Sawgrass Progressives is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping environmentalist candidates run grassroots campaigns for the state legislature. The organization was founded in August 2020 after founder and executive director Lisa Straehley met several great candidates who weren’t getting the help they needed to be successful.

Straehley took her first political action in 2003 by drafting a petition against the Iraq War – but since she was in eighth grade at the time, it was written in sparkly blue gel pen and it was circulated around her junior high. From there, she started volunteering on campaigns until people started paying her. Straehley ran her first campaign in 2012: a state senate race in rural Colorado.

A California native, Straehley moved to Colorado just after it cemented its status as a swing state by electing two Democrats at the top of the ballot in the 2010 Tea Party wave. Colorado’s anomalous behavior encouraged Straehley to move there to learn as much as she could about how a red state could become a swing state, help as much as she could, and see if Colorado’s method could be a model that could be applied elsewhere in the country.

After several years of working on political campaigns of various sizes, at different levels, and in different locales; Straehley moved to Florida at the end of 2019 to be closer to family and take advantage of the state’s unique diversity of flora and fauna eager to plug herself into the progressive infrastructure needed to turn the state blue. Not seeing the kind of work she had seen modeled in Colorado and after talking to a few candidates, Straehley started Sawgrass Progressives the following summer.

 Sawgrass Progressives is building a statewide organizing infrastructure by working with strong candidates in red districts to hire campaign managers to do the on-the-ground organizing work needed to flip the most competitive districts in the state and help Democrats at the top of the ticket.