Amanda Litman on How Real Change Happens
Amanda Litman on the generational handoff, sustainable fundraising, and why better work creates better citizens.
Listen to the full interview below, or find it on YouTube or your Favorite Podcast App.
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 helped more than 1,500 of them win.
And 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?
Full Interview
Eric Ressler: Amanda, thanks for joining me today.
Amanda Litman: Thank you for having me, Eric.
Eric Ressler: To start, I’d love to hear how you think about social change in this moment. Not just politics, but broadly. In your view, what’s the most effective path to creating the change we need?
Amanda Litman: I think there are lots of different avenues for social change, which sounds like a mealy-mouthed answer, but I think you need all of 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 business leaders can have a really big way to make a difference in people's lives. I had a book come out in May about called When We're In Charge, about people leading differently, and one of the arguments I make in the book is that if work sucks less, it creates more time for people to be better partners, parents, friends, citizens, community members, and that 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: You’ve written about “casual hosting” on Substack, and it really stuck with me. I’m also a parent of young kids, and I’ve seen my social life shrink because of it. How did you come to this practice, and what has it meant for you?
Amanda Litman:
So like most good things in my life, it's because of my husband. 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.
We were at that point still in the newborn trenches, and he was listening to some podcast 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.
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 unimaginable. 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 at our home every Saturday in 2025. And I thought this was absolutely insane. I was like, alright 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 times.
Once or twice we did it on Sunday — for 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 the hardest thing to do I have found as an adult, especially as an adult with little kids.
Eric Ressler: I’ve been thinking a lot about how digital culture shapes real-world connection. We’re in a strange moment—the platforms are shifting, the promise of connection often feels hollow, and polarization is everywhere. How do you navigate that landscape and still build authentic relationships?
Amanda Litman: 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. So I think about how I'm 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, I try to remember to answer it later. If I get an email, I try to work through my inbox really quick.
If I get a DM — not a point of pride necessarily — but I know how frustrating it is to be on the other side of that where you send the text and it never gets answered and then you're like, well, do I double text? Do I triple text? They actually don't want to talk to me at all. It's never personal, but it feels personal. So I'm careful when people are extending bids for connection to try and take them and return that as much as I can. It's so hard though. It's so hard.
Eric Ressler: It is hard. One of the things making this so hard is just the sheer volume of information each of us is exposed to as a normal human being in our modern culture. It's unreasonable. It's incongruent with our psychology and our capacity as humans. As a leader of a movement, of a nonprofit, of an organization, how do you think about actually growing your reach in a meaningful way to make your mission come true?
Amanda Litman: 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 5 o'clock. Here are three Saturdays that are available. Which of these works for you? If not those three, how about these three? Now, 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.
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 intuitive, but you'd be surprised — maybe you wouldn't — how many times you get an email and think, I don't know what you're asking me to do here. 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: Yeah, I mean, this is the "hey, can I pick your brain" kind of email that you might get, right?
Amanda Litman: I hate that, which I feel bad because sometimes people send me those. I've written — in the book, in Substack, whatever — don't pick my brain. Ask me a specific question and 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: 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. I've been thinking a lot about fundraising tactics, more from the nonprofit space, but also in the political world. Fundraising has become tragically transactional and broken. I see this on both sides of the aisle — I get text messages from every side you can imagine. No one's winning there, in my opinion. There are rare exceptions.
Can we do this in a more constructive, authentic way, but still raise the funds we need to? We're in a moment where funding is falling short for a lot of social impact organizations — fallout from federal funds evaporating, USAID being spun down. Many causes we work with are not only short on funds; some lost funding out of the blue with no planning. Fundraising is more competitive than it's ever been.
How are you thinking about fundraising in your world and, more broadly, how can we bring people together for these movements in a way that's constructive — not extractive or transactional?
