Wyatt Closs is interested in exploiting pop culture for progressive gain. And vice versa. At SEIU, the Service Employees International Union, he has served in a variety of capacities since 1993 from serving as its Community Strength Director, Government Affairs Director, and staffing SEIU’s President’s Committee 2000 – a long-term strategic planning initiative that served as a blueprint for the union’s work today. In these roles, he has taken on tasks and projects ranging from developing diversity education curricula to models for creating political infrastructure to coalition building training to organizational change to branding ideas for the union bringing creativity to each step of the journey. He is now based in Los Angeles, currently involved in a new initiative for SEIU called Popular Media Organizing which focuses on the intersection of popular culture and working families stories and issues.

Prior to joining SEIU, Wyatt worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and then became, in his words, a “hardcore political hack”, managing political campaigns for a living all over the country including coordinated campaign manager during the national-attention Harvey Gantt vs. Jesse Helms US Senate race. A North Carolina native, he has also maintained a steady diet of popular culture pursuits, serving as a contributing writer on the arts for the NC Independent Weekly from 1990-96 and founder of an urban eclectic events crew in Washington, DC known as the Madame Zenobia collective and a weekly e-mail called “Thangz To Do” from 1998-2001. He now spends what little downtime he has writing screenplays and eating coffee ice cream.

In his current work, he is working within SEIU to generate non-traditional alliances and partnerships that cut across popular media, ethnicities, new communities, and young people, guide SEIU contributions as well as working through a concept known as sustainable community organizing and other innovative approaches to achieving social and economic justice where SEIU can be a catalyst. To quote Chuck D, he likes to “reach the bourgeois and rock the boulevard.”

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