Conversations with the CTGCA Team: Executive Director Susannah Delano
CTGCA Executive Director Susannah Delano discusses what led her to work in politics, how she talks about privilege with her son, and her hopes for California.
This interview has been edited for brevity. CTGCA Volunteer Jessica Sass interviewed members from our team to learn about their roots in the gender equality movement. To learn more about our Interview Series and read other pieces like this, please click here.
When you were a little girl, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I always said and thought that I wanted to be a writer or a designer, and have always kind of been in artistic circles and had an artistic outlet or two of my own. But when I look back, I really see that the thing I got most excited about throughout adolescence and young adulthood was social movements. I studied them, I read and watched anything I could get my hands on that illustrated how they unfolded, and what they won. At the time, it didn’t come easily to say, “I want to be in a movement that gets justice done,” but that’s definitely something that was very present for me really early on. I wished I was in the ’60s. I would always look and hope for signs that various causes I was passionate about were about to “catch fire” and take off in that way. I feel like it’s finally happening.
Was there a specific “aha moment” or someone in your life that influenced your decision to be involved in movements?
A few things — my parents were activists, so I grew up watching them. They were both ministers with the United Church of Christ, which is kind of a liberal protestant denomination- the same as President Obama, Oprah, and Howard Dean. As an only child, I was outnumbered by clergy in my own home.
So they were activists in the ’60s, first and foremost, around civil rights. My mom actually took a bus from Michigan to the original March on Washington, and she registered voters as part of Mississippi Freedom Summer. Then my parents both got involved in the anti-war movement, as well as the women’s movement. It was really a time when a lot of people who were becoming ministers were looking to church as a vehicle for promoting a beloved community social justice vision. So they basically bounced from small Midwestern city to larger Midwestern city, trying to combine their social justice goals with what they were preaching, and I would watch them write their sermons and run committee meetings and usher refugee families through their networks. They were also doing a lot around nuclear disarmament and deliberately interracial coalition work in Michigan, where they were both born and raised, and where I lived until I was 6 years old. So that was definitely a part of my awareness growing up.
I had the opportunity to go on a two week trip to South Africa when I was 14, and that was really a pivotal trip for me. I always say I think whatever you were doing around that age ends up being incredibly core to who you become. Apartheid had ended and Mandela was free, but he had not yet been elected President. So it was a very unstable, transitional time in South Africa’s history when we weren’t quite sure what was going to happen. And it was a church-sponsored trip of 12 women from all different races and geographies throughout the U.S. I was the youngest and the oldest was 82, and we went throughout the country talking to people and groups who had played a big role in bringing the apartheid system down and hearing their first-person testimony about what it had been like to live in that system and what it took to change things. So we met with labor unions, we met with the ANC, we visited schools for girls, we met with Black Sash, which was mainly a white woman-led group against apartheid. We met with Ellen Kuzwayo in Soweto, and stayed overnight in the YWCA there. So that was really foundational for me to see and meet the people who were instrumental in massive systemic change, their allies, and specifically those who rose from the most targeted, oppressed communities to the new national government post-Apartheid.
Were your dreams or ambitions at all modified because of limited opportunities for your gender, race, abilities, sexuality, religion, etc.?
I have a lot of privilege as a white cisgender woman that has undoubtedly shaped my path at every turn and continues to. I grew up with a certain degree of thinking I could do anything I wanted that I don’t take for granted, and a lot of people don’t get that feeling. I was a really energetic and inquisitive kid, and I definitely experienced early on being shut out of groups or plans where a girl’s voice or a woman’s voice was not taken seriously. My parents were committed feminists who shared the driving and the diaper changing and dressed me kind of unisex growing up, so I definitely had some paths open to me there in terms of my identity that many did not. All my friends in high school were gay so I was up front and personal for their coming outs, and the shared trauma and hope of those times is part of my identity.
I think I also really wanted to be funny my whole life, and I always had this frustration as a young woman that women were not allowed to be funny in a lot of spaces, like your jokes don’t get laughed at, or they’re seen as kind of offensive. Socially, part of how I navigated becoming an adult was finding places where I was allowed to be funny.
Was there anyone in particular that you looked up to or that shaped your where you are today?
