Anna Galland's organizing and electoral work began at Brown University in Providence, RI.
As an undergrad at Brown, she was involved in student-led campaigns for workers' rights and living wages; she volunteered for local and national candidates in the 2000 election; and wrote her senior honors' thesis on the civil rights movement in Chicago. After graduating in 2001, she founded and for nearly three years directed a new regional program of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker-based peace and social justice organization. Working with a terrific Support Committee, she built a mailing list of 2,000 members, and organized forums, conferences, media events, and the biggest mass demonstrations in Rhode Island since the Vietnam War.
In summer 2004, she moved to Oregon to take a position as state director of the 21st Century Democrats' Young Voter Project. The Project registered, educated, and mobilized over 50,000 progressive young Oregonians, turning almost 70% of them out to vote - a new record for Oregon. Since the election, she has been directing a new program called Building Blocks, Building Votes, setting up a long-term network of trained apartment and block captains to do voter registration and turnout in low-performing neighborhoods in Portland.