Marj Plumb, NLA Board Member (she/they)
Before racking up impressive credentials in public policy training and public health training, Marj Plumb learned how to do it by herself. Coming from a family of seven siblings, helmed by a teamster father and a mother who worked as a waitress, she was the only one of their children to go to college. “I wasn't raised in a family where knowing how to do stuff was handed down,” Marj explained. So before she could understand how grassroots groups can identify and pull levers of power to improve systems, she started a career in advocacy by first just getting into the room.
“I would go to policy workshops, and I’d leave and think, ‘It makes a little sense, but where is the capital, and how do you figure out when there’s a committee meeting?’” she said. This was the beginning of an applied education that would later lead to Marj helping to shape the Left’s approach to power building through community-based participatory research and advocacy trainings.
The willingness to roll up her sleeves and dig in is what defines Marj’s approach. “When I came to DC in the early 90’s with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force—this was before computers and the Internet
were widely used—I literally went to every federal health agency building and grabbed every brochure that they had, and I took them home so that I could plot it out: What does NIH do? What does CDC do?”
That information gathering and analysis was the foundation of extensive policy expertise that Marj would later pass down through creating and running successful training programs all over the United States, including for the Women’s Foundation of California, the California Breast Cancer Research Program, the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment, and more recently, a collaboration with Black Futures Lab to create a public policy training program. The common thread throughout these experiences for Marj is working with people who are determined to build a better world. “It’s social justice—making sure that the people who have been given the least and don't have access to power gain that access to power.”
With Marj’s training programs, the locations and issue areas vary, but the key is getting into the fine details of implementing just and equitable policies that center communities in which governments have historically disinvested. For example, Marj’s mentees might learn how to craft legislation that levels the playing field for the most marginalized or how to advise a department using information relevant to and for marginalized demographics. By the end of the training, they have a deeper understanding of how to get the government to equitably distribute shared resources and reduce the burden of injustice. Marj’s training programs are responsible for hundreds of new laws and changes in government programs throughout the country.
“That’s always been my motto when working with training programs–when they are done, I want the policymaker to turn to them and say, ‘You’ve done everything but assign the staff.’”
Marj has a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management (MNA) from the University of San Francisco and a doctorate in public health (DrPH) focused on public policy and community-based participatory research from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives in D.C.
