About Marcus Ismael

Born from a diverse family that hailed from all over the world, Marcus was raised in San Francisco’s southside neighborhood of Crocker-Amazon on the ragged edge of the middle class. From riding Muni buses at a young age to being surrounded and raised by several generations of working immigrants, Marcus knows the city from before it began to radically change with the influx of the tech industry and understands what it means to be a San Franciscan who has to work for his keep.

A product of public schools, Marcus got a chance to earn a quality, affordable education at San Francisco State University. With scholarships and a generous CalGrant from the state, Marcus studied economics and urban planning to gain an insight on how the world around him worked. Coming of age in a changing city encouraged Marcus to commit himself to championing a community built by and for working people. His work in communications continues to be informed by competency, inclusivity and awareness of the critical issues affecting residents in the Bay Area.

GROWING UP IN THE BAY AREA

Marcus’ upbringing may not have been the toughest but it was not without its struggles. He grew up both in San Francisco and a variety of Peninsula towns. Marcus learned quickly the value in having such a diverse family who all chose to settle here in the San Francisco Bay Area and appreciated, from a young age, the importance of having a city that welcomed people from around the world. Life was seemingly normal until an unfortunate medical condition in the family threw things into disarray. On top of that, the recession hit. Bills piled up, stress was high, the threat of losing the home they rented loomed ever constant, but the family persevered.

Marcus grew up quickly in this time and learned firsthand just how American families could lose everything with a single medical diagnosis. From being pushed out of the city economically to just barely scraping by through major life challenges, Marcus’ story is not unique nor is it one to pity. A young Bay Area family starting out could do everything correctly and the political system and economic structures at play still can derail and hold them back. Cognizant of this reality, Marcus made it his life mission to do what he can to ensure politics and faith in local institutions in his home region focus on making life easier, more livable and more accessible for families like his.

THE PATH FORWARD

Finishing up his studies at SF State, Marcus pushed harder into the world of politics believing that fixing some of the less challenging ails in society began with electing the right elected officials who empathized with the plight of working people. He got his start running a Democratic club on the SF State campus - one of thirty official, sanctioned Democratic clubs in the city at the time - and working for the Democratic County Central Committee, or SFDCCC, to help elect progressive Democrats to local, state, and federal office.

As time went on, Marcus reached state and national levels of politics first serving as Chief of Staff of the California College Democrats for three years where he helped overhaul its operations from its communications apparatus to its brand identity to shaping up its finances in crucial election years to revising a code of conduct to give justice to survivors. Marcus then went on to serve as Director of Communications of the College Democrats of America in 2016. Working in tandem with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, Marcus emphasized the need to both hear from and elevate perspectives of young, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, women, religious minorities, LGBTQ individuals, and people living with disabilities on college campuses all over the nation. While 2016 didn’t pan out the way we had all hoped, Marcus is nevertheless proud of the work he did there.

In 2019, as the 2020 presidential election field was heating up, Marcus was given the opportunity to work for yet another presidential campaign, this time fighting for big, structural change with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. Organizing field operations in Northern California, Marcus led the largest volunteer base in the state with nearly 1,000 active volunteers in five Congressional districts from the Peninsula down the Central Coast to Santa Barbara who knocked on least 22,000 doors and made at least 10,000 phone calls leading up to the March 3, 2020 California Democratic Primary. During the Get Out the Vote period of Super Tuesday, Marcus’ organizing in California resulted in the single largest turnout of volunteers in the state. With California being the busiest state in terms of campaign volunteer turnout and direct voter contact, Marcus’ efforts topped the national campaign presence in all Super Tuesday states. Of the 10 delegates Warren ultimately won in California, one was won in Marcus’ turf.

Marcus continued this commitment to progressive, inclusive politics by working as a political consultant at DC-based E Street Group - a full service media and advertising consulting shop that staffs exclusively progressive candidates and campaigns across the nation, including here in the Bay Area. In this role, Marcus helped candidates in Arizona, Minnesota and Washington state make strides in their local media markets, earn critical endorsements and stand up to far right-wing attacks on human rights.

Moving beyond the 2020 elections, Marcus’ attention turned toward the critical ongoing work of local governments to keep residents safe during the pandemic. This led Marcus to seek opportunities in public service where he could help build out responsive, culturally-competent, and adept communications for influential leaders in the Bay Area. In turn, this became a role in the office of the Mayor of the City of San José. At the time Marcus joined, the City was rolling out a vaccine requirement for employees, developing a plan to dramatically scale up solutions to homelessness, and making progress on what would become a landmark gun safety reform law. Within his first few months, Marcus built out the office’s media database to include not only all outlets in the Bay Area media market, but statewide and national newsroom contact information; he booked the Mayor on regular interview segments on media outlets with the local media market’s highest audiences; and, following the launch of the Mayor’s signature gun harm reduction law, scheduled and briefed the Mayor on over three dozen interviews with national media outlets in print, on television and streaming, and podcasts and radio.

Seeking a chance to blend his expertise in media relations and strategic communications, he embarked on a new role at San José State University leading public relations and marketing for capital projects with a focus on housing for students and the university’s workforce. From hosting town halls and meetings with external stakeholders such as legislators and other educational institutions, to strategizing and iterating the communications plan, within months of starting, Marcus helped the university secure approval for its marquee project: a 1,000-unit, 24-story housing tower in the middle of downtown San José for faculty, staff and graduate students. In the time since, he took on a range of unique responsibilities from joint marketing efforts to spur downtown vibrancy through placemaking and branding, campus crisis and emergency communications planning, overhauling facilities outage and maintenance notifications process and presidential initiatives like launching the first Campus Master Plan in two decades and rolling out, over the span of a year, the acquisition and renovation of a luxury hotel tower for housing up to 800 students.

Marcus continues to hone his decade of communications experience with a current focus on strategic content generation in web and print formats, change management and internal communication strategies, and executive communications, speechwriting and signature event planning.