Blueline helps mission-driven employers recruit talented staff.
Campaign staff are your organization’s greatest untapped resource.
Every election cycle, thousands of dedicated, inspired staffers join campaigns across the country. Campaigns are start-ups, and these staffers build and scale these ventures from the ground up at lightning speed. They defy expectations under enormous pressure and excel at people and project management. Plus, they bring an unmatched scrappy and whatever-it-takes attitude wherever they go.
Yet when their campaign ends, the vast majority of these talented operatives - whether they’re working on ballot measures, electoral campaigns, or issue advocacy - immediately become unemployed. This cyclical unemployment is the broken reality of the campaign industry; right now, there is no scalable infrastructure to retain talent in the year between election cycles. As a result, thousands of talented staffers are leaving the industry because they cannot afford to be unemployed every two years. This talent retention problem has enormous costs, in the form of money, time, and results.
Blueline creates a centralized way for organizations to recruit this talent.
Our 2025 Pilot Program
Blueline recruited top talent who worked the 2024 cycle.
Employers submit role descriptions (accepted on a rolling basis).
Blueline conducts first-round screeners and matches finalists with employers. Accepted Fellows work at partner organizations and receive holistic career development programming from Blueline.
It’s a win-win for employers and for staff: employers are able to access top-tier talent quickly to drive projects in their organizations, and staffers retain employment and have a path to build a career fighting for the causes they believe in.
Here’s how it works:
Our employer partners include organizations like:
Our Story
Solving the talent retention problem is personal. Before business school, Blueline’s Founder Lorenza Ramirez spent five years managing voter turnout programs on Presidential and Senate campaigns in battleground states. She witnessed both sides of the talent pipeline problem: countless talented operatives leaving the industry because there is no scalable infrastructure to retain them between cycles, and the enormous financial and efficiency costs of this attrition for progressive causes in the subsequent election year.
She came to Booth to do something about it. Blueline received special recognition as a finalist in the UChicago Social New Venture Accelerator and officially launched in September 2024 at a kick-off with Beto O’Rourke. Learn more about our journey here.
