Mariah Montgomery

she/her

National Campaigns Director

New York, NY

Mariah Montgomery takes the fight to wealthy corporations that stand in the way of our communities getting everything we need to live full and healthy lives. She leads campaigns, collaborates with organizers across our network to supercharge their work, and supports the national team to develop and execute strategies aligned with our analysis and vision.

When she was a working-class kid growing up in rural Pennsylvania, her mom always said that “fair means everybody gets what they need.” This (unintentionally) radical idea took hold, and Mariah saw evidence everywhere that things were definitely not fair — most starkly as a scholarship student at a prep school. She started organizing in college and has been at it since.

Prior to joining PowerSwitch Action, Mariah spent 3 years at the Strategic Organizing Center, working on campaigns in telecom and retail. She also spent 6 years with locals of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in Los Angeles, where she did research and worked on campaigns to organize nursing home workers and subcontracted service workers. In her unpaid organizing work, Mariah has organized with other white people for racial justice as well as in mutual aid efforts.

At PowerSwitch Action, Mariah has led a national effort to push back on Amazon’s extractive HQ2 search and worked, as part of the Athena Coalition, with communities around the country opposing the company’s harmful impacts on local economies and democracies. She has led work to expand democratic control of public resources and build cities that prioritize community health and wealth, and supported the development of programs and campaigns in climate justice and democratizing budgets.

Mariah holds a BA in History from Swarthmore College. She lives in Brooklyn and happiest when she has recently been to the woods or the desert. When she isn’t charting out campaign calendars, you’ll find her making too many ceramics, wandering Prospect Park, or cooking something with olives and lemon.