Olivia Merrill

I joined Democratic Socialists of America in November 2016, after having seen both the promise of Bernie Sanders returning socialism to US political discourse, as well as the ultimate victory of Donald Trump in the presidential race. As a new member of DSA, I was one of the five co-founders of the original Organizing Committee for DSA Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and have been organizing here ever since.

I have served in elected leadership in the chapter virtually every year since its founding, putting my energy wherever the chapter needed it. My campaign experience is equally spread across that time, including:

• Coordinating the chapter’s first neighborhood canvassing operation in January 2018, knocking the doors of the entire west end of Newport to get public support for a needle exchange operation opening in the city,

• Organizing mass turnout to public meetings to support unionizing workers, as well as putting on a successful structural organizing training for those workers, who ultimately went on to win their election,

• Leading the chapter’s successful 100K recruitment drive in 2020, leading to us being the fourth best DSA chapter in percentage growth across the country,

• Successful bowl-a-thon fundraisers in 2019 for abortion funds and 2021 for workers on strike, raising over $6,000 in a month’s time in both instances,

• Stepping into electoral leadership in 2023 and 2024, with total number of doors knocked doubling between 2023 and 2024 and our chapter successfully contributing to wins for abortion rights in Ohio and protecting public school funding in Kentucky, as well as an increasingly developed bench of electoral organizers and leaders in the chapter to continue raising our capacity year by year,

• Reinvigorating the communications committee in 2024 and successfully organizing new members who have done incredible work with graphic design, new member onboarding, website design, and a whole host of other tasks. This also led to a successful flurry of new member organizing following our election bump in November 2024, with over 25 new member one-on-one conversations successfully coming together within a single month.

Our chapter has an incredible amount of energy coming from new members who are excited to get to work. As secretary, I’ve devoted a substantial amount of my term to ensuring we have the best processes available for onboarding new people into the chapter and making sure they are both welcomed and informed on how they can best connect to the chapter as whole. I will continue and substantially scale up that work in 2025 in order to make DSA a place where we are able to provide a sense of direction for people looking for a solution under the incoming Trump administration. I will invest a significant amount of energy into ensuring intentional recruitment efforts begin happening on a regular basis, both as stand alone events and as part of our chapter’s outward organizing work generally.

I also will continue scaling up our regular communications to members. I will do this by fleshing out our newsletters and the number of volunteers we have available to work on making them available and relevant to members, as well as by working with our website volunteers to make sure it is a reliable resource and hub for members and nonmembers alike to learn more about organization.

One activity I’d like to explore in more detail for the coming year is to intentionally get members published via op-eds and similar write ups in local papers, so we can share the ‘DSA perspective’ as broadly as possible in our region during a time of intense reactionary backlash.