August 2025 Special Steering Election

Member Statements
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The candidate statements for the August 2025 Special Steering Election are available here.

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Far F - Campaigns Coordinator
Hello I am Far(he/him). I am running for Campaigns Council in the special election. I am sorry I couldn’t make it to the candidate forum, as it happens I am currently running the Campaigns Council Meeting happening at the same time. I am ultimately running because I am happy to keep up these responsibilities to ensure a continuity of operations for the remainder of the year. Ultimately I see the potential of campaigns council in offering a place for all our formations to truly deliberate and strategize together and at its best offers a way to break out of our organizational silos. If elected I’d like to keep cultivating a deliberative space where real conversations around the issues we face as a chapter can happen alongside all the leaders in our chapter. I joined DSA in the summer of 2022, and in the time since I have been an active part of NoVA’s Abolition (serving as a steward), Migrant Justice, Tenant Organizing, and Medicare for All working groups, I am also currently on the NoVA Branch Steering as a representative for Arlington/Alexandria/Falls Church. I currently also serve as an at-large member on the Chapter’s Steering Committee. Also I have been fairly involved in our chapter’s Palestine work through the internationalism workgroup and also in local NoVA coalitions. The breadth of my engagement across many different campaigns gives me a good sense of what it means to work across these siloes to find intersections and abilities to effectively collaborate. Some of my favorite times have been when there have been organic opportunities for such collaboration. In NoVA Abolition when we were doing a Brake Light Clinic, I invited a lot of my close comrades in NoVA Tenant Organizing to collaborate. The result was an even deeper mutual aid effort which included more than brake lights and allowed us to push messaging that crossed the workgroup lines. So I hope to continue to cultivate such efforts. Thanks!

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Nell G - At Large
No Statement

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Christian H - At Large
My name is Christian H (he/they) and I am running for one of the open At-Large seats on Steering as a part of the Left Unity Slate along with comrades Nell G, John S, and Far F. Some of the core principles that guide my organizing include empathy, dignity, responsibility, and respect. These principles drive my work as an organizer, in and out of DSA. I currently work for Habitat for Humanity as a Construction Crew Leader with Americorps. Before I get into our platform, I wanted to give a huge thanks to everyone who nominated me for Steering!

I’ve just celebrated my one year anniversary with DSA this past month. Over the past year, I’ve been pretty active within the Chapter. I served as a member of IEFD for two consecutive elections, then as a Chapter HGO, and a Beginner Organizer within EWOC. More recently, I was elected as a Delegate to represent our Chapter at National Convention as a part of the Red Slate. I’ve enjoyed the experience and insight all of these positions have given me into our Chapter’s structure.

Over the past year, our Chapter has been through the wringer. I’ve noticed a large amount of distrust in our Chapter’s ability to establish a culture of respect, opportunity, and unity in the face of the increasing fascism we face everyday. I am running for Steering because I believe I can help facilitate more of these principles within our Chapter. I, along with the comrades I’m running with, believe in fostering an unwavering culture of respect, transparency, and proportional leadership. If you’d like to learn more about me, feel free to reach out! In the meantime please review our Left Unity Slate platform linked here.

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Kurtis H - At Large

  1. I joined MDC DSA in 2019 and immediately involved myself in the Bernie working group. Within a month or two, I was leading this working group alongside a couple other comrades. In 2020, I was elected to the chapter’s Steering Committee, where I served through the end of 2022. During my tenure on the Steering Committee, I helped organize for chapter HGOs, I created and ran the Campaign Council, and I served on the Bylaws Reform Commission, which successfully passed a full-scale reform of our chapter’s bylaws in late 2020. I also helped plan and execute countless General Body Meetings and three local conventions. Following my tenure on the Steering Committee, I helped lead the Labor Working Group, where we mobilized towards the UPS Teamsters Strike and against Union Kitchen with UFCW Local 400.

Recently, I served on the chapter’s IEFD for national delegate elections. I have also been involved with the chapter’s support work with Unite Here in their fight against Starr restaurants. Finally, I’m plugging into our chapter’s canvassing efforts for Frankie in Greenbelt, and I’m helping launch one of our first canvasses for Frankie on August 3rd.

  1. I believe that I’m a good fit because I have served on this body before. The start of my first term was similar to our current moment: Trump as president, ruptures leading to increased working class energy, renewed excitement for organizing, and state violence. I was able to help lead our chapter through these waters. I have helped organize rallies, direct actions, social events, strike support efforts, and canvasses, with a focus on specifc strategic goal and measurements of success.I have experience harnessing excitement around electoral strategies to build the chapter more broadly (the Bernie 2020 campaign), and I see a similar opportunity with local candidates in the wake of Zohran’s primary win in NYC. With acknowledgement that membership on the Steering Committee is a political position above all, I believe it is important to note that, then, as now, I have a clear basis of theory to inform the political decisions that Steering is charged with answering. That theory is rooted in Marx (obviously!), Miliband, Poulantzas, and Gorz, among others. At the risk of oversimplifying, I will say that I am a partyist and strongly believe in the importance of moving as much of the working class as possible into DSA as the vehicle for working class liberation. With this goal in mind, I am a proponent of Class Alignment, or the strategy of seizing levers of state power to make transformative changes that can open up space for the exercise of organizing skills and the expansion of organizing horizons by the working class.

