Meet the Trainer: Jordan Berg Powers on Kindness, Strategy, and Why Progressives Are Right
A veteran organizer on leading with kindness, thinking in decades, and why your lived experience is your greatest asset on the ballot.
TL;DR
Stop trying to be a ruthless operator. It’s time for kindness and honesty as a long-term strategy for building relationships that actually move things forward.
Most organizers fail not from lack of effort but lack of strategy; setting clear, long term goals and measuring opportunity costs along the way separates out long-term power building from campaigns that stay busy.
Candidates from marginalized backgrounds bring irreplaceable perspective to office — and the barriers they face are worth preparing for specifically and deliberately.
Ever wondered who’s really behind our campaign training sessions?
At NDTC, our trainers are field organizers, campaign strategists, and longtime advocates who bring hard-earned experience into every session they lead.
Today, we’re introducing you to one of the experts you’ll find leading our trainings: Jordan Berg Powers. He’s a longtime political organizer and coalition builder based in Western Massachusetts, and one of NDTC’s trainers. We caught up with Jordan to talk about his path into political work, what he wishes he’d known earlier, and what he wants every new candidate to understand.
Here’s one of our favorite moments of Jordan. If you’re as addicted to his personality as he is to electoral work, head to @TrainDems on Instagram for more clips coming soon.
NDTC: You’ve spent a long time in this work. What’s one thing you wish you’d known at the start?
Jordan: I really wish I’d leaned more into who I am and my strengths. Early on, I spent a lot of time being told how to do the work by people who thought I needed to be more ruthless — more of a dealer, more of a player. And I really wish I’d spent less time listening to that and more time just being myself.
By the time I got to Mass Alliance, the things that made me successful were the things I try to be all the time: kindness, honesty, being collaborative, letting people in. In politics, information is currency, and people have an incentive to hoard it. But I’ve always been more myself when I’m trying to let people in rather than trade secrets. I wish I’d trusted that from the beginning.
NDTC: Is there a story that captures the moment you realized you could lead with kindness — and it would actually work?
Jordan: There was a legislator who had taken a bad vote, and my coalition wanted me to really let them have it. And I could have done that. But I really felt like what mattered was the relationship — communicating our disappointment, yes, but also preserving something long-term.
So instead of meeting them at the Statehouse, I said let’s get coffee a few blocks away. Let’s actually sit down and talk. And instead of playing the information game — who’s mad at you, what do your members think — I just leaned into values. I asked: how did you get here? Why did you make this decision?
And through that conversation, I actually learned a lot about what was happening behind the scenes — the pressures legislators face that they don’t usually share. By the end, we had built a real friendship. Instead of secrets and trades, we had a relationship where we’d communicate with each other before things happened. That’s the sweet spot.
NDTC: What mistakes do you see most often in newer organizers and candidates?
Jordan: Two things. First, people mistake being nice — going along to get along, being agreeable to someone’s face — for kindness. They’re not the same thing. You can have clear values and be honest and even confrontational, and still do it in a way that sees the whole human in front of you. You don’t have to be deferential to be kind.
Second — and this is the bigger one — most organizers don’t have a strategy. Almost everything I see is: we did it this way last year, or we’ve always done it this way. There’s rarely a clear plan for how you get from point A to point B.
When I was at Mass Alliance, I set a 10-year plan with really big, clear goals, and every year I asked: how does what I’m doing this year move me toward those goals? I got to our goals in eight years instead of ten. When you have a clear destination, things fall away — good ideas, worthwhile activities — because they’re not actually moving you forward. And it frees you up to be creative when something isn’t working, because you know what you’re measuring against.
NDTC: You led a training called “Black and On the Ballot,” which is specifically designed for candidates who face unique barriers to running. What made you want to teach it?
Jordan: When my mom turned 18, she couldn’t vote where she was at school. My grandfather was, as far as we know, the first Black trainer in the NFL. He showed up to a university after World War II with his GI bill money, and they created a workaround to keep him out of the doctoral program, so he got his PhD anyway. He also started one of the first support programs for disabled college students — one of his early students was Judy Heumann, who went on to lead the disability rights movement and is named in her autobiography.
I grew up with these stories. My grandmother was an organizer — one of the first Black women post-antebellum in the South to get a master’s degree. My grandfather always told me: wherever you are, lift people up.
So when I think about this training, it comes from that place. There is a unique experience to running for office as a person of color, and the world needs people with that lived experience at the table. Our society often tells marginalized people they’re not welcome, that they’re not a part of things. And I want to push back on that — and give candidates the practical tools to push back on it themselves.
NDTC: What are some of those practical tools?
Jordan: One of the things I talk about is how the media tries to “ghettoize” candidates of color — framing them as running as a Black candidate, signaling to their audience that this person will only represent Black people. It’s a way of turning a strength — lived experience, a perspective that actually allows you to see everyone — into a liability.
So I work with candidates on how to avoid that framing, how to stay on message: your lived experience is exactly what makes you the right person to represent everybody. We also talk about planning for racist incidents before they happen — not in the heat of the moment, when emotions are running high, but in a calm space where you can think through your response in advance.
And we just talk about the full reality of running as a person of color, as a woman, as an LGBTQIA+ candidate, as a person with a disability. It’s a different experience. It’s worth naming, and it’s worth preparing for.
NDTC: What do you tell new candidates who feel overwhelmed by how big all of this is?
Jordan: I always think about this thing from theater [Jordan identifies as theater kid-adjacent]: nobody knows how it all comes together, but somehow on the night, it does. The set’s not finished, nobody totally knows their lines — and then it all comes together.
Electoral work is addicting for a reason. You take a small action and you get feedback almost immediately. You knock on thirty doors over the course of an afternoon, and within days people are talking about it — at the grocery store, on social media. In the corporate world, you can take a small action and wait years for results. Here, the feedback loop is fast. That’s exciting. It means you can learn, adjust, and keep going.
So my advice is: have big, clear goals, take the next small step in front of you, and trust that it’ll come together.
NDTC: You have a background in international development and studied in London. Did that shape how you see American politics?
Jordan: The most formative experience was actually in South Africa. Studying apartheid, I learned about the mechanics of how you maintain power over a vast majority — divide and conquer, controlling information, restricting education, creating tiers of opportunity. The white population was largely kept uneducated, because knowledge threatened the regime. TV came late, and it did a lot to undo apartheid, because people started seeing what was actually happening. In the end, apartheid was voted out by the very people who had held power.
My master’s thesis was on the power of language — why governments that want to stay in power and don’t care about killing people can still be stopped by the language of human rights. Just words on paper. But those words set something off at our core. They name what we believe about ourselves.
I’ve believed my whole life that our beliefs — why we hold them, how we hold them, and how we can mobilize them for change — are the core assets of this work.
Jordan Berg Powers trains Democrats with NDTC, and is currently a PhD student in Western Massachusetts.
Early in this conversation, Jordan talked about how information functions as currency in politics — and how people often have an incentive to hoard it. That’s exactly what NDTC works to disrupt. Every training, every course, and every resource we offer is completely free, always. The knowledge Jordan has spent a career earning — on strategy, on running as a candidate of color, on building coalitions that last — is available to anyone who shows up.
To catch him in action, sign up for an upcoming NDTC training at TrainDems.org
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