Amanda Litman: I've been thinking a lot about this because my original career entry point was in digital fundraising. My first job was doing online fundraising for Barack Obama's presidential campaign in 2012. I did the same thing in 2014. Then I ran Hillary Clinton's email program, which was asking people for money and to volunteer and engage in other ways — primarily grassroots support. I remember in 2012 running an experiment on our email list testing, was there such a thing as too much email?
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? What we found in that experiment — this was 2012, 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.
We were thoughtful and careful about the tactics we used as part of those emails. We were intentional about making emails sound like the voice they were coming from. We thought about treating supporters with respect. Our guiding ethos was to never treat the list like an ATM. Over the decades since then, people and programs have internalized "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 email people for money regularly because we're doing work that deserves to be funded, but not every time, not every day. I am rigorous about the kinds of things I approve. Sometimes we do things and I'm like, we need to scale that back next time.
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. I can't burn those bridges.
Campaigns have a very different mindset, and nonprofit groups can have a very different mindset. One of the tensions is that if you aren't putting your foot to the fire for your small-dollar fundraising — email, social, text — the money has to come from somewhere else. And right now, it's not. Major money — foundations, institutions, major donors — is also not really moving in a meaningful way.
So we're at 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. It's a big conversation among the Democratic left and the broader nonprofit sector: how do you do this in a way that sustains the work and the relationship?
Eric Ressler: 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. I always chalked it up to this: 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 — afford to burn some bridges if that means they might win. I don't think that's ever been true for nonprofits. And I think that mindset, to your point, has spilled over into the nonprofit space — fake urgency, negativity bias — tactics that make me feel icky, even from candidates or groups I support. Their reputation is tarnished because of how they're fundraising.
Is that coming back to bite us now? This decade-plus of fundraising that way, in a way that's tarnished the brand, where a lot of supporters feel like ATM machines?
Amanda Litman: 100% — if you've been telling 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? It feels like we've been gaslit. I also think many of the tactics that many of these organizations and organizers are using — it's just lying, and I don't think there's ever a good reason to lie to your supporters. The 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 "supporter record" — like, oh, you haven't given yet this year. I think that's fine within reason. There are ways to do that respectfully. But the 400X match happening today, deadline tonight, surge the money to XYZ, and trying to raise money off a thing not related to your work — no. It's shitty.
It treats people like crap and they deserve better than that, and it's emblematic of how voters in particular feel about the organization — like the Democratic Party's 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: Let's tie this into one of the other big topics you're talking about a lot right now — the generational change in work culture. What do you think is behind the cultural shifts happening right now? What are you seeing and hearing as you're writing this book and out there in the world?
Amanda Litman: In 2030 the youngest boomer is going to hit retirement age. We are already seeing now, per a new Glassdoor survey, millennials are now a majority of all managers. Gen Z makes up one in ten 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 about to have a generational passing of power.
And I think it's going to look and feel very different.
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 the responsibility of the workplace to the employer and the responsibility of the leader to model that — to model the kind of behavior they want to see.
A lot of this got accelerated because of COVID. The shift to remote or flexible work probably would have happened eventually anyway, but COVID put gas on the fire in a way that meant all of a sudden you had executives trying to manage teams remotely or flexibly and not really knowing how.
Those who have grown up online — cultivating friendships over group chats, on online forums since we were teenagers — understand which gifs are right to use in which moment; think about emoji as part of communication style; and what it means to show up over a video chat and have executive presence. That comes more naturally when you've been doing it your whole life. As Millennials take power, you'll see downstream effects in the workplace be very different — and when work sucks less, things open up more outside of it.
Eric Ressler: On that note, some of the fallout from the last election cycle — there was a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking around "the left doesn't understand new media" and that was the Achilles heel that lost the campaign. Without getting into that toxicity, how do you think about new media fitting into these causes, to your cause, in a responsible way? How important is it to understand how culture is happening digitally if you're behind one of these missions right now?
Amanda Litman: 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. It's not new anymore.
