A Featured Profile of Ilyse Hogue
Ilyse Hogue is a nationally-recognized social change practitioner and expert in online engagement with a passion for progressive work. She became president of NARAL Pro-Choice America in February 2013.
Ilyse Hogue is a nationally-recognized social change practitioner and expert in online engagement with a passion for progressive work. In January 2013, Ilyse was named president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, succeeding Nancy Keenan. Ilyse has worked for and with a multitude of progressive organizations, and most recently served as co-director of Friends of Democracy, a 2012 initiative to build political power around the issue of money in politics.
Previously, she was a senior adviser to Media Matters for America where she focused on advocacy programs to undercut the power of right-wing media. From 2006 to 2011, Ilyse served as director of political advocacy and communications for MoveOn.org. In her more than five years at MoveOn, she was responsible for shaping political strategy and developing communications initiatives to give the organization's five million members a voice in Washington. Ilyse is an expert in both electoral and advocacy campaigns, and she mobilized MoveOn members and worked closely with leaders in Congress and the White House to advocate for progressive legislation on financial regulatory reform and health care. In these capacities, she has served as a spokesperson to the media, frequently analyzing breaking news on both televisions and in print.
Prior to joining MoveOn, Ilyse was program director at the Rainforest Action Network, where she spent six years pioneering and implementing corporate advocacy campaigns in the banking, forest, and other sectors. She was the recipient of the Business Ethics Network award in 2005 for her work in the financial sector. This work included a campaign that ultimately moved more than 60 multinational banks to adopt a groundbreaking framework of environmental standards for private investment known as the Equator Principles. These principles led to a host of voluntary initiatives in the US banking sector, including action by Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Ilyse was the chief negotiator in each of those agreements and worked to market them to a spectrum of constituencies, from institutional investors to environmental NGOs. A Harvard Business School case study was written in 2005 about this work, and she has lectured on it at Yale and Columbia.
She has been a frequent speaker and writer about issues ranging from political and social movements, to impacts of legislation on specific constituencies, to electoral dynamics. Her recent focus has been on women and women's issues. She's been a frequent guest on MSNBC and CNN. She also writes opinion pieces for CNN and has a regular column in The Nation. Ilyse has travelled extensively from South America to Africa working with emerging democratic movements keen to have a voice in their governing institutions.
Ilyse is the co-founder of smartMeme Strategy and Training project which works to amplify the impact of grassroots organizing with new strategy and training resources, values-based communications, collaborations, and meme campaigning. Ilyse serves on the board of Public Campaign, Story of Stuff, and National Domestic Workers Alliance. Ilyse holds a master's degree in Resource Ecology Management from the University of Michigan where she studied the impact of resource constraints in politics and culture. Her bachelor's degree is from Vassar College.
