Meet Ilyse Hogue, NARAL's New President

NARAL announced that Ilyse Hogue will succeed Nancy Keenan as president. Awesome choice.

Hogue has an overwhelmingly impressive resume: she co-founded Friends of Democracy, a super PAC concerned with campaign finance reform, and has also been Senior Adviser to Media Matters for America, Director of Political Advocacy and Communications for MoveOn.org and Program Director at the Rainforest Action Network. Here’s more from her Nation bio (She’s also a columnist! You know, in her spare time…):

She was the recipient of the Business Ethics Network award in 2005 for her work in the financial sector, a campaign that was ultimately instrumental in moving over 60 multinational banks to adopt a groundbreaking framework of environmental standards for private investment known as the Equator Principles. These principles led to a host of voluntary initiatives in the US banking sector, including from Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and Bank of America. Ilyse was the chief negotiator in each of those agreements and worked to market them to a spectrum of constituencies, from institutional investors to environmental NGOs. A Harvard Business School case study was written in 2005 about this work, and she has lectured on it at Yale and Columbia. She has been a frequent speaker and writer about corporate power, corporate accountability and multi-national institutions that govern financial and corporate behavior. Ilyse was very involved in the global justice movement, traveling from Seattle to South Africa and many places in between working with international allies on corporate power.

She is the co-founder of smartMeme Strategy and Training project which works to amplify the impact of grassroots organizing with new strategy and training resources, values based communications, collaborations, and meme campaigning. Ilyse serves on the board of Rebuild the Dream, Oil Change International, Story of Stuff, and National Domestic Worker’s Alliance. Ilyse holds an M.S. in Resource Ecology Management from the University of Michigan where she studied the impact of resource constraints in politics and culture. Her BA is from Vassar College.

Last May, Keenan told The Washington Post that she would leave her position because it was time for “a new leader to come in and, basically, be the person for the next 40 years of protecting reproductive choice.” Hogue, who said yesterday that now is a “critical moment to engage a new generation of young people in the conversation about what choice means in a modern age,” sounds like the perfect fit.