Kathleen Campisano is a seasoned LGBTQ faith-based organizer, innovator, and lifelong learner who has played a pivotal role in shaping community-centered political engagement within religious and non-religious communities. Over the past several decades, her work—ranging from local ballot measure campaigns to national legislative efforts—has woven together faith, justice, and grassroots strategy. What emerges from her story is a profound commitment to relational organizing, a fierce belief in the transformational power of personal narrative, and a deep faith in ordinary people’s capacity to grow and lead. Although Campisano’s work has touched many geographies, faith traditions, and issue campaigns, her life journey reflects a remarkable consistency: wherever she finds herself, she returns to the central question of how communities can awaken to a collective moral vision of justice, inclusion, and love.
Kathleen was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, a city that often sits ambiguously on the border between the American Midwest and South. To Campisano, Louisville always felt more Southern than Northern, infused with the warmth, intensity, and complexities of Southern culture. She was born into a large Italian-American family. Her paternal grandfather emigrated from Italy, establishing in their home a tight-knit, boisterous, food-filled environment where everyone had opinions—and everyone expressed them. Yet young Kathleen was a quiet, introverted child, more eager to sit with a book than to join the animated debates swirling around the kitchen table.
Religion arrived early in her life. She attended Catholic school and remembers with vivid clarity the day she learned she could talk to God directly. As a child, the idea of a guardian angel, of a divine presence who listened to her whispered hopes and fears, soothed her. In a chaotic family and cultural environment, spirituality offered a private sanctuary.
Yet, as she grew older, the relationship with the Church became more complicated. By high school, Kathleen began to question the narrow doctrinal worldview she was taught—particularly the Church’s insistence that Catholicism was the sole, unambiguous path to God. Reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology opened her eyes: other cultures had their own sacred stories, their own divine narratives. This discovery ignited a crisis of faith. She felt betrayed that no one had acknowledged the possibility of allegory, symbol, and diverse understandings of the divine. Her teenage confession—where she angrily confronted a priest about why no one had been honest that these were stories, metaphors—marked a departure.
Campisano’s academic path took her through art history at the University of South Carolina. When Kathleen began preparing to teach a Renaissance art history course, she felt uncertain about dealing with the Church-related imagery she had long since left behind. To find her approach, she walked, reflected deeply, and pored over the slides—often crying as she came to terms with the spiritual loss she still felt, especially around her devotion to the Virgin Mary. In the end, this process allowed her to teach the material with a distinct, personal perspective that went beyond a traditional academic approach.
Around this time, Campisano also came out as a lesbian. It was a gradual process. She had been married to a man and had a child. Coming out meant dismantling the life she had known, risking relationships, and forging a new identity. This revelation coincided with her greater political awakening. She discovered that being open about who she was could not be separate from working to build a world where LGBTQ people were safe, respected, and loved.
In the early 1990s, Louisville’s LGBTQ advocacy was taking shape through the Fairness Campaign—an organization founded to combat discrimination and expand civil rights for LGBTQ people. Inspired by the city’s civil rights legacy and guided by Black elected officials who insisted it was time to include sexual orientation and gender identity in local anti-discrimination ordinances, the Fairness Campaign was part of a broad coalition that worked on issues like affordable housing and civilian review of police in addition to LGBTQ rights.
Campisano began as a volunteer, moved by the notion of fairness and inclusion for LGBTQ people. Soon, her talents as a communicator, relationship-builder, and strategist became evident. She joined the Fairness Campaign staff as an organizer, making it her first paid organizing job.
This was a formative era. Campisano learned early that faith communities and clergy could be both allies and gatekeepers. One of her earliest public speaking engagements was at a Unitarian Universalist congregation that had recently declared itself open and affirming to LGBTQ people. This experience underscored for her that faith institutions could provide moral grounding and amplify the call for justice, but would require nuanced, patient organizing. She also joined a small group called Sophia—mostly lesbian women, including some former nuns—who had left or felt alienated from the Catholic Church but still yearned for spiritual sustenance. In Sophia’s gatherings, Campisano saw the possibility of a faith tradition reclaimed by those marginalized in its pews.
Campisano’s next major chapter came when she connected with the National LGBTQ Task Force (then the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force). By the mid-2000s, the Task Force was investing heavily in grassroots campaigning, ballot measure fights, and relational organizing models. They dispatched experienced organizers like Campisano across the country to help local communities defend against anti-LGBTQ ballot measures or push pro-equality legislation.
