Our Revolution Conference Call 9/20/17

This is the "debut membership call."

Our Revolution is a grassroots group and mostly volunteer, even its Board. Anyone who attends a meeting or event or contributes any amount is a member of the organization. Our groups join groups or start any groups (ten members or more). There are over 450 groups across the U.S. and its territories and even some other countries.

Groups work on:

1. Work on issues. This can be working on "big issues" campaigns, like Bernie's Medicare for All plan, or working on local/regional issues, such as anti-pipeline issues.

2. Endorsing local candidates who support progressive issues. Now endorsements must come through local groups and only through local groups. Groups also work on progressive ballot measures.

3. Party building, either within the Democratic Party or joining with others to help independent candidates or Green candidates who support progressive issues win. We should help turn people out at the polls, like recent successes in Massachusetts and Alabama (the latter now in a run-off).

Volunteers have made great efforts, especially the texting teams. Grassroots volunteers are the lifeblood of the group.

Summer for Progress was successful this summer. This was a concerted effort to contact legislators in support of progressive legislation. This generated an "incredible" number of co-sponsorships.

The Denver chapter shared its process in getting started and its team approach and how it vetted, researched, and interviewed candidates for endorsement. They found it important to define voting membership to avoid candidates flooding a meeting last-minute with their supporters. Beyond endorsement, there is a process for actively supporting candidates. They've vetted candidates from the local (school board) through the state level.

They found it important to have face-to-face meetings at least monthly and to have informative and fun events, such as guest speakers like candidates. 

A speaker for the texting team talked about her efforts on a variety of texting campaigns. The most memorable event helped defeat a ballot question, "Question 2," that would have diverted money from public schools to a charter school initiative. She also started Greater Worcester for Our Revolution.

Go to OurRev.US/t4OR to join the texting team. It organizes through Slack. Responding to requests from Our Revolution by making requested calls or texts helps show the political establishment that our movement is growing. It's important to make them.

Join a group, start a group, build your group, "solidarity forever."