Anna Brelje named new political director

From the Minneapolis Labor Review, June 21, 2007

By Steve Share, Minneapolis Labor Review editor

MINNEAPOLIS — Anna Brelje began work June 4 as the new political director of the Minneapolis Central Labor Union Council (CLUC).

Brelje — pronounced “Brail-ya” — worked closely with the Labor 2006 political program in Pennsylvania, where she was a field director for the America Votes coalition.

In the 2004 campaign, she was a field director for America Coming Together (ACT) in Nevada and worked in coalition with unions there, especially SEIU.

After working with America Votes and ACT, she says, she wanted to work more closely with the labor movement.

“I think the labor movement has the greatest resources and tools and history of doing the political work you need to do to win elections,” Brelje says. “In the labor movement, people put their money where their mouth is and work at the grassroots level and turn people out.”
	Anna Brelje

Brelje grew up in a union household in Iowa City. Her father was a member of the teachers union and her mother was a member of the nurses union.

As a high school student, Brelje interned in Iowa Senator Tom Harkin’s Washington, D.C. office. In college, she interned for then First Lady Hillary Clinton and later worked on Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign in New York.

Brelje is a 2002 graduate of Smith College in Northamp-ton, Massachusetts, where she majored in government and was elected student body president her senior year.

After graduating, she came to Minnesota and worked as the Third Congressional District field director for Paul Wellstone’s ill-fated 2002 U.S. Senate campaign. “Paul was my first political hero,” she says.

In 2004, Brelje also worked in Minnesota as an organizer for the Steelworkers associate member program (her name then was Anna Franker).

“I have always wanted to come back to Minnesota to defeat Norm Coleman in 2008,” Brelje notes.

“Another reason I moved back to Minnesota: I love swimming in the lakes in the summertime,” she adds.

Brelje lives in Minneapolis.

Contact Anna Brelje at 612-379-4206 ext. 102 or e-mail anna@mplscluc.com.

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