Announcing Anna Bakalis, our new Executive Director

Please join us in welcoming Anna Bakalis into her new role of Executive Director of Popular Comms! 

Anna brings with her a tremendous wealth of experience. Prior to stepping into her new role, she worked with Popular Comms as our Labor Strategy Director, playing a leadership role in developing our labor and public education partnership work over the past year. Anna has more than a decade of leadership experience as a labor movement strategist, developing and implementing values-based, worker-led messaging and communications strategies with educators, students, nurses, healthcare, public and private sector workers as well as other social justice causes. We’re so excited that she has accepted the job of Executive Director!

We want to thank Jonathan Smucker for his service as our Executive Director since co-founding the organization with Allison Troy two years ago. As his family is growing, Jonathan decided to step out of the Executive Director role. We’re excited that he is staying with Popular Comms in a different role, continuing to serve as our Board President, and (following his paternity leave) serving in a staff role as Senior Strategist. In this role, Jonathan will continue working with Anna, Allison, and Cicia to shape our organization’s vision and trajectory and to implement our training and partnership work.

As we look ahead to the rest of 2024 and beyond and reflect upon what’s at stake, we know that to win the big changes we long for, we need more people power. We need to develop bigger and more powerful grassroots movements and organizations. We need messaging and organizing strategies that fight visibly and vocally for working people and invest in their leadership. We’re committed to doing our small part in this fight for a better future—helping build people’s organizations and movements that integrate bottom-up organizing and communications strategy. As we dig in, we’re excited for the role Anna will play leading our team!