Last week, a historic number of women were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. But it’s not those headline-making victories—like that of Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress—that Erin Vilardi, the founder and CEO of VoteRunLead, a nonprofit that trains women to run for office, is most proud of. It’s the smaller campaigns that brought change on a local level.
“There were these stories about women ousting people who were highly discriminatory, and it’s so inspiring,” she says. One such story happened in-house: VoteRunLead’s national training director, Faith Winter, is a Colorado state representative-elect who ran against her alleged harasser—who himself faced accusations from 11 other women. “She ended up running for his seat [in the Colorado state legislature] and replaced him,” says Vilardi.
That’s exactly the kind of movement Vilardi hoped VoteRunLead would spark. Her history with the organization goes back to 2004 when she helped found it as part of The White House Project, which worked to increase female representation in institutions, businesses, and government. When that shuttered in 2014, Vilardi turned VoteRunLead into a standalone organization. Since then, she’s helped more than 33,000 women run for office and is planning to train another 30,000 women by 2020.
Unlike other organizations that help raise money for or mobilize volunteers around candidates, VoteRunLead is all about providing the how to women who want to run. Via a training methodology called Run As You Are, the group teaches women the hard skills around campaigning, fundraising, and building a team. “We believe that women have the skills and talents already to run—we just help transfer them into the political realm,” Vilardi says. “They’re learning how to craft a narrative, how to deal with sexism and harassment, and all these practical actions that speed up your political literacy.”
Part of that training is one- and three-day in-person training sessions at WeWork locations across the country (Vilardi and her staff of six are based in New York City’s WeWork Harlem); since the 2016 election, VoteRunLead has been active in 25 cities. The organization plans to expand to 14 WeWork cities next year.
In 2018, 80 percent of VoteRunLead alumni advanced in the primaries, and 50 percent went on to win. On Nov. 12, Vilardi celebrated those wins at VoteRunLead’s Women & Power 2018 conference at WeWork Times Square in New York. “We really see this as just the beginning of women claiming their roles in government,” she says.
Women from all over the country attended what Vilardi deemed “Radical Conversations With Barrier-Breaking Women,” including New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, whose name has been floated as a possible 2020 presidential candidate; one of Glamour’s College Women of the Year, who is planning a campaign for school board; and Lauren Underwood, the 32-year-old congresswoman-elect from Illinois and the youngest African-American woman to serve in Congress (and the first VoteRunLead alumna to be elected to Congress).
Underwood and Ilhan Omar both attended VoteRunLead trainings. Ilhan did so beginning in 2014 and became a certified VoteRunLead trainer, then won her seat in the state before running for Congress. Underwood attended the Minneapolis training in 2017; during her campaign, her staff viewed VoteRunLead video resources.
As high-profile as the congressional campaigns of those women were, VoteRunLead also helped train Gerri Cannon, one of three transgender elected state representatives; Kim Norton, the first female mayor of Rochester, Minnesota; and Brenda Lopez, the first Latina elected to the Georgia State Assembly. “We really specialize in local and state offices,” says Vilardi. “And we’re nonpartisan—we’re not going to turn a woman away who wants to get a political education.”
In fact, the organization is turning its focus to local elections, like the 19,000 school-board seats that are up in 2019, and building their state-representative benches. “There are only so many hundreds of federal seats,” says Vilardi. “But there are 519,682 other seats across the country.”
For now, VoteRunLead is riding the wave of positivity that came from the recent elections. “I really think people felt really positive about seeing these local wins for women, that it wasn’t just this national handful of women,” says Vilardi. “There’s a wave of diverse women underneath them coming up and running locally. Everyone keeps calling it an ocean, an ocean of women that’s ready to keep going and keep running.”
Erin Geiger Smith contributed to this report.
