found as an adult, especially as an adult with little kids,

Eric Ressler (05:59):
I want to touch on this a little bit deeper because I've been thinking a lot about how digital culture shapes real world experiences and to me it feels like we're in kind of a strange period of the internet right now where we don't really all know how to show up and the platforms are constantly changing and the more that the promise of digital connection is kind of touted by these platforms, the more far removed it actually kind of feels in at least my personal lived experience. And so this speaks to me very deeply around just, it sounds so simple, but just reconnecting with people in our lives and when we're in this moment of just extreme and growing polarization politically in a way that's getting in our way as a culture and as society of actually even making things that we all agree on happen. I'm just kind of curious how you're navigating that and thinking about how do you actually show up digitally in a meaningful way because there is something real about meaningful digital connection. We're doing this podcast and this episode remotely and if it weren't for that, maybe it never would've happened, right? But at the same time there's this tension and this yearning for just real authentic human connection. How are you thinking about all of that right now?

Amanda Litman (07:11):
Such a good question, especially when you're in the trenches with little kids. It's really hard to be in person. I'm at the whim of my daughter's nap times, and so really thinking about how am I using my group chats? How am I engaging, it's okay for some of my friendships right now to be weak ties that are dms over Instagram or sending memes and tiktoks back and forth. That's not a replacement for a friendship, but that's okay if that's what the friendship is right now, understanding that it has to be something more later. One of the things that I am really, really careful about, especially in this stage of my life, is making sure that I am not letting things go unanswered, which I know can be very easy for things to fall through the cracks if I get a text message and even if I can't answer it immediately, try to remember to answer it later.

If I get an email, I try to work through my inbox would be like if I get a dm, not to say that that's not a point of pride necessarily, but that I know how frustrating it's to be. On the other side of that where you send the text in never gets answered and then you're like, well, do I double text? They triple text. They actually not want to talk to me at all. It's like an ever personal, it feels personal, so being really careful about when people are extending bits for connection to try and take 'em and return that as much as I can. It's so hard though. It's so hard.

Eric Ressler (08:36):
It is hard, and I think one of the things that's making this so hard is just the sheer volume of information that each of us is exposed to is just a normal human being in our modern culture. It's unreasonable, right? It's incongruent with our psychology and our capacity as humans, and I think about that a lot and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this as a leader of a movement of a nonprofit, of an organization extending that same challenge, how do you think about actually growing your reach but in a meaningful way to make your mission come true?

Amanda Litman (09:12):
I think a lot about what can I do to make it easy for people to say yes, which is kind of the same thing we're doing with dinners where we just say, come over at five o'clock, there are three Saturdays that are available. Which of these works for you? If not those three. How about these three? The work that we do at Run for Something, asking people to run for office is an incredibly challenging thing. Our job is to ask as many people as we can and then make it really easy for them to say yes. We do that through digital tactics, we do that through onboarding. We do that through resource generation. I do that through accessible communication, but what can I do as an organization or as a leader so that if I'm asking someone to do something, it's so easy for them to satisfy that. It feels really intuitive, but you would be surprised maybe you wouldn't. About how many times you ever get an email from someone you're like, I don't know what you're asking me to do here. I don't know what you want me to do. I want to help you, but I don't know what help looks like and if I don't know what help looks like, I can't provide it.

Eric Ressler (10:10):
Yeah, I mean this is the like, Hey, could I pick your brain kind of email that you might get?

Amanda Litman (10:13):
Right? It's insane. I hate that, which I feel bad sometimes. People send me those and I've written and I wrote in the book, I wrote, Substack, whatever, don't pick my brain. Ask me a specific question. I will give you a specific concrete answer. Picking my brain is not fun for me and it's not going to be helpful for you.

Eric Ressler (10:29):
It also feels like when you get a request like that, you don't know what you're even really saying yes to. The motivations can be unclear, and I think that I've been thinking a lot about fundraising tactics more from the nonprofit space, but also sometimes in the political world. I think fundraising has become just so tragically transactional and broken, and I say seeing this being true on both sides of the aisle, I somehow get text messages from every side of the aisle. You can imagine at this point, and I mean no one's winning there in my opinion. There's some very rare exceptions. I know this is a topic that's being broadly discussed is how can we do this in a more constructive, authentic way but still actually raise the funds that we need to. We're in a moment right now where funding is falling very short for a lot of social impact organizations fallout from the federal funds being basically evaporated, USAID being spun down recklessly. A lot of the people that we're working with causes that we're working with are not only short on funds, maybe they lost funding just completely out of the blue with no planning, no preparation, but what I'm hearing on the front lines is that fundraising is more competitive than it's ever been. How are you thinking about fundraising in your world and just more broadly, how can we bring people together for these movements in a way that's constructive in a way that's not extractive or transactional?

