National Political Committee (NPC) Report

Elected at the convention, the National Political Committee (NPC) is DSA’s leadership body.

by Marianela D’Aprile - Spring 2020

Our August 2019 convention set many high goals for DSA! Since then, the National Political Committee (NPC) elected at the convention has met twice, and members have gotten to work. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

At the October 2019 NPC meeting, we elected our five-member steering committee, which meets every two weeks and makes decisions between NPC meetings. We also assigned each of our NPC members to national committees. A central goal for the October 2019 meeting was for us to get to know each other and DSA staff. In a practice we hope to continue, we started the meeting with a discussion of our political moment, framed by three texts proposed by NPC members.

At the February 2020 NPC meeting, we set staffing priorities for the organization, committing to hires in tech, design, and communications so that we can bring in new members and be ready to retain them. We discussed our grievance structures at length and made plans to strengthen them. And we approved a budget for 2020.

Overall, we want to put our organization in a good position to take advantage of this exciting political moment, recruit more members, and build the strength of our movement. We want to build capacity at the national level so that we can remain in this fight for the long haul. This can take the form of tweaks, like changing how we prepare for NPC meetings so there’s more time for review and discussion ahead of time. It also means big commitments, like one-third of the NPC serving on the Growth and Development Committee, which will be developing our strategies for recruitment, member retention, fundraising, and training our members so that they all feel confident as socialist organizers.

It also means being nimble and responding to things quickly, as we did when we organized an anti-war call that is now becoming a coalition.

We know we’re living through a hugely important moment for democratic socialism, and we want DSA to be the place where people commit to socialist politics for life!

NPC Steering Committee

  • Erika Paschold, Lincoln, NE
  • Jennifer Bolen, San Francisco, CA
  • Kristian Hernandez, North Texas
  • Natalie Midiri, Philadelphia, PA
  • Sean Estelle, Chicago, IL

YDSA co-chairs also sit on the SC.