Become a leader in your neighborhood, and take a statewide role. You could easily become a member of the Progressive Caucus. The Caucus is composed of members of the State Democratic Party's Central Committee who have simply decided to join it. People get to be on the Central Committee by simply being voted on by a majority of other PCs. Pretty much anyone wanting to be elected can be, once they are PCs. Becoming a PC is easier than you might think. There are always precincts with slots that are vacant. MORE Winning on The Line at the Phone Bank By Steve McClure, Precinct Committeeman, LD 28 11/13/05 We called it the Barney Bus, a grungy semi trailer parked out in the lot behind Democratic Headquarters. Inside were a dozen laptops "on the line," along the wall, each with headsets and each networked into a computer that dialed telephone numbers for us. MORE Human rights promoters fan out, advise other Latinas By Ernesto Portillo Jr, Metro Columnist for the Arizona Daily Star, Tucson, Arizona Published: 11.15.2005   Reproduced by permission of author. About 10 women are gathered around a kitchen table Monday morning. They're stuffing envelopes while talking loudly and laughing. Several conversations are going on simultaneously, mainly in Spanish, in a small, cluttered kitchen in a converted office on South Sixth Avenue in Armory Park. But when the subject of human rights comes up, the women become focused and talk seriously. This is nothing to joke about. MORE If Progressives Succeeded in Texas, Why not Arizona? By Stuart Heady, Tsaile, Apache County From the late seventies through the eighties and nineties, I was part of a coalition of progressive activists in Austin, Texas. We went from not being able to get the time of day from a city hall that had been owned by developers since the 1930s, to electing all members of a "green" city council. MORE ARIZONA LETTERS TO THE EDITOR LINKS Arizona Republic Online Letter Form http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/sendaletter.html   Become a leader in your neighborhood, and take a statewide role. What does a PC (Precinct Committeeperson) do? Every precinct needs someone to organize efforts to contact voters to listen to their concerns, to educate them about issues and candidates, and to help get out the vote. This person is called a PC in Arizona, may be called something else in other states. Most precincts are large enough that there are three or four PC slots needed to get the job done. Precincts are assigned a number of PC slots according to their population of Democrats. PC's also vote on the all the business matters of the party at the local level. Who can be a PC? Any registered Democrat may become a PC in the precinct in which she or he lives, at any time, usually just by filling out a form and turning it in at a Legislative District meeting. Your County or Legislative District Chair will assist you in the process. Once you are a PC, you become eligible to vote on county, district, and precinct party business. How do I become a PC? Your application is then voted on at a regular District/County Party meeting. The County Party then recommends you to the County Board of Supervisors, who in turn officially appoints you as a Precinct Committeeperson after simply verifying your voter registration and precinct. Now you are referred to as an "Appointed PC." What if there are already enough PC's in my precinct? We can ALWAYS use more help. While there is a limit to the number of PCs per precinct (based on voter registration), there is no limit to the number of Assistant Precinct Committeepersons who may be appointed by the District/County Party. Assistant PCs participate in the party organization and may vote in county, district, and precinct matters except for the election of officers at the biennial District and County re-organization meetings. What is an elected PC, and why would I want to be one? Every two years, during the primary election of even years, PC's are formally elected within their precinct. Your District Chair will know how many slots there are in your precinct. Unfortunately, there is little competition for these slots, and most precincts have empty slots, some going into an election with no PC at all. Elected PC's form the pool of candidates to be elected to the Democratic State Committee, and ultimately to the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The reason you would want to do this is to have a say in the direction your party takes in issues that matter to you. How do I become an elected PC? To become an elected PC, you complete the Affidavit for Nomination with the County Registrar. (Your District Chair or County Democratic Party office has this.) Then you collect the required number of valid signatures from Democrats in your precinct. Typically, this means having to collect about 10 signatures, including your own! Your name will be placed on the Primary Election Ballot, unless there is no need due to the seat being uncontested. What if I missed the deadline? If you did not file your nomination petition in time you can also fill out a Write-in Candidate form. For election as a write-in, you will need as many write-in votes as you would have needed signatures on your nominating petition. Do you need more help? See our Contact Page   Winning on The Line at the Phone Bank By Steve McClure, Precinct Committeeman, LD 28 11/13/05 The Barney Bus, made available to the party by the SEIU, was at the strategic center of the efforts to elect two progressive Democrats to the Tucson City Council.   