Heather Booth (born December 15, 1945) is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes.

[5][note 1] After her family had moved to Long Island, Booth's mother, using Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, made her aware of the growing discontent of prosperous suburban housewives with the conventionally narrow lives they led.

[4] In high school, Booth joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she came to believe that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives.

[10] He helped organize the 1965 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam,[11] subsequently became president of the Citizen Action Program in Chicago (a group formed in 1969 by members of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation), and was later a director of the Midwest Academy.

"[15] While in high school, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to help protest Woolworth's lunch counter discrimination in the South.

In 1963, soon after enrolling in college, she became head of a group, called Friends of SNCC, that was organized on campus to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Confronted by the violent resistance of white Mississippians, she feared for her own life, but also realized that she could leave whenever she wished and was awed by the extraordinary heroism of the black residents with whom she worked.

[8] Shortly afterward, she helped form a number of local groups that sought to learn about urban problems and find ways to overcome them.

"[19][note 4] In discovering how many ostensibly unique concerns were actually common ones, members gained a sense of the collective influence they might exert toward changing the unfair practices and dismissive attitudes they had previously accepted as cultural norms.

Booth formed it by involving like-minded students in a clandestine organization for evaluating doctors, counseling women who contacted them, performing referrals, and conducting follow-up discussions by phone.

"[23][note 7] The Jane Collective disbanded following the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, which effectively legalized abortion throughout the country.

[note 9] The bureaucratic obstruction that they encountered led the three to set up a new citywide organization in Chicago called the Action Committee for Decent Childcare (ACDC).

Using the tool, academy instructors taught the importance of establishing organizations to set specific goals for using pressure-group tactics in a formally-structured campaign.

[31] This tool, the "Midwest Academy Strategy Chart," instructed students in the actions that must be taken following the articulation of a problem and the methods that must be used for determining the success of the resulting campaign.

And it asks how the campaign can be used to strengthen the coordinating group, what experience its leaders will gain as they conduct it, and whether it offers a good chance to expand into new constituencies and raise additional money.

The group chose her as its executive director at its first meeting and began work toward overcoming the mutual distaste that was seen to exist between the major elements of the New Left and the leadership of the AFL–CIO.

[33] The experience she gained as president of the Midwest Academy and the many contacts she made with people who attended its training programs enabled her to set up Citizen Action, a nationwide coalition of local activist groups.

[15] The issues it took on included plant closings, affordable health care, high energy costs, toxic waste sites, and similar problems, most of them having a degree of bipartisan support.

[35] Largely influenced by the negative fallout following the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan, Citizen Action began to move away from the nonpartisan activism of the other organizations that Booth had founded.

[4] In 2018, Booth was arrested at a Capitol Hill protest in support of the DACA program and in 2003, she was lead consultant to the Campaign for Comprehensive Immigration Reform and subsequently to the Voter Participation Center.

As Elizabeth Warren later explained: AFR managed to scrape together some money, and they used it to hire a handful of employees, including Heather Booth as executive director and Lisa Donner as her deputy.

Instead of each nonprofit putting a little time into fighting for this or that provision, AFR coordinated the efforts of dozens of groups, magnifying the work of each one by helping them speak with a single voice.

Heather and Lisa and the rest of their crew put out press releases, coordinated briefings on Capitol Hill, and organized groups of volunteers.

The progress we made was because people raised our voices, took the message to the public, to the streets, and to the Halls of Congress, where we were joined in our efforts by some committed elected representatives.

And always she's advancing the credo she learned as a child: that you must not only treat people with dignity and respect, but you must shoulder your own responsibility to help build a society that reflects those values.

[54] During the Biden/Harris presidential campaign of 2020, Booth served as director of senior and progressive engagement and on December 15 of that year was quoted as saying "President-elect Joe Biden's team has always focused on older voters and their concerns will be top-of-mind in his upcoming term.

activists that the way to create a socialist system in the United States was to organize a 'hate the rich' campaign under cover of a 'populist' movement for those who have incomes near or below the poverty line.

"[59] In a book published in 2010, conservative author Stanley Kurtz called Booth "arguably the queen of socialist politics in Chicago,"[60]: 228  also saying she was determined "to drag modern American socialism, kicking and screaming, into the heart of America's mainstream institutions.

"[60]: 150 In 2013, Paul Sperry said she was a leading figure among the "socialist activists and their front groups [who] played a shockingly outsized role shaping and passing the monumental financial reform legislation that authorized the creation of President Obama's powerful consumer credit watchdog agency.

"[61] Sperry is a conservative journalist and author of anti-Muslim books, who has served as bureau chief in Washington, D.C. for the conspiratorial website WorldNetDaily and written opinion pieces for the New York Post.