Posts with the tag hq-fellows-john

Organizing Fellows: John in Gwinnett County, Georgia

Bradley Portnoy — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:24:00 EDT

As part of a continuing series, we're following Obama Organizing Fellows as they share their stories and their experiences. They discuss the people they meet, the hardships of organizing, what the campaign means to them, and how this summer is changing their perspective.

John is an Organizing Fellow in Gwinnett County, Georgia. His stories appear each Sunday.

Yesterday marked the end of the Obama Organizing Fellowships. I wish I had some watershed revelation to share with you, something spine-tingling. But here in Gwinnett County, where the other side holds the power, the seats, and the tradition of victory, I have discovered sore feet are more useful.

Here in Georgia, we may have the biggest task of any other state; we are in play, but to win, we have to register hundreds of thousands of voters, persuade tens of thousands to let go of a beloved party, and then get all of them to vote. In other words, we have to work, every day, all day.

And we have to do things we thought we never would.

Take canvassing--most people don't want strangers knocking on their door, and most of those people don't want to be the stranger knocking. But yesterday, we had over 50 first-time canvassers grab voter registration forms, walk sheets, maps, and scripts and go out to knock on over 700 doors. By voter registration numbers, it was not our most successful effort. But it was also exciting to see the volunteers, many of whom were skeptical at the idea of canvassing, return tired and sore, their hair a little disheveled, their arms a little more red, but with great beaming smiles. They all said, "This was fun. We met so many people!"

I have only canvassed a little, but all of us are discovering together that knocking on a door to sell a vacuum and knocking on a door to register voters are two different things. This campaign asks people to do nothing but take hold of their rights and responsibilities, to live up to the ideals of our nation. We ask people to be citizens, not consumers; we ask them to step into the activity of making this country work.

We don't see the other campaign here, besides the occasional yard sign and bumper stickers. We don't know what their game plan is, and we don't really want or need to know. But we see that we are the ones who are reaching out to the Georgians who have been left behind in the explosion of 'development' in this county. We see that we are the ones who want the jaded and disaffected to come out and believe in the power of a vote.

Yesterday we heard from a couple of our opponent's supporters. Some of our volunteers knocked on the door, identified themselves as Obama volunteers, and asked to register voters. The owner of the house said, "I support the other side, but I gotta tell you, I admire what your campaign is doing." Maybe that man will change his mind come November. And if there's one of him, maybe there are more like him that we will find today when we strap on our walking shoes and knock on more doors. What that means to me and our volunteers, is that we're making progress in this county.

It took me six weeks to get here, and now I see how far we have to go. But we have hope here in Gwinnett County, and the more we work for change, the more hope we have.

Visit our Flickr page for more of John's photos.

Organizing Fellows: John in Gwinnett County, Georgia

Bradley Portnoy — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:23:58 EDT

John is an Organizing Fellow in Gwinnett County, Georgia. His stories appear each Sunday.

I have the great fortune of working with a Field Organizer named Tawny, who is brilliant at making contacts and following them up—in this case with a customer relations manager at a major retail chain.

We signed an agreement with the store to register voters outside its doors for Tuesday and Thursday, and on the first day we registered 60 voters, which is pretty good for our area. But we got to talking with the manager, who said there was trouble in one-stop shopping paradise.

He said, “They don’t like it. They said that all these voter registrations will hurt their party’s chances in November.” And sure enough, the next day, we got a call from our contact.

“They don’t want you out there,” he said. Tawny got a hold of his manager, who said, “Well, we’re really just looking for community groups. You know, like cheerleaders.”

Now, I support cheerleaders as much as the next guy. But we asked: “What is more fundamental to our community than voting?” To which we heard, “Well, we look for community groups, not groups doing things like that.” And you can probably imagine the rest of the conversation. So we moved our registration across the line in the concrete to an empty store and kept our work going, only half as successfully as before.
In the grand scheme of things, this is not a big deal at all. Everyone who has volunteered for the campaign has a story like this one. But our country has a better story to tell than a store’s management playing partisan politics with its own customers. And we run into this attitude all the time from people who seem frightened at what will happen when lots of people get ready to make their voice heard.

And this is the great thing about working for Barack Obama. When he speaks, you can sometimes hear the awakening voices of these silent people. At every organizational meeting, and every volunteer event, we see new people who have never been involved in a campaign before come in and say, “I’m ready to work for change.”

I finally took a day off from Fellowing, to attend a friend’s wedding. I sipped icy beverages and mingled. Eventually, small talk made the inevitable turn to, “So, what do you do?” Of course, I said, “I’m a volunteer for Barack Obama’s campaign.” That always moves small talk to a much different conversation.

