Like so many others, I knocked on a lot of doors this fall—each day my worry growing that the Democrats might come up short. In a trailer park in southern Pennsylvania, two white women seethed about “the border,” thousands of miles away and nowhere close to the cause of their economic precarity. A young Latino man in his early 20s, living in his mother’s house with his two kids underfoot, wanted so much to hear that something in this economy could work for him, but our rap fell short. In Milwaukee, a Black man my age living in decrepit low-income housing sneered at my pitch: “They all have good jobs and send their kids to the best schools, but I’m still here.”

After four years of an Administration that advanced progressive economic policy, how could this be? The disconnect on inflation was more than a mere messaging challenge: It was a symptom of how far removed the Washington bubble has become from real people. Insiders wondered why “People just didn’t get it.” Brandishing charts and economic indicators, experts kept repeating that the economy was strong and talking past what people were saying: “We cannot afford rent, groceries, gas.” Expertise got in the way of seeing and hearing people, of acknowledging that they were right and that we had much more to do to reverse decades of rising income inequality.

I agree with Deepak Bhargava, who wrote in these very pages that policy alone is not enough. However, policy is the vehicle through which decisions are made and resources are allocated, so it is imperative we get it right. And that means placing people at the center of setting our policy agenda while also shedding the presumption that experts know more about what regular people need than they do.

We (in government, think tanks, advocacy groups, policy schools) must make a practice of listening to what people say about their lives and concerns. We must reorganize how we make policy by treating lived experience as the necessary data and expertise that it is and ensuring it has a larger role in shaping the policy agenda. Don’t get me wrong, we absolutely need the weedy expertise of the wonks; but/and we need to expand our toolbox.

We should look to our colleagues in community and political organizing. Organizing does not just tell people what to do—it asks. “What are your pain points? What do you need to see change? What common cause might you have with your neighbors or co-workers, and how might we work together to win something?” We need more of that type of listening and partnership in policymaking. (We also need more resources going to organizing. Full stop.)

As we reorient our work, we have the opportunity to reset how we in the policy community partner with organizers. Too often, the relationship is one-way, with Organizing asked to mobilize for whatever Policy is serving up. But true partnership—with early engagement, feedback loops, and shared ownership—will get us better results for the people we all care about.

Building people-centered policy is not just the right thing to do. It will also improve our policy and politics, and lessen the gulf between the two. First, centering people’s lived experience makes for better (and bolder) policy. Too often, policymakers make assumptions about what people want and need. When we do that, even with the best of intentions, we often get it wrong. For example, social policy often replicates and exacerbates inequality, as documented by Rachel Black and K. Sabeel Rahman. Centering people and their needs disrupts these assumptions—and has the added benefit of forcing us to confront communities’ biggest problems instead of letting our current tools limit what we aim for.

Next, engaging people in policy design, campaigns, and wins builds their sense of agency and ownership. It’s not just what policies we can tick off that matters, but how we do them and with whom. People need to be the actors in their own story. Agency must be shared if we are to build faith that government institutions are in fact working for the public. The Obama Administration’s infamous working families tax cut that no one knew about stands in stark contrast to the examples below where Organizing and Policy were in partnership.

And finally, prioritizing people’s own power helps us create an economy that works for all. Policymakers need to think with intention about power. Who has it? Who needs more of it? How can policy design better include feedback loops that build political power and voice for workers and create more space for future policymaking? And with more political power, how do we, as Senators Sanders and Warren have called for, do more to challenge corporate greed? President Biden’s focus on rebuilding unions, misunderstood as just “politics,” was exactly the type of people-centered power-building policymaking that we need to pursue. Labor law reform must be a top priority for all of us who care about our democracy and economy. It is not an issue for the unions to shoulder alone.

