Today, GAIN Power and Management Personnel Xchange (MPX) announce a strategic partnership to build the workforce infrastructure progressive campaigns and organizations need to hire, retain, and sustain talented professionals. Learn more about this partnership here.

To mark this launch, GAIN Power Founder and CEO Amy Pritchard and MPX President and Founder Joe Lestingi co-authored the following piece on why this work matters — and what it will take to build a movement that can win consistently.

Progressive politics don’t have passion problems.

We have infrastructure problems.

Across the country, campaigns and advocacy organizations struggle to hire and retain experienced staff — especially the mid-level managers and operators who turn strategy into execution. The result is predictable: higher turnover, thinner benches, and more institutional knowledge walking out the door after every cycle.

That is more than a staffing headache. It is a capacity problem. When the movement cannot retain a professional workforce, it becomes harder to build durable organizations, harder to defend gains, and easier for opponents to define progressive ideas before we do. A shallow bench does not just make campaigns messier. It makes outcomes more fragile.

For years, there was a clearer path into progressive campaign work. New staff learned through field programs, party roles, legislative offices, and coordinated campaigns. Over time, they built the skills and judgment to become the managers and mentors the next generation relied on.

That path weakened in the 2010s as valuable, local in-person training programs were scuttled, and it broke further in 2020. When the pandemic hit, campaigns shut down in-person operations and laid off thousands of staff. A whole cohort of field-trained talent is scattered. When the work returned, it came back more fragmented: shorter contracts, faster ramps, fewer mentors, and less continuity from one cycle to the next.

People do not leave this work because they stop caring. They leave because the system makes it too hard and expensive to keep caring.

After the 2022 cycle, Joe met with a young operative to talk through her next steps. She was talented, ambitious, and exactly the kind of person the movement should be fighting to keep. But she did not come from money, and she did not have a family safety net to carry her between cycles. Without affordable healthcare and a stable paycheck, she told us she was being pushed out.

She was headed to a corporate consulting firm — not because she stopped believing in progressive politics, but because she needed stability. Sitting at a bar, we flipped over a napkin and wrote down everything that made campaign life unsustainable: benefits, self-employment taxes, healthcare, retirement, and the financial credibility that often comes more easily with W-2 employment than 1099 contracting. She left the industry. That conversation helped spark the idea for a different model.

We cannot eliminate election cycles. But we can stop treating instability as inevitable.

That is why GAIN Power and Management Personnel Xchange (MPX) are partnering to strengthen the workforce infrastructure behind progressive campaigns and organizations. GAIN Power connects and prepares professionals for their next opportunity, and helps employers find their next all-star hire. MPX helps provide the stability that makes those careers sustainable — with professional employment services tailored to political and movement realities: W-2 employment options, payroll processing, benefits administration, and employment compliance support.

Together, that means professionals get more security, and employers get better access to talent. MPX supports portable benefits and continuity pathways so professionals can stay in the ecosystem without repeatedly starting over. Through MPX’s Professional Index Fund, the partnership can also provide a healthcare bridge to help professionals stay covered as they move between campaign cycles, contracts, and organizations.

GAIN Power helps turn that stability into momentum. By connecting professionals to their next role and helping employers identify and recruit qualified candidates, GAIN keeps talent circulating within the movement rather than leaking out to sectors that offer greater predictability.

This matters for employers because campaigns and organizations perform better when they can hire faster, retain longer, and spend less time rebuilding the basics. It matters to professionals because they should be able to build long-term careers in democracy work without gambling on healthcare with every contract renewal.

And it matters for the movement as a whole. If we want to win consistently — not just when the political climate breaks our way — we need a deeper, more professional bench. We need a system where people earn opportunities based on their experience, talent, and skills, not because they have financial support or a personal network to survive instability.

The MPX and GAIN Power partnership will not solve every challenge in progressive talent development. But it is a concrete step toward something the movement has long needed: a workforce infrastructure that matches our ambitions.

If you are an employer, build stability into your staffing model, not just your messaging. If you are a professional, do not accept instability as the price of admission. And if you care about winning, recognize that talent retention is not a side issue. It is a campaign strategy.

Learn more at gainpower.org/mpx.