Amanda Litman (11:58):
I've been thinking a lot about this because my original career entry point was in digital fundraising, so my first job was doing online fundraising for Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2012. I did the same thing in 2014 and then I ran Hillary Clinton's email program, which was just asking people for money and volunteer and engage in other ways, but primarily grassroots support, and I remember very vividly in 2012 running an experiment on our email list testing, was there such a thing as too much email? Literally one of my jobs for two months was that every day I was responsible for picking the two or three emails we were going to send that day and sending it to an additional test group and a control group to determine was there a limit to how many times we could ask people to give. And what we found in that experiment, this was 2012, so 13 years ago, sorry, math over a decade ago, more email meant more money even when you factored in unsubscribes and if our job on the campaign was to raise the money to help win that was worth it even if people complained.

Amanda Litman (13:00):
Now, we were also really thoughtful and careful about the tactics that we used as part of those emails. We were really intentional about making emails sound like the people they were coming from, thinking about treating supporters with respect. Never. One of our guiding ethoses of our program was to never treat the list like an ATM over the decades since then, I think people have internalized and programs have internalized the more email means more money. You ask more, you get more without remembering the treating people with respect part run for something does not run a program like that. We ask email people for money pretty regularly because we're doing work that I believe deserves to be funded, but not every time, not every day. I am really rigorous about the kinds of things I approve. Sometimes we do things that I'm like, we need to scale that back next time, and I think it's important because we're trying to build something long-term and sustainable, and that means we want our supporters to be with us for the long term.

Amanda Litman (13:55):
I can't burn those bridges. Campaigns have a very different mindset. Nonprofit groups can have a very different mindset. Now, one of the tensions to all of this is that if you aren't putting your foot to the fire pedal to the metal for small dollar fundraising, which is primarily email, social text messaging, that kind of thing, the money has to come from somewhere else. Right now it's not major money. Anyone who's working with foundations or institutions or major donors knows that money is also not really moving in a meaningful way sort of as a standstill. I still don't think that's an excuse to treat supporters like crap, but I understand the motivation for these organizations to do so, and it's a big conversation among the democratic left and I imagine among the broader nonprofit sector of how do you do this in a way that sustains the work but also sustains the relationship.

Eric Ressler (14:48):
I want to touch on that a little bit more deeply because I've thought about this parallel between what I've observed with political candidates and their campaigns and how they fundraise versus the nonprofit sector, and I always kind of chalked it up to, well, at the end of the day, these folks need to raise as much money as quickly as they can. At the end of that, they either win or they lose the campaign, and so they can, to put it bluntly, essentially afford to burn some bridges if that means they might win,

Eric Ressler (15:15):
And I don't think that's ever been true really. I don't think it's true for nonprofits, and I think that mindset to your point, has kind of spilled over a little bit more into the nonprofit space, this kind of fake urgency, negativity bias, these tactics that just make me feel icky, even from candidates that I might want to support or groups that I want to support, who I believe in the work, but their reputation is tarnished because of the way that they're fundraising, and I wonder, is that coming back to bite us now, this decade plus of fundraising in that way in a way that's kind of tarnished the brand where I think a lot of supporters do feel essentially like ATM machines right now?

Amanda Litman (15:54):
100%. I think if you've been tilling supporters for a decade, the sky is falling, kiss all hope, goodbye, and then the sky does fall, what do you do? What was it for?