These ideas were embodied in the Fight for $15, a demand that came from what the people said they needed, not what experts said was prudent or winnable. When the Fight for $15 first called for a minimum wage of $15 and a union in 2012, even some progressives were taken aback. A bill advanced the next year by Democratic lawmakers George Miller and Tom Harkin proposed raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour. The Obama White House argued that going higher than $9 would cause job loss. But SEIU, the labor union that helped start the Fight for $15, and its allies listened to workers. In city after city, state after state, they raised the minimum wage to $15 through legislation or at the ballot box. They built a movement of low-wage workers who won something because they fought for it—and then kept pushing for more. SEIU has gone on to win sectoral wage councils, a structural reform that raises wages across a full sector but also shifts power by giving workers a seat at the decision-making table. As we began 2025, 9.2 million workers got a raise of $5.7 billion thanks to minimum wage campaigns across the country.

Of course, if you are actually living on $15 an hour, this demand is not bold. It is still very hard to pay rent and buy groceries when making that amount. Workers often have to juggle multiple jobs because so many offer only part-time hours, and many have extremely unreliable schedules. Policy experts who think nothing of charging $250 to $500 an hour, or who are in full-time salaried positions with benefits, easily lose sight of this if they are not hearing directly from people who live this reality.

The Fight for $15 is a great example of how when Organizing leads Policy, both can win. Here are five more ideas for how to secure people-centered policy wins.

1.Partner more deeply with organizers.

Many policymakers and think tanks already partner with advocates and know they need organizing. Organizing, at its best, brings “real people” to the table who can share their lived experiences and create more urgency and nuance. But these exchanges are often relegated to “check the box” exercises to keep constituencies happy, and they frequently happen late in the process, when an idea is nearly fully baked. Many organizations bring more PowerPoints than people to their meetings with lawmakers. We should all prioritize starting these collaborations earlier and making them more reciprocal—and we should allocate time to craft ideas with people in advance of the sprints to seize moments of opportunity that often characterize policymaking.

A brilliant example of this sort of collaboration occurred when the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and a Yale Law School clinic collectively engaged the Department of Labor (DOL) about domestic workers’ labor conditions in 2009. The meeting opened with workers telling their stories of unpaid wages and intimidation at work. DOL staff were visibly moved, and they wanted to help. Next, Yale law students translated those needs into concrete asks—down to specific language at the sub-regulatory level. (The career staff’s eyes lit up. The students were “speaking” their language!) The technical expertise was critical, but the workers themselves had shaped the substance of the demands. Similarly, Caring Across Generations—the coalition of caregivers, care workers, and folks who need care that NDWA created with labor rights group Jobs with Justice—has made a practice of centering workers and families in its policy design and campaigns in a profound way for over a decade, so that when they win, their members and leaders feel ownership and pride.

2. Find (more) ways to listen early and often.

The policy community needs to engage more with workers, community organizations, and unions. It should be standard practice to check in and listen to what folks are saying and hearing on the doors, at their kitchen tables, and in their workplaces—and to use that information to shape policy priorities.
Leveraging technology is one way to make those connections. New tools allow us to reach (and hear from) large numbers of people—including, critically, people who may not always agree with us. Focus groups like those conducted by the Factory Towns Project let us listen to people unaffiliated with existing organizations. The Shift Project, a leading source of data and analysis on service workers, provides ways for us to hear from hundreds of thousands of workers about their economic precarity through innovative survey tools. And during the Obama and Biden Administrations, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) brilliantly set up a Consumer Complaint Database that invited Americans to share what was most impacting them. (The CFPB received nearly 1.7 million complaints in 2023 alone and regularly used them to inform policy.)

3. Build narrative and engagement strategy at the outset of policy design.

Too often, communications and engagement staff are brought in only at the last minute for the “rollout” of a federal policy. We at Workshop (a team of former political appointees supporting “inside-outside” strategies) and Groundwork Collaborative (a leader in changing economic policy and narrative) convened a strategy session with policymakers, organizers, and advocates last year on how to better center narrative and communications at the beginning of the policy process, so that policies are designed to resonate effectively with people, improving take-up and creating further demand for change. Lightbulbs went off: “Look how this changes how we think about our work!”