Campisano traveled widely, eventually working on over 60 ballot measure or legislative campaigns. she worked with fellow organizers like Dave Fleischer and others who were pioneers in the process of “deep canvassing,” a technique rooted in storytelling and authentic, vulnerable conversation to change hearts and minds. She also contributed to developing and refining a coaching model within the Task Force—a simple, flexible tool for volunteers and leaders to reflect, improve their skills, and foster leadership in others.
It was during this period that faith-based organizing became central to her work. Campisano saw that clergy could stand at podiums and issue moral proclamations, but the true electoral and cultural shift would come from people in the pews. She believed faith communities could serve as incubators of civic engagement and moral reflection. Working closely with faith director colleagues, she insisted that recruiting clergy was not enough. Lay people, volunteers, and quiet supporters in congregations needed guidance and empowerment. The path to victory in electoral and legislative fights, she realized, ran through living rooms, Bible studies, and church basements—spaces where people’s deepest values informed their politics.
One of Campisano’s defining endeavors was her involvement in the 2012 Minnesota Marriage Amendment fight. Minnesota voters were asked to decide whether to enshrine a ban on same-sex marriage in the state constitution. At that time, Campisano worked as a faith organizer and strategist for the Task Force, which partnered with Minnesotans United for All Families, a statewide coalition. Minnesota was fertile ground for testing relational and faith-based organizing models. The old top-down structures of political campaigns would not suffice. It was in Minnesota that Campisano developed the “people you know” conversation model within faith communities—a relational adaptation of deep canvassing for congregations. This model encouraged faith communities not just to endorse LGBTQ equality but to transform internally: congregants were taught how to share their own stories, ask open-ended questions, and connect the principle of love with the moral imperative to vote “no” on the marriage ban. This approach minimized sterile voter IDs in favor of cultivating authentic community dialogues. The measure lost at the ballot box—meaning Minnesota voters rejected the anti-marriage amendment—and soon after, the state legislature passed marriage equality, signed into law by the governor. Many credited the campaign’s success not only to its messaging, but to the deeper, relational trust-building across Minnesota's communities and faith institutions.
In the years after the Minnesota campaign, Campisano continued to work with the Task Force and other partners, focusing on broader issues of social justice. She introduced trans ally trainings in faith spaces, ensuring that congregations understood that supporting LGBTQ equality meant embracing the full spectrum of identities. She also became increasingly invested in intersectional campaigns—efforts that recognized LGBTQ issues as inextricably linked to race, class, and economic justice struggles.
To her, faith organizing is not solely about securing a particular electoral outcome. It’s about transformation—of individuals, neighborhoods, congregations, and whole cities. A believer in the power of ordinary people, she insists that even small groups can spark movements. A modest turnout at a faith workshop, if deeply engaged, can trigger a wave of relational growth that outlasts any single campaign.
Campisano is not one to rest on past victories. She continues to wrestle with contemporary political realities, from the rise of authoritarian populism to the challenge of motivating infrequent voters in hostile electoral environments. She knows that deep canvassing must keep evolving. Today, she reflects on how to help people discern the good—the morally sound choice—in an era of misinformation and fear. She ponders how to bring faith-based principles, such as love of neighbor and the sacredness of human dignity, into civic discourse where partisanship and cynicism dominate.
As she works independently as a consultant or aligns with community-based organizations, Campisano remains committed to embedding faith-based relational approaches into political and social movements. Her trainings, whether formal or informal, emphasize listening and curiosity. She encourages organizers to let conversations unfold organically, believing that the most profound shifts occur not when we preach at people, but when we invite them to share their own stories. And she still calls forth clergy, but never alone—always alongside the people in the pews, insisting that lasting change requires a broad base, rooted in both spiritual and democratic traditions.
Kathleen Campisano stands as an embodiment of how one can merge faith, LGBTQ identity, and organizing skill into a cohesive force for good. From her early struggles with Catholic orthodoxy to her embrace of relational faith-based organizing, she has consistently championed the idea that each conversation matters. She has challenged large campaigns to trust small, personal encounters; insisted that people of faith can and should be architects of progressive change; and demonstrated that activism grounded in spiritual values can offer not only victories at the ballot box, but genuine healing and transformation in communities.
By bridging the gap between personal story and public policy—between love as a theological concept and love as political action—Campisano invites future generations of faith leaders, organizers, and activists to think differently. Her life’s work suggests that when communities bring their deepest values into the public sphere, when they trust in people’s capacity for growth and empathy, and when they organize not just to win but to become better neighbors, they reshape the world in ways both measurable and immeasurable.
(This biographical statement written by Justin Lewandowski from an interview with Kathleen Campisano for a Fall 2024 Queer & Trans Theologies class at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.)
Biography Date: May 2025