“We’re in a really exciting period of growth, and we have a strong strategic vision for all the unique ways we can positively impact the movement building ecosystem.”
Brit Blalock is good at keeping promises. The new Senior Director of Communications and Marketing for New Left Accelerator (NLA) and its separate but affiliated 501(c)(3), The Capacity Shop (TCS), has a history of coming full circle in both her personal and professional life.
Brit grew up in the Gulf Coast town of Orange Beach, Alabama, just a few minutes’ drive from the Florida state line. As a young person, she was heavily influenced by her mother, a social worker-turned-community-organizer who ran for office when Brit was a teenager. In many ways, her career in social justice was sparked in those early days of watching her mother work to improve systems from many different angles.
“When I was in high school, I helped my mom run for city council. That was my first time working on a campaign,” she remembers. “She was running to protect the beautiful environment I grew up in. There was excessive development happening in our area, and she was worried about the impact on the water, the sand dunes, our neighborhoods, everything really.”
By the time she entered her freshman year of college in the fall of 2004, Brit was making waves of her own. As one of the top high school graduates in the state of Alabama, she was awarded the Beeson Scholarship, given to future leaders who are committed to serving in Alabama after graduation. She enrolled in Samford University, a private college where she studied English Literature and Psychology. The campus environment further sparked her passion for activism, and she quickly became a student organizer. She says, “I got involved in the College Democrats, which was a very small group because I was at a pretty conservative college. I was in the working minority, but I did some volunteering to get out the vote in ‘04.”
She would continue her work to get out the vote through her senior year for several historic political campaigns, most notably for future President Barack Obama. Tying her experience to a popular refrain in 2008, she explains, “I was just really willing at that time because I knew we needed change.”
That change couldn’t come fast enough. Just as Brit was graduating from college in 2008, the U.S. economy crashed. She took a gap year after undergrad to decide on her next steps. “I knew I wanted to work in social change, but I was torn between attending law school or going to a creative writing graduate program,” she explains. “I realized I loved the idea of being in an environment where we were all being creative together and embracing a culture of feedback and critique.” Brit eventually decided to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at NYU where she got to fulfill her dreams and study under her favorite living poet, Sharon Olds.
Her stint in New York may have seemed like a departure from the career she was previously building, but Brit could see the throughlines to her passion for social justice. She understood that achieving real change takes excellent storytelling. After earning her graduate degree, she set about integrating her writing skills with her experience in mobilizing and base building. In 2012, she began working as a marketing assistant for Goodwill Industries based in Denver, Colorado. That’s where her two career paths began to coalesce: “I realized I really loved that world of getting the message out to the right people about the impact you’re trying to make. So that was my foray into email marketing, social media marketing, and public relations.”
Around the same time, she was also reflecting on her experiences as someone who was unable to safely be an out queer person while she was a student at Samford University.
Brit knew there was a need for a space that supported LGBTQ members of that community. She began to build the foundation of what would become Students, Alumni, and Faculty for Equality (SAFE) Samford by setting up a Facebook group to connect queer and trans students and alumni. “In less than 24 hours we had 200 plus members,” she recalls. “I would get messages from strangers asking if I could help them come out. It was the most life-giving feeling that I’d ever had, and that’s when I knew I was meant to be in community organizing,” she says.
A few years later, Brit was once again asking herself where she should go next. Remembering the promise she made to become a leader in her home state when she received the Beeson Scholarship, she headed back to Alabama. Once there, Brit replicated the successful model of SAFE Samford by founding The Bevy, a social belonging and networking group for queer women and trans and nonbinary people with local chapters in cities across the Southeast. The flagship chapter blossomed from Brit’s years of forming deep connections with people across Birmingham. “It went from being the 15-20 people my co-founder and I knew in the area to now having about 3,500 members in Birmingham,” she recalls. “And as people have moved away for jobs and other opportunities, we’ve launched chapters in New Orleans, Mobile, Memphis, Nashville, and Huntsville, AL.”
The vast membership is a testament to Brit’s approach to building community for social change. Connecting with people, creating spaces for marginalized folks, and imagining a better reality has never been just a job for her, but a calling. Recounting how The Bevy has grown over the past nine years, she explains, “It has been an important and a very joyful part of my life. It’s basically about creating a family where lots of folks didn’t previously have one.”
In 2018, Brit returned to her campaigning roots, serving as campaign manager and communications director for Heather Milam for Alabama Secretary of State while completing candidate training through Emerge Alabama. Later that year, she joined the University of Alabama at Birmingham as a communications specialist and was promoted to communications director the following year. Brit also went on to help more than 20 progressive women run for office in Alabama and Georgia, and then in 2022, she became a candidate for Alabama House District 54 in Birmingham: “After years of encouraging other people to run, I felt it was my turn, and I ran the first openly anti-dark money campaign in the state,” she shares.
In 2020, Brit made another career stride when she became the director of marketing for Innovation Depot, a nonprofit accelerator and small business incubator, where she clarified and strengthened the organization’s brand and supported social entrepreneurs and for-profit startups—with an emphasis on supporting minority business owners. It was a role that utilized Brit’s ability to simplify technical language and complex ideas into messaging that supported the organization’s mission. And most recently, in 2023, she transitioned into a new role as the director of marketing at Southern Research, a nonprofit science and technology research organization based in Birmingham that was integral to the country’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
These recent experiences most closely resembled Brit’s new role at New Left Accelerator and The Capacity Shop. After joining the team this summer, Brit has already provided momentum for key communications projects, such as brand overhauls for both organizations that speak to their growth. She explains, “The brands have served us well over the years, but because we are at this moment of scale, we need a very modern-feeling look that reflects where we are headed.”
Brit joined the multi-entity team at an organizational turning point. In her role as Senior Communications and Marketing Director, she is learning the ropes with four other new team members: NLA’s Chief Program Strategy Officer Phillipa Wood and Senior Director of Coaching Andrea Frye, and TCS’s Managing Director Melinda Gibson and Senior Director of Training and Curriculum Bethel Tsegaye. Brit has even been collaborating with Melinda on the creation of a new TCS digital resource hub that will launch later this year.
She describes working with this new cohort of directors as an ideal scenario: “Five important leadership roles came in at the same time, and it's cool because everyone has very clear specialities, experiences, and skills. I’m having such a blast getting to know everyone—both the old team and the new people.”
The more she settles in, the more she and her new colleagues buzz with ideas for how to strengthen the reach and recognition of NLA and TCS. In the near future, she says to expect even more strategic offerings from both organizations designed to meet the current base-building landscape and strengthen infrastructure for the future: “We’re in a really exciting period of growth, and we have a strong strategic vision for all the unique ways we can positively impact the movement building ecosystem.”
