Cortney K Bouse

About

Cortney Bouse is a senior organizer and campaign strategist with over a decade of experience building large-scale civic engagement programs, coalitions, and volunteer leadership pipelines in reproductive rights, electoral organizing, and democracy work across Pennsylvania and Missouri. Most recently, Cortney served as Pennsylvania State Director at NextGen America, where she led a $7M statewide program across 18+ campuses and built a student chapter network still active today. Cortney's training and curriculum expertise runs deep: she was selected for a national Planned Parenthood Federation of America cohort to design organizing curriculum for affiliate staff nationwide, trained at the Highlander Center through Training for Change's adult experiential learning methodology, and has designed and delivered advocacy, campaign strategy, and data management trainings throughout her career. In 2022, she led an independent expenditure campaign that used data-driven targeting to contribute to flipping the Pennsylvania state house for the first time in nearly 20 years. She holds an MPH in Health Behavior and Health Education from the University of Michigan and is passionate about building the next generation of organizers equipped with both the practical skills and strategic thinking to win lasting victories for their communities.

Origin story

I came to organizing through public health. I studied Health Behavior and Health Education at the University of Michigan because I was drawn to a simple but powerful idea: that lasting change in people's lives comes from understanding what actually motivates them, not from telling them what to do. That belief has shaped everything I've built since. My first real organizing experience came in Missouri, where I worked as an Organizer with Planned Parenthood Great Plains. In 2019, when the state senate tried to sneak a six-week abortion ban through in the middle of the night, I helped mobilize over 200 people from across the state to the capitol in under 72 hours. We didn't have the votes to stop the bill, and we knew that going in — but we made its passage as painful and visible as possible, and we built a volunteer network that, weeks later, helped defeat an attempt to revoke the license of the state's last abortion provider. That fight taught me something I've carried ever since: organizing isn't just about winning the vote in front of you. It's about building the durable power that lets you win the next fight, and the one after that. From there, I moved into deeper coalition and campaign work — building cross-sector partnerships with faith communities, labor unions, and racial justice organizations; designing training curriculum for organizers across the country; and eventually leading statewide programs at Planned Parenthood Pennsylvania Advocates and NextGen America. Along the way, I discovered that what I care about most isn't any single campaign win — it's building the systems, leadership pipelines, and infrastructure that outlast me. The student chapters I helped launch, the coalitions I helped anchor, the training curricula I helped design — the ones I'm proudest of are the ones still running without me. I believe deeply that democracy gets stronger when more people learn how to organize, not just how to show up. That's what draws me to training and teaching this work — I want other organizers to have the tools and confidence I had to fight hard for early in my own career, and to build things that last long after any one campaign ends.

Golden organizer rule

Expertise