Jake Schlachter

Jake Schlachter is the founder and executive director of We Own It, an organizing nonprofit that supports member-owners to protect their democratically-owned electric utilities and credit unions from unscrupulous and self-interested takeovers by management -- "coup defense in small democracies" as I've been describing it this year.

I took my first two-day training in Public Narrative in 2012 and three-day training on the Ganz/LCN community organizing framework in 2013, and have been using both and training other folks on them ever since. At We Own It, we partnered with Leading Change Network from 2017 to 2020 to lead several nine-month national organizing fellowship programs modelled on Marshall's "Leadership, Organizing, and Action" remote course. In 2023 and 2024, I graduated from LCN's Public Narrative and Community Organizing Coaches Training Programs, which not only leveled up my training abilities, but also provoked me to start thinking deeply about how we welcome newcomers to the framework, and how our efforts to train organizers and coaches might be scaled up.

In February 2025, when Elon Musks's DOGE seized control of the US Treasury, I dropped everything to join current and former federal workers in defending our democracy from illegal destruction - "the coup in our big democracy." I've been organizing with and training civil service members since. The Democracy Teams Initiative was born out of partnership with organizers from USAID and the AmeriCorps alumni network to think about how to build organizing training infrastructure that the pro-democracy movement could then build on top of. I'd like to thank Lacey, Mike, Dominique, Randall, Jess, Blaine, Caitlin, Van, Ro, Kel, Laura, Amy, Shannon, Jeremy, Melanie, and many others whose collaboration and moral support made our first pilot happen and guaranteed that there would be a second.