Phil Radford

Philip David Radford (born January 2, 1976) is an American activist who served as the executive director of Greenpeace USA.

He was the founder and President of Progressive Power Lab, an organization that incubates companies and non-profits that build capacity for progressive organizations, including a donor advisory organization Champion.us, the Progressive Multiplier Fund and Membership Drive.

Radford is a co-founder of the Democracy Initiative, was founder and executive director of Power Shift, and is a board member of the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

He has a background in grassroots organizing, corporate social responsibility, climate change, and clean energy.

He currently serves as the Chief Strategy officer at the Sierra Club.

Radford began his environmental activism as a high school student at Oak Park and River Forest High School in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, volunteering for an environmental justice campaign to stop the building of trash incinerators in the West Side of Chicago near his family's Oak Park home.

His first job as a grassroots organizer came as a canvasser for Illinois PIRG.

While studying political science and business at Washington University in St. Louis, he directed campaign and canvass offices during summers for the Fund for Public Interest Research for clients including the Human Rights Campaign, PIRGIM, and Ohio PIRG and worked part-time during school for the Sierra Club.

After graduating college in 1998, Radford became a lead organizer at Green Corps, the field school for environmental organizing.

Radford received his B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in 1998.

From 1999 to 2001 Radford was field director for Ozone Action, an organization dedicated to working on the atmospheric threats of global warming and ozone depletion.

As field director, Radford planned and executed a number of grassroots campaigns, including a campaign during the 2000 presidential primaries, which was the initial impetus for Senator John McCain sponsoring the Climate Stewardship Act.

Radford also managed the grassroots mobilization for the Global Warming Divestiture Campaign, which resulted in Ford, General Motors, Texaco, and other companies ending their funding the Global Climate Coalition, which spread misinformation about global warming.

According to The New York Times, the result of the campaign was "the latest sign of divisions within heavy industry over how to respond to global warming."

In 2001, Radford founded Power Shift, a non-governmental organization dedicated to driving clean energy market breakthroughs and building the grassroots base to stop global warming.

As executive director of Power Shift, Radford worked closely with the cities of San Diego, Chula Vista, California, and Berkeley, California, as well as nine other municipalities, to secure investments for installation of solar energy systems and implementation of energy efficiency measures in municipal buildings.

Radford also helped to convince Citigroup to adopt innovative new means of financing clean energy infrastructure for wind and solar installations that made them affordable to average Americans.

In 2001, while running Power Shift, Radford launched a campaign to push Citibank to offer and promote Energy Efficient Mortgages (EEMs).

Citi was "missing the opportunity to help stop global warming by phasing out fossil fuel investments and promoting clean energy now," Radford said.

"The irony is that if Citi financed solar for people's homes, solar energy could be made immediately affordable for millions of Americans today."

In 2004, Citigroup agreed to offer and promote EEMs for residential wind, energy efficiency, and solar installations that would make clean energy affordable for millions of Americans.

In 2009, at the age of 33, Radford was selected as the youngest ever executive director of Greenpeace.

Radford's tenure at Greenpeace USA is best known for convincing over 100 corporations to change their environmental practices; exposing the anti-environmental influence of the Koch Brothers, making them a household name; increasing the organization's net income by 80%; launching the organization's grassroots organizing and significantly growing the canvass programs; and serving as a founder of the Democracy Initiative, a national coalition of major unions, environmental groups, civil rights and government reform organizations working for universal voter registration, to get money out of politics, and to reform Senate rules.

In September 2013, Radford announced that he would step down on April 30, 2014, once he had completed five years of service as executive director.

New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin referred to a Greenpeace campaign during Radford's tenure as "Activism at Its Best."

Ben Jealous, former president and chief executive officer of the NAACP as well as co-founder of the Democracy Initiative with Radford, described Radford at the helm of Greenpeace as "a modern movement building giant. He has built powerful diverse coalitions to bolster the fights for the environment and voting rights. In the process he has shown himself to be unmatched in mobilizing everyday people to fund their movements directly."

Environmental leader Bill McKibben stated: "During Radford's tenure, Greenpeace has been helping the whole environmental movement shift back towards its roots: local, connected, tough."

Before becoming executive director of Greenpeace USA, Radford served as the director of the organization's Grassroots Program.

In that capacity, he directed and significantly grew the organization's street canvass and launched and directed the door-to-door canvasses, online-to-offline organizing team, social media team, the Greenpeace Student Network, and the Greenpeace Semester.

Under Radford, the street and door-to-door canvassing programs grew to include nearly 400 canvassers in almost 20 cities across the country and was responsible for doubling the organization's budget.

After leaving Greenpeace, Radford launched Progressive Power Lab, which starts and manages organizations that work to move millions of dollars and people into progressive causes.

Through Progressive Power Lab, Radford launched the Progressive Multiplier Fund, Membership Drive, a Salesforce App developer which built Apps including The Field, and Champion.us, a donor advisor firm for small donors focused on democracy and climate change.

During Radford's tenure at Greenpeace, his theory of change shifted from viewing governments as arbitrators between public and private interests on environmental issues, to finding that most governments are captured by industry.

Rather than fighting first for new laws, which could be blocked by industries, he has focused on pressuring large companies to change their practices and enlisted them as allies in pushing for strong environmental protections.

Examples include Greenpeace campaigns that convinced Apple Inc. and other tech companies to shift to 100% clean energy and lobby utilities and regulators to make that possible, as well as work to protect both the Indonesian rainforest and the Bering Sea Canyons.

Radford argues that the combination of creating industry champions and "outside pressure" focused on the government are the keys to passing new laws to protect the environment.

However, Radford has also been a vocal leader calling for the United States to pass campaign finance reform and respect all Americans' voting rights to shift power in politics from corporations towards people and fulfill "the promise of American democracy."

Radford played a major role in several initiatives to influence corporations such as the Global Climate Coalition, Citigroup, Kimberley-Clark, Asia Pulp and Paper, and the tech industry.

Radford managed the grassroots efforts of a national divestment/disinvestment campaign, which forced Ford, General Motors, Texaco, and other companies to stop funding the Global Climate Coalition, which spread misinformation about global warming.

Soon thereafter, the GCC ended operations.