In the beginning, New Working Majority was a consulting shop of one–and one of my very first contracts as a consultant was with Make the Road Pennsylvania/Make the Road Action in PA (MRPA/MRAPA). The director of MRAPA at that time hired me to come and do weekly staff training and coaching with his small but mighty staff team of seven, most of whom had been hired from the organization’s membership base. Some of that involved working through individual organizing challenges, and some of it involved doing train-the-trainer work that would enable those organizers to lead workshops and trainings with members.
After I had been working with MRAPA for a little over a year, the director left suddenly, and Maegan Llerena, who had recently become the Deputy Director, asked me to stay on and continue working with them. Over the course of the next six months, Maegan moved into an interim director role, and was eventually hired as the permanent Executive Director of Make the Road PA/Make the Road Action in PA.
Maegan and I went on to work together, with me in a coaching role, for six more years. Over the course of that time, my engagement with MRPA went through many transformations, as Maegan was able to hire more staff. When we first started working together, I was the person in the room who had the most political experience–so I had more to do in preparing the staff for electoral work. In 2021, Maegan hired Diana Robinson as the Civic Engagement/Political Director for the organizations, and I stepped back from working directly with political staff and started coaching her.
In her earliest days as the permanent ED, Maegan had confided to me that she only planned to stay in that role for five years. That what she saw as her role was to build the organization to the point where it could survive her leaving, and that she would not be leaving her successor the disorganized place she had inherited. Together, over that five year period, we worked to see her vision through.
As the organization moved through the pandemic and grew larger, Maegan and I spent more time working on internal structure–building teams of different levels of management, holding retreats so that their staff could reflect, build camaraderie, and plan for future fights. And as the staff developed, I stepped further and further back from doing things myself, and more and more into an advisory role.
I’ve now had the experience, multiple times, of working with a group of young organizers to design and pull off meetings or events, where the director of the organization came to me after and said, “I felt so useless, I didn’t have to do anything except show up!,” but the first person to say it to me was Maegan. There is nothing useless about having developed your people to be able to act without you.
That’s a principle I’ve held tight onto for my whole career, and it is one I am glad to be able to pass on to others, as I continue to move in my Emerita era.
I ended my coaching with Make the Road PA at the end of 2024, with a triumphant closing of Maegan’s leadership of the organization. She has passed on the reins to Diana, as well as Patty Torres (the former Organizing Director), and now MRPA has co-Executive Directors, as the organization’s permanent staff is more than 30.
Today, I’m happy to announce that Maegan has moved into a national leadership role, as April 1st was her first day as the Co-Executive Director of Make the Road States/Make the Road Action. I can’t wait to see what she’ll do in that role, in this critical moment in our country’s history.
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