The Contest for the Working Class: Organizing Rural Communities

media release: UW Havens Wright Center hybrid in-person (Room 8417) and online event. If you would like to attend online, you must register in advance.

When he was 19, George Goehl walked into a soup kitchen to eat. Four years later, he left a community organizer and has been organizing ever since. He has run campaigns to take on the biggest banks in the world, the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Secretary of the Treasury, and the Deputy Commissioner of Rodent Control for the City of Chicago. In 2017, he led the largest progressive rural organizing program in the country, culminating in 280,000 deep-canvass conversations with swing voters in the lead up to the 2020 election. He is the author of Fundamentals of Organizing, and under contract with One World of Penguin Random House for a book about how to bring more working-class white people into the progressive coalition. Today he is focused on organizing working-class people unlikely to be reached by today’s progressive sector, including rural people, the elderly, working class moms who are not progressive, moderate Chicanos in the Southwest, and beyond. Because if we want nice things – we need an aligned working class. George’s organizing has been covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Rolling Stone.