I have three people who were the most pivotal influences in my life. One of them was a friend that I made when I went to Cuba for a month when I was 18 or 19. He was a young man from San Francisco, and both of his parents had been in the Black Panther movement. We were both really into political theory but came from very different points of view. He was willing to spend the time and effort to really guide me in wrestling with race and power, my own privilege, the chasm between how most middle-class white folks experience those aspects of life vs. the way that many communities of color experience it, especially in lower-income areas. I’ve never seen the world the same since. He was hard on me, and consistent, and real. The older I get the more grateful I am to him for working with me so intensively — it was an act of grace and incredible patience in the face of what was undoubtedly my stubborn white liberal fragility, until I began to transform little by little. He put in the work of anti-racist teaching that is so often unfairly put exclusively on people of color to do, especially by liberals, and I try to pay it forward by taking that work on myself as often as I can. “Work in your own communities” as the Malcom X saying goes.
The second person was a woman I met while we were exchange students in Barcelona during high school. She was from Texas. She taught me a kind of body-positive feminism and vibrancy that my midwestern upbringing simply could not have provided. And at a pivotal time of life when you can get completely derailed as a woman if you can’t figure out how to be bold and comfortable in your own skin.
The third person is a professor I worked for throughout college, who actually taught the first undergraduate critical race theory course on “whiteness” in the US, in the late ’90s. I helped build the syllabus and worked on creating the course with him. He drew on pop culture a lot in all of his courses and was also a practicing clinical and forensic psychologist where I assisted as well. So his guidance and investment in me was formational. It helped me figure out how to bridge academia with artistic culture, radical thought with applied practice. He believed in me, and that was incredibly important as I became an adult.
What drew you to political work?
Well, it’s the family business [laughs]. My dad was the Indiana State Treasurer for the Jesse Jackson for President campaign in 1988, just as a volunteer in his spare time, so my parents were always paying attention to elections and engaged in community-based activism and advocacy. Both my parents were Planned Parenthood escorts when we lived in Indiana in the ’90s, a really fraught and violent time to be doing that work, especially as clergy members, and I took notice. My dad also volunteered with a group working to document housing discrimination- he would be the white guy who goes to rent an apartment and receives better treatment over potential renters of color. So that was kind of baked in for me, but honestly, I was so heady and intellectual as a kid, and as a young adult, I really thought I would just write and maybe stay in academia, but I caught the union bug on the heels of my first job out of college.
First though I went to work for a personal injury law firm, because I thought that I might want to go to law school. And it was terrible. It was just a horribly exploitative, ridiculous work setting in a downtown LA high rise where the legal secretaries were all getting paid $7.50 an hour. Some of them were undocumented, and the attorney and his wife would force them to work unpaid overtime and regularly threaten to call INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service). It was just awful, and that lit the fire in me to look at unions. [Editor’s note: Susannah clarified that this attorney has since been disbarred.]
That experience steered my career search more immediately towards values because it was just so intolerable- and the way they would treat and talk about the clients who were primarily Spanish speaking. At the time, I had some friends who were involved with HERE Local 11, which is now UNITE HERE, Local 11. And the head of the union was María Elena Durazo, who’s now State Senator and just became leader of the Legislature’s Latinx Caucus, and I had been able to hear her speak, and I was really inspired by her and a lot of union history in my own family — going back to being from Michigan, everybody was in the UAW or another union, and was first-generation immigrants mostly — so I was inspired by those friends of mine who were working for HERE, and I went for a job.
It never occurred to me to try and leverage any network I might have had to get a fancy job via connections right out of college, which I’m critical of myself for in retrospect, but also says something about my upbringing- we weren’t people who generally had or relied upon connections. I often tell the stories of the generations of women in my family going back, and what kinds of routes were open to us as women. One of my favorite stories is how my mom, Valedictorian of her small rural high school, accomplished and outstanding in every possible way you could be in Berrien County, Michigan — became the first in her family to go to college after she mustered up the courage to tell her guidance counselor that she wanted to, and he responded by tossing her the application to Michigan State. She went there and she’s done absolutely remarkable things her entire life, but come on, she probably could have gotten a free ride in the ivy league!
I used to contrast my own opportunities with hers, and they were far greater, but at the end of the day, I’m still critical of myself for not “thinking bigger” about where I could go and what I could do, simply because it didn’t dawn on me to aim higher in a more deliberate way. To leverage a network is not to resign yourself to becoming exactly like the people in that network. These days I’m often finding myself urging women, especially younger women, to be more calculated about the way they identify and leverage their networks. And I get to do that every single day at Close the Gap.
