Values-driven strategies for the 99%
Organize! Media builds winning campaigns for workers and the labor movement
We are a full-service communications shop
Under the leadership of President Anna Bakalis, a 10-year veteran union communications director, Organize! Media is a full-service communications shop, with values-driven writers, designers and creatives who bring campaigns to life.
We provide Strategic Communications for contract campaigns including:
- Taking on bad bosses, applying pressure to change public discourse and win
- Communications for internal and external audiences
- Organizing-style communications that centers rank and file union members
- Media trainings on how to tell your story
- Story-based, research-driven strategies that win hearts and minds
- Facilitating internal and coalition meetings
- Media event coordination
We also do Communications Diagnostics including:
- Assessing and fine-tuning current communications capacity
- Alignment of union vision with communications
- Retooling digital organizing strategies
- Creating sustainable communications infrastructures with current resources
- Retooling to increase communications capacity
Our offerings and services include:
- Advocacy
- Creative materials
- Earned media strategies
- Event PR
- Graphic design
- Internal communications
- Logo and branding
- Paid media
- Pitch stories to media
- Press advisories
- Press list management
- Project management
- Media management
- Media relations
- Media training modules
- Owned media
- Social media
- Translation services
- Union staff mentorship and training
Our process to win
Build
We scale up what is working and build an effective communications program. We assess and create internal capacity.
Strategize
We bring a campaign or project to life by creating sustainable strategies, media trainings and communications plans.
Organize
We can help workers push back bad boss narratives, apply pressure, change public discourse and win.
UTLA’s strike poster by Ernesto Yerena Montejano, done under the direction of Organize! Media’s Anna Bakalis.
Anna Bakalis and her team launched pro-worker, anti-privatization messaging on billboards and multimedia platforms across Los Angeles
More than 80,000 joined the December 2018 march with Los Angeles teachers to end privatization and reinvest in public education.
You can expect a worker-driven narrative and a strategic assessment of communications needs for your organization or project within your timeframe as an Organize! Media client. Together, we will create bold and successful communications strategies that will win for workers.
Together, let’s build our movement
Organize! Media’s Anna Bakalis knows how to mobilize members, media, and the public around key issues that build power for working people. She has contributed to organizing unions and other pro-worker, pro-racial and social justice causes.
Anna comes from a long line of proud unionists. Her grandfather, who emigrated from Greece, worked as a tinner in a steel mill outside of Pittsburgh and led the steel worker strike of 1944. Her mother was a middle school teacher in Watsonville, California and father was a stagehand and member of IATSE Local 33 in Los Angeles.
Anna started out as a newspaper reporter in New Jersey then continued in California, where she worked as a journalist for 10 years.
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In 2011, she joined the labor movement with SEIU Local 1021, a large, progressive and diverse public sector union. She started as a communications specialist, focused on highlighting the important work of city and county employees, tearing down bad-boss narratives and in support of contract campaigns throughout Northern California. She was promoted to Communications Director in 2013 where she helped build messaging strategies to win contract and strike campaigns throughout the Bay Area.
In 2015, she joined United Teachers Los Angeles as Communications Director. There she re-tooled the communications department to align with the fighting spirit of LA educators. She quickly launched the “We Are Public Schools” public awareness campaign which included billboards, radio, video and online ads showcasing the undervalued but heroic work of LA educators, students and parents. The campaign helped UTLA’s broader goals to fund and support public education.
She was the strategic messaging architect for the LA Teachers strike in 2019, creating the battle cries echoed across the city and around the nation: California ranks 46 out of 50 in per-pupil funding; 80% of LAUSD schools do not have a full-time nurse; teachers pay $1,000 out of pocket each year for classroom supplies while the employer sits on $2 billion in reserves. The messaging resonated with the community over the six-day strike, with more than 30,000 parents, students and community joining the 32,000 educators on the picket lines. UTLA won the strike and shifted the power dynamics of a city. Her messaging helped redefine what was possible in a contract campaign.
In March 2021 she garnered two exclusive stories in the Washington Post and launched a national campaign to get the federal government to fulfill the promise made in 1975 to America’s students to fund IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) at 40% and to provide a free and appropriate education and evaluation of unique learning needs for all children with disabilities.
In 2022, she conceptualized and launched the “We Love New York Nurses” public campaign in New York City, in support of the biggest multi-table contract campaign in the unions’ history, representing more than 30,000 members.
Anna believes in the power of contract campaigns, new organizing fights and all inflection points that bring power to workers. Raised by a single mother, she believes in uplifting all working families to lead healthy, fulfilling lives for this and the next generation.
She is a proud graduate of San Jose State University, where she received a BS in Journalism.
She currently lives with her husband, son and two dogs in Silver Spring, Maryland.
