A few weeks ago, we announced the addition of two senior staff to the teams at Public Campaign and Public Campaign Action Fund.

This week’s issue of National Journal, a respected Washington, D.C. policy magazine, featured interviews with our new folks, Betty Ahrens and Jeff Robinson. “Determined to do something to change the status quo, both have joined Public Campaign, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group bent on enacting sweeping campaign finance reform.”

In the interview, both Betty and Jeff talk about their years of community organizing on a variety of issues and when it comes down to it, the voices of everyday people are being drowned out by our big money system.

“Everything I’ve done in 30 years has been directed toward the goal of making democracy work and to make sure every American has an equal voice,” Jeff told the magazine. “Special interest money in politics does the opposite. It takes the individual out of the discourse.”

National Journal is subscription only, but here’s the full article:

Betty Ahrens, Jeff Robinson
It was doing the slow, plodding work of community organizing, only to see their progress undone, that galvanized Betty Ahrens and Jeff Robinson to fight the influence of special-interest money in politics. Having logged hundreds of hours trying to get citizens engaged in the political process, these veteran organizers confronted the reality that the playing field was not quite level. Too often, Robinson and Ahrens say, groups that had money to burn drowned out the voices of average Americans.

Determined to do something to change the status quo, both have joined Public Campaign, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group bent on enacting sweeping campaign finance reform. Ahrens, 46, will be vice president of outreach and operations, managing Public Campaign’s D.C. office, and coordinating and mobilizing with partner organizations. Robinson, 60, will serve in the newly created post of political director of the Public Campaign Action Fund; he will also work closely with like-minded groups’ communications and research teams to illuminate how special interests stymie reform efforts.

Ahrens comes to Public Campaign after working on issue-advocacy campaigns in Iowa for 17 years, most recently with the Iowa Citizen Action Network. During her nine years as executive director of the network, she led initiatives on sustainable energy, health care reform, voter registration in disadvantaged communities, and civic engagement. Ahrens has been involved in grassroots campaigning even longer than that—her first gig was working on the presidential campaign of Republican-turned-independent John Anderson, a former House member from Illinois, in 1979 when she was 15.

For Ahrens, watching the Clinton administration’s hopes of reforming health care falter and fail in the early 1990s starkly demonstrated the power of big donors in the policy-making process. “I saw the bill go down in defeat because the health insurance industry and pharmaceutical providers—they really called the shots,” she says. “That was a defining fight for me, and that’s why we need to clean up the system.”

Public Campaign’s hopes are riding on the Fair Elections Now Act, first proposed in 2009. It would allow congressional candidates to refuse large campaign contributions and instead raise money through small donations—$100 or less—that the government would match with public funds. The tentative plan is for its bipartisan sponsors to reintroduce the bill in Congress sometime during this legislative session.

Robinson arrives at Public Campaign with three decades of experience in organizing, campaigning, and political consulting under his belt. “Everything I’ve done in 30 years has been directed toward the goal of making democracy work and to make sure every American has an equal voice,” Robinson says. “Special-interest money in politics does the opposite. It takes the individual out of the public discourse.”

He witnessed that power firsthand, he says. He started his career in California with public-service and community-organizing groups before becoming executive director of the environmental group Friends of the River. After 10 years, he became a partner in a political media consulting firm; there, Robinson says, he finally got a look behind the curtain and saw how the backroom deals of politics and policymaking really work.

He ultimately returned to community organizing, serving as national executive director of Neighbor to Neighbor, a multi-issue advocacy group that mobilized its staff members for 40 congressional races in 22 states between 1996 and 2004; as the national deputy political director of campaigns and elections for the now-defunct ACORN; and as an organizer for a multistate campaign to pass ballot measures to increase the minimum wage.

“I was raised by a single mom who had to work very hard to raise two kids, and I saw the struggles of everyday Americans. It encouraged me to use my education and the skills I had to make sure that the playing field was even,” Robinson says. “This is the culmination because it is clearly the most direct and full-time experience I will have in changing the rules in how politics is done.”