Executive Director Jane Fleming Departs After Three Years of Building YDA
As you know, over these past three years I have had the honor of working for YDA. I say honor because there are few professional accomplishments that I have been part of that have been more rewarding to me personally, or to the many issues and concerns I know we both share about our nation’s future.
For any organization to grow it must take steps to continually renew itself and, as such, find a time to transition its leadership. I am pleased to announce that the time for such a change is right for both YDA as an organization and for me personally.
Therefore, starting March 12th we will have a new Executive Director in place which we will announce later this week. I hope you will join me in my excitement at having them take YDA to the next level. Chris Gallaway, the YDA President, and the other officers are on board until our national elections this July.
Let me take this opportunity to say that the next level will be building on an incredibly successful last few years we have enjoyed. Together, with our officers, national and state staff members, local chapter leaders and donors, we have grown YDA into a powerful political organization that is building strong chapters and a solid bloc of young Democratic voters.
- We took YDA from an organization of only one person to a staff of five in the national office, four state Executive Directors, and hundreds of staff on the ground during elections.
- We increased our budget from $70,000 a year to an average of $1 million a year which includes a major growth of small donor revenue from just $10,000 to now almost $50,000 annually.
- We expanded from 32 chartered YDA state and US territory chapters to 46 and added hundreds more on a community level bringing the total to over 1,200 local chapters.
- We grew our email list from 15,000 to over 150,000 subscribers.
- We broadened our quarterly conferences and national convention to be true partnerships with host states. These meetings now include in-depth training sessions and materials for YDA members to bring home to their communities and replicate on a local level.
- We professionalized our internal systems and policies and created a new Board of Directors, which includes YDA elected officers, to provide strategic guidance and oversight for our growing organization.
- We joined, as the only youth Democratic group, the America Votes table in order to coordinate our field efforts with other progressive partners.
- We developed a new “look” for YDA which includes press and fundraising materials as well as a website that lists all of our events, blogs, YDA manuals and research on youth voting. Our website also includes a new online store where chapters and members can buy Young Dem gear.
- Since 2004, we contacted over 450,000 young people in 14 states with our Alliance peer-to-peer field program resulting in a 12% increase in the youth vote.
Our most notable success is that together we shifted the national dialogue about young voters. Before 2004, conventional wisdom held that young people don’t vote and can’t be counted on as a bloc for Democrats. Through YDA’s groundbreaking Alliance peer-to-peer program and partnerships with allied youth groups, we fundamentally changed that perception. The attention is finally shifting to recognize the power of young voters. We are the winning difference for Democrats. The YDA Alliance program and the work our chapters do on the ground will continue to shape and lead the Party.
All in all, I am excited to be handing over a fiscally healthy, professional and robust organization to a new leader and look forward to seeing many of you in my new role as Executive Director of the Young Voter Pac as well as in my new home in Nebraska. Please feel free to email me at jane@yda.org (until April 12, 2006) or jane@youngvoterpac.org.
Democratically yours,
Jane Fleming
PS: Take a look at our new fundraising materials and let us know what you think. YDA fundraising folder.pdf and yda fundraising brochure.pdf