In the past Democrats had won the votes cast on election day, but had lost so badly in the early ballots that Republicans controlled the City Council. The Democratic Party strategy was simple - this time we were going to beat the Republicans on the early mail-in ballots!     This strategy put us on the phone bank line squarely at the center. We first had to get Democrats to request early ballots, which meant call after call, encouraging requests, sending request cards, following up to make sure "our voters" sent in their request cards, and then call again to make sure the early ballots were received, filled out and sent in.  From our vantage point, the strategy was clear: call, call, call.  Endless calling.   We sat there, headphones on, waiting for the computer to feed us calls.  The computer beeped into our ears and we started into our spiels.  We talked.  We listened.  People hung up on us.  People questioned us.  Listened to us politely.  People laughed at us, and sometimes with us.  People told us not to call them again.  And some even thanked us for our volunteering to make those calls.  Over and over, call after call.     Sometimes the computer took a minute to hand us a live call, and so we listened to each other and learned from each other.  We stole ideas from each other.  On how to say things.  On how to respond to this or that question.  On how to pack lots of information in a few words.  Most of all, on how to sound enthusiastic and interested and fresh with each call, call after call, over and over again. After two hours ³on the line² enthusiasm is hard, but we kept each other alive.     We did this because we were at the center of the election.  Sometimes we looked down the line and found top campaign people on the line with us.  Sometimes the candidates themselves were there with us, on the line, making call after call.  Almost always you saw new volunteers on the line.  But usually there was a solid core of those who came, day after day, night after night, for call after call.  Because we hoped, and then believed, that we were making a difference this time, a big difference.     Phone-banking is a 21st century way of connecting with real live voters, asking them for their votes asking them to vote, even in a not-so-sexy off year election, asking them to vote early (but not often!), asking them, and honoring them, because we wanted voters to decide this election, not advertising dollars.        Then the early ballot totals came in on election night.  Both our progressive Democrats won that early vote big.  We from the phone bank line looked at each other and knew we had made a difference, by gawd, we on the line had won!   Human rights promoters fan out, advise other Latinas By Ernesto Portillo Jr The women are human rights promoters, or as they call themselves in Spanish, " promotoras de los derechos humanos." They're immigrant women who meet once a week to share ideas on how best to inform their immigrant Latino neighbors and friends about human and civil rights. Armed with information most immigrants - and even native-born residents - don't have, the promotoras fan out to their neighborhoods, churches, children's schools, parks and grocery stores to share their knowledge. The group organizes some meetings. Mostly the women strike up conversations one on one. "Human rights is not talked about anymore. People don't recognize they have basic human rights that cannot be taken away," says Guadalupe Morán, one of the more experienced promotoras. The group is sponsored by Derechos Humanos, a non-profit human rights organization. A sister group is in Nogales, Sonora, and a third group may begin in Willcox, east of Tucson. Whether in the city, in rural Arizona or across the border, abuses of human rights persist, members of the group say. And in today's anti-immigrant climate, where simply speaking Spanish can create problems and generate discrimination, human rights abuses are increasing, says group member Maria Carrasco. "There are days we laugh a lot, but there are days we cry," Carrasco says. The women's work is not limited to educating their friends and neighbors about human rights abuses. They also provide information to women who are victims of sexual abuse and help people find help or seek redress for violations of their rights. But don't ask the immigrant women their legal status. They will not say. Legal status - theirs or anyone else's - is unrelated to the discussion of human rights. Too much attention is paid to whether immigrants are legal, they say. What is overlooked are the immigrants' contributions to the economy and their communities. The women sometimes sound angry. They have reason to be. They feel the resentment hurled at them. They hear breathless television news reports, in English and Spanish, of the growing public anger over legal and undocumented immigrants. They understand that state and national laws being enacted are grounded in the belief that immigrants are to blame for our troubles. They are defiant of individuals or groups who insist immigrants have no place in Arizona. "Even my husband doesn't believe I should be in these classes. But I will continue to attend these meetings," says Sonia Coronado, who attends the weekly Monday planning sessions. The women talk about the difficulty of educating others about human rights. Even among other Latino immigrants, the women sometimes are met with indifference and hostility, says Victoria Navarro. The work of a promotora is time-consuming and can be difficult, but it is important, say group members Ana Belia Gonzalez, a mother of four, and Rosalinda Gallardo. It