So out of college I also applied to work then at the ACLU, when they were gearing up to sue the school system statewide in California, and I wanted to be part of that, but I ended up getting a job at SEIU (Service Employees International Union) right as they were launching a countywide ballot initiative to get homecare workers past the minimum wage and get them health benefits. That led to eight years of me working for homecare workers all over the state.
Before I joined SEIU, I think I was political in some senses, but I didn’t pay attention to local politics. I didn’t think it was very relevant. I really thought it was about these bigger pieces coming together, anti-colonialism, anti-racism, anti-corporate control, smashing the patriarchy — this was around the time of Bush v. Gore. I was quoted in a WaPo article around that time as a student who “sports a bandana and a tattoo,” talking down on Ralph Nader of all people, I think for not being more aligned with communities of color. I did volunteer with No on Prop 38, which was a charter school prop, but I didn’t really pay attention to who was running at the local or state level. So it really was me finding my place at this union, and helping to put money into low-income women’s pockets by bargaining contracts and running organizing campaigns and trying to build power on their behalf.
What I learned there though, over my eight years, was just how incredibly important and relevant local and state politics are to the everyday lives of the very people who should have power. I go back to the woman that I met in South Africa when I was 14, Ellen Kuzwayo — she was a very respected community activist and social worker, but living in a township, reviled and imprisoned by her government, and to see that flip where all of a sudden, she’s in Congress, and she’s in charge, that’s what I wanted to do with the homecare workers I was working with — I want each one of these women who are giving their lives and working 48-hour shifts, taking care of kids with cerebral palsy and injured veterans, and have never gotten a break in their lives — I want them to be as close to Congress as I can get them, let alone get access to dental insurance and basic job protections. That power inversion was what I was interested in, but I came to see how both local and state politics were central to building that pathway. And we needed people in office — mostly County Supervisors and State Legislators — who saw the incredible wonder of our members’ lives and work, and were willing to fight for their dignity.
Towards the end of my time with SEIU, I was trying to arrange myself a role where I was only focused on politics and legislative action because that was what I was most excited about. I wanted to do more in terms of policy and politics, but I just couldn’t get out from under the responsibilities I had taken on over the years — bargaining contracts and being a regional manager — so this job came up, Public Affairs Director for Planned Parenthood Northern California, it was all policy and electoral work. This was something new and different within my spectrum of passions, and it allowed me to focus.
Were there any barriers or challenges you encountered to sustaining the momentum in your passion?
There were definitely barriers. One was watching the cycle of poverty both in the union and outside, let alone neighborhoods I grew up in. Even if we were able to raise wages from $7.50/hour to $9.50/hour, life is still far from transformed. We have to get up and fight again, defend everything we’ve won, every year. And just listening to the life stories of so many of the member leaders that I worked with, you get to this feeling of kind of irrelevance, like “What’s it all worth if we can’t get the biggest county above a certain wage, what good is it all?” Ditto for Planned Parenthood, and the constant struggle to keep basic rights and access for all people, especially the most vulnerable. My fabulous boss at Planned Parenthood, her go-to quote was from Coretta Scott King: “Struggle is a never-ending process. Freedom is never really won. You earn it and win it in every generation.” It gets old. But who else is gonna do it?
We played a lot of defense during those years, much of which was against the Schwarzenegger administration. Over and over, they’d start the year by proposing a 35% pay cut and a cut in hours which also affected the seniors and people with disabilities who counted on those hours to be able to stay in their homes. And it was just brutal every single year on top of the other bills we were trying to get passed or stop. There was definitely fatigue, to just keep going no matter what — you’ll win some, you’ll lose some. But that’s why it matters- for the wins.
How did your time with Planned Parenthood get you closer to working with Close the Gap?
Reproductive justice is obviously core to Close the Gap’s commitment to progressive values. I worked with CTGCA a couple of times when I was at Planned Parenthood. Janet [Cook] and Betsy [Cotton] would call me every once in a while, and say, “What do you think is going on in this district?” and, “Do you think this woman would run?” and I was one of the allies that they would talk to and invite to a search party or something like that.
The whole time I was at SEIU and Planned Parenthood, I would write a political plan every year — “here’s what we need to do to build power for the members, here are the endorsements we should make, how much money we should put into direct contributions, phonebanking, canvassing, etc., and here’s how we think long-term.” Every single one of those plans would end the same way, year after year, which was: We need to recruit candidates, and we have to do it years in advance. We never had a rich enough candidate field. There weren’t enough women. There weren’t enough candidates of color. The ones that were there didn’t always have the resources they needed to be really competitive and prepared. There weren’t enough champions for our issues, who really got it, and were really going to go to bat for what mattered.
