This week, I sat down with Buffy Wicks, our Western Field Organizer, to talk about the innovative field program she's running. I asked her a few questions about the Camp Obama grassroots organizing training she recently ran in California.
Why did you do this training? Why now?There’s an enormous amount of grassroots energy in California. For example, we had 146 individual canvasses in California on the Walk for Change, and five of them had over 100 people. Our activists are ready to dedicate their time and are eager to be trained in community and field organizing tactics, and this was an opportunity to do that.What was the turnout like?We had 160 people who spent 3 full days—34 hours of curriculum-- training. People came from all over Southern California.
Who was involved in the trainings?We had trainers from across the country. These community organizers include people from environmental organizations, faith-based groups, labor, and traditional Democratic organizations. Marshall Ganz, a legendary civil rights and labor organizer, who once worked with Cesar Chavez, and currently teaches at Harvard, helped spearhead the training curriculum and led trainings as well.
What was unique about the trainings?It was a marriage between community organizing and traditional organizing tactics, which is rare in campaigns. Community organizing is more of a long-term investment. We took some of the community organizing tactics—like relationship building and the ability to find common interest in people, and want to employ them within this campaign. It fits so clearly with Barack Obama’s grassroots community vision.There’s a big emphasis placed on being able to understand and articulate your own story. Where are you coming from? What are the challenges facing your community, and why have you been called to join this movement for change? We also taught fundamental field campaign skills, such as how to do voter contacts, canvassing, phone banks, online organizing, earned media, and database management.Campaigns have a tendency to come into communities, mobilize people during an election cycle, and then pack up and leave. How is this different?
This training is about building local leaders in the communities and fostering long-term relationships to support our common values. We split people up into teams based on their congressional districts and they worked in these teams from the moment they showed up to the moment they left. We created, in a way, mini-campaigns with these groups—self-sufficient, interdependent teams that take responsibility for all aspects of a campaign within their congressional district.We want to win this election, but we also want keep winning elections for generations to come, and if we invest now, we can continue to reap the rewards. We also want people to continue to be active beyond elections, to use their networks to create change in their own communities. For example, if they want to clean up a local park or river, they will have these very strong, preexistent networks to create change.Barack is a community organizer and for him, change is about making local communities strong and ensuring that every single person in every community has access to resources and the ability to organize. This is a vehicle for that.
What’s next?The goal of these teams is to continue to multiply and replicate. For August, their goal is to recruit volunteers. We already got almost three hundred people signed up next weekend for volunteer recruitment meetings. Each team will go out in their communities with the goal of creating more teams.I’m going to replicate these trainings in Phoenix, the Bay Area, Boise, Idaho, Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque, and Anchorage to continue these trainings.
For info on how to get involved with Camp Obama West, click here.
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