About Caroline

Caroline Murray is a visionary and results-focused leader with over three decades’ experience on the frontlines as an organizer, strategist, trainer, and social entrepreneur across the movements for social, racial, and economic justice.

As a student at the University of Massachusetts, she had the honor of studying with such luminaries as James Baldwin, Robert Paul Wolff, and Eqbal Ahmad. She was part of the Anti-Apartheid Movement that led to UMass being the second University in the U.S. to divest from South Africa and, as an elected Student Senator, led the campus fight against the rise of Reaganism in all its forms.

Caroline began community organizing with the Welfare Rights Movement successfully blocking the Clinton Administration’s punitive “Welfare Reform” from being implemented in Massachusetts. For the next three decades, she led and participated in numerous local, state, and federal campaigns resulting in many key progressive policy victories of our time impacting housing, banking, healthcare, labor standards, jobs, education, poverty, the climate crisis, immigration and more.

Caroline is a seasoned political strategist. She served on the National Staff of the Jesse Jackson for President Campaign in 1988, helped lead a successful statewide campaign stopping a tax rollback in 1990, served as Senior Advisor to Cynthia Nixon on her historic run for Governor of NY in 2018, and managed and advised many hotly contested down ballot races.

In addition to delivering real improvements to the lives of everyday people, Caroline has worked to build an ecosystem of powerful movement organizations and trained tens of thousands of grassroots leaders who have been transformed by speaking truth to power and organizing to create a just and equitable future.

She was founder and 20-year Executive Director of the Alliance to Develop Power (ADP), a multi-racial, multi-generational, low-income people’s organization known for its cadre of fearless leaders and strategic campaigns. ADP pioneered the national strategy for tenant buyouts of at-risk HUD apartments. They successfully purchased, transferred to cooperative ownership, and renovated over 5,000 units of affordable housing, the largest tenant-owned block of housing in the United States, bringing in $500 million in investments. ADP’s Casa Obrera, the first worker center in the nation to be a dues paying member of the AFL-CIO, secured millions in stolen wages and launched multiple cooperatively-owned businesses. This network of alternative institutions, led by hundreds of ADP leaders, became ADP’s base of power, placing them in the vanguard of the New Economy movement. Under Caroline’s creative leadership, they pioneered a synergistic model that combined the best practices of community organizing, community building, and cooperative economic development. She built a sustainable community-controlled economy valued at over $100 million that stopped capital flight, generated and redistributed community wealth, and built the Beloved Community.

Following ADP, Caroline went on to serve with Van Jones as Rebuild the Dream's first National Organizing Director where she worked with renowned artist Prince to bring attention to growing economic and racial disparities while highlighting innovative solutions to the economic crisis.

Caroline has appeared on numerous national networks and local news programs, including NPR, CNN, Good Morning America, Fox and Friends, the Laura Ingraham Show, the Wall Street Journal. the NYT, the Boston Globe, and she was a regular guest on the O’Reilly Factor.

Since founding Innovative Organizing, she has worked with an array of movement organizations, leaders, and campaigns seeking to build power and scale their impact.

Notable projects include:

• Securing the investment of millions of ARPA dollars in community priorities, including a local hiring program and eviction defense program in NY

• Designing an organization-wide restructuring and launch of a global faith-climate justice network

• Building a bi-national faith-led program to meet, witness, & accompany thousands of asylum seekers at the US / MX border

• Winning a nationally watched County School Board seat in Leesberg, VA, the hotbed of the culture wars

• Launching the groundbreaking NYC Department of Education Family and Community Outreach Program, successfully recruiting and training tens of thousands of low-income parents as co-decision makers in hundreds of NYC Community Schools

• Leading the People’s Climate March, the largest and most diverse climate mobilization in history

Caroline lives in Western Massachusetts where she is a leader in her community working towards social and economic justice, equity, and sustainability. She is also the proud mother of two daughters who speak truth to power through art and activism.