Sorry, Sarah. The community organizer without “actual responsibilities” is now Commander-in-Chief. HahahahaHA (I couldn’t help myself.)
Since I started this blog about a month ago, I’ve been very curious about Organizing for America and I’ve written about it frequently. I’ve been waiting to see what this thing would be about and whether it can work. This weekend OFA will kick off its work with house meetings around the country. I admit I have been a bit skeptical about attending this one, mainly because I didn’t see what the point would be. However, I think I have an idea what the people at OFA are up to. They probably want the President’s most intense supporters to get together, meet, form relationships, and most importantly, OFA wants to start testing commitment. The idea of testing volunteers by seeing who shows up to events was a key feature of our organizing during the campaign. That’s part of how we chose our team leaders–the volunteers who committed to 10 hours a week (at least) during the campaign. Al Giordano writes about this part of organizing at his blog:
One of the ways that an effective organizer succeeds is, when forming those core teams, he and she set up a series of small bite-sized tests to find out which volunteers really are ready and committed to carry out the mission and to simultaneously weed out those that suffer from the “flake factor” (those who say they’ll be involved but in the end, for whatever reason or none at all, aren’t there to do the lifting when time comes).
Apparently, the hosts of these meetings will turn in their sign-in sheets online so that OFA can receive the data: who attended, which cities had particularly high turn-out, etc. That’s the first step in testing commitment. It also looks like a key part of these meetings is for people who attend to tell their story of how they have been affected by the recession. As all of the organizers from the campaign know, “telling your story” is a central part of organizing. The hosts will then submit video of the stories to OFA that will be shared with the public. If this is done well, it could be an effective way for OFA to put a human face on the barrage of statistics that we’re hearing about the stimulus plan. You can see the plan for the meetings here.
So I’m going to go just to meet other people who are motivated enough to take some time from their day to discuss the economic stimulus plan. I’m also just interested in learning more about the plan. I encourage you to attend a house meeting as well, and you can go here to find one near you. I don’t know how effective OFA is going to be because it’s an open question how interested people are going to be in organizing now that the campaign is over. But OFA has a lot of potential and I’m definitely rooting for its success.