But my interlocutor and I discovered we shared political affinities, including Senator Obama. And we figured out that we liked him because he came from the outside and transformed his party, and continues to reach out to others in order to transform the country. And if our experience at the store is any indication, whether or not to reach out is one of the chief differences in the campaign.
If you have been reading our blogs and thought to yourself, “I’d sure like to volunteer, but…” consider this my way of reaching out to you. Get off the computer and hit the street. We’d love to have you, especially if you live in Gwinnett County. There’s a lot more reaching out to do.

Check back next week for more from John in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and visit our Flickr page for more of his photos.

Organizing Fellows: John in Gwinnett County, Georgia

Bradley Portnoy — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 14:56:59 EDT

John is an Organizing Fellow in Gwinnett County, Georgia. His stories appear each Sunday.

A while back in this campaign, Senator Obama was saying something that bothered me. He said, “This campaign is not about me, it’s about you.” I used to think to myself, if it’s about me, or if it’s about us, why is everybody waving signs with your name on them?

I did not realize then that with these words, Senator Obama revealed to us just what kind of leader he is.

If you had come to our office this past Tuesday night, you would have seen what the Senator is talking about. That night, four Fellows led meetings for two towns: Jacob and Nick led Snellville, and Matie and Heather led a group from Lilburn. All four of them are under thirty, and all of them are putting in much more than the thirty hours a week the campaign asks of them. The people come to an obscure nook in the county, they somehow make it through a far-too-secure door, and they plan, and they commit—and we watched the rest of the week as they did great work, and brought in more of their friends, all rumbling for change.

They come with something in common--their support for Barack Obama. So Field Organizer Tawny and I started our meeting for Lawrenceville with a question: Why are you here? What brings you all this way to show your support for Senator Obama? We hear answers like, “I agree with him on most of his policies,” or “I like that he doesn’t take PAC money.”

But then you will also hear the stories from people’s hearts. Stories like ones you might hear from a receptionist in Lilburn who has a 22-year-old friend on his third tour in Iraq. Which is also a story about how his family worries about him not only on the battlefield, but for when he comes home. They worry about the change they have seen in him and they worry about help for him which they have not seen. Or we hear a story about health care bills, or choosing between bankruptcy or selling a house. We hear many things that bring us there in that office with barely enough chairs, no good way to get in, and no ventilation.
But many times, we weave into our stories another story involving “his speech,” which almost always means his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention—the "one America" speech. We look around the room, and we see that the words from that speech are true. We’re all sitting together there, black, white, young, old, for a purpose. And perhaps we don’t realize it at that moment, or not even for a few weeks, but slowly we come to understand that even though we are talking to each other about Barack Obama and the hope he offers, we are really talking about the hope each of us brings to that meeting and to our work as campaign volunteers.

We come to those first meetings and events because we support Barack Obama, but we leave them knowing that Senator Obama is our candidate. The difference is subtle, but it is the difference between a hope that maybe this guy will be better and the hope that this time we all can be better.

Here in Lawrenceville, we are blessed to work with Donna, a volunteer I call the "Athena of Voter Registration." By work-day she is a chemical engineer; the rest of the time she is a hunter for unregistered voters, not afraid to employ every weapon in her considerable arsenal in a blitzkrieg of direct-citizen democracy.

Yesterday, in five minutes, she combined the obligation of parents and a call to live into the legacy of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. with a simultaneous assault consisting of the narrative of American history to blast a hole into the heart of a man who said, “My vote doesn’t count; my vote doesn’t count; my vote doesn’t count.” When we walked away with his signed voter registration form, she said to him, “And I’m telling you, if Senator Obama doesn’t listen to us, we’ll elect somebody else to take his place. That’s how serious we are! We’re getting organized, and we know how to do it now.”
And I think that’s what the Senator means when he says this campaign is not about him, but about us. After all of the Fellows and the Organizers have finished their Organizational Meetings, after Donna and the other volunteers have convinced the last voter on the street, after (God willing) Senator Obama has won the presidency and begun the work of good government, all of us everyday people will have molded ourselves into an organized citizenry that realizes its responsibilities and has power to perform them. It takes a courageous leader to trust the people with this power. But because of that trust, after this election we will know that we can face our problems together, and build together our American dreams. We will know that the appropriate place to begin is here, that the acceptable time to start is now. This campaign, as the Senator says, is about us -- “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Check back next week for more from John in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and visit our Flickr page for more of his photos.