Ella Barrett (She/Her)

Ella has a deep love for building dynamic teams and innovative systems to create measurable social change.

Her passion for social justice and team-building began in the woods of Timber, Oregon where her family built a large community home around the core value of radical acceptance. Ella’s earliest organizing focus was on developing innovative tactics to recruit, train and retain large, dedicated volunteer teams with the Oregon Student Association at the University of Oregon.

Ella then managed the Leadership LAB project at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, where a team of more than 1,000 volunteers and staff collaborated to innovate new methods of voter persuasion and prejudice reduction and apply them on the ground to help win LGBT rights campaigns across the country. Most notably, she led the LAB’s collaboration with SAVE - Miami-Dade’s leading LGBT group - to develop and measure a deep canvass model that could reduce transphobia. David Broockman and Josh Kalla’s measurement of this project’s impact become the landmark study that brought deep canvassing into the national spotlight, proving that it had the power to lastingly reduce prejudice.

Steve Deline (He/Him)

Steve is an organizer who began in this work as a gay volunteer terrified to talk to anti-gay voters. But after his first few knocks and the experience of coming to understand someone on the other side and be understood himself, he was hooked. Over the next 8 years on the groundbreaking Leadership LAB team Steve helped develop the original deep canvass conversation model.

He helped the LAB team partner with numerous other organizations to apply deep canvassing on the ground. In 2012 he embedded with the Minnesotans United marriage equality campaign as a Regional Field Director, mobilizing LGBTQ volunteers and allies in deep red Central Minnesota. That campaign ultimately organized over 14,000 volunteers to have more than 220,000 deep canvass conversations on the phones and ended in a victory that many thought impossible.

He is deeply passionate about the superpowers of vulnerability and non-judgmental curiosity that we all carry within us, and the political and personal transformations that occur when we use those powers to bridge fear and difference.

TRISTAN OVERTON (HE/THEY)

Tristan is a trans masc person who grew up between Mississippi and rural Minnesota. Tristan has been an organizer for 11 years. They got their start while at the University of Minnesota where they studied political science and minored in race, class and gender studies.

He’s since become an expert in organizing, movement building and Deep Canvassing. Tristan believes Deep Canvassing is our greatest tool to shift the narratives and underlying emotions that have upheld oppressive systems in this country for hundreds of years. One of Tristan’s greatest passions is developing organizers and investing in organizing as the high skill craft that it is so we can build the large scale movements we need to win.

Tristan has organized in nearly 30 states across the country in a wide range of communities. They’ve organized for trans and queer rights, abortion access, economic justice to transform capitalist systems, healthcare, jail and prison abolition, police reform, climate change, union work/workers rights. They’ve done candidate work, issue ballot measures, legislative fights. They’ve worked from the hyper local level up to organizing internationally.

Tristan is passionate about organizing for collective liberation. Especially since he would mostly love to just spend his time with his partner, three kids and their dog, ideally in the woods somewhere. Or on a rock climbing adventure with his NCI colleague and bf Drew Frye :)

DREW FRYE (HE/HIM)

Drew’s passion is building massive volunteer teams to take strategic action in the progressive issue-based organizing space.

Drew began his decade of experience in deep canvassing as a volunteer in college at UCLA fighting for gay marriage with the LA LGBT Center’s Leadership LAB. After organizing a cohort of fellow students, Drew became a full-time staff member at the LAB from 2015-2017, developing and implementing deep canvasses on trans rights, abortion, voter turnout, and more. In the years since Drew helped develop the first deep canvass on prison abolition, and during the 2020 presidential election he ran a remote campaign with SURJ in Georgia that led to 34,000 deep canvass-style phone conversations.

Today Drew supports labor unions and nonprofit organizations to employ the tools and learnings of deep canvassing in issue based organizing. Residing in his home of Santa Cruz California, Drew spends his free time rock climbing, surfing, and walking among redwood trees.

MANY MANY OTHERS

Deep canvassing was not cooked up by experts in a laboratory - it’s the product of the work of many organizers and thousands of volunteers, going out tirelessly to knock new doors, try new things, think together, and take new risks, week after week over a course of years. Our goal is to continue to help more people and teams join that process.