takes patience and courage to talk up human rights. "If we didn't have these values," Coronado says, "we would not be here." Ernesto Portillo Jr.'s column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach him at 573-4242 or at eportillo@azstarnet.com He appears on "Arizona Illustrated," KUAT-TV Channel 6, at 6:30 p.m. and midnight Fridays. http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/102467.php   If Progressives Succeeded in Texas, Why not Arizona? We learned that until we could demonstrate that winning a few elections was not a fluke, we could not get taken seriously by the inner core of the power structure. We were able to keep at it because winning was such fun that more and more people kept wanting to share in it. This coalition also became a factor at the county courthouse and in the state legislature, through Austin's delegation. Our votes, especially in certain precincts, were a factor in our Congressional seat as they outweighed many rural precincts. (This unfortunately was one of the things that caused Tom DeLay to engineer the famous Texas redistricting - a fight that is not over yet.) The essence of grassroots organizing is that it isn't a set of methods so much as a way of living. GOTV (Get Out The Vote) techniques are useful in a short period of time during election campaigns but are not particularly useful between times. And, the dependence on GOTV lists means leaving the people who are not on them out of the whole picture. Some people whose grassroots organizing experience dating back into the 1930s with the FDR campaigns and those of Lyndon Johnson, were still around and this turned out to be valuable. It was natural for them to see campaigns as an outgrowth of continual community building, not as the only time to get political. For a generation or two now, this way of community building and political campaigning has become a lost art. We have become dependent on TV ads instead. It was seductively easy and so modern. We didn't have to be responsible for any thinking or taking any action. We could leave it up to "experts" only too glad to amass the power (and wealth) this gave them. We have become content to just talk back to our TVs. So, taking on a role as an active citizen and as an organizer may feel kind of weird at first. The difference between being an audience member and being a citizen is stepping beyond this weird feeling that results from a sense that we don't belong in a role that is active in relation to our friends, neighbors and fellow community members. We feel we should remain watchers as others act, because conditioning by TV is so powerful. This is why calling a list of names can seem so emotionally difficult. But such calling is where it all starts, along with meetings. It all boils down to one common sense thing, really: Organizing is a constant search for people who can put aside the things that cause difference in order to achieve the things that can be agreed on as sensible and progressive. This means turning people we don't know yet into people we do know, and continuing the effort until we know enough people to forge coalitions that have the numbers going for them to win elections and move policy in desired directions. We are tempted to remain in a comfort zone, content just to talk to people who are already friends and to talk about things that everyone finds comforting, like the latest dumb stuff Bush has done. The effort to enlist people in the effort to be active as organizers (who in turn search for more people,) has to be persistent and ongoing. Our energies should not be focused on efforts to win contests in producing the best and most strongly articulated opinions. Our focus should be to forge whatever agreements are possible with real people to foster substantial enough support systems in the public sphere to sustain elected leaders in the pursuit of policy goals that move society forward in practical ways. This medium, the internet, has come into being just recently and the organizing potential to transcend distance and involve more people and to forge those coalitions has yet to be fully realized. We are the pioneers in this new territory. By tying together the efforts of people at a distance, who may live a long way from any urban centers, and looking for more active and aggressive ways to use this as a tool, we have some chance of actually succeeding in 2006 and 2008. But local, person-to-person organizing has to be at the center of all efforts at building a progressive coalition if it is to be viable. The place to start: find some people to invite to a conversation gathering, maybe organized around a book or a DVD. Keep lists. Grow this by holding more public forums at the local library or a coffeehouse. When election time comes around, this group of acquaintances can be the basis for a neighborhood or local effort to call lists or walk precincts. Persist. Over time this can grow into a political coalition that could span a city, a county or a state. Be encouraged. Americans are really progressive at heart. The entire concept of America was radical, in 18th century terms, but progressive and really common sense. The sort of neoconservatism that the Bush administration is invested in is actually a distorted sort of Puritanism, and not even mainstream in that. Strip the spin rhetoric away from the natural concerns that people express when they can get together and talk in terms of common interests, and you see this. Progressive policies are the right directions for government for the 21st Century at all levels from neighborhood to global.