For advocacy organizations that play a lot of defense like we did, at SEIU and Planned Parenthood, it’s really hard to carve out the space and the bandwidth to actually invest in offense. We usually never quite got there. And I see Close the Gap’s work as answering that challenge. It made me feel better knowing that there was a group completely focused on working a cycle ahead so that I didn’t have to panic about it. They share our values, they’re good at what they do, and they prepare progressive women ahead of time and do that advance work that those of us who were on the frontlines in terms of the legislative and budget battles couldn’t ever clear out the resources to do.
In her interview, Mary said, “I want to win- that’s what we’re here for.” How has CTGCA’s movement in achieving a broader goal changed your perspective on the importance of winning?
First of all, I totally feel the same as Mary. I’m a very competitive person with endeavors that have to do with the larger social good, and I prefer to work with people who are the same. In some ways, that’s an ideal criterion that we have for recruiters — if you’re competitive or you want to find a woman that’s going to go out there and upset apple carts that need to be upset and bring people together, if nothing can stop you from doing that, then you will probably be a great recruiter.
With everything I ever did in any of my other roles, I wanted to win. With every bill that was defeated or every budget cut, I would get really fired up about that, and I totally internalize the cause or the constituency that I’m working for. They are who I’m out there for, to win for them. With Close the Gap, we’re sort of less directly connected to each individual win, and I think that has value. Of course, we track and celebrate every win with any woman that we touch throughout our recruiting, but the work we do is so sharply focused on the bigger win, and adding to the field before gametime even starts. It’s a way to operationalize long-term change and speed up the pace of progress. It’s a very wholistic, very collective endeavor. We are a group that is putting people’s focus and excitement onto a longer-term, bigger win than just one race — getting to 50% is the ultimate thing, and there’s so much collateral benefit for Californians, en route to getting there.
For example, we talk about Elizabeth Betancourt up in Redding blazing a new trail in Northern California along with other progressive women running, and building progressive infrastructure that will come into play, in terms of the political landscape, for years to come. Imagine if her expertise on the environment and non-extraction-based economies could influence the way that Democrats win back rural areas nationwide and find ways to address the economic devastation that’s gone on in rural America. That’s so exciting. That’s the kind of win I get to focus on with Close the Gap.
How have you been raising your son with empowering women and racial equity in mind? What are some lessons or values that you try to instill in him?
I had good instruction from my parents. With my son, it can be tough. It’s a matter of prioritizing with kids because you can’t take care of or do everything all the time (especially during the pandemic!), but I call him out when he refers to women as “girls”, and I do little annoying parent things like that. He knows to expect it’s going to drive me crazy. Now that he’s 13, he gets annoyed with me if I suggest any of his female-identified friends is anything *more* than a friend — he throws my outdated norms right back at me.
I talk to him about history all the time, and I started talking to him about white privilege when he was pretty young, and it was really important to me to go further than this sort of sunny liberal view that everyone should get along, and everyone’s created equal. That is a baseline for him growing up in the Bay Area. And his friends are great, they have always been very diverse and continue to be, but I wanted him to be literate in power, and understand how much power he has, being perceived as a young (extremely handsome I might add!) white male, and how a lot of people don’t have power. So when I started talking to him about it, we talked about Eric Garner and Trayvon Martin when those national catastrophes happened, we drew the connection between Trayvon wearing a hoodie and my son’s go-to hoodie at the time, but it was not as direct in conversation because he was still pretty young, and we had the privilege as white people not to go there yet. But we talked about, “imagine if you go to a convenience store, and every time you go in, someone’s looking at you and they think you stole something or they look scared when you talk to them, just because of the way you look.” He just sobbed when we talked about that for the first time because he really was able to feel something that I think a lot of adults sort of turn themselves off to — the pain of living with that, carrying it, decade after decade, generation after generation. And then when the threat of violence and bodily harm is added to it. I think the ability and the will to see and appreciate that pain, recognize it as injustice, is what’s missing for so many who can’t seem to get comfortable with the basic assertion that “Black lives matter.”
So my lesson for him was that you have to question yourself, because people have different experiences than you, and you’re going to get “free passage” and help and neutrality in your life a lot of times when other people who don’t look like you, or sound like you, or can’t even get in the room you’re in, will not. And when people say things that don’t square with your experience, you need to understand that your experience is not the only one, and you have to question your gut. It’s your cue to listen and learn when someone expresses difference, not to assert what you know. That’s a hard thing to teach to a kid because you want your child to trust their gut, but when it comes to power and privilege, that’s where the rub is.
