As part of our 2025 Higher Ground Institute Media Innovation Fellowship spotlight series, we’re profiling six leaders reimagining how digital media can shape civic engagement and political outcomes. These Fellows are designing tools and strategies that help progressives understand, reach, and move key audiences in an increasingly fragmented information landscape.

In this profile we’re featuring Jesse Thomas—a pioneering social impact strategist with deep experience bringing innovation to campaigns, nonprofits, and companies alike. An Obama For America-trained organizer, marketer, and technologist, Jesse has led strategic impact and mobilization efforts for some of the nation’s largest political campaigns, nonprofits, and mission-driven brands.

Now, through his HGI Media Innovation Fellowship project, Jesse is working on activating live audiences through performance marketing strategies. This project explores how nonprofits and movements can leverage commercial performance marketing techniques from the live-streaming content industry on YouTube, Twitch, and Kick. In partnership with The Civics Center, he’s aiming to tests new ways to drive measurable social actions—like voter registration—through sustained sponsorships with livestream creators and their communities.

We sat down with Jesse to dig into the “why” and “how” of his project.

HGI: What inspired you to apply for the HGI Media Innovation fellowship?

Jesse: In dark times it is important to lean on your community, and the Higher Ground team is composed of people and organizations who have been pillars of the communities that have been important to me personally and professionally for nearly two decades. I’m hoping to once again learn from and lean on them, and in return to share and develop the ideas and knowledge that I’ve picked up in unique experiences from my career over the past few years.

HGI: How did your personal background and professional experiences plant the seed for this project?

Jesse: As an appointee at USAID during President Obama’s first term, one of my tasks was to find ways to connect the dozens of USAID missions around the world to the headquarters in DC for important events. I invested heavily into the burgeoning livestreaming community and produced dozens of streams, and through that process discovered JustinTV which soon became Twitch. I was also an avid gamer and fan of Starcraft 2, but working on President Obama’s reelection campaign, I was too busy and tired to be able to play. So I started watching people play online on a second monitor while I worked. I joined their chats on Twitch and found a community I’ve now enjoyed for over 13 years. I was able to use that experience to lead campaigns with Twitch streamers for Biden for President and with Future Forward in 2020 and 2024. I believe there is quite a lot more opportunity for our movement to be present in these highly engaging spaces—and that’s why I decided to pursue this idea with HGI.

HGI: What problem or opportunity are you aiming to address as a Media Innovation Fellow?

Jesse: Millions of younger Americans are spending millions of hours watching streamers on Twitch, YouTube, and Kick, with an average watch time of 2-3 hours per session. Political commentary on those channels has concentrated at the anti-democratic extremes, and with this fellowship I hope to help find ways to support, grow, and encourage successful streamers with more pro-democracy views to get more of their points of view into streaming cultural space.

HGI: How does your project address the gaps in digital engagement or communications for progressive campaigns?

Jesse:Many of the Americans progressives have been losing over the last few years view progressives and Democrats as incredibly out of touch. Through my own observation and participation in streaming and gaming communities where those Americans gather, I’ve seen that one reason they are perceived this way is because they are largely absent from and ignorant of the places where those Americans spend so much of their time engaging with the world. My project aims to build bridges and onramps for more progressive ideas, organizations, leaders, candidates, and communicators into these spaces.

HGI: In what ways is your approach leveraging innovation or emerging technologies differently than current tools or strategies?

Jesse: Current livestreaming strategies from progressive-aligned campaigns tend to focus either on tools for candidates, campaigns, and organizations to produce or host their own content, or on appearing on streams hosted on platforms like Substack or by more established media brands. My approach focuses on engaging successful live streamers with high value audiences directly in the format, style, and language that their audiences are used to—in a way that gives them permission and space to engage in news, commentary, and the issues they care about most.

HGI: When you look at live-streaming creators on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, what are the key aspects that make them best-positioned to mobilize people for social causes?

Jesse: Livestreaming creators, more so than almost any other types of content creators, create deep, long-term, relationships with their audiences with very high levels of trust and engagement compounded over years of viewership. Livestream viewers tend to tune into their favorite streamers for hours at a time several days per week. Talented streamers encourage engagement and high retention through engaging with their viewers directly via their chats, and form tightly knit and highly engaged communities that become as much of a part of the streaming experience as the streamers themselves. That trust, and those communities, have the potential for high mobilization and persuasion on issues that streamers care deeply about.

HGI: What can progressive leaders learn from live-streaming creators about building a movement with an online audience?

Jesse: The next generation of progressive leaders will have grown up in the streaming era. The best and most effective communicators will be those who embrace the tools and techniques of livestreamers. Successful livestreamers have built highly engaged communities through consistent presence, radical transparency, and real time reaction and engagement via their chats, which they turn into communities via their social media presence and community hubs on Discord and Reddit.