A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Quentin James is the Founder & President of The Collective, including its five legal entities, as well as the co-founder of Vestige Strategies, LLC. Before launching the Collective in 2016, Quentin led a team of Vestige Strategies’ consultants in securing victory for Dr. Keith Rowley as Prime Minister of Trinidad & Tobago in 2015. Previously, Quentin was the Black Americans Director for the Ready for Hillary PAC. In that role, Quentin directed the PAC’s outreach to the black community across the United States, and helped recruit over 50,000 African American grassroots donors and over 3 million grassroots supporters.
Formerly the National Director for the Sierra Club’s Sierra Student Coalition, the nation’s largest youth environmental organization, Quentin directed the organization to train, empower, and organize youth to run effective campaigns that resulted in tangible environmental victories and developed leaders for the environmental movement. From 2009-2013, Quentin served as a National Board Member for the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. Quentin is the founder of Inclusv, a diversity hiring initiative and was named one of the 2017 NBC Blk28 under 28 and named one of the 2018 Root 100 Most Influential African Americans.
With the 2022 midterm election cycle now in the rearview mirror, what does it take to maintain Black political engagement and support for Black candidates at the ballot box and beyond?
When it comes to Black candidates, we deal with so many challenges, whether it be voter suppression of our community to issues of gender and racism in terms of voters’ perceptions of Black candidates, so here we look at candidates holistically.
It’s important that authenticity be number one. Number two is running for the right reasons. You know, what is your plan to improve your community? Don’t focus on national trends or what the hot buzzwords are, but what does the community want from you and from a leader? It’s really establishing what your policy priorities are. And then third, it’s a lot of other mechanics that we look at, so we train candidates on how to raise money effectively.