Wholesome moments in advocacy

January 13, 2022

When advocacy feels like an uphill battle, who keeps you climbing?

Today, I looked for inspiration on what to say about advocacy that I haven't already said here. I found it in a project for U.S. History class, at the end of last school year! The assignment was to write a letter to my hypothetical future grandchildren about what life was like during 2020.

It reminded me how tiring advocacy can be, but also that the power of personal relationships and fun moments do more to keep me engaged than the urgency of statistics, and I think that's a valuable lesson about movements.

Here's an excerpt of what I wrote to my imaginary grandchild:

Separated from my local community because I was isolated at home, the Sunrise Movement became my community. All that time online was draining, and electoral politics feels soul-sucking, so our team made sure that we were real friends to each other. These were the people I stayed up with until 1 a.m. on election night video calls.

The combined weight of all the crises we faced… it took a toll. I’d be running a round of check-ins at the start of a meeting, and M.S. hadn’t seen the sun in weeks because of the West Coast fires, while I.L. lost their job, and A.G. was recovering from getting tear gassed at a Black Lives Matter protest. Our original team leads burned out hard, so T.W., G.C., and I became co-leads of the national phonebank team in July. T was fourteen, while G and I were both sixteen. It was like we were emotional sponges, holding everybody’s hands through really hard times, while at the same time, coordinating a team that was transforming the way Progressives thought about electoral organizing. (Sunrise developed new best practices for virtual election work and distributed organizing, since traditional campaign activities were disrupted by the pandemic.)

[Nine members of the Sunrise Phonebank facilitation team in a zoom call, smiling and holding or pretending to hold phones. They have matching orange zoom backgrounds!]

In the last 20 minutes of any phone-bank shift, M and I declared it “CAPS LOCK O’CLOCK” and threw aggressive encouragement into the Zoom chat. The chaotic, silly energy was infectious, and I missed it when I had to do regular school Zooms. When I felt overwhelmed throughout the day, I might check the schedule to see if any of my friends were facilitating a phone-bank, and then I’d sneak into the Zoom call and just sit there, watching them hype people up. It always made me smile.

Over the summer, many of my school friends tried to take a break from Zoom, tired of online school. Not me— I lived on Zoom for 30+ hours a week with Sunrise Phonebanking. Sometimes I felt like my eyes were turning into squares. Once, my teammate I.S. appeared in a meeting to announce “Yara has been on Zoom for three hours straight! I am here to kick them off their computer, or virtually fight her if she does not go willingly!” Those moments of care and levity got me through 2020.

When the next school year started in the fall, most of my school friends tried out the “hybrid” format, going to school in person every other day, but I stayed home through the rest of 2020 so that I could multitask during the day, focusing on Sunrise 60% and school 40% of the time. Some days, it may have been closer to 80%-20% if I’m being honest. With the general election in November and Georgia Senate runoffs in the winter determining control of Congress — and so much at stake for every issue, from LGBTQ+ rights to the economy — the moment felt too urgent for me to sit around studying Precalculus.

As I said in that letter, moments of care and levity really do get us through hard times, especially when you devote a lot of time to advocacy that feels like a losing battle.

I thought of some more, and thought I'd share!

- Preparing for a long day of lobby meetings on Capitol Hill, my team of RESULTS advocates has a traditional pizza party the night before while we assign roles and review talking points. As a kid, I'd do handstands in the corner while my mom organized everyone. Even when I got older and did the organizing myself, I still sit on the floor with a paper plate in my lap, and it's nice to be so casual before putting on a suit the next day!

[Picture of a Zoom Chat: "MAY I REMIND YOU THAT EVIL POLITICIANS ARE CORPORATIONS ARE SCARED OF ALL OF US" and people cheering on Stephanie, who spoke to a voter that would support our candidate]

- It feels great to win, and celebrate together at the end of a long year. The Sunrise Phonebank team had a big virtual party at the end of the 2020 election cycle, including this video I randomly made with pictures and video clips of the team from my camera roll.

But the best part of that party was a 130-page Google Slideshow we used for a "yearbook," writing nice notes and superlatives for all our team members (there were so many, people got multiple pages-- we definitely didn't have 100+ people on our team!)

- My mom used to make short videos on YouTube to demonstrate how easy it is to call Congress, with appearances from me and my sister as little kids. I was very proud to get to help fight poverty! And it's a memory I still smile about.

The top video is me, and the bottom one is my little sister. (I think hers is a lot cuter and funnier- she yells "LOVE YOU" at the congressional aide because she was like 5 years old and that's what she did whenever our parents called each other on the phone, lol)