Steve Dooley

Steve serves as Director of Organizing for CPD/A. In this role, he leads CPD/A’s programs to build grassroots power at the scale and depth required to win transformative societal change.

Steve brings nearly 20 years of experience in community organizing to this work. After engagement in campus and anti-war organizing, Steve was trained in community organizing at ACORN where he led organizing drives in Washington, DC and where he drove campaigns and organized Hurricane Katrina survivors as director of ACORN’s offices in Dallas/Ft. Worth.

At CPD/A and CPD/A’s predecessor organization, the Leadership Center for the Common Good, Steve has served as Mid-Atlantic Regional Director and Director of Partnerships. In these roles, Steve led key work in CPD/A’s early days to cohere and support CPD/A’s network of community organizing groups. This included work to help organize CPD/A’s first major national gathering of community leaders, the People’s Convention. He also provided foundational organizational development support to key grassroots organizations throughout the country and helped advance CPD/A’s State Power Project, a $20 million initiative to strengthen and expand community organizing infrastructure in strategic states. Steve also launched CPD/A’s climate justice work, driving first-time climate funding and support to a set of community organizations that are now leaders on efforts to address the climate crisis. Throughout Steve’s time at CPD/A he has also led major direct action protests, serving as the lead organizer of a 3,000 person march and series of direct action protests at CPD/A’s first national convention, coordinating the organizing of a 10,000 person march in Philadelphia days after the Trump inauguration, and, in front of the White House in 2017, co-leading a major rally, march, and the first network-wide CPD/A action with civil disobedience arrests. In response to Hurricane María, Steve also co-founded, helped lead, and helped raise over $7 million for the María Fund, a Puerto Rican-run immediate relief and long-term fund that supports frontline grassroots initiatives that organize for change in Puerto Rico.