Anna has worked with:
Testimonials
"Anna Bakalis is hands down the best messaging strategist in the labor movement today. Millions of workers today want to fight back — and she has shown what it takes to reach them. Organize! Media plays a key role in helping working people and unions meet this urgent moment."
“Anna Bakalis is hands down the best messaging strategist in the labor movement today. Millions of workers today want to fight back — and she has shown what it takes to reach them. Organize! Media plays a key role in helping working people and unions meet this urgent moment.”
— Eric Blanc, professor of labor studies, Rutgers University
"Anna is a collaborative team leader and an honest thought partner in building strategy for what’s right for workers. She leans into difficult conversations and builds the fight."
Anna is a collaborative team leader and an honest thought partner in building strategy for what’s right for workers. She leans into difficult conversations and builds the fight.
At UTLA, Anna worked closely with a diverse team of elected leaders, staff and members to devise and deliver some of the most compelling communication strategies in the labor movement, harnessing the power of storytelling and narrative to shape the LA teachers strike and win against powerful interests. She’s an unparalleled force in labor communications and I’m proud she has the ability to work with the broader labor movement through Organize! Media.
– Alex Caputo-Pearl, UTLA NEA VP, UTLA President 2014-2020
"Over the last decade, Anna has re-tooled communications departments and led successful contract campaigns and strikes, including the paradigm-shifting LA teachers strike in 2019. Anna is not just a superior communicator, she is a great team player and understands the connection between organizing and communications."
“You want Anna in the room to work through strengths and challenges and build messaging strategies that support a truly worker-led labor movement. I am thrilled the entire trade union movement gets the chance to work with Anna in her new capacity at Organize! Media. This will allow workers to access and scale up Anna’s unique organizing-style method of communications. Over the last decade, Anna has re-tooled communications departments and led successful contract campaigns and strikes, including the paradigm-shifting LA Teachers Strike of 2019. Anna is not just a superior communicator, she is a great team player and understands the connection between organizing and communications.”
— Dr. Jane McAlevey, Organizer, Author and Senior Policy Fellow of the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center
"Anna is more than a communications strategist - she is a deeply committed, successful organizer whose zone of genius just happens to be media, messaging, and communications."
“Anna is more than a communications strategist – she is a deeply committed, successful organizer whose zone of genius just happens to be media, messaging, and communications. She instinctually understands how to shift the public narrative in favor of workers, and – even more importantly – understands what it takes to educate and motivate workers to lead the fight to shift that narrative. In my time working with her, she was the connective tissue that connected innovative research to systematic organizing, grounding wonky facts in compelling personal, shop-floor stories. Not only that – she’s just a great person to work with, shifting seamlessly between a generous team player and an ambitious leader.”
— Grace Regullano, Senior Strategist, Sunrise Project and former Research and Analytics Director, UTLA
"Anna is impressive in her knowledge of how to galvanize support for a campaign with union members, the media and the public. Organize! Media fills a need in the labor movement for a nimble, strategic messaging expert to come in and assess, using the tools on the ground, and build from there."
“Anna is impressive in her knowledge of how to galvanize support for a campaign with union members, the media and the public. She is insightful, patient and a pleasure to work with. She will bring tremendous value to any team fighting to uplift the voice of workers and their unions.”
— Bill Fletcher Jr. is a long-time racial-justice, labor, and international activist, scholar, and author
"Anna shines at using storytelling to develop public-facing messaging that can shift the narrative and win campaigns. I worked with Anna to build — from the ground up — a diverse nationwide coalition to advocate for increased special education funding for schools."
“Anna shines at using storytelling to develop public-facing messaging that can shift the narrative and win campaigns. I worked with Anna to build — from the ground up — a diverse nationwide coalition to advocate for increased special education funding for schools. Anna excels at coalition work and in engaging partners to develop and implement a shared strategic vision. As part of the coalition launch, Anna developed a media strategy that united a research-driven narrative and the powerful stories of parents and workers, garnering a multi-part exclusive in the Washington Post that put the coalition on the map.”
— Gloria Martinez, UTLA Elementary Vice President and special education teacher for 20 years
"Anna came in and worked with our national team to develop a strategy to take on the $3 billion sex trade industry. She quickly assessed our needs and helped us organize members around a national platform."
“Anna came in and worked with our national team to develop a strategy to take on the $3 billion sex trade industry. She quickly assessed our needs and helped us organize members around a national platform. Together, we built a fight that challenged common misconceptions and garnered national media attention, shifting the narrative on the sex trade, and centering survivors. She was generous with her time, trained other writers and organizers in our organization, and shared her unique media organizing skills that we use to this day.”
— Jollene Levid, organizer of over 18 years in the labor movement and Founding Chairperson of AF3IRM, a transnational feminist women’s organization of women of color in over a dozen cities in the US & Puerto Rico, which she has been a part of for 20 years