Ed Yoon

As chief external affairs officer, Ed Yoon is NRDC's principal strategist overseeing and integrating the Center for Campaigns & Organizing department, including its campaigns and government affairs divisions and the Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) affiliate. He also oversees the communications department and the institutionally oriented regional impact division that is responsible for U.S. regional strategy and operations. He leads these departments to achieve NRDC’s programmatic and power-building goals. In his NRDC Action Fund capacity, Yoon oversees that 501(c)(4) sister organization’s advocacy, political strategy, and programs.

Yoon joined NRDC in 2013 and previously served as its chief policy advocacy officer and the director of the Center for Policy Advocacy, which he built from its nascent beginnings to become a central function inside the organization (which has been reorganized as the Center for Campaigns & Organizing). He is also a principal architect of NRDC’s 2017 strategic plan and its central Power & Voice direction, which has made a lasting mark on the organization by putting it on the path to prioritizing buildup and modernization of campaign and communications capacities; establishing the organization’s first-ever institutional U.S. geographic strategy and regional coordinating systems; broadening and diversifying the supporter base; more deliberately cultivating nontraditional partners; and investing in the NRDC Action Fund. 

Yoon also masterminded NRDC’s multiyear state strategy and campaign in North Carolina from 2013 to 2016, which was credited with successfully helping effect much more pro-environment conditions in the state since 2017 and has indelibly contributed to NRDC’s further expansion in the southeast region since.

For more than a decade prior to his work at NRDC, Yoon managed or consulted on numerous candidate, independent expenditure, and issue advocacy campaigns throughout the United States as well as for political and civic organizations. Prior to NRDC, Yoon counts his signature environmental impact to be when he managed the 2006 midterm election cycle’s most high-profile—and one of its most expensive—c4/527 campaigns, which was credited with defeating who the Rolling Stones magazine called the “Enemy of Earth”: the powerful chair of the House Natural Resources Committee from California in what began as a safe seat.

Yoon holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from University of California, Los Angeles and is based in the Washington, D.C., office.