Local directors hire canvassers to raise money for the Fund's partners and support its other campaign activities including media relations and coalition building.
The Fund has canvassed for groups including the Sierra Club, the Human Rights Campaign, Environment America, and Fair Share.
[7] In 2019-2020, the last year before the pandemic, the Fund employed 5,263 people nationwide to knock on doors and make calls, raising $20 million.
The Fund grew out of a Massachusetts Public Interest Research Group initiative campaign to pass the Bottle Bill where they first used door-to-door canvassing.
[citation needed] In 2009, the Fund settled a $2.15 million class-action suit alleging it subjected workers to "grueling hours without overtime pay."
[11][12] The book Activism, Inc.: How the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America by Columbia University sociologist Dana Fisher, is based on her study of a sample of Fund canvass offices during the summer of 2003.