Welcome to Hollerin’ Up! I’m Erin, Founder & Principal.
Erin Bridges (she/her) was born and raised on the traditional homelands of the Shawnee, Cherokee, & Osage tribes in Louisville, Kentucky where she currently lives in beloved community with blood and chosen family. Erin grew up with a love for big shared meals, music sung in fellowship, pies made from fruits and veggies in the garden, and a close relationship to the earth. Her work is rooted in fighting for a world where everyone can access these simple pleasures no matter who they are.
From helping co-found Sunrise Movement and passing the largest climate legislation in US history, to coaching frontline organizers to build up their financial strategy and staying power, to advising donors on the leading political strategies of the moment, Erin leads with both precision and heart. She is a long-haul movement builder—someone who can build a fundraising spreadsheet in one hand and conjure just the right movement song in the other.
Erin’s work offers something too-often absent from the non-profit Left: a way to take seriously the work of building a freer world without leaving behind the self, the land, or our communities.
Erin brings over a decade of experience in multi-entity fundraising strategy, management, team culture, and organizational flow to her clients—growing projects outside the bounds of status-quo philanthropy and party politics. Erin’s approach blends data and story, structure and intuition, spreadsheets and warmth. She works as a coach, strategist, and facilitator, helping leaders actualize clarity, confidence, and self-sufficiency so they can grow without burning out.
Erin specializes in:
multi-entity organizational structure and strategy
coaching up new Executive Directors and fundraising staff
building sustainable multi-year fundraising strategies across grassroots, institutional, and major giving streams
retreat and meeting design and facilitation
building resilient, liberatory organizational culture
Erin brings long-haul vision, people-first process, and a whole lot of Southern tenderness to the table.
A portrait of Erin wearing a white ribbed tank top, chunky green earrings, and wide-legged light blue jeans. Photo by Natosha Via.
A portrait of Erin sitting back in a large black chair. She’s wearing a long sleeve collared white shirt and white cowboy boots. Photo by Natosha Via.
A closeup of Erin’s mom’s hand lightly touching vibrant green moss on a dead tree in Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. Photo by Erin.
“I’m not afraid of love or its consequence of light.”
Joy Harjo, The Creation Story
Communities of practice ground Erin in her work:
Erin is a member of the Momentum Community and the Solidaire Network
Erin is a regular meditator and Dharma practitioner with Radical Change and the Southern Dharma Retreat Center, and am a graduate of Norma Wong and Collective Acceleration’s 8-month course on the Art of War.
Erin is a member of the Mourning Choir, a Louisville-based community choir founded in October 2023 in response to the unprecedented siege on Gaza. The choir brings songs to vigils, public grief spaces, and protests.
Erin and a fellow Kentucky protester lead a chant at a cold, blustery rally with Sunrise Movement outside Congress. Photo by Rachael Warriner.
Reading inspo:
The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls, by Mona Eltahawy.
“What would the world look like if girls were taught they were volcanoes, whose eruptions were a thing of beauty, a power to behold and a force not to be trifled with? What if instead of breaking their wildness like a rancher tames a bronco, we taught girls the importance and power of being dangerous?”
A picture of Erin bundled up by a fire reading on a beach at Deam Lake on winter solstice. The sky is full of clouds embossed over a bright blue sky. Photo by Al Herring.
“Flowering Jasmine” by Sumana, the first free women, translated by Matty Weingast.
“Walk through the mind all day and all night. When you find each thought ending right where it began—here your circling ends.”
“Appalachia the Borderland” by Veronica Limeberry, Dissembling the Split Rail, Vol. 2 No.2 Mergoat Magazine.
“Being of the border, existing in-between, beyond, and against, necessitates resistance.”
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Alexis Pauline Gumbs.
“Audre is overwhelmed by the sands of time. Ancestor Audre knows the desert is an ocean.”