Field + Outreach, December 2025
Written by Rebecca Harrington, Senior Director of Advocacy and Outreach | Published: December 8, 2025
Introducing Our New Organizing Manager, Isabel Song
Isabel Song got “bitten by the organizing bug” in 2015 during her freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, after a friend invited her to a debate watch party. One of her earliest field wins was coordinating a group of students to canvass for Bernie Sanders in Reno, in advance of the 2016 Nevada caucus. While she describes this as her most stressful time in college, she was invigorated by her efforts to recruit 40 students to join the canvass, fundraise to transport them from Berkeley to Reno, secure housing (they all slept in the Reno campaign office their first night in town), and coordinate door knocking efforts with the Bernie campaign. It was cold, and there was still snow on the ground, but Isabel thought to herself in those moments that this was something she wanted to do again and again.
Isabel started college on a pre-med track, with hopes of becoming a pediatric oncologist. She realized though that she was much more motivated by advocating for access to health care than eventually providing services herself. (She also realized she hated studying chemistry and physics.) So, during her third year of college, she switched her major to political science.
She organized on campus throughout the first Trump administration, running phone banks, coordinating volunteer events, and helping local campaigns and initiatives around housing and food access. Isabel is an organizer to her core. She loves connecting with people, recruiting them, and then watching as they grow into volunteer leaders.
Her first professional organizing job was as a field organizer with Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign, crisscrossing the huge district in Los Angeles County that she was assigned. There was a volunteer in her turf who opened up her house to Isabel, allowing her to host phone banks there, and offering her a place to take a break or eat dinner. She would send Isabel home after each visit with a bag of citrus from her own trees and a parental reminder to “get [her] vitamin C and not get sick.” Another volunteer asked his parents if their garage could be used as a staging area. From there, huddled over a space heater, Isabel launched door knocking canvasses and hosted phone banks while her volunteer’s parents brought out warmed orange slices to keep them energized. During her time on the Warren campaign, Isabel cultivated an impressive 178 volunteers who knocked on 4,359 doors across the district.
Days after Senator Warren suspended her campaign for president, the world shut down due to the pandemic. Just as Isabel had gotten confident in her professional advocacy skills, she had to learn a whole new way of organizing, when she started her next job as a youth constituency organizer for Katie Porter’s successful congressional re-election campaign.
By the time Isabel got a job as a campaign organizing director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in 2021, she was a well-seasoned leader who was ready to manage other organizers and push volunteers up the ladder of engagement. As Isabel was building her field team, she knew that she “wanted [her] volunteers to leave as organizers” and worked hard to meet that goal. Isabel and her team partnered with down-ballot Democratic candidates so voters wouldn’t only prioritize the top of the ticket. They knocked on 125,000 doors, made more than 680,000 calls, and sent more than 290,000 peer-to-peer texts.
In 2023, Isabel began working as the DCCC West Regional Organizing Director. In this position, she managed organizing programs in competitive congressional districts across Washington, Oregon, and California, where she and her teams successfully flipped four Republican seats in 2024, while keeping Democrats in control of the seats they already held. They also participated in multiple weeks of ballot curing in California — the process of reviewing ballots to correct minor errors that are usually the result of voter signature issues with mail-in ballots. This task kept Isabel and her teams busy until their last race was called in December, highlighting the importance of talking with every voter and carefully reviewing every ballot.
Isabel was drawn to working at Population Connection from a desire to resist the dismantling of reproductive rights here in the US and around the world. After multiple cycles of electoral organizing, in which work with volunteers ends on Election Day, she was also interested in cultivating volunteers for a long-term effort like the #Fight4HER campaign.
“I’m excited to join the #Fight4HER because everyone deserves access to reproductive health care, regardless of where they live in the world. Organizing is about building a better world for all of us.”
– Isabel Song
Isabel is a voracious reader — she has already devoured 217 books this year, mostly in the science fiction and romance genres. She’s also a proud Swiftie (fan of Taylor Swift) and has been fortunate to see her perform live three times in Los Angeles.
Despite the awful political times we’re living in, Isabel remains firmly committed to field organizing. Her talent, creativity, and dedication to global reproductive health and rights are a huge asset to our team. We are delighted to have her join us and are excited for all the great work she’ll do in 2026 and beyond.
Rebecca Harrington: rharrington@popconnect.org
Isabel Song: isong@popconnect.org