What’s different now — and a challenge for organizations — is that organizations cannot really further a mission. A person can. A personality can. Perhaps an organization with a strong point of view or a compelling character can advance an effort, but you kind of need a person.
I think one reason Run for Something has been able to succeed up till this moment is because I have put myself out there as a person telling a story. I've had to operate a little bit like an influencer, a non-influencer. I'm an operative and executive — it's not the same thing.
But I think about how to use my personal voice and 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 — 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. You can't do a 45-minute podcast interview where you only talk about the organization or pivot 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 — unless they can find the persona within them.
Eric Ressler: I've compared this year at times to how it felt going into COVID, where everything became contracted and paralyzed. I'm starting to see some motion away from that. I imagine you've had a tough year in your own ways. Everyone has. How do you keep going when things are hard and feel impossible? What keeps you energized around the work?
Amanda Litman: The work itself is really forward-looking. I'm lucky and grateful that I 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 probably going to exceed that number by September. It's huge. Those are people willing to change their lives and careers to ultimately change the world, and I'm grateful they're willing to reach out to Run for Something for help to do it.
I'm also lucky that I have two very rambunctious children who keep you grounded whether you like it or not. It's hard to think about the bad things happening in the world when your toddler is screaming, "Mama, help me tuck in my monsters," and the baby is just giggling as second kids do. The final thing I would say is being really thoughtful about my news consumption.
I read a lot of news — it's my job — but I try to only drink the poison I have the antidote for. I focus on the Democratic Party, congressional stuff, all the races we work on. I read a lot about New York City politics because as a NYC voter I can do something about it.
If you drown yourself in the flood of information every day, you will never catch your head above water. It's okay not to 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: My podcast co-host Jonathan Hicken, who's an executive director at a nonprofit, has described this as knowing your sphere of influence and acting within that. I think that's an interesting tie-in to what you're doing with Run for Something, because it's been a seed-sowing organization — 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?
Amanda Litman: I worked for Hillary for two years — gut-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?" At the time — November 2016 — if you were young and you wanted to do more than vote and volunteer, there was nowhere you could go that would take your call. That felt like a symptom of big problems in the Democratic Party and our democracy. So I reached out to a bunch of people with an idea: what if we solve this problem?
One of those folks became my co-founder, Ross Morales-Rochetto. We wrote a plan and built a website and then launched Run for Something on Trump's first inauguration day, thinking it'd be small. We thought we'd get 100 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 1,500 across 49 states plus DC. At this point in 2026, there will be dozens running for higher office — Congress, Senate, governor, secretary of state, treasurer — who have come through our pipeline. They are the present and future leaders of our party and our country. It's exciting to see that pay off.
Eric Ressler: 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 you want.
Amanda Litman: I am all over the internet — either Amanda Litman or Amanda Lit — on social. I post too much. You can find me on Substack: amandalitman.substack.com. And you can get my book, When We're In Charge, which is a next generation's guide to leadership. Available wherever you get your books — audiobook, ebook, hardback.
Eric Ressler: Awesome. Thank you so much, Amanda. This was great.
Amanda Litman: Thanks, Eric. This was fun.
Key Takeaways
The fourth lever is people. Durable change comes from distributed leadership—not savior narratives.
We’re mid–generational transfer. Millennial/Gen Z leaders are rewriting norms around mental health, transparency, and work-life boundaries.
Culture is infrastructure. If work sucks less, people have more capacity to be better partners, parents, neighbors—and citizens.
Play the long game. Treat supporters with respect. Don’t burn bridges. Sustainable fundraising > panic-driven tactics.
Leaders must be people, not just brands. A clear personal voice can advance a mission—when used thoughtfully and authentically.
Act within your sphere of influence. Curate inputs, protect energy, and take action where you can actually move the needle.
Democracy is built locally. Recruiting and electing everyday people to local office compounds into real power over time.
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