Alumni Profile: “Joyful Warrior” Rob Perks
Rob Perks worked with the PIRGs in the 1990s and is now the managing director of campaigns and external affairs at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). From the small town in Virginia where he grew up to Florida, Montana, North Carolina and D.C., Rob has developed a tenacious drive that he’s put to use for good causes along the way.
Hailing from a low-income family, Rob had high aspirations for making a difference in the world. As a child, he thought he might attend law school and become a politician, and he served in student government leadership roles throughout high school partly as a means to that end.
After graduating from The College of William & Mary and taking the LSAT, Rob stepped back to gut check whether he wanted to dive directly into the career path he had always imagined for himself. An avid surfer, he embarked on a solo surfing trip to consider the question, “What do I truly care about?” During this time, he reconnected with childhood memories of playing in the woods, exploring the streams and creeks near his home to catch crayfish. He considered the dissonance of humans’ harmful impact on these places and discovered a passion to fight pollution, litter and anything else he felt was threatening natural places he loved.
Home from his trip with this new perspective, Rob cracked open a phonebook, came across a listing for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and called to apply for an internship. He got the gig.
Rob later attended a job fair where he met Liz Hitchcock, who was there interviewing candidates for jobs with U.S. PIRG. Rob mentioned that he had gone to high school with Ed Johnson, who was two years older and had served as a role model in many ways. After the fair, Rob reached out to Ed to ask about working for PIRG; with Ed’s encouragement, he applied for the PIRG job. He soon headed up to D.C. for his interview with Gene Karpinski. Noting the somewhat shabby state of the PIRG office, the mismatched furniture and the fact that Gene was wearing jeans, Rob started to imagine he was doing the organization a favor by showing up that day. Gene immediately flipped that notion on its head and showed Rob that he would be lucky to work for PIRG and that they took only the best. Rob left hoping and praying he would get the job, and when Liz called with an offer, he didn’t hesitate to accept.
He started out as a canvasser and was promoted to FM within the week. The work and lifestyle were tough, but he enjoyed things like training others and cutting turf, and before long, he got really good at canvassing. Rob soon stepped into a new role as a canvass director, and after August training, he hopped on a bus to Florida to help run the Miami office (though he had hoped to go to Atlanta to work alongside Ed!). He found the Miami canvass to be a “scrappy outfit,” and he says that by the end of his time there, he had learned how to persuade anyone of anything. He also figured out how to keep his staff motivated with frequent competitions where he would assign himself the “worst” turf and reward anyone who could raise more than he did in a day. As hard as they tried to beat him, they never managed it.
Everything changed when the office was shut down by Hurricane Andrew and his old boss at Chesapeake Bay Foundation recruited him back. After two years with the foundation, he headed to grad school at the University of Montana to earn a master’s in environmental studies. Initially, he wasn’t accepted into the highly competitive program, but he didn’t take no for an answer. He wrote, called and — after a cross-country road trip — showed up on their doorstep until the admissions dean finally allowed him to join the program.
Finishing up grad school, Rob jumped into the world of politics to work on U.S. Senator Max Baucus’s 1996 reelection campaign. After applying for the job, he got a call from Jim Messina. Jim had seen the PIRG experience on Rob’s resume and told him he wanted him to “PIRGify” the campaign’s field operation. Rob agreed but was so afraid that he couldn’t get the job done that he nearly didn’t show up for his first day of work. But he gritted his teeth, and — using the skills and experience honed on the canvass — did the job and helped win the campaign.
From there, Rob went on to work at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), where he used his trademark tenacity and skills of persuasion to convince them to create and hire him for a national field director position. PEER supports current and former public employees on a mission of environmental ethics or scientific integrity by defending whistleblowers, bringing improper government actions to light and engaging in policy work. Alongside two attorneys who specialized in whistleblower protections, Rob pioneered an innovative organizing strategy he termed “anonymous activism,” working directly with state and federal government employees to uncover inside information and then run successful media campaigns to expose agency corruption and the politicization of environmental policies. About five years and 15 state chapters later, Rob and his wife, Karen, moved to North Carolina, where he ran the Pamlico-Tar River Foundation. As the youngest ever executive director for PTRF, he developed relationships with local media and wrote exposes on local water pollution, which won a moratorium on new hog farms in the watershed.
In 2001, Rob and Karen moved back to DC where he landed a fellowship doing press work for NRDC, which eventually turned into a communications director job. In 2005 he did a stint at American Rivers, rebranding the organization and revamping the communications and outreach departments, before heading back to NRDC in 2007, where he was given the green light to start up the “Center for Advocacy Campaigns” he’d dreamed up during his previous time at the organization. Fellow PIRG alum Melissa Waage was his first hire. His campaigns team has since expanded from five staff to more than two dozen campaign and outreach experts.
These days, Rob is motivated to get as much done as possible to enact far-reaching climate policy in this narrow window under the current administration. He is also excited to work on expanding NRDC’s electoral work. Whatever the issue, Rob is someone with a lot of energy who knows what he wants and digs in to pursue it. He considers himself a “joyful warrior,” and win or lose, he just can’t sit on the sidelines.
Rob and Karen live in Rockville, Md., with their son, Brooks, and their bulldog, Dali. Rob told his son that if he’s looking for a job after college, he should go canvass with PIRG because running a canvass office had taught him more than anything he learned in grad school and because he's used those skills in every job he’s worked since then. Rob can be reached at rperks@nrdc.org.
