• Radical organizer/activist since the early 1960s
• Co-founder and President of the Midwest Academy, which teaches tactics of direct action, confrontation, and intimidation
• Helped develop methods adopted by AFL-CIO's "Union Summer"
• Co-founder of left Democrat group Coalition for Democratic Values
• Was Training Director for the Democratic National Committee
• Executive Director of the NAACP's National Voter Fund
• Board member of the Center for Community Change
• Vice President of USAction

Heather Booth is a veteran activist in the civil rights, women's rights, and antiwar movements. She was a co-founder and onetime President of the Midwest Academy and currently serves as a board member of the Center for Community Change, Vice President of USAction, and Director of the AFL-CIO's campaign for universal health care coverage. She also is a guiding force of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). Moreover, she has served as a consultant to such groups as the National Organization for Women, Campaign for America's Future, MoveOn.org, Working Assets, and TrueMajority. Booth is a disciple of Saul Alinsky, of whom she says: "Alinsky is to community-organizing as Freud is to psychoanalysis."

Booth enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1963 and quickly became active in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements as a member of the Freedom Summer Civil Rights Project and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She also served as a leader of the Progressive Student Political Committee.

Booth was enthralled by the sense of unity she felt among the various radical factions with which she became involved during the Sixties. "It's not like there was just one strand," she reminisces. "All of these strands together meant being in the Movement. Women, civil rights, anti-war, students rights -- it was all part of the Movement."

In 1965 Booth turned her attention to feminist issues and organized the group "Jane," which helped women find illegal abortion providers in the years preceding the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling that made abortion legal nationwide. Booth recalls:

"In 1965, a friend of mine was pregnant and needed an abortion…. I called doctors in the civil rights movement and found someone who could help my friend. A few months later, someone else had heard about it and asked for help. I made another contact. And someone else called, then another, then another. I told people when they called they should ask for Jane. I would counsel the women, preparing them for the abortion and doing follow-up with them and with the doctor afterward… Jane ultimately served over 10,000 women …"

Heather Booth's husband, Paul Booth, was a founder and national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. He is currently an assistant to Gerald McEntee, President of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME).

In 1979 Heather Booth helped organize five state activist groups in Oregon, Massachusetts, Illinois, Connecticut, and Ohio into a national federation called Citizen Action, a consumer advocacy organization focused on such issues as environmentalism and socialized medicine. She served as Citizen Action's co-director until 1988. By 1999 the group had become moribund, and Booth helped resurrect it that year under the name USAction.

In 1990 Booth became Director of the Coalition for Democratic Values, a partisan organization of leading left Democrats, formed as a counterweight to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council.

In 1992 Booth directed the Field Operation for Illinois Democrat Carol Moseley Braun's successful run for the U.S. Senate.

In 1993 Booth became Training Director for the Democratic National Committee. In this job she solicited endorsements for President Bill Clinton's policies from a wide array of interest groups.

Booth also served as a legislative aide to Democratic Senator Howard Metzenbaum before he retired in 1995.

In 1998 Booth was a signatory to the Statement of Principles of the New Century Alliance for Social Security, a coalition of groups -- spearheaded by the Institute for America's Future -- that opposed the privatization of Social Security. Other notable signers included John Sweeney, Steven Kest, Mike Farrell, Roger Hickey, Marian Wright Edelman, Patricia Ireland, Kweisi Mfume, Raul Yzaguirre, Robert Reich, Susan Shaer, Jesse Jackson, Eleanor Smeal, Brent Blackwelder, Nancy Duff Campbell, Norman Lear, and Andrew Stern.

Booth contends that the defeat of Social Security privatization was a watershed moment for leftwing activists:

"We've learned to play an inside and outside game as we did on stopping Social Security privatization, which was the first effective stopping of the Bush juggernaut and the first indication of this new democratic promise. Their union (AFSCME and AFL-CIO and others) and community and state based groups (USAction) and MoveOn and think tanks (Campaign for America's Future) and others came together working with the Democratic leadership with common message, common purpose and common strategy. And now the campaigns are multiplying on the budget, on the war, and other key issues."

In 2000 Booth was named Executive Director of the NAACP National Voter Fund (NVF), whose get-out-the-vote effort helped to increase African-American turnout at the polls by 4.5 million over 1996 levels.

In January 2004 Booth spoke at the National Conference on Organized Resistance (NCOR) at American University. She participated in a panel discussion with Elaine Brown (a former Black Panther Party leader) and Cathy Wilkerson (formerly an editor of the Students for a Democratic Society magazine New Left Notes and a member of the domestic terrorist group Weatherman). Popular themes at NCOR conferences include anarchism, anti-capitalism, black nationalism, animal rights, climate change, revolutionary strategy, classism, "indigenous resistance," prisoner rights, and the rights of illegal immigrants.

In October 2006, Booth lent her name to a letter rebutting accusations that MoveOn.org was an anti-Semitic entity. The controversy over MoveOn had begun when the organization cited approvingly a CounterPunch piece depicting American Jews as dual loyalists who make policy decisions in the interests of Israel as much as the United States. Fellow signers of the letter included such notables as Eric Alterman, Peter Edelman, Todd Gitlin, and Michael Lerner.

Booth believes that the conservative movement in America is on the decline, and that the left needs to unite and seize the moment:

"The right wing control (hegemony) is fracturing and it is not clear that it can be put back together.... A majority of people are turning against the right.... It is now, when there is this opening, that the extraordinary work which has been tak[ing] shape over the last 30 years really will pay off."

Booth's vision of uniting various leftist factions has also been the subject of her two books: Toward a Radical Movement (1968), and Citizen Action and the New American Populism (1986).

In December 2005 the Midwest Academy announced its establishment of the "Heather Award," in honor of Booth's four decades of work as an activist leader. The award is given annually to a woman who has spent at least 15 years in the field of organizing and who, "like Heather, demonstrate[s] a generous spirit that brings others along." Past recipients have included: Chicana activist Alicia Ybarra, Training Director of SEIU International; Sarita Gupta, past President of the United States Student Association; and Mary Beth Maxwell, former Deputy Field Director for NARAL Pro-Choice America.

In June 2009 Booth praised ACORN as an organization of people dedicated to "building a better society and a better world."

Over the years, Booth has contributed money to the campaigns of numerous political candidates -- all Democrats. Notable recipients of her donations include Barack Obama, Al Franken, Tom Harkin, Jesse Jackson, Kweisi Mfume, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Barbara Boxer, Tammy Baldwin, Al Gore, Ralph Neas, Jan Schakowsky, Russell Feingold, and Lane Evans.

Booth also has made contributions to the Progressive Politics Network, Progressive Majority, EMILY'S List, Moveon.org, and 21st Century Democrats.