Conversations with the CTGCA Team: NorCal Lead Recruiter Julia Leitner
CTGCA Northern California Lead Recruiter Julia Leitner tells us about her work helping to unionize childcare providers, why achieving parity will take more women realizing they are the ones who are qualified, and more.
This interview has been edited for brevity. We 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 really wanted to be an archaeologist. I grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and it is a wonderful blend of various indigenous cultures and tribes, as well as Spanish history. I remember visiting places like Bandelier National Monument and Chaco Canyon and learning about these incredible previous civilizations, and I wanted to be an archaeologist because I thought it was really cool that you got to spend your days outside doing things like discovery and running around in the dirt.
How did your family and community influence your passions?
Santa Fe is this really unique, crazy and wonderful community, where you have a lot of artists, you have a lot of different cultures coming together and a very liberal mindset in general. My upbringing really gave me a sense of rewarding curiosity and creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Coming into college, I was interested in majoring in politics and government. I signed up for my very first political course — comparative politics — and was thrilled sitting in this beautiful lecture hall, feeling very intimidated, and discussing the readings. I remember that 1) the people who spoke up in that room were almost all men, and 2) they seemed so confident and sure of themselves and projected this “I belong here, and I know what I’m doing” energy. It actually led me to completely abandon the idea of doing politics in university. I was still very much interested, but the feeling of exclusion made me decide to approach politics from a different path, through history and literature instead. To me, politics is about storytelling, people, connections, and relationships. It’s about the way that we share where we come from, and what we’ve done. I didn’t feel that in that first comparative politics class.
Was there a specific moment or someone in your life that kind of influenced your decision to be involved in politics?
I originally became involved in politics during high school because I realized that democracy was the way that everyday people could have a voice and make change. The very first campaign that I ever worked on was for Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico in 2008. Not too long ago, New Mexico was very much a swing state, and now it is mostly blue.
After college, I moved to California and was working with SEIU to unionize childcare providers across the state. Up until that point, childcare providers had been attempting to form a union for about 11 years (I got there in 2013). My job was to go door-to-door and talk with these women, predominantly women of color, working at daycares and as childcare providers, who were taking care of the future of our state.
It was a tough project because it wasn’t even that they needed support for a union. It was that they needed to pass legislation in order to gain the right to unionize. It wasn’t until Governor Newsom came into office that the legislation was finally signed into law. Seeing how democracy blocked popular opinion showed me the importance of the political process and having allies and women in elected spaces to understand and really represent the interests and needs of workers, women, and everyday people across the state.
What has been your proudest accomplishment so far?
I helped to create and develop what is now the leading national training program for campaign staff called Arena Academy. We have trained over 2000 people to staff campaigns at all different levels, around 70 candidates, and thousands upon thousands of volunteers to do the hard work of democracy. I’m really proud of that because I was able to help build this thing that I didn’t have growing up in politics. I got some good training through working with unions, but the first time I worked on a campaign, which was in high school, there wasn’t much training. I had no idea that you could do this for a job and get paid to do it.
Campaigns are cyclical work. Every time you build up an organization, it gets shut down in November or December because it’s seasonal work. We end up losing a lot of information and a lot of really great people each cycle. One of the other unfortunate aspects of having these short lived organizations is that it also can foster bad management practices. There’s a lot of improvement that’s needed. We need women and people of color to be informing strategy because those are the communities that Democrats are organizing and we need those voices in the room to have winning campaigns. I’m really proud of having created Arena Academy and excited that it exists as an institution now.
What do you enjoy about the work that you do with Close the Gap?
Lead Recruiters have this wonderful role of getting to work with volunteers within a certain region of the state to both identify prospective candidates for our target districts and then work with prospective candidates on their explorations.
Holistically, I just love working with so many badass, incredible, brilliant women who are all contributing to this vision in different ways. From Susannah and Michelle who are making this organization run and doing everything from putting on these complicated, intricate events to keeping track of boatloads of information about all of these things that are happening all around the state. And then working with these volunteers who come from all different walks of life and from very diverse backgrounds. Some of them have been in politics and some have not, but they all share this vision and desire for gender parity and equality in California.
I will be here each and every single day for any woman who says that she wants to run for office. It’s hugely important to change the face of power in the state. I absolutely love working with these amazing women at each level.
What progressive policy would you most love to see implemented when we achieve parity?
Universal childcare. It has some momentum, but not enough. It keeps getting cut out of major bills, like the Inflation Reduction Act, but it needs to happen.
What do you think it’s going to take to get more to get us to parity in the legislature?
It’s going to take any woman out there who has considered running for office or who has met a woman who should run for office, to stand up and recognize that oftentimes there is no one else to do this. It is you.
And we need to talk about what it’s like to run for office. We have men everywhere, and they have no problem feeling empowered and entitled to jump in these races.
As women, we often hold ourselves back and say, “There’s got to be someone else who’s more qualified or it’s a better time for them. Right now I’ve got these other things going on. I’ll just wait a couple of years.” Having more women stand up and take that leap or nudge that friend or connect with that person who you saw at a meeting that was an absolute firecracker- that’s how we’re gonna get to parity.
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.
Nearly one in every three women in the Legislature is a CTGCA Recruit. Our Recruits are committed to reproductive justice, quality public education, and combatting poverty, and 11 of 12 serving today are women of color.