Amanda Litman (16:05):
It feels like we've been gaslit. I also think it is so shady, many of the tactics that many of these organizations and organizers are using, it's just like lying and I don't think there's ever a good reason to lie to your supporters ends never justify the means on that front kind of a hot take maybe, but I think it is worth being really on the level with people. If you are doing work that is good, if you have a story to tell that is honest and true, if the impact is clear, then you should be able to raise money telling that story. There's like a record like, oh, you haven't given yet this year. I think that's fine within reason. There's ways to do that in a way that is respectful, but it's the 400 x match happening today. Deadline tonight, we got to urge, surge the money to X, Y, Z thing and try to raise money off of a thing that you're not even related to the work you're doing. No, no. It's shitty treats people like crap and they deserve better than that and is emblematic of how voters in particular feel about the organization, like the Democratic Party brand. They feel like they've been told, we're fighting, we're fighting, we're fighting. Are we? Is this what fighting looks like? Doesn't seem like fighting to me.

Eric Ressler (17:26):
Hey friends. Real quick before we continue today's episode, I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy, but we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges. Let's talk at designbycosmic.com. Alright, back to today's conversation.

Eric Ressler (18:12):
Let's tie this into one of the other big topics that you're talking about a lot right now, which is just the change, the generational change really in work culture and what we're expected to do and what it means to show up at work. Whether you're working for a political candidate or a campaign in the nonprofit space, the social impact space, or just even in the corporate world. You've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about this. You just wrote a book about this. What do you think is behind the cultural shifts that are happening right now and what are some of the things that you're seeing and hearing as you were writing this book and just out there in the world

Amanda Litman (18:48):
When we're in charge is really about the fact that in 2030, the youngest boomer is going to hit retirement age. We are already seeing now per new glass door survey, millennials are now majority of all managers. Gen Z makes up one in 10 of all managers, fortune 500 boards and companies are passing off from Boomer, CEO to millennial, CEO. They're skipping over Gen X entirely. Sorry to Gen X. It is a lived reality that we are going to have a generational passing of power and I think it's going to look and feel very different. I think we've seen, of course not all millennials, not all boomers, not all gens, no generation is a monolith. Caveat aside, millennial leaders are showing up with a very different relationship to institutions, to mental health, to work-life balance, to transparency, to authenticity, to social media. They're thinking very differently about what is the responsibility of the workplace to the employer and what is responsibility, the leader to model that, to model the kind of behavior they want to see.

And a lot of this came out I think or got maybe accelerated, accelerated because of COVID. I think the shift to remote or flexible work environments probably would've happened eventually anyway, but COVID really put gas on that fire in a way that meant that all of a sudden you had all of these executives trying to manage teams remotely or trying to manage flexible teams and not really knowing how to do that. And those who have grown up online, who have been cultivating friendships over the course of group chats who have been on online forums, whether appropriate or not since we were teenagers or younger, who sort of understand which gifts are right to use in which moment and how do I think about emoji as part of my communication style and what does it mean to show up over a video chat and have executive presence. All of that comes more naturally, whether intentionally or not when you've been doing it your whole life. I think much of that along with all the other stuff I talked about is why millennials take power. You're going to see the downstream effects in the workplace be very different. And then we talked about up top when work sucks, less things open up more for you outside of it.

Eric Ressler (20:57):
On that note, some of the fallout from the last election cycle, there was a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking happening around, oh, the left doesn't understand new media, and that was the Achilles heel that lost the campaign. Without getting into all of that toxicity, I am curious to hear how you think about new media fitting to these causes to your cause in a way that is responsible and how much it is important to understand how culture is happening digitally if you're behind one of these missions right now.

Amanda Litman (21:29):
So funny you use the term new media because when I got started in politics 15 years ago, new media was the name of the digital department and it's not new anymore. It's not new at all. What I think is different right now, and this is a challenge in particular for organizations and I've been grappling with a lot, is that organizations cannot really further a mission a person can, a personality can. So perhaps an organization that has a really strong point of view or has a really compelling character may be able to advance an effort, but you kind of need a person. I think this was one of the challenges of 2024, which is that basically up until midway through the summer, we didn't have a great person to tell the story even after it got very messy very quickly for any number of reasons. I think a lot about one of the reasons run for something has been able to succeed up until this moment is because I have put myself out there as a person telling a story, but to operate a little bit like an influencer, I'm not an influencer, I'm an operative and an executive, it's not the same thing, but thinking about how to use my personal voice and my point of view to advance the organization's mission really thoughtfully.

