House Meeting to Gauge Interest

This meeting was at someone’s house. There were homemade bagels (omg thank you AJ) and food and coffee for everyone. It was welcoming, informative, and casual. I’ll jump straight into the notes I took that morning:

Info session for folks that wanted to organize to support candidates and how candidates move through the process and get support. It’s not clear to me what group makes up the majority of the group since virtually everyone here is completely new to me.

My priority at the moment:

• Gauge my interest and dedication
• Figure out my relevant goals and priorities and how to communicate those (stump speech)

Questions:

• They mentioned “15 minute cities” and I have no idea what that means

Issues:

• Our funding sucks – and mostly because it’s from TABOR which causes issues. Ideally, this group would want to end TABOR
• There will be candidates that come in that have conservative values or political aspirations and they will have corporate or big money – this isn’t going to be easy

Process, at a very high level:

• Get approval and endorsement from the PEA (Jan/Feb/Mar, after questionnaire)
  • Getting an endorsement from the teachers’ union is really important
  • They have a PAC / questionnaire and a process to get funds (V & LM know a lot about this)
• This group, plus others (Democratic Socialists, Working Progressive Families (R)) are there to help and support you from understanding and creating a campaign to getting funding
• They also have an office space that we can use
• March through May is a big fundraising time
• This is all for the vote in Nov

Notes:

• AJ (bagel and school board gal) is the lady who organizes all of the material – the binder babe! Hero status!
• Though the campaign is political, the office/job is NOT
• Compassion and doing the actual work is really important
• Even if there are ideological differences you need to create positive dialog, hear them out, model good relationships, develop stakeholder relationships, and of course advocate for the kids
• It’s much bigger than you as an individual – the kids need someone to listen and speak for them and represent THEIR interests
• The group wants to partner more with the city council and other groups
• They want to encourage our electors to protect us and represent us where we cannot