A highlight was a case study presented by Elizabeth Wilkins and Nidhi Hegde on how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) developed its rule banning noncompete clauses in employment contracts. The FTC instituted open comment dockets and commission meetings, which dramatically expanded agency experts’ understanding of how noncompete agreements negatively affected people’s lives and underscored the importance of a rule’s breadth and simplicity in making implementation effective. Heeding that lesson, they used plain language in their very short proposed rule. Outside groups like the American Economic Liberties Project democratized the notice-and-comment process and transformed it into an organizing and communications tool that organizations and individuals could really use. More Perfect Union, the innovative advocacy journalism nonprofit, led with an explainer video to create momentum, and organizers and policymakers put a priority on real people’s stories. Millions of people saw themselves in the proposal and spoke up in comments, in the media, and in workplaces, pushing many employers to roll back the practice as it was exposed and discredited and outcry surged.

This offers the policy community a new template for our work. Policy should be simple and effective, and it should reach people so that they know they have a new resource or a new right. This is, of course, good politics—but also better policy. People who know they have a new benefit or protection can better exercise those rights.

4. Plan for people-centered implementation in the policy process.

As a foundation program officer at Open Society Foundations, I scrambled to move millions to help with implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). But we all struggled with the large gap between the complexity of the policy levers and requirements on the one hand, and the infrastructure needed to put them into action on the other. Communities that had been under-resourced for years and were not at the table helping to shape how this could work were racing to catch up.

What if, at the policy design phase, we could get more input and game out how a policy will work on the ground? What if we thought in advance about how people will see that the policy benefitted them? What if we insisted moving forward that Policy has the responsibility to partner with Organizing to anticipate communities’ needs, and that the policy is not done until we have asked and answered these questions?

A great example: United Today, Stronger Tomorrow, a strategic new organizing project in red states, organized listening sessions in towns that were receiving historic investments from the above legislation. Policymakers were surprised by the barriers people were encountering as they tried to access federal resources. Imagine if there had been resources for these listening sessions before the policy was designed!

There are exciting new experiments in the policy world on how to accomplish this: Tara McGuinness literally wrote the book (Power to the Public) on how we can transform human services and put “users at the center of the policymaking process.” New America is designing new models that recast the role of social services “recipients” as that of “co-designers.” We must learn from them.

5. Learn from experiments and innovations in federal, state, and local policy.

We need to sit down with Biden-Harris appointees and document what they know and learned. From substance to process to spending to feedback loops, many of their experiments and new approaches could be models for the future. A few examples:

• The weedy work to get labor standards into regulations, sub-regulatory guidance, and program design for the BIL, the IRA, and the CHIPS and Science Act, which meant that spending on bridges and clean energy would create good jobs for people.
• Groundbreaking reforms by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs to broaden public engagement in the federal regulatory process.
• Innovative programs such as the EPA Community Change Grants Program and the Energy Department’s RAMP Initiative, which helped communities access federal resources and realize the promise of good jobs with investments in clean energy, and the DOL Women’s Bureau FARE Grants, which awarded funds to community organizations that help women workers learn about and exercise their rights at work.

What was attempted (and much of it achieved) in the last Administration was unprecedented and could have lasting effects. We need to capture what worked and what didn’t, reflect on the barriers people faced, and commit to what we need to do differently next time.

We can learn from state-level policymaking, too. States are “laboratories” for policy design, development, and testing. To name just two examples, the federal models for paid family and medical leave and paid sick days come from victories in cities and states, and the Biden Administration’s Justice40 Initiative was modeled on an earlier provision in New York’s 2019 climate justice bill. But states can provide more than just a template for the substance of federal legislation and executive action. We can also look to them for new ideas for the process of policymaking. State policymakers often get to experiment and work more nimbly, and having fewer resources, they tend to rely more heavily on partnerships with advocacy and membership organizations.

A people-centered policy approach can ensure that we actually address people’s problems, that more people are engaged throughout the policymaking process, and that we build the political muscle needed to remake our economy into one that works for everyone.

To get there, think tanks, organizers, advocacy groups, policymakers, funders, and academics need to sit down together, dig into case studies, explore new approaches to the policy process and policy design, and create a community of practice around how we do this. No single organization or proposal can achieve this alone. We need creative, radical collaboration and to tap into everyone’s strengths. Candidates or a new administration will be clamoring for proposals before we know it—so we must create space to reflect, learn lessons, and craft practical models now. Let’s get to it!