Even the fact that I have a personal substack and I write about parenting and books and also politics. Yes, that's an intentional strategic choice as part of my communications efforts for the organization as well as for myself. If you don't have an executive who is comfortable putting themselves out there in that way, it can be really hard to break through in this media environment because in this media environment, you can't do a 45 minute podcast interview where you only talk about the organization or where you pivot it back to kitchen table issues. You have to be willing to be a person. We're in a moment where personality drives things, persona drives things. Brands don't really, unless they can find the persona within them. Does that make sense?

Eric Ressler (23:22):
It totally does. I'm curious to hear how you're thinking about this moment in culture, not even just politically, but if you're behind progressive causes, it's not been a fun year and if you are doing this work professionally, it's been especially tough.

Eric Ressler (23:40):
We work with a number of nonprofit organizations, some political organizations, some businesses who are very mission-driven and across the board people have felt, I've compared it at times to how it felt going into COVID where everything just became contracted and paralyzed, and I'm starting to see some motion away from that at this point. I imagine you've had a tough year in your own ways. Everyone has in a lot of ways. I'm curious to hear how do you keep going when things are hard and when things feel impossible or difficult? What is it that keeps you lit up and energized around the work?

Amanda Litman (24:18):
The work itself is really forward looking. I'm very lucky and grateful that I sort created a job for myself where I get to focus on the future. We've had more than 60,000 people sign up to raise their hands to say they want to run for office this year. That's more than we had in the entirety of Trump's first term. We're very close to it. We're going to probably exceed that number by September. It's huge, huge. Those are people willing to change their lives and change their careers to ultimately change the world, and I'm just so grateful that they're willing to reach out to run for something, for the help to do it. I'm also very lucky that I have two very rambunctious children who, as you know, kids keep you grounded whether you'd like it or not, and that it's very hard to think about the bad things happening in the world when you're toddler is screaming at you, mama, help me tuck in my monsters, and the baby is just giggling, giggling, giggling as second kids do.

And the final thing I would say is being really thoughtful about my news consumption. I read a lot of news. It's my job to read a lot of news, but I try pretty carefully to only drink the poison I have the antidote for. So I focus on stuff about the Democratic party, I focus on congressional stuff, the races we work on. I read a lot about New York City politics because as a New York City voter, I can do something about it, but if you try and drown yourself in the flood of information every day, you will never catch your head above water. And so being really careful, it's actually okay to not know everything going on at all times as long as the things that you do know about that you can take action on you do.

Eric Ressler (25:51):
My podcast co-host Jonathan Hicken, who's an executive director at nonprofit, has described this as knowing your sphere of influence and acting within that. And I think that is an interesting tie into what you're doing and with Rome for something because it's been really kind of like a seed sowing organization in the sense of coming down ticket up and growing off of that. How did you first come up with that strategy and how does that tie into your philosophy on this work? So

Amanda Litman (26:21):
I worked for Hillary for two years, got wrenching about a week after election day. I started hearing from people I'd gone to high school and college with, Hey Amanda, I'm a public school teacher in Chicago. I'm thinking about running for office. If I want to do this, who do I call? What do I do? And at the time, this was November, 2016, if you were young and you wanted to do more than vote and more than volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would take your call. That to me felt like the symptom of really big problems both in the Democratic party and in our democracy. So I reached out to a whole bunch of people with an idea, what if we solve this problem? One of those folks became my co-founder, Ross Morales Ricko. We wrote a plan and we built a website and then we launched one for something on Trump's first inauguration day thinking it'd be really small thought we'd get a hundred people in the first year. Eight years later, 225,000 young people have raised their hands to say they want to run. We've helped elect more than 1500 across 49 states plus DC and there are, at this point in 2026, there will be dozens of people running for higher office, for Congress, for senate, for governor, for Secretary of State and treasurer who have come through our pipeline, who are I think the present and future leaders of both our party and our country. It's really exciting to see that pay off big time.

Eric Ressler (27:31):
Amanda, thank you so much for today. Before we wrap up, how would you like people to get in touch to support, to follow you? This is your time to plug anything and anything you want.

Amanda Litman (27:42):
So I am all over the internet, either Amanda Litman or Amanda, LITM, on all the various social media accounts I post too much. You can find me on substack amanda litman.substack.com, and you can get my book when we're in charge, which is Real Next Generation Guide to Leadership available wherever you get your books or on audiobook, ebook and hard.

Eric Ressler (28:02):
Awesome. Thank you so much, Amanda. This is great.

Amanda Litman (28:04):
Thanks Eric. This was fun.