Vision and Strategy

Vision and Strategy

Freedom to Marry's Roadmap to Victory was the successful national strategy to win marriage. In this section, you'll find resources detailing how we developed the strategy, managed the Freedom to Marry campaign, and partnered with other organizations to achieve victory.

  • The Roadmap to Victory

    Freedom to Marry’s goal was to win marriage for same-sex couples nationwide, no more and no less. Freedom to Marry was created as the eyes-on-the-prize campaign to drive the national strategy that would achieve that singular, bold but focused goal, and to bring together the partner organizations, multiple methodologies, and contributions of many across an entire movement to get the job done. Freedom to Marry was all about the strategy – talking about it, sharing it, inspiring others to be part of it, fulfilling it – and it was, indeed, the Freedom to Marry strategy, which we called “The Roadmap to Victory” and posted on our website, that triumphed with the long-sought, hard-fought national win on June 26, 2015. Here’s a look at the development of the Roadmap to Victory – and the importance of a central strategy.

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  • Building a Collaborative Model: Fiscal Sponsorships

    Collaboration with partner organizations at the state and national level was a centerpiece of Freedom to Marry’s work to win marriage from its very inception. Over the 14 years this central campaign existed, we partnered with numerous organizations of many different kinds – national LGBT organizations, national non-gay allies, gay and non-gay institutional funders, businesses and labor groups both big and small, progressive and conservative groups, state-level LGBT and allied groups, regional US groups, and even international organizations. We knew that winning marriage – especially winning in the court of public opinion – would take many players each bringing their pieces to further the shared strategy Freedom to Marry was created to drive.

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  • Freedom to Marry – The Early Years

    In 2003, Evan Wolfson's concept of a central campaign singularly devoted to winning marriage for same-sex couples had become a reality, and Freedom to Marry opened its doors. By the close of 2003 a landmark decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court had brought the prospect of the freedom to marry in that state to within months of reality. And less than 15 years later, the freedom to marry was won nationwide.

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