“ Not only are we empowering other nonprofits and equipping them with skills that they can use to build stronger campaigns, but they are not going to encounter hostile regulatory bodies.”
Participants of NLA’s Empower & Protect pilot just gained a new advocate in Project Manager Dana Martinez-Ocker. Joining NLA in September 2024, Dana provides the kind of deep thinking and strategy required to grow the program during a critical time.
When asked about the day-to-day duties in her new role, Dana eagerly shared what she’s been learning over the past few months: “I’m mapping out the program so that we can do a deeper analysis of it at the end of Q4 for a relaunch in 2025. I’m spending a lot of time reorganizing things and developing new tools to prepare us for 2025 so that we can hit the ground running.”
For the uninitiated, Empower & Protect is an NLA program that helps to build strong advocacy infrastructure among organizations based on the state they operate in. The current iteration of the pilot supports more than 30 Arizona-based nonprofits like Rural Organizing Initiative, AZ AANHPI Advocates, Fuerte Arts Movement, One Arizona, and AZ Poder.
The skills and expertise Dana brings to her new role were first honed at Tri Community Coalition (TCC), a substance abuse prevention organization in the Detroit suburbs. Starting as an intern there while she pursued her Bachelor of Social Work degree from Oakland University, Dana spent seven years with TCC and was eventually promoted to program director while earning her Master of Social Work degree from Wayne State University. “I was working to help people understand that communities have different needs and change how public safety approached drug use in high school. It taught me a lot about the ecosystem and how you can partner together to make real change,” she explained.
That experience with local entities deepened her knowledge of how to lead within systems and primed her for a national role. In 2021, she became a Senior Chapter Program Administrator for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). “It was a drastic change going from substance abuse prevention in these tiny cities to a national network,” she said. “DSA is a multi-entity organization, and I worked with chapters and helped them with a lot of that operational and compliance capacity building. So that was something I learned there.”
Her role at DSA proved to be a great match for her detail-oriented, highly strategic work style. Dana worked closely with the compliance and finance teams, including reviewing DSA chapter finances and bylaws to ensure they were compliant with local, state, and federal law. She also developed and facilitated trainings on nonprofit accounting and budgeting, among other major responsibilities.
New Left Accelerator is lucky that Dana brings all of that experience to its multi-entity support framework, and Dana feels similarly lucky to have landed a role where her strengths can make a big difference: “What NLA does differently is that it takes a systems change approach, which is essential. Not only are we empowering other nonprofits and equipping them with skills that they can use to build stronger campaigns, but they are not going to encounter hostile regulatory bodies. In addition to that, we are educating funders on how to do things differently.”
Dana and the Empower & Protect team are planning to increase their capacity building support for grassroots groups so that organizations on the ground with limited resources are prepared for the challenges ahead. She shared what motivates her to continue this work by explaining, “This body of work about how to navigate multi-entity organizations is in the hands of the rich, and NLA is demystifying it. Power to the people.”