I also took him with me to walk for Hillary [Clinton], and we walked half of Reno together in 2016 knocking on doors, and sometimes I feel like I’m not having him grow up in the movement as much as I would like to because he just reached a point where he was sick of going to hear me speak at the union hall. My parents always took me to church with them, and eventually, I just tuned out and read books instead. But we try to have pretty frank conversations, and I try to draw on the things that he observes because I think there are clues literally everywhere that people of privilege can choose either to use to understand what’s actually happening, or suppress those things and not be conscious of them. If we’re in a business, we’re interacting with the service staff as much as anyone else, so issues around visibility, and who counts as a person that you interact with socially. Lately, we’ve been trying to talk about “digital blackface” which is complex but very apt for his meme-obsessed age.
What are your hopes for California’s future?
My dream is that in the decade ahead, each woman we recruit will go on to play a role in transforming our democracy itself, what we think of as politics today, into something far more inclusive, responsive, and even aspirational. Imagine if kids grew up not hearing “politician” as a dirty word. That’s not a goal in and of itself, but I feel a sting every time I see that general attitude because I know first-hand just how selfless and service-oriented so many of our elected officials actually are. I remember a couple of years ago at my son’s elementary school assembly, the Principal asked a few of the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up. My son totally surprised me by saying to the auditorium full of parents, educators and kids, “I think I’d like to be a congressman — ” and people booed! Government should be about making our wildest collective dreams come true, not our nightmares. I truly think progressive women get that more than anyone. They dare to dream, they know how to operationalize the dream, and they make sure everyone eats along the way.
It really is a remarkable thing that no matter what we do, the Legislature is going to be completely transformed by 2028. Everyone’s leaving because of term limits. So my dream is more immediately that we take this opportunity to change the face of leadership in our state, and make it transformationally different from anything we’ve ever seen before — more racially representative, more women — at least 50%, but it’d be cool to have 75% and see what kind of impact on Californians’ every day lives that leads to — but also diverse in terms of life experience, different ability levels, different gender identifications and sexual orientations, areas of expertise and passion.
I think because my background is so heavily in policy and legislative work, nothing would make me happier than a series of groundbreaking policies coming out of California that center marginalized communities and set the gold standard nationally and even globally. That really would be the holy grail, not to mention some of the women that write those policies being elevated into roles of national leadership — as we just saw with Kamala — and potentially even President someday.
California is the world’s fifth largest economy, so if we can figure out how to do things in a way that is more inclusive and representative of the people who are actually voting, the more politics is going to shift meaningfully. Look at Ann Ravel for Senate. Her campaign didn’t go the way we hoped it would, but here you have someone who is a really committed and expert thinker about dark money coming into politics and it’s potentially transformative, right? That’s what we need to make politics more economically inclusive, for candidates, voters and donors. My dream there is that Ann still somehow sets something off, throws out an initiative that could innovate past Citizens United and revolutionize the way money works in our political system in California and maybe even nationwide. Real campaign finance reform is definitely something at the top of my wishlist for the post-Trump era, and even better if it comes out of California. There’s precedent — the Obama administration’s carbon emission standards started as Fran Pavley’s California legislation years prior, and look what Dr. Weber is doing with reparations legislation. Senator Monique Limón (our Recruit!) recently got a call from Elizabeth Warren, who wanted to know more about the consumer protection bill she authored in California this year. If we can workshop policies like these here in California and address access to healthcare, criminal justice, climate justice, immigration, childcare or paying for care work that women have traditionally done- if we can test those here where we have a democratic supermajority and a real critical mass of diversity and wokeness, all bets are off. Everything can change.
Close the Gap California is committed to building on progressive women’s historic momentum by recruiting them statewide and achieving equality in California by 2028. Join us!
About Close the Gap California
Close the Gap California (CTGCA) is a statewide campaign launched in 2013 to close the gender gap in the California Legislature by 2028. By recruiting accomplished, progressive women in targeted districts and preparing them to launch competitive campaigns, CTGCA is changing the face of the Legislature one cycle at a time.
One in every four women in the Legislature is a CTGCA Recruit. Our Recruits are committed to reproductive justice, quality public education, and combatting poverty, and nine of 10 serving today are women of color.