  2. If elected, I hope to help channel the energy and excitement around us into an increase in membership and engagement with internal and external chapter activities. My main goal is to help re-right the ship - leadership turnover at the scale we’ve seen this year is never good, but is particularly bad in our current moment. We need a Steering Committee that is fully able to act on both its administrative and political obligations to the membership. I’m also interested in making sure that we are laying the foundations for the next several years. The region will have several potential electoral openings across 2026 through 2028 and we need to be prepared to play our role in those.

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Dieter LM - Treasurer

  1. I first joined DSA and our chapter here in DC back in 2017. I have mostly focused on our electoral organizing locally across various campaigns, such as the 2022 Zachary Parker where I served as one of the campaign leads. But I’ve also run for and been elected to chapter leadership, serving on our Steering Committee between 2022-2023 and leading the Membership Engagement Committee (now MED). Nationally, I served on the Steering Committee of the DSA International Committee at the same time. Today, I am an active member of the Labor Working Group and the Green New Deal Working Group, and I will be representing our chapter for the second time at DSA National Convention next month.

  2. I have previous and current experience with the position of treasurer. For two years, I served as the treasurer of the Ward 1 Democrats, a local political committee. This required me to not just manage the finances of a small organization, but also required me to file regular financial reports with the DC Office of Campaign Finance. Additionally, I serve as treasurer of my Advisory Neighborhood Commission, which has provided me with invaluable experience. Not only do I manage the finances of a small government entity, I also have to file quarterly financial reports with the DC Office of ANCs, create a budget, and manage a checkbook. Taken into account with my previous experience on our Steering Committee, I think I may an excellent candidate for this position.

  3. Given that this is a special election and that I would have at most four months in this role, I am mostly aiming to achieve two things: a) provide stability to our Steering Committee as well as experienced stewardship of our chapter treasury, and b) continue the outstanding work of our outgoing treasurer and focusing on restocking and refreshing our merchandise store.

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Sam N - Campaigns Coordinator
1: I first joined DSA in 2012 after Occupy Wall Street. Two organizing mentors of mine asked me to come with them to that February’s YDS conference and it was a fantastic experience. I was not actively involved with the DC chapter until 2016 when I started attending meetings. In 2017, I helped launch the Economic Justice Committee, now the Labor Working Group. That would be my primary area of work in the chapter until last year. We organized wage theft canvasses, worker organizing trainings, actively organized service workers, and mobilized our members to support strikers like at Cinder Bed Road and Amazon, and organized our PRO Act pressure campaign. I have also participated in some capacity with Migrant Justice and Political Education, helping with actions and presenting on socialists in the labor movement respectfully. I have run organizing skills trainings for chapter members, everything from how to run a meeting to power analysis. At the national level, in the first few years of our member surge I was a new chapter mentor, helping over a dozen chapters establish themselves, identify organizing opportunities, and restructure after influxes of membership. In our chapter, I also helped write reforms to our chapter structure after 2016, with my focus being the Campaigns Committee. I am also currently the interim chair for the Program Development Commission.

2: I have long institutional knowledge of not just Metro DC DSA but of organizing in DC more generally. I am an experienced facilitator, trainer, and organizer. I also have experience in a leadership body like this by virtue of my seven years as an Executive Council member with my union, the Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild (where I also steered the local through overhauling our bylaws). I have a big interest in the nuts and bolts of organization, ensuring that our structures and processes are transparent, democratic, and also just make sense for the chapter. I also pride myself on my own patience and enthusiasm for working with leftists of all stripes.

3: Adding my labor and perspective to what I view already as an excellently run chapter. I hope to also chair the Campaigns Council and maximize its use to our members. I am excited by the prospect of a dedicated member organizer and hope to be part of drafting a management plan. I also want to be open and accessible to members for any concerns there might be so that they can be discussed openly and honestly. I know there’s much that steering does that isn’t front and center, so I’m expecting some amount of learning curb but am up to the task.

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John S - At Large

  1. I joined MDC DSA in 2019, but did not get active until 2023. Since then I have served in a variety of roles within the labor formations of the chapter and nationally. I am currently the chair of the Labor Committee and a member of the NLC steering committee.

  2. I have held good governance and a commitment to democratic procedure to be high priorities during my time in leadership. I am a parliamentarian and member of the American Institute of Parliamentarians. I learned about procedure so that I could serve on my local union’s bylaws committee and ensure that the rules are fair and followed. I believe that a steady hand is necessary on steering and that a commitment to maintaining and strengthening our democratic culture will provide that.

  3. I hope to help restore faith and confidence in our processes and leadership. This will come from a commitment to our democratic processes and culture.